If his hope\nwas to return to Ireland, that wish was to be fulfilled \u2014 albeit\nbriefly. One year nearly to to day after he first absconded, His\nsecond Court Martial for desertion took place at Glasgow on the 13\nNovember 1830. He was sentenced to fourteen years transportation. His\nconvict ship Larkins<\/em>,\nsailed from Downs, Ireland on 11 June 1831, and arrived in Van\nDiemen\u2019s Land on 19 October. His military career was most certainly\nover and he seemed destined never to see Ireland or Scotland ever\nagain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Johnstone\nis one of those infuriating oddities \u2014 an Australian convict with a\ncompletely clean conduct record during his sentence. By May 1832, he\nwas most certainly in Launceston (or its environs), for that is where\na fellow felon, Thomas Quarrie, was convicted for nicking some of his\nclothes (to the value of four shillings). He was assigned to someone<\/em>\nin the Launceston district on 9 December 1834. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n On 3\nNovember 1837, at about the midway point of his sentence, he was\ngranted his ticket-of-leave. This effectively paroled him to work for\nwhoever he chose, or work on his own account. He could even be an\nemployer, or take on apprentices. There were however, stringent\nrestrictions on his movements, who he could associate with, or how\nlate he could be out at night. But Lorenzo Johnstone remained\nresolutely on the right side of the law. So it was on 11 April 1838\nthat he submitted his application to the relevant authority for\npermission to marry. Within two weeks the reply was made via\ncorrespondence with the Colonial Secretary in Hobart. Permission was\nduly granted. Johnstone should have been a very happy man \u2014 He\nowned outright \u2014 or at the very least had unencumbered use of \u2014 a\nhorse and cart, so he may have felt secure in providing a service\nthat should always be in demand\u2014transporting things from one place\nto another. He was thirty years old. Maybe for the first time in his\nlife he felt that everything was moving in the right direction. If so\nit was a sentiment his bride-to-be may not have shared. The wedding\ndate was delayed, and delayed again\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fanny\nDewhirst claimed (or it was estimated) that she was born about the\nyear 1813 \u2014 however if her parents were William and Mary Dewhirst\nand she was baptised in Heptonstall, near Halifax in Yorkshire on 28\nAugust 1808, she was several years older than that. It might be a\nmodern sensibility to hope that the later is true, for if it was the\nformer, she was barely 16 when it was recorded that she was \u201con the\ntown\u201d a euphemism for having no home or protection, or more\ncommonly \u2014 supporting herself by prostitution. At some stage before\nher arrest in 1832, she lost her right eye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On a winter\u2019s day 5 January 1832 she was sentenced to seven year\u2019s transportation for the theft of a very large sum of money from a man publicly identified as a Mr George Schorah of Northowram (a location a mile or so north-east of Hallifax town centre). \u00a325-\u00a326 was a vast sum of money for the time, and the sentence handed down at the West Riding Christmas General Quarter Sessions in Wakefield seems almost lenient until it is understood that Mr Schorah was most certainly also Fanny\u2019s customer and the chairman of the court was a Reverend. Fanny Dewhirst was imprisoned at York Castle until March when she was transported down south to Woolwich, near London, then cross country west to Plymouth in Devon, where she would board her transport vessel to Van Diemen\u2019s Land. The convict barque Hydery<\/em> departed England on 11 April 1832 and arrived in Hobart Town on 10 August 1832. Within a month she was sent north to Launceston, and assigned to work as a domestic servant for someone named Hubbard. On 13 September 1832 her extensive bad conduct record gained its first entry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She refused\nto do the laundry as ordered to by her mistress, so Fanny began the\nlong relationship with the house of correction for female prisoners\nback south in Hobart Town \u2014 at the Cascades Female Factory where\nshe served a month at the wash tub. It was the first of many\nsentences for a multitude of infractions of the rules. These\nincluded:\u2014 [being] out\nafter curfew and falsely representing herself to be free; Absent all\nnight without leave; Absent from her service at 3 o\u2019clock in the\nmorning; Absconding; Destroying a handkerchief (property of the\ncrown); Refusing to go back to her service; Being in public (out\nafter