sketcher, engraver, carver and silversmith, was transported aboard HMS Calcutta in 1803 with the expedition under Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins to establish a new settlement at Port Phillip. As a die-sinker and engraver of Church Street, Birmingham, Grove had been apprehended in possession of a set of plates to counterfeit Bank of England notes and was sentenced to death at the Warwick Assizes in March 1802. This was subsequently commuted to transportation for life. While in Newgate being interrogated before his trial Grove was befriended by Thomas Bensley, a leading London printer. The friendship gave rise to a series of letters written between 1802 and 1804 which provide a remarkable insight into Grove’s life and capabilities. Many letters were destroyed by fire but those which remained were edited by Bensley’s son, Benjamin, and published in 1859 under the title Lost and Found; or, Light in the Prison . The letters reveal that while on board the hulk Captivity in Portsmouth Harbour, before his departure for Port Phillip, Grove carved objects in bone which later passed into the Bensley family.
From the outset of the voyage, Grove was treated as a trusted and privileged prisoner. He was accorded his own cabin, together with his wife Susannah and son Daniel who had been permitted to accompany him. It is clear that during the voyage he established the beginnings of a life-long friendship with Collins and also evinced some of the quite remarkable diversity of skills which were ultimately to prove so useful in the colony. This combination of factors explains Grove’s early conditional pardon in 1806 and his favoured social position, the latter being chronicled by the colony’s chaplain and diarist, Rev. Robert Knopwood, another intimate friend.
During the voyage Grove made a carving for John Houston, later lieutenant-governor of Norfolk Island, and carved coconuts for Collins and for Daniel Woodriff, captain of the Calcutta . At Rio de Janeiro he wrote of taking a view. He also made drawings after his arrival, apparently of Port Phillip and of the Derwent River (where the settlement was transferred in 1804), as well as ’3 pairs of charts of the country’. Subsequently he ventured into the soap manufacturing business. He wrote of building his own house and one for Collins (the second Government House) and of engraving plates and seals.
Most importantly, Grove is credited with having made the earliest existing example of Australian silver, a small castor with the arms and crest of Collins and an inscription bearing the date 1804. Bensley also states in Lost and Found that when Grove made Collins’s coffin with his own hands he engraved a silver plate for the lid. Grove, who felt the loss of his friend and benefactor most acutely, died 37 days later and was buried in the same plot, afterwards part of St David’s Cemetery. Knopwood officiated at the funeral. His widow and son returned to England the following year (1811). No extant drawings are known. A small unsigned watercolour of Sullivan’s Cove (1804, DG) formerly attributed to him (and others) now appears to be by G.P. Harris .
