Next stop was a visit to 63 King Street and tailor John Granger, where the gang lifted twenty-four “braces,” the elastic garters worn by both men and women to hold up stockings. Just three buildings away at 57 King, Janet Rankin ran a lovely hosiery boutique filled with stockings for day and evening wear. Her merchandise was especially inviting now that the girls had braces to hold them in place. The moment Mrs. Rankin turned her back, the thief stuffed stockings in her pockets, seven pairs in all.
A quick trip to the boardinghouse gave the Glasgow girls a place to stash their latest plunder. Before heading back to King Street, Agnes couldn’t help herself and succumbed to temptation. She tore off her smelly socks and pulled on a pair of the sinfully soft wool stockings. In her hurried excitement, she forgot to remove Janet Rankin’s hosiery label.
It was now four o’clock and time for one final stunt before the shops closed for the day. The seller of sundries looked particularly inviting, with draped fabric displays and trimmings of ribbon and lace. Now it was Agnes’s turn to shoplift. It was also her misfortune to get caught exiting the shop with stolen beads pressed into her palm.17
It didn’t take long before the full ensemble, the trio plus one, was hauled down to the police station, where the officer immediately focused on Agnes’s new hosiery. The clean stockings looked unusually bright in contrast to her shift’s fraying hem. Upon questioning, Agnes told the officer they were a gift from her sister. Her lie was naïvely transparent. When she was ordered to remove the stockings, damning evidence immediately identified them as stolen. The Rankin’s tag was still attached. 18
Kilmarnock’s low crime rate had skyrocketed overnight, the charm of the village interrupted by the rustle of rogues from the north. Agnes, Janet, and Helen had blown into town like a gale-force wind, joining forces with the hapless Daniel Campbell. With the troublemakers arrested, calm returned to the township.
The book Robert Burns published in Kilmarnock included the poem “To a Mouse” and the line, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley.” This translates to “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry,” prophetic words for fifteen-year-old Agnes McMillan, arrested just a block from where Burns’s poem was published. Errors of desperation had lowered the curtain on the daring troupe. Their case would be tried on the first of the month in Ayr, the county’s capital at the time.
The four scoundrels spent the next five days in the dusty little holding cells underneath Kilmarnock’s council chambers. Built on the arch of a bridge, the government offices also housed a few lockup cells in “the most objectionable parts of the building, being low-roofed, almost without light or air.”19 At sunrise on February 1, 1836, the youngsters crept from the cramped holding cell, heads bent down like trolls emerging from a subterranean dwelling. Chained together at the wrists, the band was put in the back of a wagon for the thirteen-mile ride to Ayr.
The prisoner cart crossed the arched Auld Brig over the River Ayr, built in the fifteenth century and immortalized in Burns’s poem “The Brigs of Ayr.” Only wide enough for one vehicle to pass at a time, the stone bridge had been financed by two maiden sisters whose fiancés drowned when they attempted to ford the brackish water.20
Auld Brig converged with Weavers Street, where the cart of captives turned down the capital’s Main Street. Ayr’s town hall, erected eight years earlier, stood under “perhaps the finest spire in Scotland,” rising two hundred twenty-five feet toward a cloudless sky.21 A short ride from Newmarket Street to Sandgate brought Agnes and friends to the Wellington Square courthouse, where their tomorrows would soon be decided. The rhythm of the horses’ hooves began to slow as the driver pulled on the reins and townspeople peered at the young prisoners in chains. Because of its coastal location along the Firth of Clyde, rarely is Ayr covered in fog. The view was crystal clear from the sprawling fenced lawn. A huge courthouse with eleven bays and a “scowling fourcolumned Ionic portico” housed the heavy hammer of British law.22
As the gaol wagon rolled away, Agnes, Janet, Helen, and Daniel bore the gravity of an impending county court trial. They scuffled against the marble floor in small steps, the sound of their leg irons echoing off two semicircular staircases that rose off the entrance hall. Large stained-glass windows, casting bands of red and blue from the county’s coat of arms, lit each stairwell. Flashes of colored light ran across the deeply shaded fumed oak that decorated the entrance.23
Intimidating in both its beauty and its function, the Sheriff Court was adorned with highly polished Borneo cedar. The shining waxed mahogany benches reflected the dark silhouettes of the Glasgow hooligans, who would be tried as a group before Sheriff Substitute of Ayrshire William Eaton. John Archibald Murray, Esquire, Advocate for His Majesty’s Interest, read the prisoners’ statements before the court. He droned on in the bored monotone expected from a civil servant, his words reverberating off the walls and perishing quickly. Nobody cared what he had to say, save the four prisoners at the bar.
