by Graham Seal
CONTENTS
Introduction — Obscure Ghosts
Author’s Note
Maps
1 — By Silver Wood
2 — The Poacher’s Fate
3 — Common Folk and Common Rights
4 — On Trial for Murder
5 — Another Trial
6 — Dear Husband …
7 — Aboard the Norwood
8 — A Weight of Woe
9 — Swan River
10 — Rebels and Rangers
11 — The Long Years
12 — A Conditional Freedom
13 — The Sting in the Tale
Postscript — Lost Graves
Appendix — The Toodyay Letters and Related Documents
Endnotes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
Obscure Ghosts
It was a freezing December day when I walked on the green Yorkshire field that is now St Mary’s churchyard, Greasbrough. I had come to meet a woman, dead for over a century. But the last resting place of Myra Sykes could not be found. Together with all the other headstones that once filled this churchyard, Myra’s had long gone.
The echoes of the final hymn faded into the grey stone walls as the minister farewelled the small congregation at the door. In response to my inquiry about the unusual absence of weathered memorials to the dead in an English churchyard, the robed clergyman said that there had been no graves in the churchyard for a good many years and he was uncertain about what might have happened to all the old headstones. He thought they might be found in the municipal cemetery a few miles up the road.
Some weeks earlier I had walked through the dry heat of a cemetery in rural Western Australia looking for the grave of Myra’s transported husband, William. The cemetery was dotted with the crosses, urns and other memorials to pioneers, farmers and workers usually seen in bush graveyards. But William Sykes’s last resting place in the sand of Western Australia’s matter-of-fact Toodyay cemetery was also nowhere to be found.
I was searching the far ends of the earth for the last remains of two obscure ghosts whose story of love, hardship and endurance had survived by chance in a few of Myra’s scribbled letters, William’s brief shipboard journal and later letters to his brothers and sister, together with one written by his son; there was also a handful of official documents. Time and change had obliterated almost all other physical traces of these two human beings. Without these few tattered remnants of a long-forgotten relationship, a tale spanning decades, hemispheres and hearts would have been entirely buried in the past.
The bare bones of this story are that William Sykes, husband to Myra and father of their four children, was transported for life to Western Australia in 1867. He had been convicted of killing a gamekeeper during a poaching affray in Silver Wood, near Rotherham in England’s South Yorkshire. The diary he kept during the voyage to Australia, together with the letters Myra and his children sent to him over 24 years of separation are a moving record of a woman’s courage, determination and unflinching love for her family, against all the odds.
These documents, held in a roughly-made kangaroo-skin pouch, were discovered in 1931 during the demolition of the old police buildings at Toodyay, a colonial town about 100 kilometres north-east of Perth, Western Australia. The pouch and its contents came into the hands of a member of the Western Australian Historical Society. Some members of the Society’s Council believed the letters had little historical worth and so should be destroyed. Fortunately, the honorary secretary of the Society, Paul Hasluck, later to have a distinguished career in Australian public life and scholarship, convinced his colleagues to preserve the letters, made a copy of them and generally interested himself in their fate, as did his wife, Alexandra Hasluck.
In 1934 the matter of the letters again came before the Western Australian Historical Society in a fiery meeting during which different views were forcefully expressed about whether to keep or destroy the scraps of paper. The issues at stake were various. One strong faction held that the letters were personal and therefore not historical documents. Another felt they were related to the convict era of Western Australian history, a period that many at that time wished only to forget. Some thought the preservation of the letters constituted a trust that it was their responsibility to honour for posterity.
The preservers won the day and the kangaroo-skin pouch was left with the Society for safekeeping. So safely were the letters kept, says Alexandra Hasluck in the prologue to her book Unwilling Emigrants in which these details are recounted, ‘that nothing more was heard of them, no research done on them’. Almost two decades later, Alexandra Hasluck came across her husband’s copies of the letters and wondered if the originals were still in existence. She found them in what was then the Archives Department of the State Library of Western Australia. Two envelopes had disappeared, along with the kangaroo-skin pouch, and another letter had appeared from an unknown source. Alexandra Hasluck embarked on extensive research in Australia and in England to find out all she could about Myra and William Sykes. The results of this work are included in her classic study of the convict period in Western Australia, first published in 1959 and reprinted a number of times since, most recently in 2002.
I first came across the compelling story of Myra and William Sykes when moving to Western Australia in the mid-1980s. I wanted to find out something about the place and, one lunchtime, while I was browsing in the bins of the many remainder bookshops that then dotted Sydney, I came across Unwilling Emigrants. In this brief but passionately researched and written history of transportation to the Swan River colony I read for the first time the letters of Myra, some of her children’s and the shipboard jottings of William Sykes.
