The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (9 page)

Four Hundred Miles

On Tuesday, May 3, 1836, true-blue mates Agnes McMillan and Janet Houston were refitted with irons and yanked out of their cells to appear before the Ayr Court of Judiciary. Helen Fulton and Daniel Campbell appeared as well. Records from the Glasgow Police Court were called into evidence, listing Agnes’s prior arrests for housebreaking at age twelve in December 1832 and for theft in April 1835. The record included Janet’s arrest for “a conviction of the crime of theft” on July 2, 1834, and the following February.
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Lord Justice General Charles Hope, head of Scotland’s highest court, read aloud the report that deemed Agnes “habite and repute a thief,” guilty of “crimes of an heinous nature and severely punishable.”
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It took all of five minutes. There were too many poor to be sentenced to spend much time pondering the merits of justice for one grey-eyed girl. From under his dusty wig, he sentenced the fifteen-year-old petty thief to seven years’ transportation to “parts beyond the seas.” Janet fared no better and in short order was condemned to the same punishment. Because the Kilmarnock heist was Helen’s first offense, she was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment. Daniel, like Agnes and Janet, received seven years’ transport, but he managed an escape and turned outlaw and fugitive.
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Wrestling away fear, wrists and ankles in chains, Agnes shuffled back to her holding cell to await she knew not what. While the young women were summarily dismissed, they were also meticulously numbered and documented for the authorities in Van Diemen’s Land. As dawn broke on May 4, 1836, Agnes was rousted from her cell, where she and Janet lay in restless sleep on the clay floor. Gaol keeper John Kennedy attached black iron manacles across Agnes’s wrists.
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He chained her legs to Janet’s and led the two girls to the front of the courthouse, where a commercial coach was waiting. Shoulder to shoulder, attached at their ankles, the duo was careful not to act too chummy. After everything they’d been through, these stoic soul sisters from Glasgow’s streets dared not risk separation.

Their destination was Newgate Prison, where they awaited shipment to Britain’s most distant colony. Men were marched in chain gangs, while convict women were transported on the outside of commercial stagecoaches. Getting up on the carriage required the agility of an acrobat for the two wrongdoers handcuffed at the wrists and chained at the ankles. With a hearty boost from gaoler Kennedy, Agnes and Janet were secured to the coach and plunked onto the wooden plank serving as a seat. The sooner such riffraff was removed from his jurisdiction, the better. As was typical for the times, a crowd of onlookers gathered for the send-off and watched with disgust and amusement as the two lasses tried to keep their skirts from flying above their knees. Small fingers poked through the manacles as the driver picked up his whip and prepared for departure.

Drawn by four horses, the stagecoach was cheerfully painted, belying the unpleasant bumping, bruising ride ahead. Travel by coach frequently included getting stuck in the mud or losing a wheel and crashing off the road. The carriage held up to eight passengers on the top and six inside. A guard armed with blunderbuss, pistols, and cutlass was perched next to the coachman. Dressed in signature scarlet livery, he watched the prisoners, protected the carriage from highway robbery, and secured the mailbags.

The coach company received a small stipend from the Crown for prisoner transport. Now that their cargo was secured, it was time to pick up the paying passengers booked for Preston, Birmingham, or London. The driver snapped his whip, and the carriage jolted forward, knocking Agnes and Janet against the iron rail.

Stagecoach travelers were bundled up in bonnets, scarves, and shawls and carried baskets of provisions on board. Like the upstairs-downstairs hierarchy inside fine homes, paying customers pretended not to see their traveling companions. For the duration of the four-hundred-mile, four-day trip to London, insiders were held captive themselves, sharing company with smelly, drunk, or overly talkative passengers.

The stagecoach traveled at a speed of seven or eight miles an hour. In May, it crossed the moors at their greenest, with the bluebells in full color. Every twenty miles or so, the driver made comfort stops, primarily for the horses’ benefit. Coaching inns were open twenty-four hours a day and provided stables where the horses were groomed, fed, and changed when necessary.

