Black Bunny's Bushrangers (T) - Ralph Entwhistle West Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia
By Black Bunny on 02-Oct-17. Waypoint GA6013

Bushranger Series - Ralph Entwhistle

Ralph Entwhistle

Ralph Entwhistle (c. 1805 – 2 November 1830) was an English labourer who was transported to the British penal colony of New South Wales as a convict in 1827 and later became a bushranger.

As leader of the Ribbon Gang, he sparked the Bathurst Rebellion of 1830. He, along with nine of his gang members, were captured by police and executed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Entwistle

John Merriman on 20th May, 2015 wrote:

The Bathurst Rebellion was a brief bushranging episode outside of Bathurst, New South Wales, involving a group of escaped convicts known as the ‘Ribbon Gang’, during September and October 1830. The insurgents were led by 25-year-old English convict-servant Ralph Entwistle and at its peak they numbered more than 80 men.

Although the circumstances remain unresolved the men may have been motivated by an act of injustice inflicted on Entwistle the previous year when he was flogged by the local police magistrate for swimming naked at a ford on the Macquarie River when governor Lieutenant General Sir Ralph Darling and his entourage had passed by. Alternatively the real cause may have been a grievance at being deprived of adequate food and clothing by a local landowner.

The troubles began on 23 September when Entwistle and four others escaped from their assigned farm in Fitzgerald’s Valley, 20 km (12 mi) south of Bathurst, seizing firearms in the process. During the following days the escapees appeared at other farms, seizing more weapons, and being joined by more convicts. When the convict manager of one of the farms refused to join Entwistle he was shot and killed. Following an extensive manhunt by local volunteers, mounted police and British Army soldiers from the 39th Regiment of Foot, ten members of the gang–including Entwistle himself–were subsequently captured, but not before a series of shoot-outs during which a number of men on both sides were shot and wounded.

The rebels were subsequently tried and found guilty of murder before a Special Commission and a jury of military officers; they were publicly executed in Bathurst by hanging on 3 November. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathurst_Rebellion

Bushrangers.

Over 2,000 bushrangers are estimated to have roamed the Australian countryside, beginning with the convict bolters and drawing to a close after Ned Kelly's last stand at Glenrowan.

Bushrangers were originally escaped convicts who had the survival skills necessary to use the Australian bush as a refuge to hide from the authorities. By the 1820s, the term "bushranger" had evolved to refer to those who abandoned social rights and privileges to take up "robbery under arms" as a way of life, using the bush as their base.

Bushranging thrived during the gold rush years of the 1850s and 1860s when the likes of Ben Hall, Frank Gardiner and John Gilbert led notorious gangs in the country districts of New South Wales. These Wild Colonial Boys typically robbed small-town banks and coach services.

In other infamous cases, such as that of Dan Morgan, the Clarke brothers, and Australia's best-known bushranger, Ned Kelly, numerous policemen were murdered.

The number of bushrangers declined due to better policing and improvements in rail transport and communication technology, such as telegraphy. Kelly's capture and execution in 1880 effectively represented the end of the bushranging era.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushranger

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