The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (24 page)

Seventeen-year-old Frederick Osborn had stolen his dinner and three plates on which to serve it. His beggar’s banquet of beef, cheese, and butter brought a seven-year sentence. Charles Griffin stole two loaves of bread while his mother waited outside the market. The fourteen-year-old was punished with transport for seven years because he had been in custody before. Charles’s defense fell on callous ears: “I took the loaves because I was hungry. I did not touch the till.” The Transportation Policy specifically targeted healthy young boys like Frederick and Charles, who could best serve a new colony.
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It seems the plea of poverty was heard only when a lawyer was paid. Indicted for house robbery at sixteen, John Sherwin admitted the crime and somehow afforded counsel. In pleading his case, his lawyer stated “that poverty had led him to commit the offence, and that he threw himself on the mercy of the Court.” The jury “recommended to mercy in consequence of his destitute state,” and the judge imposed two months’ confinement.
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The inventory of goods stolen by those on trial during Ludlow’s day in court reads like a list of family necessities. Henry Brown, age twenty-two, pinched two pots valued at three shillings. He pleaded his own case, stating: “I was out of work. These two pots were in the street, and I picked them up.”
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Thomas Saunders, just sixteen, stole a pair of trousers. Seventeen-year-old Thomas Cook purloined a pair of boots from a display in a shop doorway. For these crimes, each received seven years’ transport.

Whether sentenced to seven or ten years, this was the era when only a tiny percentage of those transported would ever make their way back to England. Convicts who completed their sentences rarely returned to their homeland. The only way back was through a daring escape at the Cape of Good Hope or by paying a large fee for ship’s passage.

Five other women were among those convicted the same day Widow Tedder was exiled to Van Diemen’s Land. Like Ludlow, forty-seven-year-old Amy Wilson stole from her master and was sentenced to ten years. Twenty-five-year-old Ann Price, with friend Mary Grady, had taken two pairs of stays, the boning used in corsets. Valued at eight shillings, their small heist brought seven years’ transport for each. Mary Sullivan also received a seven-year punishment. At forty-six, she was caught stealing clothes and a bedcover. Hannah Herbert stood trial just before Ludlow. She had committed forgery, an offense that typically carried a life sentence. Somehow the thirty-four-year-old convinced the court that the laudanum she had taken the day of the crime impaired her judgment and was “Recommended to mercy by the Jury” with a seven-year sentence.
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The Central Criminal Court adjoined Newgate Prison and made for the convenient transfer of Ludlow, Arabella, and the five other women, all new chattel for the Crown’s colonies. They were convicted during peak years for the transport of women, a period that spanned 1826 to 1840.
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The gaoler led them back through the underground passage that ran between the Old Bailey and Newgate’s female ward, the sound of dragging chains wailing through the tunnel with hollow despair. When they approached the ward, the clanking of iron intermingled with the screams and shouts of prisoners from behind the great wooden door.

Arabella clung to her mother and followed the turnkey’s silent instructions. He pulled the creaking entrance open and motioned the pair inside. Mother and daughter reentered the icy darkness that had been their home over the past six days. If they huddled with the other newly convicted, they might stay warm. For the next 143 days, the future shipmates waited for the black carriages that would transfer them to the docks to begin their journey to Van Diemen’s Land.

At first, time passed quickly. In a week it would be Christmas, the first holiday Ludlow would observe without Eliza, John Bulley, and the younger Ludlow. Instead of delighting in Arabella opening a small trinket from the pawnshop, she watched her nine-year-old struggle to get comfortable on a dirt floor crawling with cockroaches and rats. Yet it might have been worse. Some judges separated children from their mothers. Youngsters older than twelve were rarely allowed to accompany their mothers.
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As Ludlow shared her daily bread ration with Arabella, bells pealed from across the street, calling parishioners to St. Sepulchre for services on Christmas morning. For the wealthy, Yule logs burned in fireplaces as families dined on goose, plum pudding, and steaming wassail flavored with cloves and cinnamon.

This was one holiday that inspired philanthropy among the well-to-do. Some brought mince pies, cakes, and a few precious oranges into the gaol, although such treats rarely made it beyond the guards. Elizabeth Fry, however, delivered her kindness directly. Her schoolroom for prisoners’ children had been in place since 1817. Since then, at least one member of her Association for the Improvement of Female Prisoners visited Newgate every day. The dedicated Quaker continued to comfort women and children awaiting transport until 1843. She delivered clean clothes for Arabella and sewing materials for Ludlow and her new companions. She helped them sell the clothing and quilts they made as a group, enabling them to purchase tea and meat from their gaolers.

