The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  The readers of the Limerick Chronicle would have found utterly predictable the published list in which Shields’s name appeared. Other women sentenced at the same Hilary session by magistrates and recorders were Catherine Mongavan, who had stolen £5 13 shillings, a third of the average yearly wages for the Kingdom of Ireland; Martha Walker, who had stolen a sheet; and Rosanna Daly, who had shoplifted ribbon from Todd & Company. The rest of the potential transportees sentenced at that October session were males.

  Details of Mary Shields’s crime are as obscure as those of the mass of Irish convicts. We do not know what cash value the jury may have put on the clothes Mary Shields took from Mr Reardon. But there were some indicative lighter sentences: Mary Brennan, stealing soap from the shop of James Kelly, was given one month’s hard labour; Patrick Farrell, stealing £1 15 shillings from Timothy Collopy, received three months. Was Shields’s theft greater in terms of quantity or did she take more expensive clothing? Since her occupation was given as that of servant, she may have been Mr Reardon’s servant, and the magistrates and jury perhaps saw her theft as a betrayal of a supposed ‘good master,’ a man like themselves. It was recorded also that she was a native of Tipperary. So she and her parents belonged to the masses of landless or evicted peasantry who wandered into cities and took what work they found.

  Accepting that Mary committed the crime, there are a number of grounds that justify our asking if it was a crime of malice or a crime of need, or both at once? Could it even have been—not unknown amongst low-paid, ill-used servants—a crime of industrial vengeance? This young woman, 5 feet 1¼ inches in height, bore the indications of want. She was also mother of a small son and an infant daughter. She had been married at eighteen in May 1834 to a man named John O’Flynn in St John’s Church, Limerick. The first child was baptised at St Michael’s Church, Limerick, in October 1835, and was named Michael after the saint. A daughter Bridget, named probably in honour of a close friend Bridget Purcell, listed as baptismal sponsor, was baptised in December 1837.

  Though there had been some recent prison reforms, the county gaol in Limerick was not much different from Larkin’s prison in Galway city. Limerick gaol too was run under contract issued by the county’s Chief Constable. Parents, husband, relatives like Annie Moloney, godmother to the infant Bridget, and friends like Bridget Purcell, came tentatively into the corridors of the women’s ward to see Mary, hoping she had not been scarred or misused. They reproached, commiserated, argued, wept, made arrangements about the infants. They gave Mary tobacco for her short clay dudeen, and heard her utter the hope there would be no ship available. If so, she might serve her time companionably in Limerick where they could see her face and she could keep her children.

  Children often accompanied their parents to prison. Mary’s son Michael was about two years old, and was, at least part of the time, in the wards of the gaol with her. In purely physical terms the conditions of her imprisonment may in fact have been no worse than the crowded room in a city hovel where she and O’Flynn lived with their families. But she missed bitterly what Hugh had missed: the hearth, the familial caress.

  Like most of the women who were to accompany her to Australia, Mary Shields had no previous conviction. In this and other aspects of her transportation, she fitted fairly precisely the same picture of the Irish female first offender given us by a modern historian who has studied convict women of a slightly earlier generation, up to 1828. More Irish female convicts—as compared with convicts from the rest of Britain—were married women, more were mothers of young families, more came from the country. Apart from Dubliners, few were described as ‘of the Cyprian tribe,’ that is, prostitutes. Fewer, too, had been found guilty of crimes of violence such as assault or highway robbery.

  The date of Mary Shields’s trial, in the autumn of the year, suggests that her crime was committed in the summer. The potato did not last after early summer, and the new crop was not harvested until September. Shields was at least a city woman, receiving a cash salary. But with the price of food rising as the summer advanced, one infant at the breast and a second, weaned child, a husband, parents, sister facing the customary hunger, it is not fanciful to claim that Mary’s motive for her first and sole lifetime offence was to convert stolen clothing into cash for bread, oatmeal, a luxurious piece of bacon, and—God knows—some liquor.

  The bill for an Irish Poor Law passed into law on 31 July 1838, three months before Shields’s trial. It permitted the desperately poor to be given shelter, work and food in English-style workhouses to be built in every barony of Ireland and paid for by a tax on landholders. Home Secretary Lord John Russell greeted its passage and the establishment of Irish workhouses ‘as a measure of peace, enabling the country to prohibit vagrancy.’ The hope that the Poor Law and the workhouse would lever the poorer Irish off the land had caused O’Connell to oppose the new legislation unless it was accompanied by the broader Irish reforms he sought.

