GRAVATT, George

GRAVATT, Lt George (1815‒1842) was born in Woolwich, Kent, the son of Colonel William Gravatt, Royal Engineers, Assistant Inspector of Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and Anne Hartcup, daughter of the late General Hartcup. He was a younger brother of William Gravatt (1806-1866), an outstanding civil engineer and instrument maker. It is not known where George trained but he was probably apprenticed as had been William, of whom their father said ‘he has been brought up to know that he must trust to his own resources for advancement in life’. George joined the army as a rank-and-file soldier of the 28th Regiment of Foot which from 1835-1842 served in New South Wales, where it arrived in various ships from mid-1835, often with the rank-and-file on guard duty of transported convicts. A few days after the regimental headquarters arrived in late January 1836, their ‘landing’ was celebrated in Sydney. On 25 September 1837 Gravatt was commissioned as an Ensign and on 24 May 1839 as Lieutenant, two weeks after he had been appointed the second-last Commandant of the Moreton Bay Penal Settlement and a Magistrate on 10 May. In anticipation of opening the Moreton Bay district to free settlement, the convict population was by then only 94, down from more than 1,000 in 1831. Preparations being made for land sales followed the arrival in March of the surveyors Robert Dixon, James WARNER, and Granville C Stapylton to undertake surveys of the district. Gravatt remained at Moreton Bay only until 21 July when he was replaced by Lt Owen GORMAN, of the 80th Regiment. Following a disastrous British withdrawal from Kabul in January 1842, the 28th Regiment embarked in June for Bombay to participate in a punitive expedition to Afghanistan which followed, but after arriving in India a severe and persistent outbreak of cholera in the Regiment prevented their participation and may also have been the cause of Gravatt’s premature death at Karachi in 1843, aged only 28. George’s eldest brother Lt Thomas Gravatt (1805‒1839) was only slightly older when he was killed in action at the storming of Khelat, Balochistan in 1839.