Sounding his bugle, the driver alerted the innkeeper to their approach. Passengers could buy a rushed meal consisting of “scalding soup-stained warm water . . . underdone boiled leg of mutton, . . . potatoes hot without and hard within.”
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Unscrupulous innkeepers delayed serving meals until just before the carriage was scheduled for departure. Travelers barely had time to inhale a few mouthfuls. As they hurried out of the inn, the food was scraped from their plates and served to the next customer. Businesses stole from customers, and customers stole from businesses. Nearly everyone pursued a criminal pursuit of one sort or another. It was merely a question of who got caught.

The stagecoach driver scheduled a stop for the night before darkness fell. In early May, that meant close to nine o’clock. Most prisoners were ill-equipped for evening temperatures that plummeted close to freezing. “Sometimes they had insufficient clothing to even properly cover themselves and it was not unknown for women to arrive frost-bitten and suffering from other physical disabilities brought on by the ravages of exposure and hypothermia.”
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For a convict lass, the ease or difficulty of her transport depended on the weather and the driver’s disposition. Some of the prisoners had families who gave them a cloak and a hat for warmth. Most, like Agnes, wore one thin layer of clothing. If the coachman felt kindly, he might have offered Agnes and Janet a spare blanket on the road. If generous, he might have shared a piece or two of bread and sips of warming brandy. If not, his charges went cold and hungry for four or five days. After three years on the streets, the girl with the glint in her eyes had learned how to draw on the sympathies of those who might help her. It was one additional survival tool in her growing reserve.

Years earlier, Elizabeth Fry, whom the Glasgow pair would soon meet in London, followed a similar route during her inspection of Scotland’s prisons. Although she traveled by private coach, her diary recorded an arduous journey, traversing bogs and streams in weather similarly damp and chilly. Fry’s nights were spent inside the warm homes of fellow Quakers, while for three nights in May, Agnes and Janet slept in stables with the horses. It was, however, a step up from their typical alleyway dwelling, and it would be their best housing for some time to come.

When she awakened from her bed of stable straw on Saturday, May 7, 1836, Agnes had already traveled more than three hundred miles. Tethered to Janet, she sloshed through the mud in her crinkled and droopy brown boots, her skinny ankles raw from the irons. The driver hoisted the youngsters back atop the stagecoach and reattached the shackles that tethered them to the seats. Over the past few days Agnes had figured out how to brace herself, pulling her knees tight against the seat and balancing against the carriage’s unpredictable drop and sway.

As evening drew near, the petite Scot watched her dreaded destination come slowly into view. Built on London’s highest point, the blackened dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral rose 365 feet in the air and dominated the skyline. To the west of the cathedral lurked the grim façade of Newgate Prison, known to Londoners as “the Stone Jug.”
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The granite vault for the poor sat across from St. Sepulchre, the church whose bells tolled on execution days.

The two friends linked by heavy chains and iron loyalty had never traveled more than twenty-five miles from home, so London must have seemed like the end of the world. The city proper grew ever more congested. Children taunted the girls and threw stones at the coach. Janet’s bright red hair made for a fine target. This was not the performance Agnes had imagined in her dreams of singing on a London stage.

3

The Angel of Newgate

Nighthawks

All roads for the desperate poor eventually led to Newgate Prison. Righteous reformer Elizabeth Gurney Fry, in an act of selfless determination, shocked the nation when she founded a Quaker ministry inside London’s chapel of the damned. By the time Agnes and Janet were headed to Newgate, Fry was already a London celebrity.