The fragmentary letters hinted at a tale of two ordinary people flung together by the ravages of the Industrial Revolution, then torn apart by the grinding of a remorseless legal machine. It was a story of a time, of two places and of a number of human beings enmeshed in processes not only beyond their control, but also largely beyond their knowing. It was also, as I was to discover, a story that held many mysteries and more than a few surprises.
When I reached Perth I searched out the documents in the Battye Library of Western Australia. Still fascinated by what I then knew of the tale, I based a radio feature on them for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, as it was then called. Some years later, still drawn by the poignancy of the Sykes saga, I wrote an article about it for the British historical magazine, History Today. It seemed then that this was enough and Myra, William and their children were best left in peace.
But then my work took me back to that part of England where Myra and William had spent their childhoods and their early married lives, and where Myra lived until her death. When I first visited Sheffield, Rotherham and surrounding areas many of the houses, streets, villages and suburbs that Myra and William called home were still there, much as they had been all those years ago. Slowly, the story of these sundered lives found its way back into my own life. I gradually realised that the only way to lay these obscure but compelling ghosts to rest was to write this book.
Beginning to work seriously at this task I discovered that it was not to be as straightforward as I had supposed. I began with the known, if limited, historical sources. The letters, lists and brief diary were still held by the Battye Library of Western Australian History. They provided a starting point for other documentation about William Sykes’s sojourn within the penal bureaucracy of the Swan River colony. These records fleshed out the basic details of this part of the story, though there was little about Myra Sykes and the family beyond the contents of her letters.
Other leads uncovered a number of new documen
ts not known to previous researchers. These included the accounts of the surgeon and religious instructor aboard the ship that transported William to the Swan River. Even more excitingly, another letter, written by the local vicar on behalf of one of William and Myra’s grown-up sons had found its way into the archives. Penned in 1891, the letter petitioned for the release and repatriation of William Sykes, after nearly 30 years of servitude and separation from family and friends. The sad ironies of this letter are detailed in the following pages.
Later still, the few available clues presented a number of new mysteries. Among these were the whereabouts of William Sykes’s last resting place, the possibility that the family had made an earlier attempt to have him repatriated and that the documentary evidence for this was contained in the archives – somewhere. There was even the odd wrinkle that a French academic had made extensive enquiries into the Sykes story during the early 1990s, though nothing further seems to have been heard of this interest. Most intriguing of all was the possibility that some, at least, of the descendants of William and Myra Sykes had been tracked down. The further I delved into these matters, long past and relatively recent, the more intriguing the story became.
Further research into the Sykes genealogy and the local history of Rotherham revealed a number of surprises. In the archives I found two previously unknown letters from William Sykes, writing back to his family in England. Another surprise revealed yet one more very important unknown detail of this very human story.
Alexandra Hasluck’s book concentrated mainly on the fate of William Sykes, cast away at the far end of the planet. She evoked the transportation system and the state of the Swan River colony’s administrative and legal machinery. My book is about the relationship of Myra and William as revealed, necessarily in fragmentary form, through their surviving correspondence and the surviving records. It also restores the balance of the story by discovering much more about the circumstances leading up to William Sykes’s conviction for manslaughter and revealing what happened to Myra and the children during and after the long years of William’s exile.
Researching and writing this book has been something like a historical detective mystery, with various clues leading to the gradual filling in of most of the jigsaw. The jigsaw remains incomplete, as all historical resurrections must. Yet it doesn’t matter. Myra and William’s story goes beyond history. What is really enduring about it is their relationship, difficult though that was, especially for Myra. The details of economic, social and political forces beyond the control of individuals and of the oppressions wrought by various legal and penal machineries are fleeting. What persists and what speaks to most of us today is the human dimension of the distant past and a constant wife’s loyalty to her dear husband.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A NOTE ON THE SPELLING
Place names, and almost everything else, were spelled variously in the nineteenth century, even within the same document. Greasbrough was also Greasebrough, Gresbro and Greasbro similarly for Masbrough, Masbro, etc. For consistency, I have used the most common English renditions, Greasbrough and Masborough. Spellings in primary source documents are as they originally appeared.
Even more variable is the spelling in letters and other documents penned – or perhaps sometimes dictated – by Myra, William and others. Despite the occasional difficulty in translating some of the words, I have preferred to leave these as in the originals. Where necessary, an occasional clarification is provided in square brackets.
Full transcriptions of the letters and selected other documents are provided in the Appendix, again in the original spelling.
A NOTE ON THE USE OF IMPERIAL MEASUREMENTS
While it is conventional publishing practice to change imperial measurements to metric measure, or to parenthetically insert a metric conversion immediately after the imperial, I felt it was more appropriate and authentic to retain only the original measurements.
Maps
The voyage of the Norwood from Portsmouth to the Swan River, April–June, 1867. (Map by Anthony Lynch)
South-West of the Swan River colony showing places where William Sykes lived, worked and died, 1867–1891. (Map by Anthony Lynch)
Silver Wood as it was in the Nineteenth Century. Surveyed 1850–1851, published 1854. Scale 1 mile to 6 inches. (Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, Archives and Local Studies)
1 By Silver Wood
Me and five more a-poaching went.
