Australian Royalty: Genealogy of the colony of NSW

age given as 80 in 1828

William Blue, one of 297 convicts transported on the Nile, Canada and the ship Minorca, June 1801.
Sentence details: Convicted at Kent Quarter Sessions for a term of 7 years on 04 October 1796.
Vessel: Nile, Canada and Minorca.
Date of Departure: June 1801.
Place of Arrival: New South Wales.

The ship Minorca arrived in NSW 14 Dec 1801

"Early on Saturday morning the following convicts were removed from Maidstone gaol to Woolwich and there put on board a hulk, preparatory to their transportation to New South Wales - ... William Blue ..."

"WILLIAM BLUE respectfully informs the Public, that he being the only Waterman licenced to ply the Ferry in this Harbour, they will always be accommodated with a tight and clean boat, an active oar, and an unalterable inclination to serve those who honour him with their commands."

"William Blue deposed, that he resided in a small house little more than 20 years from that inhabited by the prisoners; that on Saturday night, between ten and eleven, he definitely herd [sic] the words "Murder!" and "O Dear!" several times faintly repeated; that at different periods of the night he had heard a noise of quarrelling; and about one in the morning, by a sudden transition it was converted to merriment; the whole he supposed to proceed from the house they lived in, but could not speak positively.
Elizabeth Williams, co-habiting with the last witness, corroborated his testimony..."

Name: Elizabeth Williams
Spouse Name: William Blew
Marriage Date: 1805
Marriage Place: New South Wales
Registration Place: Sydney, New South Wales
Registration Year: 1805
Volume Number: V A

William Blue per the ship Minorca, self employed, free by servitude, boatman

"His Excellency the GOVERNOR has also been pleased to appoint William Blue to be Watchman of the Heaving Down Place in Sydney Cove, to have Charge thereof, reside nearby; and be answerable for such Articles as are put under his Charge by the Harbour Master. - William Blue is to be invested with the Powers of a Constable and to be sworn in as one..."

Blue, Robert, 16, born in the colony, Protestant, weaver for Simeon Lord, Botany
Blue, John, 13, born in the colony, Protestant, weaver for Simeon Lord, Botany
Blue, William, 80, free by servitude, Minorca, 7 years, Protestant, landholder, Hunters Hill
Blue, William, 21, born in the colony, Protestant

Blues Point was named after Billy Blue, a convict who arrived in Sydney on the Minorca on 14 December 1801, transported for stealing a bag of sugar. Physically imposing, he was described as a "strapping Jamaican Negro 'a very Hercules in proportion' with a bright eye and a jocular wit". He claimed to have served with the British Army in the American War of Independence. When he arrived in 1801 he only had two years of his sentence left and he was soon working on the harbour with boats and selling oysters. His friendly manner and humorous conversation made him popular and he became a notable local character. He married English-born convict Elizabeth Williams in 1805, and in 1807, was the only person licensed to ply a ferry across the harbour. Governor Macquarie named him "The Old Commodore" and he ran his ferry dressed in a blue naval officers coat and top hat. His ferry service grew to a fleet of 11 vessels, and in 1817, Governor Macquarie granted Billy Blue 80 acres (320,000 m2) at what is now Blues Point. He died in 1834 at his North Sydney home.