As days passed more slowly and winter turned to spring, Newgate’s hell began a slow thaw. The lives of Ludlow, the two Marys, Amy, Ann, and Hannah were soon intertwined. With no such intention, Old Bailey’s Judge Parke unknowingly set in motion the foundation for kinship, solidarity, and protection among unlikely allies. Over the next seven years, friendships born from fear and uncertainty began to thrive, as overturned futures unfolded. First cell mates and then shipmates, these six women were bound together for whatever fate might offer beyond the seas in Van Diemen’s Land.

7

Liverpool Street

Two Hearts and Two Doves

Not wanting to worry Arabella, Ludlow straightened up in her irons, composed herself, and willed serenity into her limpid hazel eyes. The two stood quietly on the wooden pier, waiting for Fate to tip its hand. Abruptly, a scarlet-jacketed guard from Newgate brushed the prisoners and children away from the black carriage toward a waiting launch tied to the wharf.

The
Hindostan
began boarding prisoners in April 1839. For the last several weeks, the same scene replayed every day. Husbands and lovers, mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, daughters and sons, formed a stark line of silhouettes against the grey sky. Some fought back tears, struggling for stoic control as the nightmare of a loved one awaiting transport materialized before them in the early morning mist. Others wept openly, unable to suppress their grief over what they knew in their hearts was a last good-bye. In these final few minutes together, loved ones drank in every tiny detail so they might remember in the future: dimples around a sister’s lips, a chipped front tooth in a mother’s half smile, the scent of a lover, the press of a warm body, the last fearful glimpse into the depths of a departing wife’s tear-filled eyes.

Because Ludlow was literate, she may have sent letters from Newgate to her older children, Eliza, Ludlow, and John Tedder, and to her own six surviving brothers and sisters—Fanny, William, Elizabeth, Joseph, Mary, and Henry. Mrs. Fry and her volunteers, devoted to comforting prisoners, helped deliver parting messages to those families soon to be torn apart.

In the well-ordered confusion of the transports’ departure, small dramas unfolded on the dock. Each individual created a farewell ritual, unique and intensely personal. Some uttered not a word as they stared helplessly into eyes they would never see again. Many pressed a lock of hair into the palms of their relatives, a small loving token of remembrance that preserved the final moments they shared. Ludlow may have exchanged strands of her hair for those of the two daughters she would leave behind. For all social classes, hair from a loved one was treasured like gold and often tucked inside a locket or small tin.

Prisoners left love tokens in many forms. Some used old nails to carve inscriptions into pennies while they awaited transport in Newgate cells. Hundreds of patient taps into the metal imprinted family initials, outlines of a heart, or a message of hope—“until I gain my liberty,” “may we live to meet again,” “from a friend whose love for you will never end.”
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Defacing a penny and filing off its original design also represented a small act of rebellion against the Crown, encouraging transports to steel themselves for whatever lay ahead.

A woman known only by the initials E. A. left for her father a copper penny, etched with a drawing of her home and her dog. Underneath she chiseled the words “This was once my cottage of peace.” The penny’s other side decreed her unwelcome fate in exile: “Going out of her cottage for life.”
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Her pocket-sized piece of original art left a tangible memento, as it recorded a piece of her history that would lie undiscovered for many decades.

Transported from London to Van Diemen’s Land in 1832, twenty-two-year-old Mary Ann Whitlock gave her aunt a coin before she boarded the transport ship
Hydery
. It was inscribed with the simple words “Adieu, Dear Aunt, Adieu” on one side and her name on the other. Sentenced to fourteen years’ exile for stealing a purse, Mary Ann instinctively knew she would never again see her only relative. She wanted nothing more than to be remembered, and her inscription ensured she would. This small token marked her passage more permanently than a tombstone that would later crumble.

Fourteen years before, on the docks where Ludlow stood today, Ann Maloney left behind a large English penny engraved with two doves above two crossed hearts and the initials of her loved one, W. F. The raven-haired beauty with light grey eyes also inscribed the coin with her full name and the message “Tho lost to sight the Memory dear 1825.” At age seventeen, she was convicted of shoplifting in London and received a life sentence to Van Diemen’s Land. Ludlow would later meet athirty-one-year-old Ann by the washtubs at the Female Factory.

