In the 1860s there was a man who made it his business to keep convicts out of gaol. I told a version of this story live on Darling Downs radio 4AK.

Peter Gentle was a convict with a difference because he was on a mission to keep other ticket-of-leave men out of gaol. He risked prison himself by keeping others out, and he had a knack of getting away with it.

Gentle was around just twenty-years-of-age when he was one of the 297 convicts who were transported aboard the ship Bangalore from Spithead in the south of England and arrived in Moreton Bay on the 30^th of April 1850. Despite a seven-year sentence, Gentle like the other convicts on board was immediately given his ticket-of-leave. Queensland was in dire need of labour and these exiles were assigned to mostly graziers to develop the colony.

Gentle went straight to work for the Gore brothers on the Darling Downs. They were headed up by St George Richard Gore of Yandilla who was the offspring of an aristocratic Irish family. Gore became a member of both the Queensland legislative assembly and legislative council, holding the colonial ministry of postmaster-general. The manager of his Yandilla property was later murdered by a disaffected employee who became the first person executed in Toowoomba. But in 1848 Gore had taken up the new Bodumba run and that’s where Gentle was sent.

Gentle served his term working for the Gore brothers and then gained a sort of respectability and a level of financial success by obtaining the mail delivery contracts out of Tooowoomba and Drayton. He was a postman, but there were complaints of irregular delivery and of letters being pilfered from the mail bags.

In 1856 Gentle came across a stolen horse that was in the possession of a fellow ticket-of-leave man. Gentle took possession of the horse and refused to name the man, thereby helping him evade a certain prison term. Gentle himself avoided a charge of horse stealing by then implicating a Constable Egan from Gayndah. I can say that Constable Egan did not progress to the Queensland police force when it was formed a few years later.

In 1861 Gentle came to the rescue of a fellow exile from the ship Bangalore. Dick Austin, who had already set the record for the biggest robbery in Ipswich, was held in the Toowoomba lock-up facing a charge of stealing a bullock’s yoke.

Gentle visited Austin in the lock-up and tried to bribe the constable in charge with the offer of the enormous amount of £50 which was declined. When that failed, Gentle successfully bribed at least one of the policemen, Constable George Burton, assigned to escort Austin to Brisbane gaol. Austin was allowed to escape while crossing Gatton Creek. Gentle himself got off the bribery charge at the lock-up because his arrest was not done correctly, which may have been made by another sympathetic member of the Toowoomba constabulary.

In 1862, Gentle was charged with highway robbery, which was downgraded to receiving stolen goods, which was in turn downgraded to getting off entirely, while those others charged with highway robbery got convicted. Gentle seemed to know the secret of getting off.

Gentle had been an inn keeper in Scotland and he became one of the first inn keepers here in Toowoomba. It was on Wednesday the 18^th of January 1865 that Peter Gentle breathed his last at his residence the Horse and Jockey Hotel on Ruthven Street. He was buried at the Toowoomba and Drayton Cemetery.

Twenty years later, Gentle’s widow Eliza would apply to regain the license of the Horse and Jockey in her own right. But her application was denied because her second husband, who was not a former convict, but was an undischarged bankrupt. Maybe as a sign of enduring love, Eliza would be buried not with her second husband, but directly beside her first husband Peter Gentle.

Although Gentle was just thirty-four years of age when he died, he had four children and there are plenty of descendants living on the Darling Downs today, and also plenty of those of the convicts who he helped.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO A VERSION OF THIS STORY TOLD LIVE ON RADIO 4AK.

Photo credits:
Representation of the Peter Gentle story – Copilot image.
The convict Bangalore based on scrimshaw photo from Carters Price Guide to Antiques – Copilot image.
St George Richard Gore 1862 – State Library of Queensland.
Representation of Dick Austin escaping with help 1861 – Copilot image.