Elizabeth’s husband, Joseph Fry, accepted his wife’s commitment to a higher purpose. He also tolerated her blatant defiance toward how London ladies were
supposed
to behave. In return, every day of the week except Sunday, Mrs. Fry rousted Joseph out of a deeply stuffed parlor chair, rallying the ambition that too often escaped him. On workdays, the dutiful Mr. Fry opened their front door and headed out to his bank’s counting house, conveniently located just below their living quarters at Mildred’s Court. In the morning fog, Joseph sometimes tripped over the skirts of women and children who waited patiently on the front stoop. Word had spread on the streets near Bishopsgate, Poultry, and Cheap-side about a Mrs. Fry who helped destitute women, offering them fresh food and clean clothing. “In very hard winters she had soup boiled in an out-house in such quantities as to supply hundreds of people with a nourishing meal.”
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Between the births of her children, eleven in all, Elizabeth expanded her humanitarian projects. Determined to stop the spread of smallpox, she vaccinated families who lived in remote villages and in London’s darkest slums. She established a girls’ school in Plashet for the children of laborers and servants, set up libraries for men stationed at remote coastguard locations, and founded a nursing school that provided free care for those without funds. Years later, Florence Nightingale, a distant cousin, would take some of Fry’s well-trained nurses to the Crimean War front. Still, this was not enough.

In a coincidental turn of fate, just as Elizabeth was searching for her own spiritual purpose, a French aristocrat turned American Quaker minister knocked on her door at Mildred’s Court. On a cold, rainy afternoon in January 1813, Stephen Grellet was shown into the Frys’ drawing room, the well-known British Quaker William Forster at his side. A striking figure with ragged silver hair, dark bushy eyebrows, and a prominent nose, the pockmarked but graceful Grellet could barely contain the fullness of his heart.

Grellet was an outspoken reformer, who devoutly followed the tradition of Quaker empathy and compassion for society’s outcasts. Drawn to the cause of London’s forgotten poor, Grellet was appalled to learn that nearly a million faced imminent starvation. As the New Year approached, Parliament refused imports of wheat and oats in an effort to maintain the high price of British-grown grain. Artificially inflating the price of grain backfired. It undermined the farmer and caused a dramatic spike in crime as thousands fled the fields and flocked to the city for work that did not yet exist. Bread had become a luxury item in London. The poor either suffered starvation or took desperate measures to feed themselves, resorting to theft and prostitution. Some abandoned their children. Others blinded reality with London’s cheap and plentiful gin.

Stephen Grellet rejected the ruling class’s prevailing belief that the destitute deserved their suffering. In January 1813, he called a meeting for thieves, pickpockets, and prostitutes at the St. Martin’s Lane Quaker house. It was an unprecedented request, and no one knew what to expect. The meeting was called for seven P.M. because most among this group were considered “nighthawks.” Surprisingly, thousands attended, most barely twenty and nearly all homeless. Grellet understood the depths of their misery and wrote: “I wept bitterly over them. The lofty heads, the proud looks were brought down. I have seldom known such brokenness and so general as it was that evening.”
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The police chief magistrate who watched as the crowd exited deemed Grellet foolish and offered to collect
all
the scum in London for his guardianship. Grellet declined his taunting offer but used the opportunity to ask for permission to visit London’s prisons, where he had heard that even young children were housed.

Grellet quickly filed the required petitions to visit Newgate Prison, “having religious opportunities in the many separate apartments, where the miserable inmates are confined.”
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Once inside, he tried to comfort the boys and men who awaited hanging. When he asked to visit the women’s quarters: “The gaoler endeavoured to prevent my going there, representing them as so unruly and desperate a set that they would surely do me some mischief . . . concluding that the very least I might expect was to have my clothes torn off.”
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Grellet refused to be turned away.

On that auspicious January afternoon, over a glass of brandy to chase away the biting winter chill, Stephen Grellet told Elizabeth Fry, rather breathlessly, what he’d just seen. About three hundred half-naked women and children lived in a cell about forty by forty-two feet in size, allowing each inmate a space about two feet by two feet, barely enough to sit down. A few among them had committed murder or arson. Most were chained and imprisoned for stealing a watch, a dress, a piece of cloth, or a cloak. For minor misdemeanors, prisoners waited up to six months to be assigned a ship that would transport them to Van Diemen’s Land, known today as Tasmania.