Black Commodore Billy Blue
by K.S. Poole
The plan to build a block of 250 flats, housing 1000 workers, at Milson's Point, and other flats in Lavender Street McMahon's Point, has aroused new interest in two of Sydney's oldest suburbs.
James Milson, accepted pioneer of the North Shore, arrived in Sydney Cove in 1804. His house, Brisbane Cottage, was the first to be built at Milson;s Point, and one of the earliest on the North Shore. Milson was a man of education and of note, and has not lacked biographers.
Lavender Street is liked with a story as old as Milson's, less clear but no less colourful. The street and the adjacent Lavender Bay was named after George Lavender, boatswain of the hulk Phoenix. The vessel was moored in the bay as a temporary gaol for convicts who had been again convicted after their landing in the colony. They bay, originally called Quiperee, was then known as Hulk Bay.
In 1828 its beauty and possibilities so impressed the Surveyor-General, Major (later Sir Thomas) Mitchell, that he suggested that the highest part of the foreshores might be adorned with crescents of buildings and terraces of flowers. This was considered "a sublime idea, but too vast".
Only the names of East Crescent and West Crescent Streets, McMahon's Point, now remain of this suggestion.
Mitchell also recommended Hulk Bay as a suitable site for a naval base, and foresaw quarters and docks there for the British squadrons in India and China "nowhere in the world were to be found such natural advantages". This idea also came to nothing.
In the 'incomparable' bay convicts were held on board the Phoenix until a sufficient number were assembled for transportation to the cruel remoteness of Newcastle, Port Macquarie or Moreton Bay.
George Lavender, the boatswain later became a ferryman and lived ashore. When his cottage was burnt down in 1838, public subscriptions were invited to build him a new one, "the earnings of an industrious couple being consumed and themselves penniless". He sold his second house some ten years later and went to live at the Old Commodore Hotel, in Blue's Point Road at the head of Lavender Street.
The Old Commodore himself, Billy Blue, whose daughter George Lavender married - laughing, friendly and irrepressible, a legend in his own life-time and black as the Ace of Spades - may claim equally with Milson, if you are no snob, to have initiated the development of the whole North Shore.
Blue was a Jamaican or American negro who is said to have come out as a sailor in one of the early ships, and elected to stay in Sydney. As with all ancient heroes, some confusion has grown around his story.
Some say that because he was a powerfully built man, he was made caretaker of the Octagon Provision Store, built by Governor Philip to keep provisions in at Circular Quay. Later, he is recorded as keeper of the magazine in the Domain, from which position he was dismissed, apparently through detection in attempted smuggling.
The Governor and Mrs. macquarie, according to a copy of the Sydney Gazette published just after Blue's death, could not stand by and see Billy Blue without a roof over his head, and his children homeless. So, in 1817, Macquarie gave Blue, then 83 years old, a grant of 80 acres on the North Shore, including Blue's Point and the western side of Lavender Bay.
Here, undaunted, the old man grew vegetables for the Sydney market and used his skill as a boatman (which had given happy hours in earlier days to Macquarie's delicate son) to build up a small fleet of clumsy boats.
In these he and his sons ferried travellers across from Dawes Point to Miller's Point, or Blue's Point and back.
Macquarie, crossing one day, perhaps as host to one of the parties which shot parrots, ducks and kangaroos in the North Shore bush, laughingly said to Blue "that as he had such a fleet of boats, he should be called commodore of the fleet". Thereafter Blue was always "The Commodore".
His first passengers were mainly soldiers cutting grass on the North Shore, either for their horses, or for thatching Sydney's roofs. But a track, blazed by Lieut. Ball R.N. of H.M.S. Supply, ran from nearby Ball's Head promontory to Middle Harbour. A track from Blue's Point wharf joined it, and Billy Blue's ferry provided the first invaluable transport link which opened up the north shire for travellers and settlers. As always, development followed the provision of lines of communication.
Blue built a house some little distance from the point itself. Here, out of kindness of heart and a reasonable disinclination for making enemies, he would sometimes give food and a pot of tea to runaway assigned servants, headed for Sydney rum and beauty, or to escaped twice convicted men from the Phoenix, afterwards rowing then across to Sydney at nightfall.
In 1829 (when the older settlers still told tales of "shooting parrots, to make pies of, in the middle of George Street, then a crowded wood") Blue was gaoled for sheltering a runaway prisoner, but was released on the payment of a fine.
Other homes began to spring up. At Blue's Point itself a Captain Norrie built a house, on a shelf blasted out of the solid rock, and called the house "Gibraltar". Only a wide, friendly verandah, looking over to Dawes Point and some great scattered blocks of stone, remain of "Gibraltar", which afterwards boasted a cannon for defence, and a later tenant who kept pet monkeys.
The old way to it was by steps at the point cut out of solid stone. These are still there, though access to them is unofficial. Sydney Ferries Lit., own a caretaker's cottage further inland, just behind the old house, and have marked the main entrance gate "Strictly No Admittance".
Billy Blue died in 1824, aged 100 years. Of his house also, only tumbled convict hewn blocks of stone remain, though if you go there at dusk you may be prompted to look behind you. But there is never anything there, except a queer sense of pleased amusement, as though somebody had chuckled silently, "Wot, looking for the Commodore's house, after all this time?"
In his day Billy Blue was one of the best known figures in Sydney. He was daily to be seen in George Street. His contemporaries, writing of him, said "Who ever saw the Commodore out of humour?" "Scarcely a day passes but Billy Blue, an octogenarian, makes more than half the faces he meets look happier. Many a one smiles or laughs at him and nothing else". "Even urchins doff their hats to him". The Sydney Gazette mourned his death and wrote several hundred words on his life.
Few of those who live on his 80 acre grant could tell you Blue's story now. About 1864 Mr. McMahon, a brush and comb manufacturer, built a house on the small headland just east of Blue's Point, and the suburb gradually became known as McMahon's Point.
Local history leaves many questions unanswered.
Why did George Lavender shoot himself in the Old Commodore Hotel in 1851, leaving his widow, Blue's daughter, to marry again soon afterwards? And where was Jack Buckley's house in Lavender Street, where he lived for many years? (In later days he went to Samoa, was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, and died from an explosion caused by "examining a cask of gunpowder while smoking a cigar"). And where in McMahon;s Point did Henry Lawson live? Down in the old ruin by the present ferry, or up in William Street, where heavy blocks of stone from a forgotten house lie haphazardly among the saplings?
There is no answer now in McMahon's Point to such queries. There are only old trees, old worn steps going down to the water, old houses dreaming as they look out towards Quiperee, Dawes Point, or Berry;s Bay.

