Laurence Hynes HALLORAN was born 29/12/1765 Meath, Leinster, Ireland

He used aliases of

• Lawrence Hynes HALLORAN
• Lawrence Hynes HALLORON
• William Charles GREGORY

Laurence married Mary BOUTCHER c1784 in Exeter and they had 6 children

• 1785 Laurence Boutcher
• 1786 Mary Teresa
• 1788 Theresa Mary
• 1789 Joseph
• 1791 Joseph Gregory
• 1793 Henry Alexander

Their marriage broke down c1792

Laurence had a relationship with Lydia Anne HALL (his niece) c1803 and they had 12 children

• 1802 Laurence Henry
• 1804 Laura Anne
• 1807 Laurence Henry
• 1809 Charlotte Maria
• 1810 Henry
• 1812 Arthur Edward
• 1814 Eleanor Ann
• 1816 Lydia Ann
• 1817 William Charles G
• 1819 Catherine
• 1822 Frances Simeon
• 1 other child

Laurence was convicted of counterfeiting in 1818 and sentenced to 7 years transportation. He arrived in Sydney Cove on 26/6/1819 on "Baring"

His "wife" Lydia Ann and children arrived in Australia in 1822

Following the death of his wife Lydia Ann in October 1823, Laurence married Elizabeth Forester TURNBULL in August 1824 in Australia and they had 4 children

• 1825 Robert John Turnbull
• 1827 Elizabeth Frances
• 1831 Lorenzo Hynes
• another child

Laurence died 8 March 1831 in Sydney

Laurence was the founder of Sydney Grammar School

LINKS

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Hynes_Halloran
• https://australianroyalty.net.au/tree/purnellmccord.ged/individual/...
• https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Halloran-131
• https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/halloran-laurence-hynes-2149
• https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/2185809
• https://oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/halloran-laurence-hynes-2149
• https://www.bayanne.info/Shetland/getperson.php?personID=I87139&tre...
• https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/LHGR-NV3
  • Reference: WikiTree Genealogy - SmartCopy: Oct 16 2023, 11:06:56 UTC
• Reference: FamilySearch Genealogy - SmartCopy: Oct 16 2023, 11:19:57 UTC

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Early life

Halloran was born in County Meath, Ireland and was orphaned while young. He was placed in the care of an uncle, Judge William Gregory, and educated at Christ's Hospital. He entered the navy in 1781 but was gaoled two years later for stabbing and killing a fellow midshipman. He came into notice by the publication of two volumes of verse, Odes, Poems and Translations (1790), and Poems on Various Occasions (1791), and probably about this period became master of Alphington Academy near Exeter; one of his pupils was Robert Gifford, 1st Baron Gifford (born 1779). Halloran afterwards became a chaplain in the navy, and in 1805 was on the Britannia at the Battle of Trafalgar. In 1811 he was rector of the grammar school at the Cape of Good Hope and a chaplain to the forces. He interfered in a duel between two officers and was removed to Simon's Town. He then resigned his position as chaplain and published a satire Cap-abilities or South African Characteristics. Proceedings were taken against him and he was sentenced to be banished from the colony. Returning to England, in November 1818 he was charged with forging a frank worth ten-pence, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to seven years transportation.

[edit] Transported to Australia

Halloran arrived in Sydney in 1819, was soon given a ticket of leave, and established a school for "Classical, Mathematical and Commercial Education". When news of this reached London obstacles were put in his way by the English authorities, but Lachlan Macquarie and Thomas Brisbane successively supported him, and he established a high reputation as a teacher. In February 1827 he applied for a grant of land for a free grammar school which he proposed to establish at Sydney. Governor Darling was, however, less sympathetic, and Halloran had great difficulty in providing for his family of nine children. He founded a weekly paper, the Gleaner, of which the first number appeared on 5 April 1827. However, in September, an action against the paper for libel was successful, and its last number came out on 29 September 1827. In 1828 Darling for the sake of his children gave him the office of coroner but he did not keep the position long, and in the same year was in trouble with Archdeacon Scott, who objected to Halloran's prefacing some public lectures he was giving with part of the Anglican church service. In 1830 he established a "Memorial Office" the intention being that he should draw up statements for people desiring to bring their grievances before the government. He died at Sydney on 7 March 1831. In addition to the works mentioned Halloran, before leaving England, published four volumes of poems and a play, which are listed in Percival Serle's Bibliography of Australasian Poetry and Verse.

