The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women

by Deborah J. Swiss

  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.”17 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.”18 At least two workers and often a third shared the beds in the bothy.

  The sheriff had warned Agnes and Janet not to be late for their labor assignments. Oversleeping and tardiness were severely punished. Some latecomers were hung by the wrists and flogged. Others were plunged half-naked into a well.

  Clang, clang, clang: The wake-up sounded at four thirty A.M. sharp. The bell went on and on until each child climbed out of bed into the sleepy darkness. It was a requirement to be alert and on the floor for the five A.M. whistle call. Th
e half-hour spent from dreaming to drudgery was barely enough time for the girls to throw on their uniforms and gulp down a scoop of gruel. Their next meal was in eight hours.

  As they entered the millworks the first time, Agnes and Janet were directed toward the overseer, also called an “overlooker.” Standing above the fray on a small platform, he ordered each girl to tie her hair in a bun and pull her sleeves above her elbows. Anything not tethered tightly was an accident waiting to happen. A strand of hair caught in machines scalped some girls on the job. There were no shutoff valves for a sleeve or a finger that caught in the looms. Each child was responsible for her own safety. If she hurt herself, the overseer blamed her stupidity.

  The mill was a notorious breeding ground for abuse and perversion. If a child fell asleep on her feet, the overseer dipped her head into an iron vat filled with water. “Some adult operatives and overlookers did not look beyond themselves for tools of abuse. They kicked children, struck them with clenched fist, and yanked children’s hair and ears.”19

  Disaster loomed ominously over the wide-eyed apprentices, imprisoned in a maze of spindles, tangled threads, swaying metal bars, and exposed wire teeth. Agnes, Janet, and the other young thieves stood before the spinning machines like flies examining a spider’s web. From every corner, gas lamps sputtered and hissed. The swinging rods crisscrossing the sunless tomb clanked noisy warnings. Strange sounds bombarded the new arrivals from every direction as they strained to hear the overseer. Stone walls reverberated and amplified the auditory assault: the whir of spinning bobbins, the slapping of the looms’ reeds, the hypnotic drone of leather belts and pulleys, the spastic flapping of the newly woven wool.

  By the time Agnes and Janet were sent to Mr. Green’s, conditions of child labor had become so appalling that several government investigations were taking place. Evidence for an 1832 House of Commons Committee on the Factories Labour Regulation Bill described “one girl so bow-legg’d that you could put a chair between her legs.”20 Page after page of testimony described the fate for those conscripted as weans. A man about thirty years old “does not stand, with his deformity, above 4 feet 6 inches high, and had he grown to his proper height I think he would have been about 5 feet 8 or 9 inches. He has been in the mills since he was 5 years old, and he is reduced to that state that he slides along on a stool to do his work.”21

  Another investigation, by a committee on the Employment of Children in Manufactories, interviewed adults about their experience as child workers. Robert Blincoe offered testimony that could not be challenged. He hobbled forward on his crooked legs, the deformity most common from youthful years spent in a mill. The committee asked Blincoe, now a father of three, if he would send his children to work in a factory. Without hesitation, he responded: “No; I would rather have them transported to Australia.”22 Robert had watched ten-year-old Mary Richards being torn to pieces when her apron caught on a shaft that turned a drawing frame, the device used to straighten fibers. “In an instant the poor girl was drawn by an irresistible force and dashed on the floor . . . the bones of her arms, legs, thighs . . . crushed, seemingly, to atoms, as the machinery whirled her round, and drew tighter and tighter her body within the works.”23

  At the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, the same risks stalked Agnes. Seasoned mill laborers soon figured out that keeping pace with the frames and spindles meant staying alive. They developed rhythmic movements that mimicked the millworks; their motions turned mechanical, their gait robotic. Speech, too, took on a short staccato cadence to compete with the mill’s deafening cacophony.

  Wool production was a labor-intensive business. It took ten girls to prepare the yarn for one weaver. Older lasses like thirteen-year-old Janet were assigned sorting, according to the wool’s texture. “Picking” the wool, the mill’s most unpleasant task, was primarily assigned to younger workers with smaller hands. Agnes was led past the looms and spinners and brought to the picking bin, where she would stand for the next eighteen months, fifteen hours at a time. Grabbing one piece of wool from the monumental stack before her, strand by strand, she pulled out fatty wool grease infused with dirt, animal skin, sweat, and sheep dung. Tearing the grime out of the bristly fibers, Agnes picked the matted wool clean with her fingers and a large needle. Her lack of experience punctured her skin as she clumsily pulled out thistles, thorns, and burs. Within the first hour, her hands began to cramp and to coil like talons around prey.