  There were as ever special Irish problems with a Poor Law. In England, rudimentary conditions within the workhouse stimulated inmates to seek employment in the outside world. A Poor Law commissioner, George Nicholls, wrote that such a stratagem could not be used with the Irish. ‘The standard of their mode of living is unhappily so low that the establishment of one still lower is difficult.’ Ireland was now to be divided into Poor Law unions based on the administrative units called baronies, and a workhouse was to be established in every barony, paid for by a poor rate levied amongst landlords and leaseholders. The workhouses—‘all mere decoration being studiously excluded’—were of a pattern, severe in structure, with a small entrance lodge through which the inmates approached the main three-storey building of comfortless neo-Gothic stone.

  The Limerick workhouse, costing nearly £13,000 and covering 11 acres, would not be ready to receive its poor until May 1841. But the probable truth is that had the workhouse existed as a safety net in her day, Shields would still have committed her crime. To many people, even after the workhouses were in place, a minor crime committed to deal with a needful emergency would prove preferable. Smith O’Brien had warned that the Irish feared not only the indignity of make-work stone-breaking, or the endless pushing of the spoke of a mill wheel, both characteristic labours associated with the workhouse. They feared, above all, the separation of women from men and children from parents. William Makepeace Thackeray, visiting the North Dublin Union workhouse in 1843, noticed that ‘Among the men there are very few able-bodied, most of them, the keeper said, having gone out for the harvest time or as soon as the potatoes come in.’ It would take a cataclysm to make the Irish approach these grim institutions in any numbers.

  When Mary was moved out to Dublin, she took her son Michael, but not the infant, Bridget. The child may have died in infancy. Death being then considered a family matter, most Irish priests did not intrude upon it by marking down dates of death or burial. But Bridget might well have been still alive. Some infants reached the transports if there was no one to leave them with, but it was always at their peril. So it was possible that the baby stayed with Mary’s parents, Daniel and Ellen Shields, or her sister, or with John O’Flynn, or with her godmother Anne Moloney. It is possible too that Bridget grew, experienced the coming Irish catastrophe, and emigrated to England or Canada or the United States, where Mary’s blood lives on in some unguessable place.

  The departure of Mary and her son Michael with six other Limerick women from the county gaol in Limerick occurred in late autumn or winter, an obscure penal event no one took the pains to record. Though chained at wrist, waist, or even at ankle, and guarded by soldiers detailed from the Limerick garrison, the group of women felons could hardly have seemed much of a threat to the social fabric. Catherine Bourke, housemaid, a cloak-stealer, as well as being sixty years of age, was only 5 feet tall. Rosanna Daly, the 19-year-old cook and laundress who had shoplifted, carried pockmarks on her face and was only 4 feet 10 inches. Bridget Lonrigan, a 25-year-old single kitchenmaid and clothes thief,
also reached less than 5 feet.

  And it was a harsh business getting to the ship. Some years before, the English women of the Roslin Castle came on board at the Downs after having travelled in winter 150 miles or more chained up on the outside of coaches. The surgeon found his charges aching with chilblains, and one woman crippled by frostbite. Shields and other Limerick women imprisoned with her would be conveyed in bitter air not to Cork, 50 miles away, but far across-country 120 miles to Dublin, a destination which could be approached not only by road but by canals. From Tullamore in County Offaly, they would have been put on the decks of a barge, and subject to the mockery and occasional kindnesses of bargees as they traversed the canal locks along the Grand Canal to Dublin, to august Kilmainham gaol by the Liffey on the edge of the city.

  At some time in this sequence of walking, riding, trying to keep herself and Michael warm and safe from molestation in Kilmainham’s cellars, somewhere amongst the mists and damps of an Irish early winter spent in unhealthy places, turnkeys and soldiers were certain to have meanly slipped her the horrific news of Atlantic storms, unspeakable catastrophes at sea and unguessable destinations. She heard of the Neva, which left Cork in early 1835 with 150 Irish women convicts and over 50 of their children. Four months from departure, in July, on the far side of the earth in Bass Strait, between the Australian mainland and Van Diemen’s Land, Neva struck on an unmarked rock which ripped her rudder out. The stanchions on the prison deck gave way. All but 20 of the female convicts and all their 59 children were drowned.

