[NSW CORPS] BRITISH PARLIAMENT. New South Wales Veteran Companies. Return to an Order of the Honourable House of Commons… 15 Folio, 16 pp., with additional docket titling leaf; disbound, a little frayed at extremities, very good overall. London, House of Commons, July, 1832.
Darling on the NSW Corps
Uncommon governmental report on the state of the New South Wales military, detailing the three companies of veterans that were raised in Britain and sent to Australia in 1826. This report audits the NSW veteran companies and prints eight pages of correspondence between the former Governor, Sir Ralph Darling, and Lord Palmerstone, Lord Fitzroy Somerset, Sir Herbert Taylor and other notables regarding pensions, land claims and other conditions of service. The veterans were troublesome from the start, with rumblings of mutiny on the voyage out, which is why Darling here explains his decision to send them into the interior rather than the large towns, ‘where they would only add to the dissipation which too generally prevails.’ The report includes a memorandum of 1829 stating the rewards for each man (small farm holdings), and also gives an audit of the costs. $725 Ferguson, 1554.
PEAKE, Mervyn. “All This and Beven Too” original pen and ink drawing.
Original pen drawing, 29 x 21cms, signed “Peake 1943” lower left, mounted and framed in fine condition. Sussex or Soho?, 1943.
16
Charming original drawing by the Gormenghast author
Superb original pen and ink drawing of a miserable kangaroo in London, done for Quentin Crisp’s 1943 war time book of poetry, All This and Bevin Too (and illustrated at page 13 of the book). The drawing depicts a kangaroo sitting in his blacked-out flat, struggling to fill out a civil service questionnaire; Ernest Bevin, of course, was the Minister of Labour in the United Kingdom as a member of the wartime coalition.