Prisoner George WHITE as NUTT, George NUTT alias White
Prisoner William YEOMANS: misreadings and copies
George Nutt: QVMAG copy
Prisoner George White alias Nutt per Fairlie 1852
Photographed at the Hobart Gaol by T. J. Nevin 1875
QVMAG ref: QVM: 1985: P: 70
This black and white copy of a sepia mugshot of Tasmanian prisoner George White alias Nutt, gazetted by police as George Nutt alias White, transported to VDL (Tasmania) on the Fairlie in 1852. is held at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, Tasmania. Note that the verso is inscribed with the conventionally transcribed date of Thomas J. Nevin's photographic registration (1874), the prisoner's presumed alias - "Nutt" - and the ship on which he was originally transported before 1853, the Fairlie (1852), but the transcription which appears on many other versos of these extant 1870s prisoner mugshots - "Taken at Port Arthur" - is absent.
Government contractor Thomas J. Nevin may have photographed George White alias Nutt at Port Arthur between 23rd February and 8th May 1874. Prison records by then had gazetted his name as George Nutt, and White as his alias. The former date was another sentence for Nutt for breaking the cell while trying to escape, the latter was one of the dates when Thomas Nevin attended Port Arthur on police business at the request of the Commandant-surgeon Dr. Coverdale. He was absent from Hobart when his father-in-law Captain James Day registered the birth of their first son and second child, Thomas James Nevin jnr, to his daughter Elizabeth (Day) Nevin, in May 1874.
The transcriber of the cdv's verso notes, probably at John Watt Beattie's tourist attraction, his "Port Arthur Museum" located at 51 Murray St. in Hobart in the early 1910s, had assumed the date "1874" was the date of Nevin's photographic capture. The more likely event was on George Nutt's arrest in September 1875 for absconding. Thomas Nevin would have photographed George Nutt at the Hobart Supreme Court and incarceration at the Hobart Gaol awaiting trial in September 1875 in his one and only sitting with the prisoner.
Webshot of Thomas Nevin's cdv of George Nutt alias White, 1875
Archives Office of Tasmania copy of QVMAG cdv
Ref: PH30/1/3222
CAPTION: "Possibly George White [alias Nutt] convict transported per Fairlie. Photo taken at Port Arthur by Thomas Nevin."
Police Records
The carte-de-visite of convict George Nutt alias White, which was also online at the Archives Office of Tasmania until 2010 (the AOT reversed the alias per original Separate Model Prison records of 1870-1), was taken by Thomas Nevin soon after Nutt was arrested on September 3rd, 1875. Nutt escaped while under sentence on 24th August, 1875 from the Port Arthur settlement, and was considered desperate enough that a reward of £10 was offered in the weekly police gazettes (Tasmania Reports on Crime for Police Information 1875) during the fortnight of the prisoner's freedom.
Above: The police gazette notice published on 27th August, 1875.
TRANSCRIPT
ABSCONDED: -Some details about his height were amended in the following week's description for police information:
On the 24th instant, from the settlement at Port Arthur, whilst undergoing a sentence of 10 years imprisonment with hard labour passed on him at the S. C. Hobart, on 5th July,1870, for robbery from the person.
George Nutt, alias White, per Fairlie, 42 years of age, 5 feet 5 inches high, fresh complexion, large head, black hair, whiskers shaved, oval visage, low forehead, black eyebrows, dark eyes, large nose, large mouth and chin, foul anchor on wrist of left hand, ring on centre finger, a sailor, his ears have been pierced for rings; dressed in prison clothing and a straw hat.
TRANSCRIPT
HOBART TOWN. - On the 3rd instant, by William Tarleton Esquire, J. P., for the arrest of George Nutt, alias White, charged with having, n the 24th ultimo, at Port Arthur, escaped from lawful custody and control while a priosner under sentence for felony. For description see Crime Report of the 27th ultimo, page 134; but for height 5 feet 5, read 5 feet 1 inch, full prominent features, walks with a remarkable swagger in his gait.The notice appeared again on the eve of George Nutt's capture:
TRANSCRIPT
ESCAPE £10 REWARDAnd the notice of his arrest appeared in the same issue, September 3rd, 1875.
WHEREAS on the 24th instant, George Nutt, alias White, per Fairlie, effected his escape from the settlement at Port Arthur: this is to give notice, that I am authorised to offer a reward of Ten Poounds for the arrest of the said George Nutt, alias White, in the event of his having escaped from Tasman's Peninsula.
