Probably,
James Colbeck left Van Diemen’s Land in the Shamrock
from Georgetown on the Tamar River on the 8th June, 1846.
The ship was bound for Port Phillip in Victoria.
He would have travelled on to Liverpool in Yorkshire
and then walked the seventy miles home to Dewsbury in the West Riding;
though, perhaps he had earned enough money in his eighteen years of
dishonest and honest work in the antipodean prison to ride in a coach.
Nancy and Henry, his wife and son, would have been there
but James was illiterate so they might have been ignorant of his homecoming. 

James Colbeck had been born in Dewsbury to Henry and Sarah, née Nowell,
and was baptised on 26th July 1801.
The West Riding was a traditional centre of the workingman’s struggle for
a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work; a place of organised protest.
Henry laboured for a blacksmith, John Brooks; with the multiplication of machines
he probably managed to maintain an income while the
birth of industrialisation from the womb of a gentler Britain
ravaged her and brought her to her knees.
Many of the displaced turned to crime as wages became worthless.
Even Sarah his mother was gaoled in Leeds Castle in 1826 for uttering base coin.

In 1815, James was apprenticed to Daniel Sharp.
The Napoleonic Wars ended and soldiers and sailors
returned to their hometowns in their thousands.
The military and naval demands for goods ceased;
trade blockades were lifted and competition with European textiles
drove down prices, and therefore employment. Respectable
domestic spinners and weavers were reduced to penury,
sending their children out to work in the factories and coal mines.
The power of the English in Ireland and the removal of protection for the Irish textile industry
resulted in poverty there and the emigration of skilled weavers and spinners to Yorkshire.
As the population exploded, so did unemployment, poverty, contagion and crime. 

James must have completed his apprenticeship;
his talent was acknowledged in Van Diemen’s Land.
In 1824 or ’25 he went to London where he worked for Mr. Grundy on
the New King’s Palace (Buckingham Palace) which had been designed by
John Nash in 1825. Thomas Grundy was a renowned stonemason and stone carver.
He would have paid a good wage. Though the construction continued until 1830,
Colbeck went home and committed a burglary on 7th March 1828. 

Why?
He had married Nancy Stapleton on 25th January, 1824 in Dewsbury
and Henry had been born in November.
Perhaps she went with him; perhaps he left her to manage.
His father’s mother was a Miss Nowell as was his own mother.
They came from a family of stonemasons and engineers of Dewsbury,
yet he did not seek work with them. What possessed him to risk his neck?
Was he coerced by the four other men who burgled the widow Jane Gartside’s house?
But how did they gather to plan their crime when two of them lived in distant towns?
Was he the leader? He was a good manager of men in VDL.
Perhaps there was a political motive.
Were they active in the incipient union movement?
Did they rebel against the Consumption Tax on salt, coal, tea, sugar,
soap, candles, windows, carts, horses, leather, dogs, spirits …
James was a Wesleyan Methodist and probably not a great drinker.
His partners in crime were married men with children and jobs, except for one.
It was deemed illegal to combine to appeal more efficiently for political rights
and improved wages and conditions.
Were the five bent on raising money for their cause
and becoming martyrs if they were caught?
Martyrdom in the north was not as it became in the south
for the Tolpuddle Six in 1834.

Or was James one of the desperate free who risked execution
to gain an unpaid passage to New South Wales or Van Diemen’s Land?
Sir John Hullock was the judge who presided over the Lent Assizes
in York in 1828. The verdict against James was guilty; the sentence of death was recorded
and commuted to transportation for life. Having chilled his criminal ardour in
York Castle’s dungeon, Colbeck had to sweat it out for four months in the hulk, Retribution,
moored off Woolwich in the Thames; then another four months between decks
in the transport ship, Manlius, until she moored in Sullivan’s Cove off Hobart Town 
on the 9th November 1828.

He was assigned to the Public Works and housed in the prisoners’ barracks.
He acted as many of the government men, getting drunk and absenting himself from work.
But there came a time when the magistrates did not tolerate disdain for the rules.
On August 25th, he was absent from his labour and drunk; he received twelve lashes.
Six days later he was intoxicated and flogged again.
Two weeks, and he was drunk again, sentenced to the treadwheel for fourteen days.
It must have been then that he began planning his escape.
He was “found secreted on board the Ship, Bussorah Merchant, 
with intent to escape from the Colony” in March ’30:
fifty lashes and the treadwheel until the Governor’s pleasure was known.
The Bagdad road party pleased Lieutenant Governor, Colonel George Arthur
and pleased the Inspector of Roads, Roderic O’Connor, too because Colbeck turned out
to be one of the best mechanics on the long line of road to Launceston.

From Bagdad, with two other stonemasons, Frederick Edwards and Andrew Daymond,
and two quarrymen, Thomas Herbert and John McCullen,
he was lent to William Foord, a competent builder,
who was superintending a gang of useless convict labourers
constructing a church for the Bothwell Presbyterians.
The simple chapel was completed by the end of 1830
and the gang set about repairing the barracks in the village.
The following March, the five were sent to Hobart Town
rather than their road party; this must have been a reason to celebrate
but, owing to their high spirits, they ended up in the No. 1 Chain Gang.

Chain Gangs broke rocks for roads.
Both the Civil Engineer and the Inspector of Roads considered this use
– or abuse – or misuse – of skilled men a waste
and they vied for the redeployment of the five to their respective departments.
Mr. Foord begged for them and O’Connor prevailed;
They were sent to Ross with Foord’s gang of forty men
to repair the dilapidated old bridge,
arriving in May, 1831.
(John McCullen was left behind.)

