New Zealand’s Highwayman

Taranaki in the 1890s was gripped by fear. There was, incredibly, a highwayman robbing people.
“Stand and deliver” was a phrase taken straight from penny dreadful novels and highwaymen were the stuff of serialised romantic novels.
Except when you are confronted by one.
As it turned out, this one was a teenager.
Robert Herman Wallath was born at sea on about July 18, 1874 on the ship Herschel off the coast of Cape of Good Hope off the southern tip of Africa to Hermann Christoph Wallath and his wife Catherine.
The German couple had emigrated to Australia and from there to New Plymouth, becoming farmers in Westown. A road there is named after the family.
Robert was an intelligent well-built lad who became a sub-editor of a locally published journal, a carpenter and a member of the Taranaki Rifle Volunteers.
His first crime was to waylay Henry Jordan while riding home on April 18, 1892. The highwayman was dressed in a mounted infantry style uniform with a type of mask around his face. While Mr Jordan had initially treated it as a bit of a joke, over the next 15 months the crimes continued, burglaries, robberies of hotels and the Omata tollgate leaving residents in terror.
Then on July 20, 1893 the highwayman tried to hold up the Criterion Hotel - for the second time. He presented a loaded pistol and demanded money.
This time there was a fight and Wallath’s pistol went off injuring Harold Thomson, law clerk and the son of the local police inspector. By the time it was over, Wallath had been captured.
After a brief bit of excitement in August 1893, when he escaped and was recaptured, he was brought to trial at the Supreme Court on charges of wounding with intent to kill. A series of other charges of burglary followed along with one of escaping.
He was found guilty and sentenced to eight years in Mt Eden prison.
Police had found he would hide clothes nearby and change into them to prevent being caught.
A search of his room at his home, which he had kept locked for two years, found goods stolen from the various places he had robbed.
He was indeed inspired by the novels about the exploits of characters like Dick Turpin.
He did not serve his whole sentence after a group of citizens, concerned about his youth, lobbied for his release.
He returned to New Plymouth and later married Ada Clara West and had two sons and two daughters.
His life of crime was then behind him, he became a well-respected tradesman. Ironically, once he retired he wrote a book entitled A highwayman with a Mission under a pseudonym in which he looked at the struggle between good and evil that had tormented him.
He died on July 24, 1960 and is buried along with his wife in the Hurdon cemetery in New Plymouth.