| 12. |  John Bailie, 1820 Settler was born on 5 Jul 1788 in Ongole, Andhra Pradesh, India (son of Thomas Bailie and Anne Hope); died on 29 Jul 1852 in Port St Johns, Eastern Cape, South Africa. Other Events and Attributes:
- 1820 Lineage: Yes
- Settler ID: 82
- Settler: 3 Dec 1819, Gravesend, Kent, England
Notes:
An extract from the Edinburgh Advertiser on 14 April 1820 gave the following report:
EMIGRANTS TO THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE
We have received intelligence of “The Chapman” transport, which sailed from London in December last, with the first party of emigrants destined to form a new settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, under the agreement with Mr John Bailie. The communication from this gentleman is brief, owing to the casualty by which it is flavoured. It is dated under the Line Feb 1, 1820, 7 o’ clock, PM and announces that the ship made Madeira on the 29th and the Canaries on the 31st December 1819. On 12th January 1920 they entered Port Praya, in St Jago, on the Cape Verde Islands on which they landed and encamped. Here they recruited the mess-stock with fresh meat, poultry, fruit, wine and some flour and continued the voyage. The only death which occurred was that of an infant child of Mr. Chase on Christmas day.
John Bailie the 1820 Settler was the son of Col. Thomas Bailie and was born on the Carnatic at Ongole 5th July 1788. During the Frontier War of 1835 military operations were greatly handicapped for want of a sea-port on the coast. In order to establish a port, John Bailie, at his own expense, surveyed the coast from Port Elizabeth to the Buffalo River and took a cargo of supplies in the Knysna Brig, and offloaded them at the mouth of the Buffalo River. On his recommendation East London was built there. His son Charles was a member of the expedition into Tembuland and Pondoland in 1828 against the Fetcani. He was killed in the Sixth Frontier war,1835, and a memorial tablet has been erected at the spot where he fell, and the place is known as Bailie's Grave Post. The son John became a missionary in Namaqualand. The son Archibald died of wounds received in the Seventh Frontier War, 1846. In 1848 Lt. Bailie established a trading station in Durban. In 1852 he surveyed the coast as far as Durban. Returning in his yacht Haidee, he observed the barque Hector in distress off the Natal coast. Boarding her with some of his men he endeavored to save her, but a storm arose and the Hector was wrecked. Some of the crew managed to escape in a boat which was smashed in the surf, but Lt. Bailie, who was then an old man, perished with the ship. On Signal Hill, East London, there is a memorial to Bailie, the founder of the town.
"John Bailie, son of Colonel Thomas Bailie, of Inishargy, County Down, Ireland, and Anne Hope, daughter of Archibald Hope, of Dumfries, Scotland, was born at Angola(sic), Carnatic, 5th July, 1788. In 1793 Colonel Bailie returned to England and John Bailie and his brother Thomas Manborary Bailie went to France and were educated at the Polytechnique. In 1803 John Bailie entered the Royal Navy, and during his service in the navy visited the Cape. In 1809 he retired from the navy and entered the Foreign Office. He married Amelia Crause, daughter of Mr. William Crause, of Pembury, Kent. After Waterloo he was secretary for foreign claims in France, his duties being in connection with indemnities to be paid to allied subjects for losses and damages in France during the war. In 1817 he returned to the Foreign Office in London and worked out his pet scheme of settling the Cape with British settlers. He led the first, or Bailie's, party in 18 19 on board the Chapman, which arrived in Algoa Bay in 1820. Chase, Godlonton, Stringfellow, Major Hope and some of the Crause family were of this party. He held a dormant commission as Lieutenant-Governor for the new Settlement, which he resigned very soon after landing, because "the Whigs were in," and settled with his sons Charles Theodore, Archibald Hope, Thomas Cockburn and John Amelius, on the two farms, the Hope and Harewood, at the mouth of the Fish river in Albany. He and his sons served, during all the wars and disturbances, the expedition against the Fetcani, etc., until the Kafir war of 1835 broke out. Charles Theodore, the eldest son, was appointed Lieutenant in the first provisional battalion, and met with his death at the hands of the Kafirs, June 26, 1835, at Intaba-Ka-'Ndoba, near the abandoned Pirie mission station, the spot being to this day marked and known as Bailie's grave. "
(From: British South Africa by Colin Turing Campbell)
It has since been established that his birthplace was not Angola, but Ongole, Andhra Pradesh, India.
