Leather convict cap clearly marked with the initials of the Board of Ordnance and a broad arrow, purchased with the support of Members at the Locker Collection auction in April.

The strange leather cap, shaped like a capital letter ‘D’ on its side, ranks with the broad arrow, cat-o’-nine tails and leg irons as the most recognizable symbols of convictism in Australia. Last month with the assistance of members, Hyde Park Barracks Museum acquired a well-preserved example of this cap, yet for such a well-known object we know surprisingly little about its origins.

The body of the distinctive leather convict cap is stitched along the front, back and top. The crown is stitched and folded into a long groove. The side panels are longer than the base of the crown. Folded double and secured into position with tied tapes near the base, they form a turned up brim on either side. The cap can be stored flat when not in use.

Caps like this appear in images of the British Army in the first years of the 19th century. They appear to have been introduced as an off-duty or fatigue cap at the same time the army adopted an all leather ‘stove-pipe’ shako as parade and campaign service headdress. Most of the off-duty British soldiers in W H Pyne’s scenes of camp life, published in 1803, are wearing them. Illustrations of the period show that these caps remained in use until the late 1820s. They were a very popular unofficial item of dress for British soldiers and sailors and even became a fashion statement for some civilians.

Convicts, like the army, were supplied by the Board of Ordnance. Men sentenced to transportation and bound for Botany Bay needed to be clothed. The stockpiles of surplus military clothing produced for the Napoleonic wars must have been a temptation for penny-pinching government bean counters after 1815 and so the convicts found themselves wearing military headdress and other ex-army cast-offs.

When Sophia Campbell sat down to paint in 1817 and created the water colour Costumes of the Australasians she is unlikely to have realised that she was recording for posterity just how common these leather caps had become. But were they popular with the convicts?

The weight of opinion would suggest not, as convicts were said to prefer woollen caps in winter and straw hats in summer. When Commissioner John Thomas Bigge asked Major George Druitt of the 48th Regiment of Foot, the first superintendent of convicts at Hyde Park Barracks, in 1819 about whether the leather caps issued to convicts were serviceable Druitt replied ‘They are quite useless, and afford no protection to the head from the sun’. Druitt went on to claim that the men preferred broad brimmed straw hats and resorted to stealing them when they could not be acquired by other means.

Despite Druitt’s criticism the leather caps remained part of the convict uniform at least into the 1850s. Quaker missionary Frederick Mackie sketched convicts wearing them in 1853 at Port Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land. These sketches occasionally show them worn in an unorthodox manner, with the fold from side to side, rather than from front to back as was usual, and with one brim folded down to create an eyeshade.

Loved or hated, serviceable or useless, the eccentrically shaped leather cap is an evocative reminder of our convict past.

Brad Manera
Curator, Hyde Park Barracks Museum

First published in Insites, Spring 2007