Grellet found the women gaoled in conditions much worse than those he had witnessed for Newgate’s men. His aristocratic ease became completely unhinged upon visiting the women’s sick ward. “On going up, I was astonished beyond description at the mass of woe and misery I beheld. I found many very sick, lying on the bare floor or some old straw, having very scanty covering over them, though it was quite cold; and there were several children born in the prison among them, almost naked.”
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Grellet never had to ask Elizabeth for her assistance. Fry immediately volunteered to visit Newgate to see for herself. As it happened, her friend Anna Buxton was visiting when Grellet arrived. Within hours of his departure, the Fry household grew alive with activity. In the twinkling light of the silver candelabras, Elizabeth and Anna immediately began making flannel clothes for the infants at Newgate. Throughout the night, a small parade of Quaker neighbors arrived at Mildred’s Court to assist with the sewing.

The very next day, Mrs. Fry awoke with a fire in her belly as she pulled back the curtains around her four-poster bed. Turning down the cotton sheet underneath several wool blankets and a silk coverlet, Elizabeth felt none of the malaise and depression that had plagued her so often since her mother’s death twenty-one years ago. She was on a mission.

As mistress of Mildred’s Court, Elizabeth’s first order of the day was to attend to her household duties and give the staff their orders. Technically, her address was St. Mildred’s Court, but Quakers do not believe in saints, so the Fry clan simply shortened the name to suit them. Hustling her husband, Joseph, out of bed and into his dark grey waistcoat was a daily ritual. They were served their breakfast in the parlor before Joseph headed downstairs to his office at the family bank. For Elizabeth, getting dressed was somewhat of an ordeal. Her lady’s maid had already laid out a corset and five starched white petticoats. After a quick curtsy, she applied the ornate silver hook and cinched tight Elizabeth’s corset, stiffened with whalebones and not at all comfortable. Then she layered one petticoat at a time, pulling and tugging each into place. As a final adjustment, she fluffed Fry’s billowing skirt and pulled on the creases of the puffed beret sleeves. Decorative but impractical, they added to the illusion of an hourglass. Together, they accentuated the feminine waist, even if it was a bit round like Elizabeth’s.

Fry’s maid drew back the heavy, deep crimson silk damask curtains, fastened with fringed tiebacks, that protected Mildred’s Court from London’s boisterous streets and blackened air. Elizabeth looked out her bedroom window and watched a relentless drizzle fall across the slick black slate roof of the family’s tea house. She walked to her dressing room, opened the enormous ceiling-high carved mahogany wardrobe, deliberately chose a simple black wool cloak, and then reached for another. Mrs. Fry would need a second shawl to protect her from the penetrating dampness.

Before heading downstairs, Elizabeth looked in on the eight children she had given birth to during the first twelve years of her marriage. They were currently under the watch of her housekeeper, Jane King. Efficient, albeit haughty and distant, Miss King ensured that Elizabeth’s children had fine care, but still Mother Fry worried about her absences from home. Entries in her diary reveal an emotional struggle over her responsibilities as a mother and her ordained purpose: “May I not be hurt in it, but enabled quietly to perform that which ought to be done; and may it all be done so heartily unto the Lord, and through the assistance of His grace.”
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The clocks in the house began to chime, first the large grandfather clock in the hallway, seconds later the mantel clock kept under glass to protect its delicate works from persistent, penetrating coal residue. Eight o’clock; the day was well underway. Elizabeth expected Anna Buxton at any moment. Hours before, the downstairs maid had lit a fire to warm the breakfast parlor, replenishing the hand-carved coal scuttle at the base of the fireplace. With no central heating, Mildred’s Court was filled with thickly stuffed lounging chairs and velvet couches that helped insulate the rooms from the blustery cold outside. Typical upper-class taste in décor was characterized by excessive detail in which elaborate wallpaper met floral-scrolled carpets beneath embossed, patterned ceilings. Ostrich feathers in painted vases accented shelves of cluttered bric-a-brac that required endless dusting. Crowning this visual carnival, treasured family portraits covered virtually every available space.

