Coachman's Cottage

This historic cottage was once two buildings: a coachman’s cottage and a groom’s cottage, built in the 1840s and later joined into one. The scale of the stables opposite tells you how significant the horse operation was at Woolmers. The Archer family’s carriage horses, the working horses that pumped water from the river and ground apples for cider, the riding horses: all of them required skilled men to manage them.

The cottage follows the picturesque architectural style of the main house and stable complex, simpler in its detailing but carefully placed. It’s a building that says something about status.
For almost two decades from the 1830s, the Woolmers coachman was Isaac Boxall, transported for life from Surrey for stealing £20 and assigned to Thomas Archer. He earned the role despite arriving as a convict, and wore its uniform accordingly: scarlet livery with Sheffield silver buttons bearing the Archer crest. The Woolmers carriage was crested. When Sir John Franklin, Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, visited between 1836 and 1843, it was Boxall who drove him.

Joseph Lewis worked alongside Boxall as groom from 1831, arriving from London with a life sentence and earning just a single reprimand in fourteen years. As groom and coachman, the two men spent their days together in the stables opposite, and for a time lived as neighbours, a wall’s width apart in what were then two separate cottages.

In 1838 Boxall married Ann Ball, a Somerset woman transported for stealing money from her mistress and first assigned to Brickendon before coming to Woolmers. She earned her Ticket of Leave in 1840 and her Conditional Pardon in 1842. Had you visited this cottage around 180 years ago, the family inside comprised Isaac, Ann and six children, all born on the estate. Ann lived until 1898. She was eighty-eight years old.

Image representation of Ann Ball created by Matt Daniels based on the Tasmanian convict records