The Woolwich docks departure platform framed a family portrait that would both haunt and comfort Ludlow in the years to come. The public farewells were soon brought to an end. It was time. Ludlow and Arabella climbed into the small boat waiting below. The coxswain motioned his female cargo onto their seats. Clutching Arabella’s hand a little tighter, Ludlow lifted her irons and shuffled toward the back of the skiff. Arabella tried to steady herself on the creaking boards as the boat tilted under the weight of her mother’s chains. The worried nine-year-old wondered where her mum was taking her, but Ludlow herself knew very little about their distant destination. Although she had read Barrister Skinner’s discarded newspapers, she’d never paid much attention to details about Van Diemen’s Land.

Under the guise of the Transportation Act, it was time to dispose of another mother and child. For today, they were together, and that was all that mattered. The launch glided steadily toward the waiting
Hindostan
; the river fell hauntingly silent save for the screaming of the gulls and the sound of oars splashing the water. Arabella clung closely to her mother’s sleeve. Ludlow lifted her arm and slipped her precious cargo underneath the chains and next to her breast. Like a mother bear, she grew more protective the instant the skiff bumped up against the gangplank they’d soon scale to board the
Hindostan
. She watched a group of sailors hanging over the rail of the tall-masted ship. Many of them didn’t look much older than Arabella. Midshipmen, known as “the young gentlemen,” were sent to sea at age twelve or thirteen. Away from home for years at a time, some turned to matrons like Ludlow when they needed comfort from a surrogate mother. Like Agnes McMillan, many of the child sailors were abandoned by their parents and left to fend for themselves.

The
Hindostan
looked serenely elegant as she slumbered, safe and calm in the river, quietly masking her identity as a transport vessel. Once on board, Arabella in tow, Ludlow was ushered by a Navy officer to the smith. As the rivets were removed from her irons, the wily widow wasted no time in assessing the ship’s true personality. Tangled ropes, pungent pine tar, open hatches, and confusing passages harkened chaos and unpredictable danger. She would not let her daughter out of sight, not even for a minute. Arabella, on the other hand, studied with fascination the new surroundings, which were causing her mother’s brow to crinkle.

This day, a motley crew had blown in from Newgate. On the upper deck, the newest arrivals for transport formed a line in front of Surgeon Superintendent Thomas McDonald. Ann Price, #177 from Limerick, was first, and she didn’t look well at all. Her jet-black eyebrows accentuated her sallow complexion and made her appear angry and gaunt.
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By her knees, her four-year-old daughter, Jane, clung to her mother’s shift as a detached McDonald recorded that the twenty-five-year-old had left behind a husband and two older children.
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Mary Grady, #221, checked in behind her friend and co-conspirator, with whom she’d stolen two sets of stays. She was the smallest of this Newgate contingent at four feet, ten inches tall.
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Mary Sullivan, #374, was measured next—four feet, eleven inches tall and forty-six years old, about the same age as Ludlow.
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She looked much older, however, with her greying hair and protruding front teeth. Thirty-four-year-old #339, Hannah Herbert, appeared aged beyond her years, having lost her front teeth.
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Decayed or missing teeth were common throughout the general population, but even more so for the poor. Careful not to smear the ink, Surgeon Superintendent McDonald recorded one more perfunctory notation in his oversized black ledger. Yet when forty-eight-year-old Amy Wilson stepped forward, the normally unflappable officer must have caught himself staring. Amy was missing her left eye and had a pink fleshy mole on her left cheek. Poverty had taken its toll on the mother of two, who was being transported for stealing a plate after her husband deserted the family.
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With impeccable posture, no disfiguring marks, and a calm demeanor, Ludlow Tedder stood out from her ragged cell mates. Arabella’s mother was no fool, already attentive to who made decisions about food, water, and protection aboard the
Hindostan
. Being able to read and write surely accorded her special notice, so Ludlow seized the limelight when it was her turn to be processed by Surgeon Superintendent McDonald. During his examination, he scrutinized the tidy-appearing #151 as she signed her name in a refined cursive hand, unlike the crude X most of the other women entered in the register. He needed a literate and stable matron for his nurse, someone who wouldn’t make a deadly mistake when she administered medicine. After all, a surgeon’s reputation depended on how many women he delivered alive.

