THE STORY OF THOMAS PEARCE

Thomas Pearce was born in Easton on Christmas Day 1816, the eldest of four sons and three daughters of Thomas and Elizabeth Pearce. His father worked as a horse dealer and his youngest brother John set up a successful stud of Shire stallions – gold sovereigns worth £200 were said to be found in his mattress after his death. His two other brothers, Edmund and David, were farm labourers.

Thomas worked at Easton Farm on a casual basis, as and when his pocket required. Mr Powell’s account book of 1852 shows that the farmer advanced Thomas cash on several occasions – which would indicate a constant need for money and the ability to spend. He was a rover, a likely lad who found it difficult to conform to the submissive routine of a small rural village. Thomas chased the bright penny and used his countryside skills when the need arose.

Pewsey Vale farmers were poor payers and life in large labouring families was hard. Housewives faced a never-ending struggle to put food on the table, living mainly on potatoes, sometimes supplemented by a swede surreptitiously ‘lifted’ from the fields.

No wonder then that lads like Thomas were tempted to follow the country code which is older and more lenient than the law, but must be properly observed. If the occasional poacher – with his eye less on the market than on his own kitchen table – managed to get away with a bird or a brace of good rabbits, nobody was seriously perturbed. But all this in moderation, the habit must not become a regular one.

Thomas apparently overstepped the code on too many occasions. Early in 1854 he once again had some unpleasantness with Lord Ailesbury’s gamekeepers. The Marlborough magistrates, who knew him well, advised Thomas to take up their option of a one-way ticket to Australia.

Thomas agreed and joined the seventeen thousand others who had left England’s shores to follow the route taken by the Tolpuddle martyrs twenty years before. His destination though was South Australia where there were no penal colonies and where some rough form of planned settlement was attempted. Few of those men who left England in 1854 were able to return home. Thomas married and settled near Adelaide, but the story of a strange experience was passed down through the Pearce family.

Some twenty years later on a winter’s afternoon, Thomas’s nephew John with his young son Harry were working on Crossroads farm finishing off the afternoon’s milking. Harry glanced up from his milking stool and saw a tall bearded stranger standing by the half doors at the far end of the cowshed.  The man seemed to be beckoning, so Harry called out ‘somebody to see ‘ee  father’.

His father looked up, seemingly recognised the man, jumped from his stool and rushed towards the end of the shed shouting ‘tis our uncle Tom come back’. But when he reached the half doors, there was no-one there and the men in the yard had seen nothing. Three months later, a letter arrived from Australia with the news that Thomas had died ‘down under’ on what the family believes was that very day.

Crossroads Farm

John Pearce and Guardsman