George Nutt, alias White, has been arrested by Sergeant Hanley and Constable Newitt, of the Sorell Municipal Police.Sources: Tasmania Reports on Crime for Police Information 1875. James Barnard, Govt printer
The "Fairlie" 1852
Professional photographer Thomas J. Nevin would have been able to recognize and describe George Nutt from their common experience as passengers travelling to Australia on board the Fairlie, which arrived in Hobart on July 3rd, 1852. Thomas J (James) Nevin was still a child in 1852, the ten year old son of John Nevin, former soldier of the Royals Scots who was deployed as a guard of the 292 adult convicts and 30 Parkhurst boys on board. Thomas James Nevin was accompanied by his mother Mary Ann (Dickson) Nevin and three siblings, William John (Jack) Nevin, Rebecca Jane Nevin, and Mary Ann Nevin. They arrived in Hobart as free settlers. Prisoner George Nutt was a Parkhurst boy, a transported exile from the prison of the Isle of Wight. He would have been about 18 years old in 1852, if he was 42 years old when he fled the Port Arthur prison in 1875.
Above: George Nutt's transported convict record, Archives Office Tasmania
Ref: CON33-1-107_00197_L
https://libraries.tas.gov.au/Digital/CON33-1-107/CON33-1-107P197
Unlike many of these transportation records, this one contains some information of George Nutt's work record and serial criminal offences up to his discharge in 1884.
Copies, Duplicates and Aliases
The black and white copies of George Nutt's mugshot held at the Archives Office of Tasmania and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery both bear the number "1" on the front mount under the photo. But on this copy held at the Archives Office of Tasmania in Hobart, there is the addition of an ink stain of a square stamp partially covering the prisoner's face.
INK STAMP ACROSS FACE
AOT: PH30/1/3222
Archives Office of Tasmania photographic database:
PH30/1/3222
Title: George White
Subject: convicts, people, portraits
Locality: not identified
Date: 1874
Archives Office of Tasmania Convicts' names database:
Database number:81329 Name: White, George
Arrived: 03 Jul 1852 Fairlie
Departed: 11 Mar 1852 Plymouth
Transported as George Nutt
The AOT database has used this transportation and incarceration record in 1870-71 at the Separate Model Prison Port Arthur under his alias - George White as Nutt . This prison record (below) which records Nutt's earnings as a shoemaker, is held at the State Library of NSW: it also uses his alias White rather than Nutt. It wasn't until he escaped from Port Arthur and was arrested that the police decided to use the name under which he was transported, George Nutt,alias White.
State Library of NSW records - White as Nutt in Separate Prison July 1870
White as Nutt Separate Prison April 1871
Convict Department - Separate Prison Reports, 1867-1871
SLNSW Link: https://collection.sl.nsw.gov.au/record/n88E66Ln
George White as Nutt,
Separate Model Prison 1870-1
Mitchell Library, SLNSW
Photos © KLW NFC 2009 ARR
The police, however, documented his escape as Nutt alias White. According to information detailing the Parkhurst Boys at the website (formerly online), Convict Central, a 13 year old boy called George Nutt was convicted of larceny on 15th May 1848, sentenced for 7yrs and transported on the Fairlie departing Plymouth on March 2nd, 1852, arriving in Tasmania on July 3rd, 1852. The transportation record (above) confirms these details, although his age by 1852 was given as 19 yrs. He was listed as a tailor or shoemaker. George Nutt would have been born ca 1834 if aged 13 at the time of conviction in 1848, and would have been around 42 in late 1875. The photograph taken by Nevin shows a man of that age.
Wm Yeomans: copying & misreadings
Thomas J. Nevin took the one surviving image of prisoner George Nutt as a police photograph at the Hobart Gaol when Nutt was incarcerated on arrest in 1875. The photograph was printed from his glass negative as a standard police identification carte-de-visite in an oval mount, typical in those years and even into the 1890s in Tasmania, and pasted it to Nutt's criminal record sheet. The number "1" on the mount may have been written by the same person at the QVMAG when so many of these prisoner cdvs were exhibited there (1976, 1977), copied and dispersed to the Port Arthur site and the TMAG for exhibition in 1983, with paper copies made at Archives Office in Hobart. It might be Nevin's numbering, on the other hand, or one used by the police, and there would have existed at least three more duplicates from his original capture circulated to police, but more likely it has been numbered by museum archivists on accession or for copying in 1958. Another indication on this carte that it was the first photograph in an album copied as a series at the QVMAG in 1958 is the impress left by the square QVM stamp across George Nutt's left cheek and collar from the verso of the second carte in the series in 1958 which was placed on top of it, that of convict carte No.2, Nevin's photograph of Wm Yeomans.