  Mary’s potential Neva was the bark Whitby, a ship of 431 tons, registered A1 at Lloyd’s. Throughout January and February, 130 prisoners and 29 of their children were rowed out through the misty estuary of Dublin Bay and put below in piercing cold on the damp prison deck. In the struggles for space, rations and warmth, Michael was both a burden and, in the kindness he might attract, in the demands she might make in his name, a protection. Not that the other women were hardened criminals. Only three of them had done serious prison time. Whatever their slyness, sullenness, loudness, they were identifiably normal, powerless women.

  On 16 February 1839, Captain Thomas Wellbank signed the Lord Lieutenant’s warrant, acknowledging the ‘several bodies’ he had received on board, and the prison shifts, jackets, petticoats, caps, stockings, shoes intended for their use. ‘Twenty four children accompanied the above Female Convicts supplied with two Suits of Clothing each.’

  The surgeon-superintendent on Whitby was the naval man John Kidd, who found Mary to have brown hair, brown or chestnut eyes, ruddy complexion. Kidd noted also ‘marks of scrofula under the chin or right jaw.’ Called the King’s Evil because it was believed that the touch of a monarch could cure it, scrofula was something she caught by her parents’ hearth, while drinking buttermilk from a cow infected with bovine tuberculosis. Tuberculosis of the lymph glands had imposed high fever, agony of the joints, and swelling and ulceration. The scars remained.

  Surgeon Kidd would note that like Larkin before her, she had Reading but not Writing. As a small girl then, she too had got a taste of a hedge school.

  Many of the children aboard were young and delicate, said Kidd, and ‘several of the women old and infirm.’ But he kept the women busy with sewing and exercise on deck, and the noise of some crewman’s fiddle and the distant thump of jigs was probably heard through the mists by occasional winter promenaders ashore.

  The time of anguish and noise came on 18 February. Whitby left in much more severe climatic conditions than had Parmelia, and in their chains some of the women held and nursed infants. Panic was diminished only by the onset of seasickness and exhaustion. The sickest young woman aboard, Mary Hennessy of Cork, mother of an infant son, had entered the sick bay even before sailing, and continued to suffer from dysentery with anal bleeding—‘the bloody flux.’

  A veteran surgeon, Peter Cunningham, who made six journeys to Australia, frankly recommended cohabitation between convict women and sailors or guards. He proposed that these sexual alliances were to the benefit of all parties. They provided the women, he said, with extra comforts—tea and occasional spirits—and provided the sailors with washing, sewing and cleaning. Other more evangelical surgeons kept a stringent eye on the behaviour of all parties. As ever, the little island of a women’s ship left in the record more questions than answers, carrying within it its own net of accommodating secrets. And how could the letter of the Admiralty’s and Transport Board’s regulations always run in the unsupervised Atlantic, and the cold reaches of the Indian and Southern Oceans? Kidd’s journal gives not the slightest direct information on what arrangements were permitted or suppressed aboard Whitby. We have the consistent observations of visitors to Ireland, from Arthur Young to Sir Walter Scott to de Tocqueville and the German traveller Johann Kohl, on the strict virtue of Irish women in their communities. But these women were mis-located, and whether or not they would have welcomed new associations, they had only the surgeon and the far-off regulations to protect them from abuse. Sailors may well have considered them savages. They carried the stain of proven criminality, their Irish raucousness, and—in most cases—their Catholic religion. Many had the further disadvantage of lacking all but rudimentary English.

  In kersey jackets, or frocks and woollen caps, the twenty-four children of the convict deck, solace to their mothers, may also have reminded other women of children left behind, deliberately or because of the random policies of the various counties. A 22-year-old needlewoman named Elizabeth Byrne, who had stolen two tumblers in Carlow, was noted as having male and female children. If so, none of them appeared on Whitby’s list. But Mary Doyle, a potato-thieving kitchen maid of Dublin who had a previous sentence, was accompanied by a 7-year-old son. There were many such poignant disparities.

