Wagga’s first bank had only been open for six months when it received a late-night caller. Photo: Ai generated.
This week we are winding back the clock to the early days of the Wagga Wagga settlement and a failed attempt to rob the town’s newly opened bank.
The Australian Joint Stock Bank (AJS) was the first financial institution to open a branch in the growing town in January 1859. Mr John Frederick Skinner was appointed manager and operated from a leased shopfront on Fitzmaurice Street.
In those wild colonial times, regional banks were a prime target for bushrangers, and bank managers and tellers would often carry a pistol as both a deterrent and a last line of defence. In fact, the practice of bank staff ‘packing heat’, or keeping a loaded gun under the counter, continued in Australia until the 1980s.
A report from the Wagga Wagga Express described with great excitement the late-night events of Wednesday 27 July 1859 and their aftermath.
“The peaceful residents of Wagga Wagga were not a little astonished on being roused from their slumbers on Thursday morning last, to hear that during their balmy slumbers of the previous night, the bank, in Wagga Wagga, had been burglariously entered, and that the housebreaker had been captured,” the story began.
The enthusiastic scribe proceeded to outline the rumours that were already swirling around the town including one that the “furious desperado” had been clobbered over the head with a brass candlestick by Mrs Skinner who then ran to fetch the police while her frightened husband sat on the unconscious burglar.
The facts of the matter were soon laid out in the police court and the painfully thin Henry O’Hara, a tailor and occasional stockman, was led into the dock.
“The burglar rather resembled a Methodist parson out of luck, or a public lecturer on free-trade in search of employment than a housebreaker,” the Express reported.
“Paradoxical as it may appear, we must confess that, despite his emaciated visage, Henry O’Hara possesses the largest stock of ‘cheek’ we ever saw allotted to any one individual.”
The belligerent prisoner joked with the public in the gallery, addressed the judge in a “patronising tone”, mocked his captors and at one point told the chief constable to “dry up and mind your own business”.
Appearing as a witness, Mr Skinner explained that he lived in the bank premises and was woken by a noise at around 2 am.
Taking his pistol in one hand and a candle in the other, he and Mrs Skinner burst into the office where they discovered a man rummaging through a desk drawer.
“In the confusion of the moment the candle was extinguished, but he made a rush at the prisoner, who fell down on the table by the witness pushing him backwards,” the Express continued.
“He had no ideas at first whether he was a big man or a strong man, but seized him by the throat and held the pistol to his head, telling him that if he offered to stir he would shoot him.”
O’Hara stayed frozen in place “under the influence of the cold steel” and begged the banker to refrain from shooting or choking him.
While Mrs Skinner headed off to summon the police, the banker and the would-be thief settled into a “long conversation” in which O’Hara declared that he hadn’t meant to do anything and was looking for a “public house”.
Defending himself in the court, O’Hara attempted to make the case that he had been drunk and mistook the bank for the pub.
He cross-examined the witness and challenged the banker’s version of events suggesting that it was Mrs Skinner who had seized him by the throat while her husband stood quaking in fear nearby.
Mr Skinner rejected the implication and said that any trembling on his part had been because he was worried that he might accidentally shoot his wife “which he should have regretted all his life”.
He also disagreed with O’Hara’s claim that the scrawny tailor was drunk when captured and said he thought he was “gammoning to be intoxicated”.
“A loaded pistol at one’s head, in a nervous man’s hands, is enough to sober one,” O’Hara replied.
Chief constable O’Keefe also testified that O’Hara showed no signs that he had been drinking and was less than impressed by the taunting he received from the prisoner under cross-examination.
O’Hara again argued that a pistol to the head had sobered him up “better than soda water”.
“I don’t think either you or Skinner was competent to tell if I was drunk or pretending to be so; you was both in a bit of a perturbation,” O’Hara concluded.
Despite his “cheek”, the would-be bank robber was committed to stand trial in Goulburn.
