When this you see, remember me
CNG 106, Lot: 946. Estimate $2000.
Sold for $4500. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee. |
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AUSTRALIA, Private Token Issues. Thomas Brownhill, convict, transported 1831-1832. Æ Convict Love Token (35.5mm, 23.25 g). Man standing right on shore, doffing hat, holding irons attached to his legs; to right, ship under sail right; below,
T Brownhill/
aged 20 april 1, 1831/
for get me not /
~/
When this/
you see reme/
mber me tho/
banished from/
my count/
ry ~, all engraved on a smoothed Cartwheel-type penny. Michele Field & Timothy Millett,
Convict Love Tokens (Kent Town, South Australia, 1998), p. 110 (for another token of Brownhill). Good VF. Recently discovered in a house clearance in the UK.
Thomas Brownhill was tried and convicted at the Warwick Assizes on 26 March 1831 for housebreaking, and sentenced to transportation. He sailed from Portsmouth on the Isabella on 27 November 1831, bound for Sydney. The voyage was marked by a mutiny of the ships crew, with fourteen being executed upon their arrival in Australia. But the convicts, Brownhill included, remained well-behaved, and are even reported to have helped the captain. Following their arrival in Australia, Brownhill was assigned to one W.T. Morris of Batemans Bay, where he died on 13 December 1840.
Brownhill is surprisingly known from another token in the Peter Lane Collection, bearing the initials and ages of his family members. Other records describe him as as literate, a Birmingham-born Protestant, and a ‘fancy plater’ by trade, with a tattoo on his lower right arm of a man and a woman and his initials.