Agnes dictated her statement because she could neither read nor write. In her arrest report, she admitted to having met Daniel Campbell in Kilmarnock. She pretended not to know Janet and Helen in a desperate attempt to protect her friends, but the die was already cast. Sheriff Eaton announced his judgment for “crimes of an heinous nature and severely punishable.” Barely looking up, he declared that Agnes McMillan, Janet Houston, and Helen Fulton did “wickedly and feloniously steal and theftuously take away” from Kilmarnock merchants two men’s cotton shirts, two women’s cotton shifts, twenty-four braces, a cloak, and seven pairs of woolen stockings. Furthermore, he declared that Daniel Campbell had “wickedly and feloniously” and knowingly received the stolen goods.24
The four were scheduled for sentencing on May 3, 1836, before the Circuit Court of Judiciary. They would spend the next three months locked inside the Ayr County Gaol, an overcrowded holding area that adjoined the rear of the court. With a backlog of cases, it was a long wait for everyone.
Deep inside the cavernous passages, Agnes had ninety long days to contemplate her past and her future. The present looked very black. Agnes would not have known that a Quaker social reformer named Elizabeth Gurney Fry had labored fervently since 1816 to spearhead prison reform for the burgeoning population flooding into gaols. William Crawford, a Quaker who traveled in the same circles as Mrs. Fry, was, in 1835, appointed one of the first inspectors general of prisons for Great Britain. His words had explained Agnes’s situation: “It is very easy . . . to blame these poor children, and to ascribe their misconduct to an innate propensity to vice; but I much question whether any human being, circumstanced as many of them are, can reasonably be expected to act otherwise.”25 Crawford was ahead of his time, yet too late to make a difference for Agnes. Rather than condemning her, he understood that parental neglect, lack of education, poverty, and just plain hunger propelled too many children into a life of crime.
When Elizabeth Fry and her brother Joseph John Gurney inspected prisons in Scotland, they witnessed the practice of housing the mentally ill, violent felons, and petty thieves together. In overcrowded gaols, they were packed into unheated cells, furnished with only a handful of straw and a single tub for every purpose. As was her custom, Elizabeth knelt down on the straw to pray with the incarcerated and encourage them to turn from crime to wage-paying work. During a visit to Glasgow, one prisoner, in particular, conveyed the raw hopelessness that led to thievery and the regret that lingered still. In her journal, Fry describes the “old woman, with the appearance of a menial servant and hardened features, [who] said, ‘No! no use work!’ But these rugged lines were at length relaxed, and I saw a tear fall over the brown visage.”26 She had worked her whole life, and here she was in gaol.
Age mattered hardly at all when it came to being poor. Realities and regrets were embedded in nearly every decision it took to survive. At fifteen, barely a woman, Agnes appeared to have reached the same conclusion. She’d seen what the mills had done to her mother—“no use work
.” Little did she know that in a London gaol four hundred miles away, the well-heeled and well-known Mrs. Fry had already woven herself into Agnes’s destiny. The worst thing that had ever happened to the worried youngster was going to open up opportunities she’d never thought possible.
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.27
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.”28 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.29
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.30 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.”31 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.”32
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.”33 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.”1
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.
The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women Page 7