Captain Lamb paced the deck as the women and their children boarded and queued up for the surgeon’s examination. Lips pursed in disapproval, he stayed aft, hands clasped behind the small of his back, keeping a sharp lookout for potential troublemakers. Even one woman was considered bad luck on a voyage, and here he was stuck with a full boatload of them, along with their crying children.

Once they passed inspection, Ludlow and Arabella were escorted by an officer across the deck and into an open hatch. Mother and daughter climbed gingerly down the wooden ladder leading to the orlop deck just above the bilge. Once they entered the lowest level, dimly lit by gently swinging candle lamps, they were assigned an open berth. Arabella instinctively hunkered down, tucked her chin close, and pulled her shoulders forward, making it easier to squeeze into the narrow passageway at the bottom of the ship. Ludlow recognized many of the faces on the orlop because most had spent months at Newgate before transfer to the
Hindostan
.

After a meal of salt pork and biscuits topped off with a dose of lime juice, the new prisoners were divided into messes of twelve. Already comfortable with the sensation of movement beneath her boots when the ship swayed, Arabella found joy with her new playmates. Sarah Smith was just a year younger, and the two became fast friends within hours. By suppertime, the nine-year-old knew the names of all the other girls and boys. She’d already spent nearly five months inside Newgate playing with Ann Price’s four-year-old daughter, Jane, and now assumed the role of big sister.

When the bells rang for bed call, Arabella was again the little girl ready for comfort from her mother. Ludlow rubbed her back and enfolded her in the woolen cloak she’d brought from London. Arabella was dressed in the hand-sewn flannel clothing and warm hat that Mrs. Fry and her volunteers had delivered for the children on board.

At first, the nine-year-old child couldn’t figure out how to position herself comfortably on the narrow bunk, but she managed to squeeze herself into the space between her mother and the scratchy shipboards. Caught between bouts of restless sleep and anxious waking, Ludlow observed hazy figures in the fetal position, each staking claim to her only private space. Along with captain, surgeon, and crew, the ship now carried 178 women and 18 children.

Some fell ill immediately, right in port, even before the
Hindostan
cast off. Confinement in the ship’s bowels, unable to focus on the horizon, proved the worst place for nausea and dizziness. With sheep and chickens on the upper deck and crew one level below, prisoners were housed in an area normally reserved for nonliving cargo. They bunked in near darkness except for slim ribbons of light that filtered through the hatches when they weren’t locked tight for bed call.

The urgency in a clanging of bells rousted Ludlow to her feet in a flash. Unaccustomed to the routine
Hindostan
clamor, she instinctively readied to run for safety with Arabella. Blankets in hand for airing on deck, she first helped Arabella into a reeking water closet. With nearly two hundred passengers sharing the two privies, a septic stench soon saturated the air belowdecks. The mother-daughter pair couldn’t scurry fast enough to the top deck for morning muster.

Shortly after a breakfast of oatmeal and a dash of sugar, an officer summoned Ludlow to the
Hindostan
infirmary. Surgeon Superintendent McDonald desired an interview with the widow about serving as his nurse. This was the opportunity Ludlow was waiting for, and she embraced it without a breath of hesitation. She and Arabella would benefit from additional rations, extra medicine, and safety from the crew. Without a word, she curtsied deferentially, being careful not to overdo it as the surgeon evaluated her every move.

If the London widow were to pass this test, she needed to convey respect, composure, and, above all, dutiful behavior. Before making Ludlow his assistant, the surgeon would examine the depth of her intelligence, perhaps asking, “What would you bring me for a case of dysentery?” One can only imagine what Ludlow was thinking at this pivotal juncture. Certainly, she was wise enough not to utter the first response that flew into her head: “For you, me Lord? Why, arsenic, of course.”

Widow Tedder knew well enough to recognize the potential for elevated status in the ship’s hierarchy. A chief nurse commanded a position of power and protection. She would be the one everyone else bribed for medicine and an extra blanket. Payoffs would provide money to purchase provisions and dried meat from the cooks. She and Arabella would have easy access to fresh air on the main deck for the entire journey. Most important, she’d have the comfort of knowing where to find medicine should Arabella fall ill during the long voyage. The picture of obedient politeness, Ludlow opened the cabinet quickly and efficiently, careful not to upset its contents. She examined the glass bottles and dispensers, each with a label penned in black ink.