The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (4 page)

The Industrial Revolution heightened society’s imbalances. It fattened the prosperous and starved the weak, widening the chasm between classes and creating an incubator for juvenile criminals like Agnes and Janet. In earlier decades, parish schools in rural villages welcomed children during the slower farming cycles and fostered a relatively high literacy rate. Had Agnes been born into an agrarian family, hard labor would still have been her fate, but she would have eaten better food, grown up in healthier surroundings, and perhaps learned to read. Though farm hands labored long and hard, there were changes in pace and a variety in chores, unlike the perpetual monotony that poisoned the factory floor. Farm children were valued by their parents, if for no other reason than their ability to work the fields. This bond helped keep rural families intact.

Factories, on the other hand, demanded labor every day of the week, every month of the year. As industry enhanced technology, it stunted education for the poor, and literacy declined. There were simply not enough hours in the day for children to learn to read and write. The lowest classes, following the lure of progress, traded a self-sufficient agrarian lifestyle for enslavement in an urban jungle. From 1780 to 1830, child labor grew exponentially, largely due to the end of a family-centered economy.

Well on its way to becoming one of the largest cities in Europe and already Scotland’s most congested, Glasgow had grown to a population of two hundred thousand. As daylight broke, low-lying smog erased the city’s color. Ashen figures wandered hopelessly through a black-and-white world. By Christmas 1832, Agnes’s hometown, unrivaled in squalor, was dirtier and more dangerous than any city in the empire.

This was a far cry from the pristine paradise enjoyed by Glasgow’s seventy thousand inhabitants just thirty years earlier. The city’s name came from the Gaelic
Glaschu,
or “clean green place.” English writer Daniel Defoe described eighteenth-century Glasgow as “one of the cleanliest, most beautiful and best cities in Great Britain.”
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Built along the River Clyde, this peaceful enclave was protected by steep rolling hills. Children played in the water, and men fished in the streams by tree-lined meadows. This was an urban oasis defined by nature’s beauty, resplendent in its orchards, cornfields, and terraced flower gardens.

Agnes and Janet never knew the green, open spaces of a more serene Glasgow. The tobacco and linen trade had set the Garden of Eden on fire. Seldom did the close companions see the magical northern lights, hidden under a murky haze that rarely lifted from their city’s sky. The lazy River Clyde was widened and violated to make room for noisy steam-powered ships bringing sugar and raw cotton to fuel Glasgow’s new industries. The fragrance of buds in bloom was replaced by the stench of the slum. A once-glistening metropolis had lost its luster by the time the Goosedubbs Street girls sat before the sheriff.

Glasgow residents lived on average twelve years less than their rural counterparts, a fact attributed to urban housing: “damp earthen, muddy floors, walls saturated with moisture . . . small closed windows admitting of no perflation [
sic
] of air, crowded apartments, thatched roofs saturated like a sponge with water.”
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The physical toll on the tenement dweller was devastatingly obvious. The rich were almost always taller than the poor by four inches or more.
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One-third of Glasgow’s children hobbled along with a disfiguring gait caused by malnutrition and rickets.
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More were maimed by their work in factories or mines.

Laborers were pitted against one another for every job, every day. A person willing to work for less landed the job only until someone more desperate arrived at the factory door. Glasgow shipping companies imported starving Irish citizens who eagerly accepted cheap wages, thereby putting Scottish citizens out of work. To make matters worse, peasants from the highlands crowded the city in search of a better life that did not exist. In addition, the shift from hand to power looms destroyed a large cottage industry and left thousands of traditional weavers without employment and their families without food. Bleakness clung to the land like mold on an old loaf of bread.

The Glasgow wynds did not suffer fools. Like feral dogs, children on the streets learned to live according to their wits and a well-developed talent for exploiting opportunity. Alley dwellers worked their way up the street society according to a criminal hierarchy. Agnes and Janet would have started at the bottom, lifting an apple or two from a vendor cart. With small successes, the novice progressed to stealing items from stores and passersby. The proceeds could be bartered for money through any number of fences who lurked under the cover of candle shops, street stalls, and public houses. Many lodging-house owners offered thieves a bed for the night in return for an item that could be pawned easily. Other proprietors, fences themselves, encouraged crime as they made their boardinghouses a safe haven for gangs and a thriving underground economy from which they, too, profited.