From M D Nash's book on Bailie's Party - "He was born in Ongole, Madras, the son of Thomas Bailie, a subaltern in the East India Company's army temporarily attached to the service of the Nawab of Arcot, and his wife Anne Hope. Both families were well-connected; the Bailies were minor Irish landed gentry who had owned the townlands of Inishargy, County Down, from the time of the Ulster Plantation until 1767, and the Hopes were eminent in the legal profession in Scotland. Thomas Bailie and his family left India to return to England about 1790, and he was granted a pension from the Lord Clive Fund in consideration of wounds and imprisonment he had suffered during the Mysore War of 1780-84. They were living in Lambeth when a second son was born in 1796.
In 1798 Thomas Bailie fled to France to avoid arrest as a member of the revolutionary movement known as the United Irishmen. His wife and two sons joined him in exile in Paris in 1799, and returned to England in 1805 when he was arrested and imprisoned by the French police on suspicion of spying for the British government. Thomas Bailie was released from prison in 1807 without standing trial, and died in London in 1814.
Contrary to popular tradition, John Bailie never served in the Royal Navy, but by his own statement 'was bred to the sea in the merchant service and generally in mercantile pursuits and connected with ship building'. He turned from the sea to the study of law, and in July 1814 he became Secretary to the Commissioners for the liquidation of British claims against the French government, appointed to award compensation to British sub¬jects who had suffered by the violation of the Treaty of Commerce of 1786. He held this post until he resigned to emigrate in 1819. He married Amelia Crause, daughter of Charles Crause of Spring Grove and Manor House, Pembury, Kent, in 1809; their eldest son, Charles Theodore, was baptised at the church of St George the Martyr, Southwark, in 1811, and three other sons, Archibald Hope, Thomas Cockburn and John Amelius, were born between 1812 and 1816 and baptised at St Mary at Lambeth. The name of a fifth son, Maurice, was entered on the emigration list of Bailie's party in August 1819, but was omitted from the later lists.
When the Cape of Good Hope emigration scheme was advertised in 1819, Bailie applied to emigrate at the head of a large party of independent settlers, constituted on a joint-stock basis. His proposal was accepted, and his party of 84 men and their families reached Algoa Bay on the Chapman transport in April 1820. Their plans to establish a co-operative settlement did not survive the voyage, and the party broke up almost immediately upon landing. John Bailie was separately located with a small group of friends and their servants on a 1 000-morgen farm in Lower Albany which he was subsequently granted in his own right, and which he named The Hope. He built 'the best and most substantial farm house in the settlement' where he resided until 1832, a respected figure in the Albany community. In 1825 he acted as arbitrator for Pieter Retief in his dispute with the Government over the building of the Grahamstown Drostdy, and in 1828 he sat on the court of inquest to investigate the sudden death of the Resident Magistrate of Albany.
Between 1824 and 1826 Bailie was actively engaged in promoting a scheme for establish¬ing a harbour and shipyard at the mouth of the Great Fish River. He himself entered the river in a decked boat in September 1825, thereby demonstrating that it was navigable for small craft at least. Lack of funds prevented his proceeding with the scheme, and in 1832 he moved to Grahamstown to practise as a general agent.
At the outbreak of the Sixth Frontier War, Bailie had acquired considerable property
in the Albany district by purchase. The homesteads on all three of his farms, The Hope, Harewood and Layton, were burnt in December 1834 and January 1835, and his stock driven off; he and his family were plunged from prosperity to destitution. To provide them with a livelihood, John Bailie and his eldest son Charles, who had been actively engaged against the enemy from the outbreak of the war, were commissioned as Captain and Lieu¬tenant respectively in the newly-formed First Battalion, Provisional Colonial Infantry. Both served with distinction under Sir Benjamin D'Urban and Colonel Harry Smith. Charles Bailie was ambushed and killed while on patrol near the Ungqesha River in June 1835; his body was found and buried by his father after months of searching.
In 1836, John Bailie surveyed the mouth of the Buffalo River, which he had suggested as a potential harbour to land stores for troops in the Province of Queen Adelaide, and supervised the off-loading of the cargo carried on the brig Knysna. When the Provisional Colonial Infantry was disbanded in 1837 he acquired land on the east bank of the Buffalo where he intended to settle, but he was forced to return to Albany through illness. In July 1839 he was appointed Secretary to the Port Elizabeth Jetty Company, and lived in Port Elizabeth while supervising the building of the jetty, which was destroyed by storm only five months after its completion. The company was wound up in March 1844.
