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Thomas Dent
Erickson:
DENT, Thomas (John), b. 1799 (England), d. 22.4.1848, arr. 23.8.1829 per Marquis of Anglesea with wife Elizabeth b. 1796 & 3 chd. Chd. Thomas b. 1820 d. 1844, Anne b. 1825, Elizabeth b. 1827, Sophia b. 1829 (W.A.), Janet b. 1831, Maria b. 1833, Susannah b. 1835, George William b. 1839 d. 1915. Granted 3213 acres, & owned Town Lots in Perth. Licensee of "Happy Immigrant". His daughter Sophia was the first white girl born in colony.
Thomas Dent appears at #615 in the 1832 Census with his wife and five children: Thomas, Ann, Elizabeth, Sophia, Jennet [sic]. He is 36, from Kent, and a publican.
Tuckfield:
In Perth, licences went to ... Thomas Dent, with a misplaced enthusiasm, for his Happy Immigrant Public House. He himself was not the happy immigrant when in 1833 at Fremantle he received three months in jail for beating-up his wife. ...
... Just where Thomas Dent's Happy Emigrant ... is not known although there are a few clues. On 15th August 1833, the Perth Gazette ran an advertisement:— 'House and allotment at Perth for October 1834, it was announced that L. & W. Samson were about to open a wholesale and retail store at the house lately occupied by James Solomon. There it goes! If we can find out where Samson's store was, then we know where Dent's pub was.
References and Links
Berryman, Ian 1979 ed., A Colony Detailed: The First Census of Western Australia 1832, Creative Research, Perth.
Graham, Allen 2023, Inns and Outs of Fremantle: a Social History of Fremantle and its Hotels 1829-1856, Xlibris.
Tuckfield, Trevor 1971, 'Early colonial taverns and inns' (Part 1), Early Days, vol. 7, part 3: 65-82; 1975 (Part 2), Early Days, vol. 7, part 7: 98-106.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 23 August, 2023 and hosted at freotopia.org/people/dentthomas.html (it was last updated on 25 August, 2023), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.