Gaudry, William

Cathy McHardy December 2023

William Littleton Gaudry arrived in the colony of NSW on the 17 July 1807 aboard the stores ship Young William. This ship carried a small number of paying passengers including Archibald Bell, his wife and seven children. Also named in the notice were “Ensign Masters to join the New South Wales Corps, Mr. Townson, Mr (formerly serjeant) (sic) Guise and family”. Gaudry, aged 29 years was amongst the unnamed “several others’ who were also aboard the ship.

Gaudry carried a letter of recommendation to Colonel William Paterson from the Duke of York, desiring an appointment in the commissariat and a grant of land. This reference from a member of the British royalty set him apart from the convicts and military officers as well as many of the other free immigrants to the colony. Shortly after his arrival, he travelled to Van Diemen’s Land to take up a position at Port Dalrymple before returning to Sydney with Colonel Paterson in 1809. In April that year he gained the position of clerk in the Secretary’s Office under James Finucane.

Also in 1809, on the 9 September William Gaudry married Diana Kable, born in 1788, the daughter of Henry Kable and Susannah Holmes who had arrived as convicts aboard the Friendship in 1788. The bride was “given away” by the captain of one of Henry Kable’s ships

Gaudry was the beneficiary of two grants of land in 1810 comprising 100 acres in the Parish of Minto which was named ‘Cary Grove’ and the much larger 200 acres in the Hawkesbury at Richmond Hill near Little Wheeny Creek. His Hawkesbury land adjoined 50 acres promised to Benjamin Singleton on which was constructed a water mill by 1816. His surname was misspelt ‘Gandry’ on the face of the map. The land at Minto shared a border with Henry Kable’s ‘Holmes Farm’ to the north and Andrew Thompson’s ‘Saint Andrew’s’ to the south-east.

The marriage of William Gaudry and Diana Kable produced four children. First born William Henry was born in 1810 and died in 1846, he married Edna Beasley in 1831; Charles Joseph Stephen Woodward was born in 1812 and died in 1861; Emmeline Ann Susannah, born in 1814 and died in 1886, she married John Benton Wild in 1832 and George Lyttleton Gaudry lived from 1816 to 1889.

Unexpectedly, at the age of only 38 years, he died on the 3 January 1816. He was interred in the churchyard of St Matthew’s Church of England, Windsor within the Kable family vault. The inscription on the top of the vault has become illegible but two metal plaques provide details of the burials within the vault.