In May 1844, John Bailie left the colony to join his son Thomas, who had settled among the emigrant Boers in the Caledon River district. A few months later Robert Godlonton, the editor of the Graham's Town Journal, published a letter from John Bailie reporting conditions north of the Orange River, which incurred the resentment of the Boer farmers. Both John and Thomas Bailie were brought before the elected Commandant of the Boers, Jacobus du Plooy of Roode Kuil, to answer a charge of malicious libel, as well as an action for damages brought by a trader named Donald McDonald. Both Bailies were heavily and, as they asserted, illegally fined. Their appeals to the colonial authorities and to Moshesh for intervention were ineffectual, and in July 1845 they visited du Plooy to demand redress. A quarrel ensued, and du Plooy was shot dead. John Bailie took the money he considered owing to him, and rode to Colesberg to report that he had killed du Plooy in self-defence. John Bailie and his son Thomas were arrested for murder and robbery, under the rarely-invoked Cape of Good Hope Punishment Act of 1836. Their trial was scheduled to be held before the Circuit Court in Colesberg in October 1845, but local feeling against the Bailies ran so high that the trial was removed to Uitenhage, where they were found guilty and sen¬tenced to death on 30 March 1846. Public opinion among the English-speaking inhabitants of the eastern districts was strongly in favour of the Bailies, and a spate of memorials pray¬ing for remission of sentence reached the Governor, including one from Sir Benjamin D'Urban.i J.C.Chase was instrumental in organising the Bailies' defence as well as several mass petitions for mercy.
In September 1846, the Bailies' sentence was commuted to life imprisonment with hard labour. Further appeals for remission of sentence were unsuccessful, and in November they were transferred from Uitenhage gaol to the convict station at George. The case of the Bailies was a cause celebre, and created embarrassment for two Governors, Maitland and Pottinger. It took a third, Sir Harry Smith, to resolve the situation. He arrived at the Cape as Governor and High Commissioner early in December 1847, and left Cape Town for the frontier almost immediately. On 17 December he reached Grahamstown, and the Graham's Town Journal on the following day carried the news that a free pardon had been granted to the Bailies. (As far as can be traced, this act of clemency was never officially recorded.) Sir Harry's subsequent recommendation of John Bailie to J.B.Ebden, chairman of the newly-formed Natal Cotton Company, resulted in Bailie's appointment in May 1848 as supervisor of the company's plantation on the Umhloti River.
The Natal Cotton Company was a failure almost from the outset. Bailie was dismissed in January 1849, and the company's affairs were wound up in the following year. By that time John Bailie had established himself as a general agent in Durban, where his involve¬ment in public affairs included standing surety for the editor of a new newspaper, the D'Urban Observer.
In 1852, Bailie purchased and fitted out a small yacht, the Haidee, formerly the lifeboat of the emigrant ship of that name. He had previously visited the Umtata River area, and formed a high opinion of its potential for trade and settlement, and at the end of June he set out on an exploratory voyage with a cargo of trade goods. The Haidee entered the mouth of the Umgazi River, and her cargo was satisfactorily bartered for gum. On her return voyage she encountered the barque Hector of London, flying distress signals after springing a leak; Bailie and the crew of the Haidee boarded her to assist at the pumps. When it became evident that the Hector was foundering she was run ashore, and the Haidee, with only the captain and one seaman aboard, made for Durban. The captain and most of the crew of the Hector managed to reach the shore in safety, but Bailie and five of the hands were trapped on the wreck and drowned.
Bailie's assets were inadequate to meet the expenses of the Haidee's voyage, and his estate was declared insolvent. He died intestate, and appears to have broken off all contact with his family by the time of his death.
Mrs Amelia Bailie died in Grahamstown in 1864.
Settler:
Bailie's party on the Chapman
John married Amelia Crause, 1820 Settler on 23 Aug 1809 in St.John the Evangelist, Smith Square, Westminster, London, England. Amelia (daughter of Charles Crause and Mary) was born on 28 Feb 1782 in Pembury, Kent, England; died on 20 Jun 1864 in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, South Africa. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]
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1869 - 1957 (87 years)
Amelia Crause, 1820 Settler was born on 28 Feb 1782 in Pembury, Kent, England (daughter of Charles Crause and Mary); died on 20 Jun 1864 in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, South Africa. 