Impoverished girls, Agnes and Janet included, faced three basic paths to survival: mill slave, thief, or “fallen woman.” An article in the
Glasgow Courier
appeared to sanction the third option. Accounts of fifteen-hour days and floggings by mill overseers led the
Courier
writer to this conclusion: “If the females when grown up are not ugly they may find relief in prostitution.”
¹⁴

Even though she was only twelve, Agnes had been offered the job of trollop many times. Part tomboy, part rebel, Agnes rejected the “loose habits” that would have branded her a strumpet. Stealing carried the risk of gaol, but prostitution was legal. Still, she refused to sell her body, an all-too-common fate for abandoned children.

Street-smart Agnes and Janet often felt more at ease roaming the wynds, where they at least knew what to expect and where to hide. The boardinghouse might have offered the pair some relief from the worst of the Scottish weather. However, there was no safety in numbers in the rented rooms they could afford. “In the lower lodging houses, ten, twelve, and sometimes twenty persons, of both sexes and all ages, sleep promiscuously on the floor in different degrees of nakedness. These places are generally as regards dirt, damp, and decay, such as no person of common humanity would stable his horse in.”
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Glasgow’s slums devoured the innocent every hour of the day. Yet even alley life was not all gloom and doom. A piece of fresh bread tossed from a street vendor, an onlooker who applauded her singing, a penny pressed into her hand; Agnes was grateful for such moments of simple compassion.

And then there was laughter, considered indecent among the upper crust, a necessity among those missing life’s most basic comforts. From the bosom of misery, the ridiculous and sophomoric permeated everyday activities. Humor found gleeful abundance when a carriage driver stepped deep in horse droppings or a passing pedestrian looked up at a window just as garbage was dumped on his head. Even the dark comedy of a staggering drunk created a welcome catharsis with hearty guffaws and waves of falling-over giggles. An organ grinder with a monkey on his shoulder regularly carried a traveling circus to Agnes, Janet, and all the street urchins.

The pleasure palace of the poor was located in the smoke-filled pub, which could suddenly transform to a theater. Clowning, rowdy song, ribald humor, and parodies that poked fun at political figures took center stage as spectators, standing shoulder to shoulder, packed this den of amusement. Such bawdy acts later gave birth to vaudeville and the music hall. The pub’s enthusiastic audience, most arriving with empty stomachs and dirty clothes, cherished distraction in the wisecracking, dancing, and drunken choruses. The precocious twelve-year-old and her red-haired chum sometimes joined in the animated merriment. This was a precious penny well spent, whether earned, stolen, borrowed, or begged.

These brief respites for fun were one of the anchors for Agnes’s exuberant spirit, creating some small consolation in a world where every step, every breath, every sip of water, carried the risk of catastrophe. Life was usually short and cheap. Any mistake Agnes made among the street people might be her last.

Some dangers weren’t visible, though they were no less treacherous for the ragamuffins of Goosedubbs Street. As she and Janet meandered through the wynds that fateful night in December 1832, the tough two-some had already avoided a cholera outbreak that killed ten thousand Scots earlier in the year. Scarlet fever, measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, and whooping cough ravaged thousands more.

From a haughty distance, the mighty rich blamed these epidemics on the struggling masses. They believed that the lower classes brought disease onto themselves because they failed to practice religion. Succumbing to typhoid fever was seen as a sign of God’s wrath, a fitting retribution for moral corruption. Local papers like the
Scotsman
declared that the wealthy caught diseases from “the ragged, the starved, and the degraded.”
¹⁶
While the Church recommended humiliation and prayer to purge afflictions from the poverty stricken, the radical press began to focus on sanitation, or the lack thereof, as the primary cause for contagious illness.

Agnes proved sturdy enough to resist air- and waterborne disease. But now the grey-eyed girl could hear the heavy footsteps of the gaoler and the rattle of his keys. The holding cell swung open, and a gruff hand reached inside. As she was dragged off to face the sheriff for sentencing, Agnes knew that her life was about to change forever.