Long before sunrise, the downstairs maid had filled several bucket loads with about thirty pounds of coal. The work was not easy, but employment as a housemaid offered the coveted benefits of a reasonably warm room, just off the kitchen, and three hearty meals a day. Leftovers were plentiful in this grand home. A typical breakfast included porridge and salt, eggs and potted beef, toast, and butter. This cornucopia was presented on the finest translucent china covered by monogrammed silver domes. The feast filled the Frys’ mahogany sideboard to overflowing. On this gloomy London morning, the starched white linen tablecloth brightened the dark English oak that paneled the breakfast room. Logs crackled in the marble fireplace. A sliver of steam rose from the gleaming silver teapot while Elizabeth silently sipped from the gold-rimmed cup she held between her fingers.

From outside, Elizabeth heard the chains rattling as Anna Buxton’s coach delivered her just in time for morning tea. Anna and Elizabeth had been friends since childhood. Anna’s brother Thomas Fowell Buxton was a fervent Quaker abolitionist, and later Member of Parliament, who was married to Elizabeth’s sister Hannah. He would soon join Elizabeth and his sister in their work to save the women who awaited exile inside Newgate Prison, including Agnes McMillan and Janet Houston.

The Bone Gatherers

Mrs. Fry, anxious to head straightaway to the prison, tied her bonnet securely under her chin and fastened a satin shawl at her bosom with a rose pin made of wool. Her carriage soon arrived, and the footman obediently draped Elizabeth’s outer cape over her shoulders. He held her elbow to steady her as she climbed into the small black buggy that creaked under the weight of its new cargo. Sitting bolt upright just as her mother had taught her, she directed the coachman to Newgate without delay.

The horses tensed, steam blowing out of their nostrils as they shifted nervously against the leather harnesses. Elizabeth and Anna heard the crack of the whip, the wheels began to roll, and with a lurch they were on their way. The Fry horses had their own groomsman, who fed them a steady diet of fresh oats and barley, a feast worthy of envy by most of London’s poor. Although Mrs. Fry erred on the side of modesty in public displays of status, even riding in an open carriage in the winter, her horses’ smooth coats glistened with impeccable care and signaled her family’s wealth. Elizabeth liked to keep pretense at bay. In conspicuous contrast, her sisters, Louisa and Hannah, preferred the comfort of a glass coach for their leisurely excursions to the fashionable St. James Park. Her older siblings never fully understood Elizabeth’s affinity for helping the unfortunate. Louisa felt supremely annoyed by the intrusion of London’s downtrodden on their family visits, remarking: “We have had a regular Mildred Court day, poor people coming one after another till twelve o’clock, and then no quiet.”
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Distanced and detached from the true city, the well-to-do often carried pampering to heights of the absurd, taking extreme measures to avoid contact with the world inhabited by most Londoners in 1813. When a woman of means shopped for a dress in the upscale West End, she expected to be carried from the carriage across the shop’s threshold, her dutiful servant careful not to soil her satin slippers or the bottom of her gown. With a well-positioned ivory-handled fan, she need not look upon the paupers that were nearly everywhere. More than seven hundred thousand people, 85 percent of the city’s population, lived in tenement slums or in the alleyways. Hay carts, sheep, pigs, beggars, street dwellers, and pickpockets all jostled for survival in the constant commotion pulsating through London’s dark heart. Children battled with rats over scraps of rotting food.

For many, adults and children alike, prison offered more comfort than life on the street, including the certainty of a free piece of bread. Purposely committing a crime was a gamble on their future the desperate were willing to take. Depending on the judge, they either gained food and shelter inside a gaol or risked transport to Van Diemen’s Land.