  But it was surprising however how many of the prisoners were going to a reunion. Amongst others, Eliza White of Dublin travelled in hope to her convict husband, Christopher Reilly. Jane Ramsay, a Protestant kitchen maid, was also on her way to her husband, and Mary Carroll, a 39-year-old dairymaid, wanted to show her convict husband her 2½-year-old John Carroll whom he had never seen. But then a 60-year-old, Ann Murray, also had a relative on his way to New South Wales, a son, John Colquhoun, aboard the Waverley, a ship for males which left from Dublin a week after the Whitby. Had any of these women committed crimes specifically to achieve reunion?

  In the turbulent currents south of Africa, Mary Hennessy was mortally ill in heart and body, as was her infant, John Hennessy, six months old at the time of embarkation. Hennessy’s lassitude, characteristic of scurvy and heartbreak both, annoyed Kidd: he told her to collect herself and mind her child. The infant died on 21 May off the southern tip of Africa. The keening from the convict deck competed with the particular thunder of those freezing westerlies, and the pitiless discourse between Whitby’s timbers and a strenuous sea. Not long after, Hennessy herself died. She was twenty-seven when she expired and was committed to the sea to the south of Amsterdam Island, a plug of granite claimed by France, roughly halfway between Africa and the west coast of Australia.

  In harsh June, Shields found the blankets skimpy and too damp to combat the sub-Polar cold. The flux was a common complaint on Whitby. It did not always aid sisterhood or composure in such limited space. Women cursed and pitied each other as on stormier days the heads became fouled and faecal stench suffused their pitching world. They knew the harsh diet was the problem. So did the new governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps, who had taken over from Governor Bourke. He had written to Whitehall about the inferior quality of rations on ships coming from Ireland. Gipps was a studious army engineer with a taste for research. Early in his New South Wales career, he had ordered a more modest study made of the rationing of two ships, the Diamond which had arrived from Cork in March 1838 with females, and the William Jardine from Dublin with males. ‘A simple perusal of this report will, I hope,’ he wrote to Colonial Secretary Glenelg, ‘induce Your Lordship to cause an inquiry to be made
into the mode of victualling these ships.’ But plain tastes, and the fact that hunger was no stranger, equipped most of the Whitby women to survive be-weevilled flour and the rancid barrels of bony and unsavoury beef and pork.

  As Captain Wellbank rounded the southern tip of Van Diemen’s Land and reached up the New South Wales coast, he fell into company with a sloop from Sydney called the Freak. Whitby and Freak sailed in company through the sandstone headlands of Sydney Harbour. The drag of sea slackened. Mary heard raucous Australian birds call from the bushy heights above Watson’s Bay.

  6

  THE LASS FROM THE FEMALE FACTORY

  So agreeable a retreat, indeed, is the Factory, that it is quite a common thing for female assigned servants to demand of their masters and mistresses to send them there and flatly, and with fearful oaths, to disobey orders for the purpose of securing the accomplishment of their wish.

  James Mudie, evidence before the

  Select Committee on Transportation, 1837

  Even the Sydney Gazette, edited by emancipists, former convicts, had fallen into the significant mannerism of reporting human cargoes as if they were equivalent to inanimate ones. The Gazette’s shipping news the following Tuesday stated Whitby’s cargo to be ‘female convicts,’ and without so much as a paragraph break listed another ship, Tybee, a bark from Boston, as carrying a cargo of 75 hogsheads of rum, 155 boxes of refined sugar, 18 oars, 122 kegs of tobacco, etc., etc.

  The magnates of Sydney and the bush still wanted convict labour and were determined to maintain the convict cargoes and the assignment system. The report of the British Select Committee on Transportation, sitting in London, however, had the year before, 1838, recommended an end to assignment—it generated a convict peasantry, ‘one more strange and less attached to the soil they till than the negro slaves of a planter.’ The Colonial Secretary of New South Wales said too that assignment of females produced ‘grave evil to the women themselves from their frequent change of service, especially in Sydney.’ Though Governor Gipps said he found it administratively and fiscally impossible yet to take all the assigned servants back into government labour, all these forces at play helped ensure that Mary’s was one of the last half-dozen women’s transports to New South Wales, although many more would be sent to Van Diemen’s Land.