Someone had carved two plain heads to ornament the portico
of the ­little church at Bothwell; either Frederick Edwards or Colbeck, most likely.
The talent was transferred to Ross where it flourished
when the administration decided that the collapsed timber and rubble crossing
ought to be superseded by a permanent, freestone, three-arched bridge.

Knowing that James Colbeck had whiskers
and he was grimly disgruntled at being a prisoner in Van Diemen’s Land,
this sculpture may be a caricatured self-portrait.

Therefore, the partnering carving is probably
his imagining of his grieving wife, Nancy.

James Colbeck assumed the management of a clandestine building racket
after Mr. Foord’s dismissal in November 1831 for employing two men of the bridge party
to make bricks on his own property, Tryhard Farm, a few miles south of the Ross.
Labourers and mechanics benefitted from this outsourcing of government labour to the settlers of the district and the innkeepers of the village, and others who needed a house or barn or business premises,
or tools, or lime, charcoal, stone or iron.

Money was earned and circulated; the town thrived; 
stone was prepared for the bridge, timber drawn and shaped for the centres,
or so it appeared to the Inspector of Roads.

Robert Quayle Kermode, scion of the nearby Mona Vale Estate,
kept an account of Colbeck’s pickings, agreeing to arrange
Nancy and Henry’s passage to VDL when he went “home”.

But it never eventuated.

By Christmas Day, 1834, the east and central cutwaters of the bridge were in place.
The gang went to church and then to the pub as they had the previous year
but were told by Constable Freestun that it was against the rules now.
Their resistance to the police and military turned into a brawl and precipitated
an investigation into the activities of the gang, rumours of illicit trading of
government materials and men having goaded His Excellency for years.

Joe Boden squealed and James Colbeck was sent to Hobart Town.
Twenty-three men were punished by removal to other public works
or Port Arthur, as was Colbeck’s mate, Thomas Herbert.
In his own defence, the superintendent of the time,
a young and credulous architect, Charles Atkinson,
explained how his management of his men kept the peace;
but to no avail. Their punishments and his dismissal were immutable,
typical of Arthur’s ill thought through reactions to perceived mismanagement.
The construction of the bridge ground to a halt just as the piers had begun to rise.

In May ’35, Colbeck was returned to Ross,
despite the warning of the Chief Police Magistrate
that he was the rogue of the racket and he would try it on again.
He was appointed overseer with Daniel Herbert who arrived in June.
They were coerced with the promise of a pardon for work well done.
Captain William Turner of the 50th or Queen’s Own Regiment, was
made superintendent though he admitted to knowing nothing of construction.
Yet the bridge was built and still stands without a crack.
A letter from Turner to the Colonial Secretary explained that
chief mason Colbeck set every stone that was placed by two builder masons
while twenty-three men were employed cutting the stones.
There was no word about Dan Herbert’s role.
The bridge was completed on July 14th, 1836.
A letter from Turner recommends Colbeck and Herbert to the Lieutenant Governor;
their conditional pardons were issued on 29th July.

Colbeck remained in Ross until the St. John’s Church was completed.
It was designed and superintended by Charles Atkinson
but his tender for the work was too low and the church committee could not finance
the digging of sufficiently deep foundations and the cutting of adequately sized stone.
The walls soon began to separate and the whole building was demolished 
within thirty years of its construction.
By then both Atkinson and Colbeck were dead.

James probably left Ross in 1838.
The census of 1843 locates him on the West Tamar at Long Plains.
At that time, the chapel at Sidmouth was being built;
he probably worked there as it was very soon after it was finished 
that he embarked the ship for “home”.

Henry was married on Christmas Eve, 1847.
It is pleasant to imagine James was there.
Nancy died in Batley in March 1850.
The banns for the marriage between James Colbeck and Susan Ramsden,
widow of George, a stonemason, were called in April. In May "
they were married at the parish church in Woodkirk, three miles from Dewsbury.

The certificate states she was a spinster of full age and he was a bachelor,
a stonemason, whose father was James, not Henry. Were they clerical errors?
Perhaps the estrangement between Nancy and he was so wide he had reverted to
the life of a bachelor, the rift being the reason she had not emigrated to join him.
For a wife to be abandoned was humiliating; if her husband was a criminal as well, it was worse.
The parish overseers did not look benignly upon the undeserving poor;
the wife of an errant man was morally unworthy of assistance.
Her ignominy probably reduced the exiled James to a nobody.
Her hunger might have reduced her to beggary.

Was this his tale of woe?
The mask of a man is overlooking a mother and infant child. Between them
are two fish on land, one gasping for breath.
He is pouring life giving water from a bucket.
To his left is a flaccid penis, representing his impotence.

Susan Colbeck signed the death certificate of James Colbeck
at Dewsbury on the 16th February, 1852.
He had died of typhus which was rampant in the town that had become 
a festering sore in the countryside in which he had been raised.
It is a cruel irony that James Colbeck had survived dungeon, hulk,
transport ship, penitentiary and the mobile dormitory of a road gang,
only to die of cabin fever in his hometown in England.  
It is written that the sculpted portraits on St. Luke’s Church, Bothwell, Tasmania, 
are the work of Daniel Herbert though he was not there in 1829 
when the church was being built by a party of convicts.

James Colbeck was 
and I think these are carved cartoons of James and Nancy
passing for Celtic deities to dupe the dour Presbyterian settlers.
We know James had whiskers and features of the faces bear a resemblance 
to some caricatures on the Ross Bridge, which begs the question:
who carved the Ross Bridge?