To get some game was our intent,
Our money being gone and spent,
We’d nothing left to try.
‘Bill Brown’, poaching ballad
Hanging over a valley of belching chimneys and fiery forges, Silver Wood was little more than remnant wilderness as the Industrial Revolution reached white heat in the 1860s. Before the creeping demands of steel and profit blighted the country around Rotherham much of the area had been lightly treed woodlands edged with open fields. In these forests and furrows generations of Yorkshiremen had pursued their ancient custom of poaching. Traditionally, game was taken to supplement diets and, in some cases, to augment incomes as the restaurants of the developing cities provided a ready, if illicit, market for hare, rabbit and pheasant. The owners of these resources were, of course, not happy about this plundering of their larders and took increasingly elaborate and brutal steps to secure their ‘rights’ against poaching. But the poachers were a hardy lot of stubborn Yorkshire types, undeterred by these attempts to contain their pleasures. The taking of a rabbit or two, perhaps a pheasant, was economically useful. It was good healthy sport as well, and it also provided an opportunity for thumbing noses at the upper classes, a custom as deeply ingrained in Yorkshire working-class life as poaching itself.
William Sykes and those who were to be his poaching companions one fatal night were Yorkshire working men. They were employed – on and off – in the urban and industrial enterprises of coal mining and metal smelting. But though the effects of industrialism were already profound, those who sweated aboveground or below were often born and bred in the countryside surrounding the rapidly expanding conurbations of Sheffield, Rotherham and Manchester. If not, rarely were they more than one generation removed from those who had been. The ways of the country were familiar to them and usually within easy access. As the cities, with their forges and factories, bloated outwards, so too did the working-class suburbs clustering at their fringes. Often, it was simply a matter of jumping over the back wall to be out into the surrounding fields and woods.
It was nothing much out of the ordinary for working men such as David Booth, Aaron ‘Ginger’ Savage, John Teale, Henry Bone, John Bentcliffe and Robert Woodhouse to meet at the house of Myra and William Sykes in the smoky village of Masborough, as they did around round six in the evening of 10 October 1865. Four of the men had been busy making rabbit nets for the game they planned to poach near Silver Wood, just a few miles away. But this night-poaching expedition was to have life-shattering consequences for every one of those in the Sykes house that Tuesday evening, especially the lives of William and Myra and those of their children.
William Sykes, like most working-class men and boys in this part of the world, worked in the steel and allied industries, having started at the coal pits at an early age. He was a puddler, employed at the dangerous task of stirring molten metal from the furnaces at the ironworks just across the road, though he had been unemployed for some months.1 Since marrying Myra 12 years before, he had marginally improved his circumstances, spurred on by the need to feed four children. While William and Myra were not compelled to take lodgers into the house, there was rarely enough to make ends meet. Any chance of bagging something extra for the table, or perhaps to sell for some much-needed cash, was eagerly sought, especially if it provided an opportunity for a little outdoor recreation, the thrill of outsmarting the keepers and the chance for some rough male camaraderie.
The men who met at the Sykes house were William’s usual companions, much of his own station and back
ground, though their ages varied. Robert Woodhouse was ‘a powerful-looking man’ around 40 years old, with a chequered past as a publican and subcontractor. John Teale, at 36, was the tallest of the group, most of whom were under five feet six inches and solidly built in the traditional Yorkshire manner. Henry Bone, in his mid-thirties and an inveterate poacher from nearby Kimberworth, was accompanied by his lodger, John Bentcliffe, a ne’er-do-well in his early thirties. Aaron ‘Ginger’ Savage, 35 years old and known by a number of aliases, boarded at The Miner’s Tavern in the village of New York. In his early 50s David Booth, who dressed like a fisherman, was the oldest of the gang. He lived precariously in the yard of the same pub where Savage boarded. Like most adult men of their background in this place, all were experienced poachers. Bentcliffe in particular was a notorious night walker, well known to local police.
Myra was at home seeing to the evening meal, doing household chores and getting the children settled down for the night. Busy though she was, she must have been worried about what her husband and his friends were up to. She knew they were going poaching because William was upstairs seeing to his nets. He came downstairs with them and after some further brief arrangements the men prepared to leave.
Dressed in velvet jackets and fustian trousers, carrying nets and armed with three-foot sticks, the seven poachers left the Sykes house through the back door. In two separate groups they carefully made their way through a coal yard along Clough Road. With Woodhouse, Bone and Bentcliffe in the lead, the poachers went down Gin House Lane to Carr House Colliery. Here they were seen by two men who would later be called as witnesses against them. As they proceeded they came across a man they thought may have been a policeman. Widely skirting him, they continued to Aldewarke pit.