[edit] Legacy

Halloran was a good schoolmaster who honestly endeavoured to re-establish his reputation in Sydney. It was hard on him that his past sins were never allowed to rest. Unfortunately for himself he was of a quarrelsome nature and owed much of his misfortune to this throughout his life. The statement that he had forged his clerical orders is based on a private letter from Henry Hobhouse, under-secretary of state, to Earl Bathurst. But Halloran was not charged with this offence, and in the absence of sworn evidence it would be unjust to assume that the statement was correct. His son, Henry Halloran, born in 1811, became a leading public servant at Sydney and was created C.M.G. in 1878. He was the author of much verse which like his father's was of only mediocre quality. He was well-known in the literary circles of his day, and was a good friend to Henry Kendall.

[edit] References

Serle, Percival (1949). "Halloran, Laurence Hynes". Dictionary of Australian Biography. Sydney: Angus and Robertson,

A. G. Austin, 'Halloran, Laurence Hynes (1765 - 1831)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 1, MUP, 1966, pp 506-507.

This article incorporates text from the public domain 1949 edition of Dictionary of Australian Biography from Project Gutenberg of Australia, which is in the public domain in Australia and the United States of America.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Hynes_Halloran"

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HALLORAN, LAURENCE HYNES (1765-1831), bogus clergyman, schoolmaster and journalist, was born on 29 December 1765 in County Meath, Ireland. Orphaned at an early age he was placed in the care of his uncle, Judge William Gregory, and educated at Christ's Hospital. He entered the navy in 1781 but was gaoled in 1783 for stabbing and killing a fellow midshipman. Acquitted in 1784, he married Mary Boutcher and ran a school at Exeter until 1788 and then an academy at Alphington until he became insolvent in 1796. He was also charged with immorality. A professed Roman Catholic, he recanted in 1792 but never won the Anglican ordination he wanted. In 1797-98 he was in the navy posing as a chaplain. In 1800 he was awarded a doctorate in divinity at King's College, Aberdeen. After service at sea he was posted as chaplain to the naval and military forces at the Cape of Good Hope in 1807.

Here his affairs prospered as he combined the rectorship of a public grammar school with his chaplaincy, but in 1810 he incurred the wrath of the commander of the forces, General H. G. Grey, by defending two officers charged with duelling and by subsequently disobeying an order to proceed as chaplain to the outpost at Simonstown. In June 1810 Halloran resigned his commission and published in verse the first of the many libels which were to be his ruination. At General Grey's insistence the governor prosecuted Halloran, who was found guilty of defamatory libel, had costs charged against him, was heavily fined, and banished from the Cape. He returned to England in the prize frigate La Manche in 1811. He was 46, ruined financially and professionally, and separated from his wife and family. These disasters appear to have disturbed his mind and induced in him a sense of persecution and a passion for litigation. Between 1812 and 1818 he drifted impecuniously from county to county endeavouring, sometimes successfully, to find employment as a curate by the use of forged letters. In 1818 he was indicted on a charge of counterfeiting a tenpenny frank in the name of Sir William Garrow, M.P., allegedly for the purpose of accrediting himself as a curate; when he was found guilty he was sentenced to transportation for seven years.

When he arrived in Sydney in June 1819 Halloran was immediately granted a ticket-of-leave by Governor Lachlan Macquarie. He was befriended by Simeon Lord and John Macarthur, who helped him to establish a private school, 'Dr Halloran's establishment for liberal education' (also known as the Sydney Grammar School), which opened in January 1820 and quickly secured the support of the leading emancipists in Sydney. Despite his eccentricities Halloran was a very gifted teacher; even John Thomas Bigge had to admit that the standard of his school 'added one more to the many proofs that have been exhibited, of Halloran's skill in the art of instruction', though he deplored the employment of such a man.

In 1822 Halloran was reunited with his second family and their unmarried mother, Lydia Anne (Anna) Halloran, who may have been his own niece. He should have been able to contemplate a useful and comfortable life in the colony, but his obsessive sense of persecution and his fatal flair for the writing of defamatory doggerel kept him constantly engaged in litigation and impoverished him. From year to year he was forced to move his school to escape his creditors, and a series of libel suits and several periods of imprisonment for debt reduced him to beggary. To supplement his income Halloran tried various expedients, now advertising books he intended to write, now advertising lectures on ethics, theology, history or astronomy he proposed to give.

