For years I knew my Irish fourth great grandfather stole a cow and was sent to Australia. Only now have I learnt that he was innocent.
A cruel act altered my fourth great grandfather's life in Sligo, but was it for the better or worse, and what of those who came after him? This is where it all began.
It was above 25 degrees, so all the Brits and others were out in the parks, semi-naked, when I decided to go to the City of Westminster Archives Centre to delve into my family history.
I’d heard that it was easy to get a library card there. Don't threaten me with a good time. Also, given that it had taken me months to open a bank account in Bureaucratic Britain, I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Seriously though, I’d wanted to pursue this for a while. This was sparked by seeing a former editor who had told me that she was spending a Saturday looking up her father. (She was writing a book). Plus I’d recently made a new mate who was running Australian convict tours.
Others were getting in on the act. Meghan Markle had found her Nigerian roots. Australian author in the UK Kathy Lette had discovered that she was from convict stock a while ago and was still looking into this. Our former prime minister,
”ScoMo”, had even gone and looked up his ancestry while in the Old Dart for the G7 (remember that? Maybe we shouldn’t mention this…)
For months I had thought about whether the place of the antipodean in the UK was in transition and whether we were still coming to the UK in the numbers that we once did - looking at the present and the future.
But it seemed to be better to go back to the past first.
The woman who greeted me as I walked into the building not far from the Abbey and Parliament looked amazed to see someone turn up on this day. She was wearing electric blue eyeshadow and a rainbow lanyard, which was quick becoming the topic of much debate in Britain, around her neck.
There was not one single other soul there.
It had rained for weeks and weeks and was most likely going to rain again tomorrow, something which wasn’t lost upon me.
But I sat at one of the computers for a few hours putting this jigsaw puzzle together. There was one person in particular I was searching for. I didn’t know his name - I only knew what he’d supposedly done.
There were people with names like Hercules Alfred Johnson (Mum would be thrilled when I told her we were related to Boris) and another called Benjamin Dingle. I was very pleased that I had such fancy-named relatives.
But finally with one quick smack of the return key on my laptop there were the words “Cullen” and in brackets, presumably typed by someone who had done the research and adamantly wanted this stated on the record “Wrongly Accused Convict”.
“Lived 1786-1871.” My fourth great grandfather on my father’s side.
Patrick William Cullen was born in Kilmacatramy, County Sligo, which then would have been a rural and fairly poor region, in northwest Ireland in 1786.
He was known as “White Horse Cullen” in the area, according to one record. In various cultures white horses represent warrior heroes or an end-of-time saviour. I wondered if his nickname was related to that.
Pat was apparently a man of modest stature, five feet five and a half inches tall, with a ruddy complexion and freckles spread generously across his skin.
He most likely hailed from a small rural community where people’s lives were intricately intertwined. According to one story based on the Convict Register State Records NSW, when neighbour Michael McGarry abused his own wife she would sometimes seek refuge with the Cullens.
One day while crossing Michael’s land, Patrick witnessed Mrs McGarry and her sister stealing her husband’s cow – a precious item vital for survival in 18th-century Ireland , according to the records.
“The irate husband caught them in the act but because he was unable to prosecute his wife he decided to get even with Patrick,” said the records.
“McGarry having discovered them, also took the cow back and would have prosecuted the wife, were it not that every person informed him, he could not injure her. As previously remarked, he was angry with Pat for offering her asylum and therefore as he saw him at he same time in his field, he prosecuted him.”
My relative, who went on trial in County Roscommon in July 1837, was sentenced to life imprisonment in Sligo Gaol.
According to the parish priest though, the Cullens were “honest proper men”.
“It is my impression, that he was not guilty of the crime for which he is under sentence,” he testified.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff576a5e2-816b-4dea-bb24-a0d5130968e0_1440x1800.jpeg)
Through his intervention Pat’s punishment was reduced to seven years' transportation to the penal colony of Botany Bay in Australia.
In November that year, Pat sadly departed Dublin aboard the ship the William Jardine, bound for an uncertain future across the seas. There were 214 men onboard. The journey took 139 days. Two of them died during that time.
Finally, in April 1838 they arrived in Port Jackson.
“They were compelled to anchor near Watson's Bay (in Sydney) in consequence of the unfavourable state of the weather,” according to the Convict Ship Musters and Related Records.
Given the weather in Ireland then the perilous journey, I wouldn’t have been too happy.
Pat was age 52 when he arrived in Australia, not an easy age to start over in a strange country , I imagined.
Estimates suggest that around 20 per cent of modern Australians have convict ancestry. Between 1787 and 1868, over 160,000 convicts were transported from Britain to Australia.
As professional genealogist and family history speaker Kelly Cornwell pointed out some were certainly pardoned later, which signified they had been wrongly convicted, although statistics on how many experienced this were hard to come by. Kat Le Gay Brereton, a genealogical researcher and family historian, said that she’d studied a teenager convicted at a judge only trial, without proper legal representation, at Middlesex Quarter Sessions in 1831. The case was brought only under duress, as no one wished to prosecute the boy.
“An appeal was lodged by family but failed to alter the outcome,” Kat told me. “I suspect a high per centage of young men were found guilty on tenuous grounds, tried without adequate representation and sent to the colonies as young, fit labour without the life footprint in the slums of London to have their absence particularly noticed.”