hours)\u2026<\/em>\netc. This is only a small sampling of the cause of her subsequent\npunishments. \u201cBeing out after hours\u201d is by far the most common\noffence for which she was charged (16 times) but \u201cbeing absent\nwithout leave\u201d (12 times) comes a close second. There were more\nthan a few occasions when she could be found guilty of both at the\nsame time. The usual punishment was solitary confinement on bread and\nwater. It has been calculated that she spent 176 days (nearly six\nmonths) this way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of her\nmasters was Major Wellman of the 57th<\/sup>\nRegiment. He was stationed in Launceston and was assigned lands at\nNorfolk Plains (both locations associated with Fanny Dewhirst).\nWhoever he was, she must have detested this soldier or his family\nwith a passion, for two times during 1836 when assigned to him she\nran away. For the crime of absconding, her sentence of transportation\nwas increased by eighteen-months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On 17\nNovember 1837 she was sentenced to ten days of solitary confinement\non bread and water for being out in public after hours. She was\nemployed by someone called Moore who resided Launceston. This was the\nthird time she had received the same sentence for the same crime\nwhile in Moore\u2019s service. It was to be the last offence she was\ncharged with for the remainder of her time as a transportee, now due\nto expire in July 1840. Then on 11 April 1838, Lorenzo Johnstone\napplied for leave to marry her. The government had no objections, but\ndid she?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fanny\nDewhirst could neither read or write. Those life skills she had\nacquired she had learnt the hard painful way. According to the\nconventional morality of the day she was supposed to just curl up and\ndie when her situation failed to match the expectations of those who\nmade the rules. If her life in Van Diemen\u2019s Land and her life\nbefore that in Yorkshire suggests any thing it was that this was a\nperson who would fight passionately to survive in the moment,\nregardless of the long term consequences. If survival was a moment by\nmoment affair, then so would be pleasure. If she lived by the minute\nthen Lorenzo Johnstone gave every indication of being someone who\nplayed a long game in life. A soldier\u2019s life had taught him\ndiscipline, but she had already run away from one soldier. Did she\nreally want to spent the remainder of her life with another?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Something\nstrange happened on 28 November 1839. Lorenzo Johnstone applied a\nsecond time to marry Miss Fanny Dewhirst. Why he needed to apply to\nthe authorities again is not remotely clear. Maybe too much time had\nelapsed between the first permission and the wedding ceremony? Once\nagain, the Lieutenant-Governor initialled assent to the lawful and\npermanent union of the two convicts, which was communicated back to\nthe parties on 26 December 1839. On 15 January 1840, Lorenzo\nJohnstone, aged 31, was married to Fanny, who gave her age as 21\n(pull the other one), according to the rites of the Church of England\nin the Launceston parish church of St John. Lorenzo listed his trade\nas a gardener, but he would not have owned his own farm. He could not\nlegally own land \u2014 yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Mrs Lorenzo Johnstone, there was one final hurdle to overcome before her past as Fanny Dewhirst was definitively behind her. The moment came six months after her marriage on 5 July 1840 when she granted her Certificate of Freedom. She was free by virtue of servitude \u2014 She had served every hour, every day, every month, of her eight and a half year sentence. Now she was utterly free to go where she wanted to, live the life she chose. It would be a fair guess she hated Van Diemen\u2019s Land and would want to get away from that island as soon as she was able to. But of course, she wasn\u2019t free. She was married to Lorenzo Johnstone and he was still a Ticket-of-Leave convict. He had four years left of his sentence to serve. Here was the bitter irony \u2014 She had never conformed to the rules \u2014 she had flouted them at every opportunity (and paid the price). She was never granted a Ticket of Leave, much less a Conditional Pardon which was the next reward for good behaviour \u2014 yet even with an extension to her sentence by eighteen months, she now had more legal rights than her husband \u2014 who had started his sentence three years before hers \u2014 had a spotless good behaviour record, but could not legally leave the Launceston district.