  The factory was without ventilation. As the shift dragged on, the air grew heavier and thicker. Endless grey filth, never fully cleaned from the sheep’s wool, joined flying fibers, creating hazy smog that covered workers and gears in a grainy veneer. Agnes and Janet were quickly layered in sweat and dust from head to toe. With no place to wash, the children were coated with sticky particles that lodged in their eyelids and their hair for months at a time.

  Amid the whir and clang of the machines, Agnes heard the distinctive sound of the overlooker tapping a wooden rod against his palm. The iron tip on the rod’s end threatened a rap on the head for those with rebellious dispositions. Rule breakers were flogged with the same straps that drove the pulleys. Failure to obey the overseer could bring a trip to the “throttle room,” where a girl was tied to a harness and forced to walk back and forth with weights on her back. The most severe punishment of all was reserved for lasses who spoke to the lads on the factory floor. The smallest flirtation took away what was considered a woman’s most prized possession: Her head was shaved bald. The rest of the girls would soon wear the crown of thieves with telltale short haircuts.

  After eight hours on the floor, the new recruits felt their stomachs shrink and growl. The piercing sound of the supper bell arrived not a moment too soon. Agnes had only a half hour to shove hot boiled potatoes into her mouth and stand in line at the outhouse. Plunking down on the straw with Janet, this was her one chance to stretch her arms and set aside the stress of trying to keep up the pace. The workers “held up their . . . aprons that were saturated with grease and dirt, and having received their allowance, scampered off as hard as they could to their respective places, where, with a keen appetite, each apprentice devoured her allowance, and seemed anxiously to look about for more.”24

  By twelve hours into the shift, Agnes and her co-workers were reduced to a zombie-like state. Speechless, detached, and numb, they prayed for the peal of the nine o’clock release bell. When it finally rang, sighs of relief followed the scuffling sound of several hundred bare feet. The exhausted twelve-year-old dragged her leaden legs down the mill’s path back to the sleep room, ears ringing, thankful for Janet at her side. Half deaf from the din of the mill, the girls soon became immune to the commotion caused by street brawls and hooligans just outside the bothy. Nightfall brought a fitful peace, silence being an experience foreign to a child of the factories and the streets. So, too, was clean air. With no ventilation in the room, Agnes and Janet breathed blackened air even during the five hours they slept.

  This was day one of Agnes’s 548-day sentence of wool picking. Her hands would never be the same.

  While Agnes and Janet toiled in Mr. Green’s factory, young Princess Victoria was touring cotton mills throughout England in an effort to introduce the future monarch to her subjects and improve the Crown’s image. Like that of most Glasgow girls, Agnes’s coming of age reflected none of the leisure or revelry savored by the empire’s future queen. On September 11, 1833, Agnes turned thirteen. There would be no party. Birthdays were celebrated only among the upper crust.

  There was little dignity in becoming a woman on the factory floor. The lower classes could barely afford a single layer of clothing and had no undergarments of any sort. Agnes’s entire wardrobe consisted of one coarse shift. When a lass became an adult with the onset of menstruation, everyone in the mill knew. A trail of public blood marked this rite of passage. Straw spread on the floor absorbed the fluids. Mercifully, one effect of malnutrition was that a girl’s cycle was lighter and shorter than those of the we
ll fed, thus sparing her greater embarrassment.

  As she crossed into adolescence, the grey-eyed girl met few adults who were able to rise above the despair and drudgery that overran the slums. On the days she sang on the streets, Agnes had been propositioned by smelly sailors, cursed by pawnbrokers who bristled at her bargaining, and scammed by the bitter crone who owned the boardinghouse. A few of the older women in the mill offered the new apprentices snippets of motherly advice, though they had walked no easy path themselves.

  A factory owner held full rein over the daily life of his indentured “street vermin.” Under his authority, sexual abuse was tolerated and even encouraged. After all, he owned these young women for eighteen months or longer. It was not uncommon for owners to offer sons and friends their choice among the mill girls.

  Nineteenth-century law provided protections for industry, while labor had none. Parliamentary legislation lavished loving care on its principal source of wealth in the hundreds of laws covering the wool trade, ranging from the correct clipping of sheep to the length and weight of the wool. As for child protection, there wasn’t any. Humanitarianism was in the thoughts of very few. In 1816, utopian socialist Robert Owen first proposed day care for working mothers, free medical care, and comprehensive education. In his mind, a humane government was necessary to temper technology’s rising cruelty, spawned by the Industrial Revolution. A mill owner himself, Owen tried to set an example by providing schools for his workers and allowing children to work no more than ten hours a day. He was considered idealistic for his time, and his forward thinking was widely ignored in an era when greed was the order of the day.