Gubbins (Gibbons), Thomas

Only a handful of people based at the Berrima stockade have been identified and researched. Thomas Gubbins is one. He is mentioned once in the press as a witness to a case of highway robbery. George Capsey and Thomas Nokes were accused of bailing up and stealing from a local settler, Dr Reid of Inverary. Capsey was apprehended at the scene but Nokes alluded the police and was finally captured in a sawpit belonging to John Richards where he said he had been cutting wood.

At the trial Gubbins introduced himself as the local attendant at hospital attached to the stockade at Berrima and said Nokes was employed as a wardsman in the hospital. Gubbins then went on to identify a hat that had been found at the scene of the crime as belonging to Nokes:

I have seen this hat before; I recognised it as belonging to the prisoner Nokes; I know it by its general appearance, and the peculiar set of the leaf from the manner in which the prisoner had been in the habit of putting it on his head. The prisoner sells hats, but I am positive I have seen this particular hat in his possession; it was the one he usually wore about the Hospital.^[1]

Nokes was found not guilty, Capsey found guilty of this and another robbery and sentenced to death.

A Thomas Gubbins is listed on ancestry as having arrived on the Guildford in 1827 and was recorded as being part of a road gang near Windsor and later assigned to a property at Freeman’s reach.[2] It may or may not be the same man.

[1] Sydney Monitor, 3 February 1837

[2] SRNSW Convict Road Gangs, 1827-1830 vol 7/2689