For this reason, the square stamp ink is visible in the AOT image, but not in the QVMAG image, although identical in all other respects, which points to multiple copies made by the QVMAG archivist (in Launceston) for circulation to the AOT office in Hobart. The sepia original from which 20th century copies were made may be the one held at the QVMAG but not necessarily the only duplicate which was first made by Nevin from his glass negative and used in photo books accompanying criminal registers held at the Hobart Gaol and Municipal Police Office, Hobart Town Hall.
For example, there are three extant copies of the photograph taken once and once only by Thomas Nevin of prisoner William Yeomans: one at the QVMAG, one at the AOT, both numbered "2" on the front, and a third which is held at the National Library of Australia with no numbering on the front, rather, it is numbered "57" on the verso, testifying to further copying from a single original glass negative either by Nevin for the prison authorities' immediate use, or by later archivists such as John Watt Beattie when copies such as these were sold to tourists in the early 1900s. The NLA copy of the William Yeomans cdv is an archival estray donated there by Dr Neil Gunson in 1964 from government estrays and accessioned in Thomas J. Nevin's name. But under the influence of Elspeth Wishart and her former colleague at the TMAG, Julia Clark, the NLA has recently been co-opted to apply the misattribution to the prison commandant A. H. Boyd of their 84 "convict portraits", further effectively suppressing Nevin's former sole attribution, for no reason other than to attempt to mask their collective foolishness in believing Chris Long's idle speculations (1984,1995). Their doggedness is tantamount to professional fraud.
NLA Series: Convict portraits, Port Arthur, 1874.
Gunson Collection file 203/7/54.
Title from inscription on reverse.
Inscription: "No 57"--On reverse.
https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-142914713
Subject: Yeomans, William, -1899 -- Portraits
Prisoner William Yeoman, No. 2
Black and white copy of photograph by T. J. Nevin at the QVMAG and AOT.
The recto on Wm Yeomans' carte is numbered "2' and was most likely placed on top of the front of George Nutt's carte when the QVMAG archivist was in the process of copying them in 1958 or even later. The catalogue number for the job in 1958 was 1958:78:22, accompanied by the QVM stamp with more numbers.
The original transcription of the convict's name and ship and the date 1874 was added much earlier, probably ca. 1900-1927, given the calligraphic style. The most recent inscriptions by archivists date from 1985; e.g. QVM1985:P69, and are in a childish hand. Again, there is NO statement on this verso that the photograph was taken at Port Arthur, the probable explanation being that these first few cartes were transcribed verso and copied by one person, and the remainder at a later date by another. And of course, the absence of the claim testifies to the reality that these mugshots were NOT taken at Port Arthur nor indeed by anyone called A. H. Boyd, they were taken at the Hobart Gaol by the contracted photographer T. J. Nevin.
Misattribution: QVMAG, TMAG, NLA, DAAO
Given the fact the prison commandant Adolarious H. Boyd was gone from Port Arthur by December 1873, any attribution made by commentators in the 1990s and early 2000s is doubly impossible; he was gone from Port Arthur by December 1873, forced to resign under suspicion of embezzlement, and no document exists which attests to activities by him as a photographer, amateur, official or otherwise. There was NO photographer in Tasmania by the name A. H. Boyd, nor are there any extant photographs attributed in the 1870s bearing his name.
Cataloguists, librarians, archivists, students, photo historians and others in public service have made a real mess of storing and recording the accession history, numbering, and data collation on these Tasmanian prisoners' identification photos: obliteration, reinvention, fads, guesses, fashions, and personal agendas have managed to obliterate valuable data and thus the traces of facts from their past.
George Nutt's prisoner identification photograph is one example. It was one of more than 70 exhibited at the Queen Victoria and Museum Gallery in 1977 with correct attribution to Thomas J. Nevin from collector John Watt Beattie's estate in the 1930s. But by 1984 a researcher on a very tiny budget, Chris Long, who had an ambition of putting together an A-Z directory of Tasmanian photographers (edited by Gillian Winter in 1995) for the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart, speculated that photographic supplies supposedly sent to Port Arthur in August 1873 were used personally by the Civil Commandant to photograph the prison's inmates (letter to Nevin descendants 1984; letter to the authors Davies and Stanbury, The Mechanical Eye 1985). The Civil Commandant from 1871 to December 1873 was A.H. Boyd, with no reputation in his lifetime as a photographer, no history of training or skills, and with no extant works in any genre held in private or public collections. No police or official documentation associates his name with prisoner photographic records and there has never surfaced any evidence to support this "idea" or "belief", but because of the self-referential world of art history, photo historians such as Ennis, Crombie and Reeder have credited Chris Long and used his "idea" as a possible attribution, extending to the present as a "likely" attribution by the sycophantic Clark.
