In Precisely What Form did the Soldiers Draw Their Pay?

From Nswcorps

As stated in the Introduction, at no time during the twenty year period between the arrival of the NSW Corps in June 1790 and their departure in 1810 were there any coins of gold or silver in general circulation in the colony, nor any copper coins before November 1800, and if this be so, precisely how - and in what form - did the officers and men receive their monthly pay?

From the evidence of the 1801-05 ledger of the regimental agents/bankers in London, Messrs Cox and Greenwood, it is clear that the British Treasury made regular sterling advance payments of the appropriate amounts of army pay to these agents at two-monthly intervals, but it is equally clear that except for those few officers who elected to have their pay credited in London, the regiment as a whole did not directly receive any part of the sterling sums advanced by the Treasury and properly due to them.

As suggested in the various sections of this Paper, this money was being diverted from its proper purpose and largely expended (particularly in the years up to 1800) by drawing bills of exchange on the regimental funds accruing in London in favour of visiting ships' captains and other foreign traders in payment for rum and other 'luxury' goods, the purchases being by a select number of the officers (and some of their civilian cronies) for re-sale to the community at large and for paying the 'wages' due to the labourers on their own farms etc.

Yet on the evidence of the Regimental Paysheets running continuously from 25th June 1798 onwards and still held in the Public Record office here in London, (and doubtless also the Paysheets for any earlier periods currently held in the Mitchell Library in Sydney), it would seem that the rank and file and the 'other' officers were in fact all regularly paid on the 24th of each month.

These Paysheets list, Company by Company, each officer and man and the individual amounts due to them, all in pounds, shillings and pence (£.s.d.), and accompanying each monthly Paysheet is an affidavit sworn and signed by the paymaster before a local justice of the peace and further witnessed by both the commanding officer and the adjutant stating that:

' ... all the sums set down in the said Roll, have been paid by me to the respective Persons ... in strict conformity to the King's Regulations.'

Such a statement might be justified if those bills of exchange drawn on the regimental funds had been made payable to local 'bankers' in exchange for Australian currency with which to pay the men, but as there was no such currency - nor sterling - in general circulation, the statement is clearly untrue.

How, then, and in what form, were the men paid?

There is no clear or uncontroversial answer to this question and, indeed, it is likely to have varied from time to time during the twenty year stay of the NSW Corps, but one very clear division can be made, i.e pre- and post-1801, with the demarcation line pin-pointed by the arrival in November 1800 of the consignment of English copper pennies. Up to that time there were no coins whatever in general circulation; subsequently there were the pennies, passing at twice their face value and as legal tender for amounts up to £5.

This same dividing line may also have relevance in that:

a) Governor King took office in September 1800 and made considerable changes in the official financial policies of the colony

b) A few export trades commenced at about this time, bringing in the prospect of some 'foreign' currency.

Further variations in the form of payment could occur - at any period - between the different Companies and their individual Captains, (who were generally reponsible for paying their own men, they receiving the wherewithal from the Paymaster), depending on whether or not they were 'traders', keen to 'push' their goods on to the men in their charge, or possibly stationed at a location where vessels with trade goods for sale were unlikely to call (e.g. query Newcastle, Norfolk Island, Van Dieman's Land?) However, it does appear that the men must at all times have received pay in some form acceptable to them, for no evidence has been seen of their going on 'strike', or of those officers not included in any of the money-spinning trading syndicates complaining of their particular lot - even though such officers were more literate than their men and less inhibited from complaining by fears of rank.

The problem will be approached on a chronological basis, and it will be useful to bear in mind for the earlier periods the remarks of Professor S.J. Butlin, who on page 33 of the 1953 edition of his excellent Foundations of the Australian Monetary System 1788-1851 states that:

'. . . the methods by which the military and civil officers and marines were paid before 1800 are not quite clear.'

and on pages 53/54 that:

' . . . the methods by which the men of the NSW Corps were paid before 1803 are obscure;'

Period A - 1788-1800 - Form of Payment when NO Coins in General Circulation

The first two Companies of the NSW Corps did not arrive until June 1790, but the monetary problems they would face had already confronted the previous guardians of the convicts . . .

. . . i) 1788-1791 - The Royal Marines - 212 Royal Marines accompanied the convicts in the First Fleet, arriving in January 1788, and the majority returning to the UK in HMS Gorgon, sailing on 16th December 1791.

