History is amazing, especially in towns like Ipswich, Queensland, where one man can live an action-packed life and yet I bet you’ve never heard of him. Henry Foley arrived in Ipswich in the 1840s back in the days when the Moreton Bay colony was still part of New South Wales. I told a version of this story on West Bremer Radio.

In 1849 Foley opened a new hotel called the Travellers Home. It was quite commodious with five bedrooms, three parlours, bar and tap, detached kitchen, servants room, and a six stall stable, and was well-located on Nicholas Street right next door to the government undertaker. (Nicholas Street is pictured above thirty years later.)

Foley employed as his cook a known raving lunatic called Patrick Fahey. Fahey was better known as “Paddy the Horse.” Paddy proved to be totally useless and cooked nothing. Foley refused to pay his wages, so Paddy bolted. Foley took the Horse to court, had him charged with breaching the hired servants act, and he was incarcerated for seven days.

Th following year in 1850, Foley was himself fined £2 for breaches of the licensed publicans act. In early 1851 he sold the Travellers Home having been a publican for less than two years.

Later that same year, Foley was arrested charged for the wilful murder of his wife. Her body was found floating in the local Bremer River. She had a cut on the forehead, several other wounds, and the intestines were grossly protruding from the body. Foley was seen violently quarrelling with her before the murder, but got off on a technicality. That’s because the chief witness against him was contradicted when it was found that the quarrel had not taken place the day of the murder as stated, but rather, the day before.

In 1858 Foley was again arrested when he ran onto the Ipswich racecourse and threw his hat at the horses in disgust. He was fined £2 and 10 shillings under the vagrants act.

Queensland officially separated from New South Wales in 1859 and Foley may have felt perturbed because the following year he pleaded guilty to using obscene language in public and was fined £3.

That same year 1860 Foley’s daughter married the sole survivor of the Hornet Bank Massacre up by the Dawson River north of Miles. That’s when the groom’s mother, four sisters and three brothers, the tutor, and two employees, were raped and murdered in horrible fashion while he was visiting Ipswich. Foley’s son-in-law infamously embarked on a lifelong trail of revenge.

In 1861, Foley pleaded guilty to drunkenness and fined 5 shillings. His life up to that point had been action-packed, but who was he, and how did he come to Ipswich?

Henry Foley was quite possibly a convict who was transported for seven years and arrived in Van Diemen’s Land (modern day Tasmania) in 1836. He was given his conditional pardon five years later, headed north and became an Ipswich policeman.

In 1847, Constable Foley made a name for himself when he was the arresting officer in a murder on Union Street in Ipswich in which one convict was bashed to death by another convict.

In 1848, Constable Foley was again the arresting officer when he tracked down an escaped convict. But his fall from grace came at the end of that same year.

Constable Foley was accompanying from Ipswich to Brisbane three men who were committed for trial on a charge of wilful murder. But when they arrived in Brisbane, and before delivering them up, Foley and another constable took their prisoners into a public house to drink. They all enjoyed a night out on the public purse. Both the constables and the prisoners were in a state of utter intoxication when they eventually arrived at the watch-house. The principal man in the alleged murder was unable to stand, and the constable with Foley was asleep in the street.

That was the end of Ipswich’s Henry Foley’s police career – and as I said earlier, he opened a pub, cavorted with convicts, employed a raving lunatic, charged with murdering his wife, his daughter married a massacre survivor, and all that after he came out as a convict to become a New South Wales policeman.

Isn’t history grand!

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Photo credits:
Nicholas Street looking North from Brisbane Street, Ipswich, c1886 – Picture Ipswich, Whitehead Studios.
Ipswich Courthouse c1860 – State Library of Queensland.
Scene of the Hornet Bank Massacre – The Queenslander, 1st February 1919, page 27.
Constable Alexander Binning Walker who killed the bushranger Thunderbolt, cMay-June 1870 – State Library of New South Wales.