I READ with interest Nigel Heins’ Flashback article on Eliza Heins (Hereford Times, January 15) and thought you may be interested in my forebear, Joseph Trilloe.

He was born in 1819 at Lower Lyde, to Joseph and Hannah, farm labourers.

At the age of 26, he was working on the canal tunnel in Hereford and lodging in Munstone Lane, and was a friend of Thomas Tudor, a freelance farm labourer who was owed five shillings for hedging and ditching by William Cooke of Lower Lyde and wanted revenge.

On the night of February 9, 1845 he persuaded Joseph to go with him to set fire to a pile of firewood in a barn owned by Cooke.

The fire was out when the fire brigade arrived from Hereford, and the arsonists long gone, but unfortunately for them there was three inches of snow on the ground and they were tracked back to their homes and hauled out of bed.

PC Griffiths matched their hob-nailed boot prints to wet boots in their homes.

The pair came up before Judge Baron-Platt and were sentenced to 15 years’ transportation to Tasmania.

Along with 197 other convicts, they set sail from Woolwich on August 27, 1845 on board the Mayda, but Thomas was never to see foreign soil as he died of fever 64 days into a cramped 132-day journey around the Cape.

On docking at Norfolk Island, a notorious convict colony 800 miles east of Australia, the convicts disembarked to wash in the sea, but were set upon by feral prisoners on the island and all their possessions stolen.

Joseph remained on the island until May 1846, then he was taken to mainland Tasmania and assigned to work gangs on farms where he received punishments for misbehaviour such as two months’ hard labour in chains for disobedience and 36 lashes for smoking.

In March 1856 he was awarded a ‘conditional pardon’ – the condition being that he never return to Britain, in the unlikely event that he could find the money to afford it.

Nothing is known about his life between 1856 and his death in 1887 aged 67 at Oatlands, Tasmania, but how times and punishments have changed since Joseph found himself at the other end of the world for the sake of a box of matches.

MALCOLM EVANS Titley