According to the University of New England’s database, only two people were recorded as protesting their “innocence” on arrival, Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart a convict transportation expert who I interviewed in 2022 for a separate story told me. “Others pled mitigating circumstances or said that they were wrongly accused.”
The typical story told about this movement of people to the colonies was that they originated from a "criminal class" with “no moral code”, said Liberty Melly from London’s Migration Museum.
“However, research largely conducted by descendants of convicts shows a much more complex story; one of people forced into poverty, who due to horrible circumstances found themselves before a judge where they were (rightly or wrongly) accused of crimes where the punishment was deportation.”
Some of these crimes were minor infractions, such as petty theft, that equate to less than £5 (less than $2) today, or simply being in debt, Liberty told me. There were also cases of women who purposefully got caught committing a crime so that they could be transported and reunited with partners and family, she said.
Like many others in modern Australian history who would go onto be wrongly accused or forced to take a guilty plea after him – Lindy Chamberlain, Julian Assange, David McBride - Pat did the time.
I don’t know what he did when he reached Australia. But he received his “ticket of freedom” at Bathurst in NSW in 1844.
Despite being the victim of a framing leading to a cruel fate, he lived for almost 35 years in Australia.
Five of his 11 children came out to the new country as their mother had died prior to their father’s sentence, possibly from the Potato Famine, according to some records.
Pat himself eventually died at Buck's Creek, Carcoar - a place I’d never heard of – about 260km west of Sydney, in 1871, on his daughter Ellen Begley's farm. The cause was heat exhaustion. He was 85-years-old.
It was most likely a life filled with overall exhaustion, but he’d reached a good age. One of his daughters, Bridget Mary, hadn’t made it that far.
His final resting place was the Long Swamp Catholic Cemetery near Rockley and Trunkey Creek.
In 1988 the Irish government presented then Australian prime minister Bob Hawke with a copy of records which showed that Pat was innocent. The records that were presented to the then leader proving this had survived a fire in the Four Courts of Dublin in 1922.
“Patrick’s large Australian family are widespread, with many different lifestyles,” says the words on a photo of a grave that I found online.
“They are proud of their convict ancestor, whose wrongful conviction provided them with opportunities that Ireland in the 1800s could not dream of.”
His story is his own. But it’s also the story of the start of the Fallons in Australia – our path in this new country had been set by an act of cruelty by one’s neighbour but Pat rushing to the aid of a local woman who was said to have been abused had also played a part.
Had it altered my fourth great grandfather’s life and many of those who had come after him for the better? Had Pat not been wrongly convicted of stealing that cow, how would his life had turned out?
Staying in Ireland in 1837 may have meant keeping his freedom and being able to remain in his homeland surrounded by family and cultural familiarity. But this was also a period of tremendous upheaval, poverty and famine in Ireland under British rule.
Life in Australia as a convict seems like an unconscionably tough path – torn away from loved ones to face an arduous sea journey followed by harsh penal labor under a punishing colonial system. The odds of not just surviving but thriving in Australia would have been minuscule.
But it also represented a new chance – the luck of the Irish for some?
As for Michael, I have not been able to find any records on him. But if he was guilty as suggested maybe he lived a less eventful life and eventually received his comeuppances.
My family hadn’t never learnt the story of “White Horse Cullen”, the tall honest Irishman for whom life took a very different turn when he was framed by his villainous neighbour.
But someone had passed down orally that we had a convict in the family who stole a cow and for years we believed he was guilty. It turned out now that he was not.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F060867a3-4231-412c-8bee-e810157dcfba_4032x3024.jpeg)
I couldn’t help but think of the modern day parallels: the jails were full in the UK, the government were currently trying to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, and one particular Australian inmate who was being held at His Majesty’s pleasure was now one of the world’s most famous political prisoners.
Outside in Westminster clouds were forming. Inside my time on the library computer was up.
My fourth great grandfather’s story would be inconsequential to my daily life when I stepped outside that building. It hadn’t taken me very long at all to discover it. But it was still a reminder of the strength that runs in your blood and the resilience that can emerge from injustice.
Perhaps a rare day of sunshine in the UK wasn’t that much to sacrifice to learn that I was descended from a true survivor.
TOP TIPS FROM ME FOR DISCOVERING YOUR FAMILY HISTORY
City of Westminster Archives is friendly, helpful and centrally located. Once you get a card you can go on the computer and use sites such as ancestry.co.uk to build a family tree, save this and then work on it at home.
The National Archives is situated in beautiful Richmond on the river, in west London, not far from Kew Gardens, so you can visit the gardens at the same time (if National Rail is having a good day). Not open on a Sunday and please check the website before visiting.
Australian Convict Research, who I was lucky to meet recently, is a public research group and forthcoming centre for Australian Convict Research in London and the UK. They will soon be hosting walking tours around Westminster with a focus on Australia’s historical connections to the borough city.
There seems to be a lot of helpful genealogy people on X.
The award-winning Migration Museum, who are interestingly located inside Lewisham Shopping Centre, in south London were also really helpful and I look forward to visiting soon.
I acknowledge the profound and enduring harm caused by the colonisation of Australia to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. I recognise their rightful sovereignty over the land and deeply regret the displacement, cultural disruption, loss of life, and ongoing injustices that they have experienced. The impacts of colonisation, including the devastating effects of introduced diseases and the violence of the frontier wars, continue to have severe consequences for First Nations communities today.