Captain Thunderbolt - Bushranging Years

Bushranging Years

Ward and Britten headed to the New England district where they robbed a shepherd's hut at Gostwyck, near Uralla on 24 October. Three days later, while they were waiting to ambush the mail near the Big Rock or Split Rock (now Thunderbolt's Rock), they were spotted by troopers. In the ensuing gunfight, Ward was shot in the back of the left knee, an injury that left a critical identifying mark that helped to identify his body after his death. The pair separated a few weeks later. Ward crowned himself with the nickname "Captain Thunderbolt" during the Rutherford toll-bar robbery on 21 December 1863.

Over the following six-and-a-half years, Ward robbed mailmen, travellers, inns, stores and stations across much of northern New South Wales - from the Hunter Valley north to Queensland and from Tamworth nearly as far west as Bourke. He was accompanied by three other men, early in 1865, when he went on a crime spree in the north-western plains but the gang disbanded after young John Thompson was shot and captured at Millie, near Moree. Later that same year, he joined forces with another two felons but his second gang disbanded soon after one of them, Jemmy the Whisperer, shot a policeman. Thereafter Ward employed only young malleable accomplices: Thomas Mason in 1867 and William Monckton in 1868. After Monckton left him, Ward remained largely in seclusion, surfacing only a handful of times in the next eighteen months to commit robberies. On 25 May 1870, after robbing travellers near the Big Rock, Ward was shot and killed by Constable Alexander Binney Walker at Kentucky Creek near Uralla.

While claims have been made that Ward did not die at Kentucky Creek on 25 May 1870, these claims are inaccurate. His body was in fact identified at a magisterial inquiry the next day by the gunshot wound on the back of his left knee as well as by his height, hair and eye colouring, and moles and warts noted in the Police Gazette Reward Notice in the aftermath of his escape from Cockatoo Island. Additionally, three witnesses testified under oath that they could personally identify the body as that of Fred Ward: his late accomplice William Monckton, a fellow Mudgee employee named George William Pearson, and Senior Sergeant John George Balls who had worked on Cockatoo Island during Ward's incarceration there. Hundreds flocked to see the body and a large sum was raised by the local community as a gesture of appreciation for Constable Walker.

Ward's relationship with Mary Ann Bugg had ended late in 1867 so he was perhaps unaware that Mary Ann Bugg gave birth to his namesake in August 1868. Frederick Wordsworth Ward jnr took the surname of his stepfather although by occupation he walked in the shoes of his birth-father. He became a groom and later a horse-trainer, and died unmarried as Frederick Wordsworth Burrows in 1937.