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the\ncircumstances, it reads like a cruel joke that Lorenzo Johnstone\u2019s\nconditional pardon mooted as early as January 1842 but not valid\n\u201cuntil Her Majesty\u2019s pleasure be known\u201d was finally promulgated\non 31 August 1843, for the following cause:\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHaving served ten years in the Colony without a charge of misconduct\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n On 30\nNovember 1842 Johnstone had been fined by a magistrate for a trivial\ncart-riding offence. Maybe that had been enough to delay his\nConditional Pardon? He received his Certificate of Freedom by\nservitude in 1844. Now he could own land or leave the Colony anytime\nhe chose \u2014 or was able to. In previous eras expired convicts were\ngranted free land to work, but those days were long past. But had he\ntime left to save his marriage?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It took six more years before he finally departed from Van Diemen\u2019s Land. Gold had been found across the Pacific Ocean in California, USA, back in 1848, and on 9 May 1850 he sailed from Launceston on the Jane Francis<\/em> bound for San Francisco. Being who he was, he dotted all the \u201ci\u201ds and crossed all the \u201ct\u201ds on the paperwork. This is how we can be fairly certain that his wife, Fanny Johnstone did not sail with him on that vessel. This is the last verified record of Lorenzo Johnstone and (in the negative) his wife. There are any number of unverified sightings. Here lies the point of danger in concluding this story\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Pennsylvania USA, in the year 1995, a man named Lorenzo Johnston was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. After seventeen years behind bars he was freed by a higher court on the grounds that he had been falsely convicted due to insufficient evidence. Four months later, yet another court sent him back to prison to resume his original sentence. As of today (April 2019) Lorenzo Johnson was a free man living with his family in New York. He spent twenty-two years of his life behind bars for a crime he most certainly did not commit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Now\nit should be fairly self-evident that Lorenzo Johnson and Lorenzo\nJohnstone are not the same person (Nor is it slightly feasible that\none could be the great-great-great-great grandparent of the other).\nThe stakes for me in a theory I have about the fate of the\nnineteenth-century individual after his wife\u2019s freedom was granted\nin 1840 are immeasurably lower than that of a man wrongly convicted\nof a capital offence on circumstantial evidence and prejudice against\nhim for the colour of his skin. I\u2019m not going to state my theory\nhere (though it shouldn\u2019t be too hard to work out my line of\nreasoning from other articles on this site) because the case of\nLorenzo Johnson \u2014 the one who had the misfortune to be in the wrong\nplace at the wrong time and not be a pitted-faced Irishman \u2014 should\nbe a warning about leaping to conclusions without being in possession\nof all the facts, or any proof at all. At the moment, all I have are\ncoincidences \u2014 as did the jurors at Johnson\u2019s first trial. The\nresult was a gross miscarriage of justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Herein lies my problem: I have a theory about this couple. However I cannot prove my theory, but I cannot conclusively disprove it either. Conclusive facts that would disprove my case would be records of husband and wife together after the year 1840, or records of Mrs Fanny Johnstone after that date living a life away from her spouse. There is some evidence in Tasmania that the latter is what might have occurred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately\nJohnstone and its variants Johnson<\/em>\nor Johnston<\/em>\nare all too common as family names. Lorenzo Johnstone (the Irishman)\nwas recorded as being capable of being able to read and write, so\nwhile others might have misspelled his name (and did) we can be\nreasonably certain that Johnstone is the variant that he\nprefered.\nThere are records of a Fanny Johnstone having involvements with the\nlaw in Launceston between the years 1863 and 1871, However in only\nthe earliest instance was she actually found guilty of something\n(fined 6 shillings for disturbing the peace with one Thomas Crawford)\n(In the last recorded, she was employed as a sick-nurse for the\nfamily of a police constable). The difficulty is that there were\nother families of Johnstones in that town during the era, and of that\nsubset of the population were a number of other women named Fanny \u2014\nboth of the Mrs and Miss variety. I cannot prove the Fanny Johnstone\nI wish to trace is one of the above \u2014 nor can I disprove it yet.