This simple fallacy of judgment by Long and his unquestioning cohort has misled commentators, and more significantly, librarians and museum cataloguists into suppressing Nevin's attribution, foregrounding the name A.H. Boyd, ignoring the circumstances and contexts of police practices, and labelling the mugshots as "portraits" - aesthetic objects, in other words. Chris Long has since regretted the confusion he caused (acknowledged 2005, email to these weblogs), blaming difficulties with his editor Gillian Winter (1995) and the unsubstantiated rumours spread by Adolarious H. Boyd's descendants in 1983, but the misattribution in public institutions is still evident in their catalogues. George White aka Nutt's carte has gone from this record: -
Archives Office of Tasmania (and current at June 2010)
Carte no. 1
PH30/1/3222
Title: George White
Subject: convicts, people, portraits Locality: not identified
Date: 1874 Possibly George White (alias Nutt) convict transported per Fairlie.
Photo taken at Port Arthur by Thomas Nevin
and this original record at the QVMAG (prior to 1985)
Nevin, Thomas J. 1874
QVMAG carte no. 1
George White, alias Nutt
Fairlie
- to this now at the QVMAG from 1985 (until 2009) when Elspeth Wishart re-catalogued all these convict photographs for an Exhibition purely because of Chris Long's idle speculation:
QVMAG from 1985-2009
Registration Number: QVM: 1985:P :0070
Type: carte de visite
Producer/Photographer: Boyd, Adolarious Humphrey
Content: Portrait of George White alias Nutt at Port Arthur, Tasmania, 1874.
Note that the data about ship, date of transportation, and former catalogue numbers are all gone, and the aesthetic term "portrait" has subsumed the documentary facts. When asked why the QVMAG had obliterated Nevin's attribution, which was correctly assigned in 1977 by the same institution, the QVMAG, their reply was simply - "because of comments made by Chris Long, " - without so much as a backwards glance at their own curatorial history (letter from Community History Technical Officer - see this article: The QVMAG, Chris Long and A. H. Boyd.)
As at June 2012
The QVMAG has now brought online most (but not all) of their database holdings of these convict photographs, with a revised catalogue entry for Nutt (below). The first cataloguing of these photographs by the QVMAG was in 1958, evidenced by the stamp on versos, and the second database dates from 1985. A new database collation needs to be performed, going back to the original cdv's and glass negatives to include the criminal records sheets with prisoners' cdv's attached, mentioned by Nevin's curator for the 1977 QVMAG exhibition, John McPhee, in correspondence with the Specialist Librarian G.T. Stilwell.
Purely because of one idle comment by Chris Long that forced a photographer attribution to the Port Arthur commandant A.H. Boyd as the photographer of these "convict portraits" (i.e. police mugshots), the former employee at the QVMAG and now an historian at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Elspeth Wishart, has pushed onto the public the A. H. Boyd misattribution, both at the TMAG and per this entry online at the QVMAG website (webshot below). A.H. Boyd has no entry in the mammoth publication, Dictionary of Australian Artists to 1870 (ed. Joan Kerr 1992), while T. J. Nevin has accreditation with attribution as the photographer of these convict images (p.568). Incredibly, A. H. Boyd has an entry as THE photographer of these prisoner cartes in the DAA online version, probably because Wishart and Clark were actively involved as contributors who authored the fatuously illogical comment -"not surprising given his job as penal officer".
The entire misattribution problem has its genesis in a belief that a single sentence in an unpublished children's fictional tale about a holiday at Port Arthur, written in 1930 by a niece of A.H. Boyd, E.M. Hall, called "The Young Explorer" (SLTAS) which does NOT mention Boyd by name NOR does it refer to the photographing of prisoners at the Port Arthur prison, can be taken as FACT. Elspeth Wishart and her former colleague at the TMAG, Julia Clark, are determined to promulgate the A.H. Boyd misattribution with appeals to impressionable staff at the National Library of Australia and other public institutions, not to mention the editors of academic journals (JACHS 2010) purely to mask their own gullibility in placing all their faith in Chris Long's assumption that a paragraph from children's fiction can function as historical fact.
Frontispiece: inside book of Port Arthur records, SLNSW
Separate Prison records, Mitchell Library, SLNSW
Photos © KLW NFC 2009 ARR
RELATED POSTS main weblog
- Margaret Glover and the fabrication of photohistory
- Improprieties: A. H. Boyd and the Parasitic Attribution
- Julia Clark: A Question of Stupidity & the NLA
- Parkhurst Boys on board the "Fairlie" 1852
- The PARKHURST prisoners & anthropometry
- T. J. NEVIN’s cdv’s of Wm PRICE and Wm YEOMANS; A. H. BOYD’s testimony 1875