Name: William Blue
Death Date: 1834
Death Place: New South Wales
Registration Year: 1834
Registration Place: Sydney, New South Wales
Volume Number: V18341950 18

BILLY BLUE.
"I knew him well, Horatio, a fellow of excellent wit-
Where now he they flashes of merriment which were wont to set the table in a roar?"
HAMLET.
So the gallant "Old Commodore" has for ever laid aside his truncheon of command. He died at his Villa, on the North Shore, on Tuesday. The reign of BILLY is coeval with the foundation of the Colony; and the remembrance of the whimsicality of character which grew with him as he advanced to the end of his earthly pilgrimage, will be long treasured in the minds of the present generation, when the minions of ambition are forgotten in the dust. Billy's public avocations were not always such as to bring him under the particular observation of the illustrious Officers who have from time to time administered the Government; but what his talents in business would probably have for ever denied to him, was procured by his singular humour and excellent disposition.
Macquarie settled the Commodore on a point of ground on the northern shore of Port Jackson, which was given under, we believe, certain conditions depriving him or his family of the right to sell it. It was in fact a sort of entailed estate for his descendants. Here Billy was not exempt from the "iron hand of adversity" for he was incarcerated through a runaway prisoner of the crown being discovered in his house, and became only restored to liberty by the liberality of the late Mr. Pitman, who discharged the fine. Who ever saw the commodore out of humour? He might have purveyed for an army. And who ever saw him return home with an empty bag? Fish, flesh, fowl, cheese, butter, wine, porter, and ale, might be there seen in glorious confusion, borne on the shoulders of the humorous old man, to whom even the very urchins lifted their caps in token of respect. "No rows!" "Go-go, my child - true blue for ever" now and then found utterance as the obsequious citizens struck their ensigns to the Commodore.
But Billy changed the general levity of his manner on a Sunday. Though the same respect was shown to him by men of all ranks and degrees, his voice would not only on that day be heard beyond a whisper. "We are all going down; remember the worship of God my child: was the homely serious caution of one who, with all his bantering, never forgot the duties of a good christian; and who on that holy day seldom, health and weather permitting, absented himself from Divine worship. - Requiescat! "We may never look upon his like again"

DIED,
On Tuesday last, at his residence,
North Shore, WILLIAM BLUE, aged 97.