\nThere is no death or burial record that I can identify for Fanny\nJohnstone that plausibly fits the former Miss Dewhirst, nor can I\nfind evidence that supports her remarriage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As for Lorenzo Johnstone, his movements after 1850 are similarly hard to interpret:\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2026 So the fate of Lorenzo Johnstone remains as uncertain as that of his wife and for much the same reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Can\nyou help? Are you a researcher or even\na descendant\nof Lorenzo\nJohnstone (or Johnson) born Muckney, County Monaghan, Ireland about\nthe year 1808, or\nFanny\nDewhirst (or Dewhurst) born Halifax, the West Riding of Yorkshire,\nEngland about the year 1813 (or as early as 1808)?<\/p>\n\n\n\n If\nyou have come across stories\nconcerning either of these two convicts in Van Diemen\u2019s Land, or\nare connected to either by ties of family, I would love to hear from\nyou and complete their story. If you\nknow\nLorenzo and Fanny are your ancestors or you wish to claim them as\nyour own, please make that claim. That is what I would be doing\u2026\nif I had the evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Convict records for Lorenzo Johnstone<\/a> at Libraries Tasmania<\/p>\n\n\n\n Convict records for Fanny Dewhirst<\/a> at Libraries Tasmania<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fanny Dewhirst’s convict record has been completely transcribed by the Female Convicts Research Centre<\/a>.<\/strong> Registration is required to view these transcriptions, but I can’t overstate how useful access to this database has been. https:\/\/www.femaleconvicts.org.au\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" T\ufeffh\ufeffi\ufeffs\ufeff \ufeffi\ufeffs\ufeff \ufefft\ufeffh\ufeffe\ufeff \ufefft\ufeffa\ufeffl\ufeffe\ufeff \ufeffo\ufefff\ufeff \ufefft\ufeffw\ufeffo\ufeff \ufeffc\ufeffo\ufeffn\ufeffv\ufeffi\ufeffc\ufefft\ufeffs\ufeff \ufeffi\ufeffn\ufeff \ufeffV\ufeffa\ufeffn\ufeff \ufeffD\ufeffi\ufeffe\ufeffm\ufeffe\ufeffn\ufeff\u2019\ufeffs\ufeff \ufeffL\ufeffa\ufeffn\ufeffd\ufeff.\ufeff \ufeffT\ufeffh\ufeffe\ufeffi\ufeffr\ufeff \ufeffs\ufefft\ufeffo\ufeffr\ufeffy\ufeff \ufeffd\ufeffo\ufeffe\ufeffs\ufeff \ufeffn\ufeffo\ufefft\ufeff \ufeffh\ufeffa\ufeffv\ufeffe\ufeff \ufeffa\ufeffn\ufeff \ufeffe\ufeffn\ufeffd\ufeff \ufeffy\ufeffe\ufefft\ufeff:\ufeff \ufeffh\ufeffa\ufeffp\ufeffp\ufeffy\ufeff,\ufeff \ufeffs\ufeffa\ufeffd\ufeff \ufeffo\ufeffr\ufeff \ufeffo\ufefft\ufeffh\ufeffe\ufeffr\ufeffwi\ufeffs\ufeffe\ufeff.\ufeff \ufeffC\ufeffa\ufeffn\ufeff \ufeffy\ufeffo\ufeffu\ufeff \ufeffh\ufeffe\ufeffl\ufeffp\ufeff?\ufeff \ufeff \ufeff<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1923,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[12,102,36,62,94,95,93],"class_list":["post-1905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tasmanian-history","tag-convict","tag-dewhirst","tag-halifax","tag-ireland","tag-tasmania","tag-van-diemens-land","tag-vdl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.warpedtime.com.au\/encyclopedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.warpedtime.com.au\/encyclopedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.warpedtime.com.au\/encyclopedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.warpedtime.com.au\/encyclopedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.warpedtime.com.au\/encyclopedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1905"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.warpedtime.com.au\/encyclopedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4282,"href":"https:\/\/www.warpedtime.com.au\/encyclopedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1905\/revisions\/4282"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.warpedtime.com.au\/encyclopedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.warpedtime.com.au\/encyclopedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.warpedtime.com.au\/encyclopedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.warpedtime.com.au\/encyclopedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.warpedtime.com.au\/encyclopedia\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/conduct-JOHNSTONE-Lorenzo-CON31-1-24P811-1024x532.jpg\")
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The woman <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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The dilemma…<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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In Summary<\/strong> <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
References<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n