With regard to their pay, Capt. Watkin Tench of the Royal Marines produced a fine account of Sydney's First Four Years, and in Chapter XVI of his Complete Account he writes of the 63 men who accepted the offer of grants of land and a bounty of three guineas to stay in the Colony and transfer to the NSW Corps:

'Of these men, several were undoubtedly possessed of sufficient skill and industry, [and be enabled] by the assistance of the pay which was due to them from the date of their embarkation in the beginning of … 1787, to the date on which they were discharged, to set out with reasonable hopes of being able to procure a maintenance.'

The wording above in bold type suggests that the men had received no pay during the whole of their four year stay, and this indeed is likely, bearing in mind the lack of any coin in general circulation and that, in any case, men serving at sea in the Royal Navy were customarily paid only when the ship returned home and 'paid off'. However, it is difficult to believe that there were no means of 'spending' part of that accumulating pay via the medium of 'pay-chits' or book entries for their purchases in the equivalent of a 'NAAFI' canteen or sergeants' mess etc., or from the Commissariat for the few supplies which might have been available there.

The New South Wales Corps

ii) June 1790 - February 1792. The first contingent of about 108 officers and men arrived in Sydney in June 1790, and prior to joining their respective units of the Second Fleet had been given their pay for the next twelve months on 24th October 1789. Much of this had doubtless been disbursed at Gravesend, Portsmouth and/or Plymouth before finally setting sail down the English Channel on 17th January 1790, or during their 16 day call at Cape Town in April, and one might guess that any cash remaining was spent on arrival in Sydney in the purchase of the private ventures of the masters of the Second Fleet together with the 'surplus' provisions greedily withheld from them and the convicts during the voyage.

Clearly the soldiers were not entitled to any further pay until late October 1790, but it is to be doubted whether pay in any form was handed out in the months thereafter, it hardly being a priority at this time when semi-famine conditions still prevailed in the colony and no shops, apart perhaps from a baker's and the odd drinking den might have existed. There was no Paymaster as such, though one or other of the NSW Corps officers must presumably have kept accounts of the pay accruing to everyone, but the writer has seen no reference to the survival of any such accounts. As with the Marines, it is surmised that such rum, tobacco or other supplies as were available would be obtained 'on the slate' from the Commissariat or a NAAFI-type canteen.

Further convicts and members of the NSW Corps arrived between July/October 1791, the masters of the transports usually bringing something for sale with them and likely hoovering in such English money as anyone on board brought with them or which might still remain with the earlier arrivals.

iii) February 1792 - November 1800. In February 1792 the NSW Corps reached its originally planned full strength with the arrival of the Pitt, bringing Major Grose, the commanding officer, together with a Company of men and sundry other officers of whom perhaps the most relevant to the subject under discussion was the regimental Paymaster, Captain Joseph Foveaux. It is probably from the date of his arrival that proper accounting records were kept, sufficient to make it possible for books such as The Sydney Traders by D.R.Hainsworth to be able to list [the majority of] the Regimental bills of exchange issued by the Paymaster, starting with those for £1440 issued on 2nd April 1792 in favour of the master of the Pitt.

He had opened a shop on shore,and as Collins records on p.202:

' ... notwithstanding ... the high prices at which everything was sold, the avidity with which all descriptions of people grasped at what was to be purchased was extraordinary.'

Even if it had not been appreciated before, this sale would certainly open the eyes of the enlarged officers' mess, now including the commanding officer and the Paymaster, and make them realise that they were sitting on a gold-mine with their regimental funds and that these would be infinitely more profitably employed in the bulk purchase of trade goods from visiting ships for resale, rather than distributed piecemeal to those in the regiment for whom the funds were intended.

Bills of exchange for £1440 were drawn on the regimental funds for the immediate purchase of goods from the Pitt herself, thus setting in train a pattern of monopolistic trading which would continue until at least the end of 1799, and during which at least 90% of the pay intended for the regiment as a whole would be diverted to the purchase of foreign goods for the private disposal of varying trading groups of the NSW Corps officers:-

PERIOD "A"

Regimental Pay, the Bills Drawn Thereon, and the Proportion Diverted to Imports

      Estimated    Regimental Bills Drawn
        Pay          Total   Imports   Ppn.
      
1792   £4,000      £5,545    £5,312     96% 
1793   £4,800      £4,235    £4,135     98% 
1794   £5,600      £7,329    £7,026     96% 
1795 5600 130 130 100% 
1796 5600 8374 7574 90% 
1797 8800 868 250 29% 
1798 12000 15901 15601 98% 
1799 12000 13256 10566 80%

(The above figures need setting out properly)

Totals 58400 55638 50594 91%

Considerably more detailed accounts of these trading activities will follow in a later section , but with the soldiers' pay effectively pre-empted for the purchase of imported luxury goods, a logical conclusion to draw for this penniless pre-1800 Period 'A' might be that it was only with goods of some description that the men could have been paid. This is a distinct possibility, though it is worth repeating Prof. Butlin's remarks that the methods by which the officers and men were paid before 1800 are not clear, and before 1803 are obscure. To these might be added those of D.R.Hainsworth, a later authority, who states in 1972 on page 26 of The Sydney Traders that:

"It would appear that the soldiers were chiefly paid through a 'company store' system by which they could obtain such goods as liquor and tobacco, procured for them and indeed owned by their superior officers."

