NRS-12204 | Butts of ticket of leave passports

Full description

Tickets of leave could be issued to convicts who had served part of their sentence with good behaviour. Unless withdrawn because of breach of conditions, a ticket could be retained until a conditional or absolute pardon was granted or a sentence expired.

A ticket-of leave was an instrument that granted a convict limited freedom including :
to work for private employers rather than the Government;
to lease (but not to own) land; and
to be free to move within the police district where the ticket was issued, and with permission (by the issue of a passport) to move outside the area.

To obtain a passport which was required for absences from the prescribed district, consent was sought for periods to a maximum of 14 days from a Justice of the Peace. If a longer absence was necessary permission was gained from the Principal Superintendent of Convicts (later the Convict Branch of the Inspector-General of Police.) Regulations relating to the issue of passports were issued by the Colonial Secretary’s Office in May 1835. (1)

When a passport was authorised the issuing officer completed the details on the passport which became the property of the holder. Similar details were recorded on the butt which was retained by the office. This series contains the butts which record the following information:
registered number;
name of holder;
ship and year of arrival;
place and date of trial;
sentence;
ticket of leave number;
what the holder was allowed to do (ie usually to travel between certain points or to attend the city markets for a certain period of time);
by whom recommended and
the date of recommendation.


The butts are primarily in numerical order within each year. Occasionally they are out of order. There are name indexes in the front of each volume. If a ticket of leave passport was issued after the issue of a ticket of leave, the butt of the ticket of leave is annotated with the letters ‘PP’ and the number of the passport. If another passport was subsequently issued, the next ticket of leave passport number was written on the butt of the preceding passport.

Some of the volumes were bound into modern volumes in the twentieth century.

A note regarding the construction of the series:
This series consists of an amalgamation of two former Concise Guide Series
CGS 12204: Principal Superintendent of Convicts - Butts of Ticket of leave passports, 1835-69; and
CGS 10987 Inspector General of Police, Convict Branch - Butts of ticket of leave passports, 1856-69.

The items in this series which post-date 1856 may have been viewed as series CGS 10987 and could have been previously cited as such in notes by researchers or in publications or unpublished works.

Custody note
This series was held by the Chief Secretary’s office until 1934 they were acquired by the Public Library of NSW. They became State archives with the establishment of the Archives Authority of New South Wales in 1961.

Endnotes:
(1) NSW Government Gazette, 27 May 1835, p.363.