Henry Kable: from a death sentence to Sydney’s first chief constable
Henry Kable should have hanged. A Norfolk court had sentenced him to death for burglary while he was still barely into his twenties, and it was only his youth that spared him when his father and another man went to the gallows for the same crime. The reprieve became fourteen years’ transportation. Transportation, through a run of accidents nobody could have planned, became a fortune at the far end of the world.
He was born about 1763 at Laxfield in Suffolk — you will also find the family name written Cable and Cabell in the old records. The trial that changed everything took place at Thetford. The exact date is one of those small puzzles that follow convict lives: the Australian Dictionary of Biography gives one date, the surviving convict records another, and later accounts a third. They agree on what matters. Death, commuted; fourteen years; and a long wait in gaol.
Norwich Castle Gaol
The plan had been to send him to America. The American War of Independence closed that door, and men like Henry sat in England’s crowded gaols with nowhere to be sent. He was held at Norwich Castle, and it was there he met Susannah Holmes, a young woman from his own part of Norfolk who had been convicted at Thetford too. Prisoners could move about the castle by day. In 1785 Susannah fell pregnant, and on 17 February 1786 their son was born inside the gaol. The family called him Harry.
What happened next to that baby — refused a place on the prison hulk, carried to London on foot by a gaoler named John Simpson, and rescued by a public subscription after the Norfolk Chronicle printed the story in November 1786 — is one of the strangest chapters in the whole First Fleet story. It belongs to Susannah, and it is told in full on her page.
The First Fleet and a colonial wedding
Henry, Susannah and the child sailed with the First Fleet on the Friendship, leaving Portsmouth on 13 May 1787 and reaching Port Jackson on 26 January 1788. A fortnight later, on 10 February, Henry and Susannah married — the first recorded European wedding in the colony, conducted by the chaplain Richard Johnson. Neither could write. Both signed the register with a cross.
Cable v Sinclair: the colony’s first court case
Before they left England, well-wishers had raised about £20 and bought the young family a parcel of goods for the new colony. It was stored aboard the Alexander under her master, Duncan Sinclair. When it was finally handed over at Sydney Cove, most of it had gone — only a few pounds’ worth of books remained. In July 1788 Henry took Sinclair to court and won £15 in damages.
It sounds like a small quarrel over a missing bag. It was not. Under English law Henry and Susannah were “dead in law” — convicts were not supposed to be able to own property or sue at all. That a convict couple could stand in a colonial court and recover their goods set an early marker for the rights of emancipated convicts, and the case is still cited as the first civil action heard in Australia. You can read how it fits the wider family story on the Kable family history page.
Chief constable, publican, shipowner
Henry was granted his freedom in 1795 and rose quickly. He served as Sydney’s first chief constable until he was dismissed in 1802, kept the Ramping Horse inn from 1798, and is credited with running the colony’s first stagecoach. He took up farms along the Hawkesbury and land at the Cowpastures, and went into sealing, shipbuilding and whaling in partnership with James Underwood and Simeon Lord. Their vessel the King George, built in 1805, was among the first whalers owned in the colony. For a man who had arrived in chains, it was an extraordinary turn.
Fortune ran both ways. He fell foul of Governor Bligh and was gaoled and fined in 1807, not long before the Rum Rebellion deposed Bligh on 26 January 1808. Later a court ordered him to pay his old partner Simeon Lord a crushing sum; Henry signed his assets over to his son Harry, and it is said Lord never saw a penny of it. Henry Kable died at Pitt Town on 16 March 1846 and was buried at Windsor. He and Susannah had eleven children.
The family that followed
One of those eleven children, Diana Kable, married William Littleton Gaudry — and it is through Diana that the author of Son of the First Fleet, Tony Gaudry, descends from Henry and Susannah. The book keeps its focus on their son Henry Kable Junior, but Henry Senior’s rise from a Norfolk cell to the front rank of colonial Sydney is the ground it all stands on.
Common questions about Henry Kable
Who was Henry Kable?
Henry Kable (c.1763–1846) was a convict transported to New South Wales with the First Fleet in 1788. In the colony he became Sydney’s first chief constable, a publican, farmer, sealer and shipowner, and one of the wealthiest emancipists of his day. He and Susannah Holmes were the parents of Henry Kable Junior, known as Harry.
What was Henry Kable convicted of?
Burglary, at Thetford in Norfolk. He was sentenced to death and reprieved on account of his youth, the sentence commuted to fourteen years’ transportation. Sources disagree on the exact date of the trial, which is common for the period.
Why is Henry Kable historically important?
In July 1788 he brought the first civil action heard in the colony — Cable v Sinclair — and won. That a convict could sue and recover damages set an early precedent for the property rights of emancipated convicts, which mattered a great deal to the colony that followed.
Further reading: Australian Dictionary of Biography, Wikipedia, and People Australia.