In September 1825 Halloran proposed the establishment of a public grammar school under the patronage of the governor and the management of thirty trustees, each of whom, by subscribing £50, would be entitled to nominate one pupil. A land grant and payments from the police fund were suggested as sources of income and the headmaster was to have the right to take twenty pupils on his own terms; every three years the government was to send two outstanding graduates to Oxford or Cambridge, after which they were to take holy orders before returning to minister to the needs of the colony.

In November 1825 this new institution, the Sydney Free Public Grammar School, opened in temporary quarters with Halloran as its headmaster and his son as undermaster; within a month the trustees had to reprimand the father for his litigious behaviour and within four months to investigate complaints of unseemly behaviour which had been made against the son. The Colonial Office advised Governor (Sir) Ralph Darling of Halloran's shady career and rejected his appeal for a land grant for his establishment. In October 1826 the trustees resolved to suspend the operation of the school at the end of the year, giving as their reason the need to apply their limited funds to the erection of a suitable building, but Halloran's unsatisfactory behaviour, which culminated in his being imprisoned for debt in November, must have contributed to the trustees' decision to make a fresh start.

Left without employment Halloran reopened his private school in January 1827 and on 5 April published the first issue of the Gleaner, an enterprise for which he was totally unfitted by experience or temperament; he admitted to his readers that he was 'compelled to write for bread'. Although the Gleaner is rightly regarded as an organ of the emancipist press, its tone was very different from that of its contemporaries, the Australian and the Monitor; it was moderate in its criticism of Governor Darling and frequently came to the defence of Archdeacon Thomas Scott and his Church and School Corporation when they were under attack. But Darling's newspaper regulations of May 1827 and Halloran's ineptitude as a businessman ensured its failure; the last few issues consisted of little more than advertisements for their editor's business enterprises and reports of his libel suits, and on 29 September 1827 it ceased publication.

In 1828 Darling took pity on him and appointed him coroner for Sydney, but soon had to dismiss him when he threatened to publish a defamation of Archdeacon Scott with whom he had fallen out. In 1830 Halloran tried his hand at drawing up memorials for persons with grievances. He died in Sydney on 8 March 1831.

Anna died in October 1823, after the birth of her twelfth child, and in August 1824 he married Elizabeth Turnbull, aged 17, who bore him several children. A son, Henry (1811-1893), was employed in the public service, and established among his contemporaries a reputation as a minor poet.

Laurence Halloran's publications, some of which were written over the pseudonym Philo-nauticus, were: Odes, Poems and Translations (1790), Poems on Various Occasions (Exeter, 1791), Lachrymae Hibernicae; or, The Genius of Erin's Complaint, a Ballad (1801), The Female Volunteer; or, the Dawning of Peace; a Drama (London, 1801), The Battle of Trafalgar, a Poem, to Which is Added a Selection of Fugitive Pieces (London, 1806), Stanzas of Affectionate Regard to the Memory of Captain Dawson of the Piedmontaise (1812), Newgate, or Desultory Sketches in a Prison, a Poem (1819?), On the Observance of the Sabbath, a Sermon (Wisbech, 1800) and A Sermon … for a General Thanksgiving … for the … Victories Obtained … in Three … Naval Engagements (London, 1797).

Select Bibliography

Historical Records of Australia, series 1, vols 10-15; Proceedings … in a Criminal Process for a Libel Instituted … Against Laurence Halloran D.D. (Lond, 1811); L. H. Halloran, Proposals for the Foundation and Support of a Public Free Grammar School (Syd, 1825); K. Grose, ‘Dr. Halloran: Pioneer Convict Schoolmaster in New South Wales: A Study of His Background’, Australian Journal of Education, vol 14, no 3, Oct 1970, pp 303-24; Sydney Gazette, 3 July 1819, 30 Dec 1820, 22 July 1824, 17 Mar, 27 Oct, 12 Dec 1825, 13, 27 May, 18 Nov 1826, 8 Sept 1828, 18 Sept, 7 Oct 1830; Australian, 11 Mar 1831. More on the resources

Author: A. G. Austin

Print Publication Details: A. G. Austin, 'Halloran, Laurence Hynes (1765 - 1831)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 1, Melbourne University Press, 1966, pp 506-507.