Mr. Green’s Mill

Across the British Empire, children age seven and older were subjected to the same punishment as adults but were exempted from the death penalty. The last hanging of a child took place in 1708, when a seven-year-old boy and his eleven-year-old sister were convicted of theft and sentenced to death. Agnes was considered an adult at age twelve, and in Scotland adults were hanged as late as 1963. Once accused, she had no right to counsel in court even if her neck was about to be strung up. Thankfully, the wayward waif escaped the gallows, though she couldn’t elude Glasgow’s mandate to crack down firmly on young offenders. Thomas Johnston, Scotland’s secretary of state in 1941, described justice during the times in which Agnes lived: “Theft was the great crime; a man guilty of culpable homicide got only half the sentence of the man who stole the 23s. [shillings] in silver.”
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Essentially, a person’s life was worth less than the cost of a teapot.

Organized police were a new concept in the early nineteenth century, allowing for arbitrary sentencing, widespread bribery, and wholesale corruption. When it came to standards of behavior, there was a fine line between the uniformed officer and the common criminal. The police generally came from the same tough neighborhoods as those they arrested. Many supplemented their income by extorting bribes from the shopkeepers they were paid to protect. Others were quick on the take for thieves willing to pay them for a reduced sentence. Local authorities wielded tremendous discretionary power over the punishment of girls like Agnes and Janet. Some simply gave a stern warning delivered with a thrashing to their backs. More than a few hid behind their officer’s badge to get away with the sexual abuse of girls whose word would not hold up before a jury.

For their bungled burglary at the mansion, Agnes McMillan and Janet Houston stood before the Glasgow sheriff, from the streets himself and now a hard-nosed bureaucrat. He certainly understood that the two dispirited petty thieves presented no possibility of paying a bribe. At least they could be parceled out to the mill for a few pence. Lawbreakers were sentenced according to the severity of their crime. A juryless police court could impose an imprisonment of up to sixty days, whereas the sheriff held jurisdiction for sentences ranging from three to eighteen months. Fortunately, the feisty pair had yet to land in circuit court, where immediate deportation to Van Diemen’s Land was guaranteed. Unfortunately, the local sheriff was not in a holiday mood nor was he feeling the least bit generous, considering that Agnes had lied about her name to the arresting officer. He sentenced the two to the maximum sentence he could enforce: eighteen months at Mr. Green’s woolen mill along the Kelvin Docks. The four neighbors who assisted with the house break-in also received a sentence of a year and a half.

Forced labor was considered a form of apprenticeship. When Agnes and Janet were sentenced, 43 percent of Scotland’s woolen mill workers were under age eighteen. Had the sheriff sentenced Agnes to gaol, she would have avoided hard labor yet faced the perils of imprisonment with violent felons, the untreated insane, and corrupt prison wardens.

A police officer hustled the best friends, now in irons, into a waiting black carriage along with the other children sentenced to the mill. In the cold early morning light, Agnes knew exactly where she was headed. Every street urchin had heard stories about all forms of punishment, real and imagined. She looked down at the chains around her wrists.

As the buggy neared the factory, the giant mill wheels came into view, the machinery that powered the mill’s innards by pulling energy from the flowing River Clyde. After having her irons removed, each apprentice was inspected and logged into the mill journal. An unsympathetic matron issued their coarse grey uniforms. Marched across the factory yard, the new arrivals were indistinguishable from the veteran workers save for the short-lived cleanliness of their ill-fitting shifts.

Despite the eighteen-month sentence before her, her lack of a home, and no parent to rely on, Agnes hadn’t lost Janet. Records don’t indicate whether the factory overseer separated the two or if they were assigned the same room, but they worked together on the factory floor. Most mill owners were also the landlords for the “bothies,” the buildings that warehoused child labor: “Doors were all locked, both with check and turnkey; they slept on the premises, which had iron-staunched windows and were guarded all night; they had no chance of escaping till the morning, when he (the manager) released them for their next day’s employment.”
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At least two workers and often a third shared the beds in the bothy.