No particular period is specified, but something along these lines seems very likely for the period up to the arrival of the Pitt in February 1792, and perhaps for some time thereafter while the officers learned the elements of their new auxiliary trade of buying and selling and establishing their retail selling links etc. This may not have taken them long, for as will be related in greater detail subsequently, the very next bills of exchange they drew on the regimental funds in October 1792 were to charter a storeship recently arrived from England - (the Britannia) - to proceed to Cape Town with a shopping list for goods of their own choosing! Would Payment in Goods be Legal?

On the assumption that the troops may have been paid at times with goods, would this have been legal and proper?

Were a workman to be paid his wages today directly in goods this would be considered a total anathema, smacking of exploitation and the ills and financial robbery known to have been practised at times in Britain in spite of the various 'Truck' Acts designed to make payments to workmen illegal in anything other than current coin of the realm, spendable anywhere in the country.

But where coinage was non-existant (as here) or in very short supply, payment in goods was often almost inevitable and one of the few available solutions to a difficult problem. Many examples from the United Kingdom might be given, but one recounted in the tri-centenary book of the Bank of Scotland published in 1995 will suffice. After referring to the chronic shortage of gold and silver coin throughout the eighteenth century, it continues:

'Even by 1825 the move to a cash economy had not been completed. In 1835 . . . of an estimated rental income of £1300 [for Archibald McNab in Perthshire], no less than £500 was paid in kind: in cheeses, bolls of oatmeal, beasts and chickens.'

And in a far flung colony such as New South Wales, six months distant from Britain, with no coin of the realm in general circulation, payments in goods did indeed often become almost inevitable and, therefore, quite unremarkable and acceptable.

In any case, as Adam Smith stated in his renowned Wealth of Nations in 1776:

' . . . and though the wages of the workman are commonly paid to him in money, his real revenue, like that of all other men, consists, not in the money, but the money's worth; not in the metal pieces, but in what can be got for them.'

The only proviso one might expect people to require was that there should be a range of goods in common use on offer sufficient to afford a reasonable choice, and that the 'prices' charged should represent no more than those current elsewhere in the colony. Evidence of this form of payment in goods to labour, both convict and free, is admirably provided by an extract from a letter Mrs Elizabeth Macarthur wrote to an old friend in England dated 1st September 1798:

"Our farm, which contains from 4 to 500 acres, ... Mr. M.. has frequently in his employment 30 or 40 people whom we pay weekly for their labour … these we feed and clothe, or at least we furnish them with the means of providing clothes for themselves. ...

…(Re freed convicts) - they demand an enormous price, seldom less than four or five shillings a day. For such as have many in their employment it becomes necessary to keep on hand large supplies of such articles as are most needed by them - for shops there are none."

and this style of payment is confirmed by an extract from page 56 of the edited version of the original 1838 Memoirs of Joseph Holt, who arrived in Sydney in January 1800 on the Minerva with the new Paymaster Cox and became the manager of his various farms. Here he sets out the notional rates of pay for a number of common tasks, together with the prices charged in say 1802 for such goods as the men might choose in payment:

"You must know … at that time you paid them 20s an acre for breaking up the ground, 10s for hoeing and planting, 10s for harrowing and in sowing wheat, and covering you pay 16s, reaping and binding 20s. … and we pay the men as follows:

Pork or Sugar 1s6d per lb

Wheat 10s a bushel

Indian Corn at 5s

Tobacco from 2s6d to 15s a lb and sometimes 20s :Rum 15s a bottle

Tea 10 to 20s per pound

In neither of the above examples is there any reason to suppose that the rates of pay or the prices placed upon the goods were anything other than 'going-rates' between willing buyers and sellers. Only if the choice of goods was extremely limited or non-existent, and compulsion or pressure was used to make a forced sale at an excessive price would the position be different and suspect. There are undoubtedly a few contemporaneous sources which might lead writers of great authority to conclude that some officers, at least, did endeavour to take advantage of their authority to make such a sale to the men under their command and these will be discussed more fully when dealing later with Period B, post-1800.