by Graham Seal
By now local opinion about the Silver Wood affray and its participants had set firm. There was not much sympathy for the keepers, including Lilley. The Judas Woodhouse almost certainly struck the fatal blow but had saved himself and gained the very large reward at the expense of his mates. Now Booth and Savage, who had allied themselves with Woodhouse’s evidence against Sykes and the others, were generally reviled. These tensions, together with Mr Justice Shee’s antagonisms, gave the trial an especially bitter edge.
The evidence turned upon interpretations of statements made by and against the poachers before the first trial for murder and as evidence during that trial. Booth was the poacher with the most to lose if it went against him, while Ginger Savage had played only a relatively minor part in what occurred.
Once again the events of the fatal night were recounted: after the poachers had bagged three rabbits and a hare they had been set upon by the keepers, led by the unfortunate Lilley. Although the trial was concerned with the comparatively minor offences of night poaching, going armed and assault, the unresolved issues of the murder trial cast their influence over the proceedings, which were largely hijacked by the question of who had murdered Lilley.
Myra was called early and gave evidence for the prosecution. She confirmed that Booth and Savage had been at her house on the night of 10 October and that they had left about 8 o’clock. ‘Next day I was going to Kimberworth for my husband’s nets, and met Booth and Woodhouse. Woodhouse said “Yon man’s dead.” I said “Who?” and Woodhouse replied ‘The keeper we met last night.” I said “Oh dear.” Booth said nothing and only laughed.’
There was then some conversation about whether the growing number of people who knew about the incident would inform. Woodhouse was concerned about Booth’s wife, but Booth scoffed at the suggestion, saying, ‘Bloody likely. My wife has known me do things before, many a year since, and she has not told yet.’
Under cross-examination Myra said the powerfully built Woodhouse told her he had given Lilley ‘blows that would have killed a horse’ and that he did not seem surprised to learn Lilley had died from his wounds. She then said, ‘I never knew my husband guilty of being concerned in an affair of this sort. I know my husband has been sentenced to penal servitude for life …’ She broke off there and was asked another question by the solicitor: ‘He was a good husband?’ ‘Well,’ Myra replied, ‘he was my husband.’
The solicitor suggested that Myra hoped her court appearance would mitigate William’s situation – ‘You would like to get him out?’, he asked. ‘I should like to hear tell of it,’ Myra replied spiritedly. In further cross-examination Myra said the police had suggested to her that it would ‘ease her mind’ to tell what she knew in court. The questioner persisted with his suggestions that she had only come to help her husband. ‘I should like to get him out if I could,’ Myra admitted, ‘but I am not aware that what I can say will diminish his punishment. I have told the police, because I thought it only right that murderers worse than my husband should be punished … I think it nothing but proper that the man who said he had given strokes that would kill a horse should be punished.’
Then the solicitor asked Myra if she expected her husband’s sentence to be commuted as a result of her evidence. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘I’m told that tickets of leave are abandoned.’ Then Booth, clearly incriminated by Myra’s evidence, accused Myra and William of conspiring: ‘Have not you and your husband not made it up between you in this very place to get us punished for it?’
Myra denied this. ‘Nothing of the kind.’ But Booth persisted with his suggestion that she and William had concocted this story in the brief time the husband and wife had been together after the last trial. ‘I know you did when you were alone.’ But Myra stoutly refuted the suggestion. ‘We were not alone, there were three policemen there.’ Unable to resist a joke at the expense of the police and the hostile witness, Booth said, ‘And no doubt they made it up with you.’ The court laughed at this but Myra stuck to her guns, saying, ‘We never said anything of the kind.’ At this point a female voice was heard from the public gallery crying out, ‘Speak the truth, Mrs Sykes.’
On that mixed note of mirth and derision, Myra’s evidence ended. She had done her best. She had stood up on behalf of her husband, even though her evidence hinted that William was less than the perfect spouse. She had also amplified the possibility that Woodhouse bore much more than a small share of the guilt that had gaoled her husband for life. Mr Shee would not miss these inferences during the remainder of the trial.1
Proceedings began again on Wednesday morning. By now the judge had come around to the side of local opinion about Woodhouse. During legal argument over the admissibility of Booth’s statement, Mr Shee made the remarkable observation that ‘I cannot understand why in the world this evidence was not taken and Woodhouse put in the dock, for he was clearly the worst of the whole lot – a thousand times.’ And later, ‘It is a lamentable thing indeed that we cannot admit these scraps of evidence, that we must refuse them. Here is everybody in the district, everybody all around the place and the whole district, here is everybody speaking of this as a murder, and when it comes here there is no murder at all!’
As the prosecution began summing up the judge interrupted, still unhappy at Woodhouse’s absence from the dock. He asked if Woodhouse were in the court. On finding that he was the judge asked him to enter the witness box. Once there, Justice Shee questioned the informer he had just maligned about the sticks that were used during the attack. He wanted to know if Woodhouse’s stick was there among the exhibits. It was not, but the judge asked, ‘Were they all as thick as these?’ Woodhouse replied, ‘Yes, some of them rather thicker’, apparently not realising the judge’s intention to reinforce for the jury the fact that Woodhouse had been carrying a stick at least as deadly as those of the other poachers.
After this singular intervention from the bench, defending counsel continued his final address to the jury, suggesting that Myra’s bias actually supported rather than undermined Booth’s case. He congratulated her for coming forward and exposing herself to being ‘compelled to admit that the wife of the prisoner Booth was a much more respectable person than she was’.
This attempt to blacken Myra’s character would be specifically addressed by the judge in his summing-up. He thought the suggestion that Myra was trying to influence the jury in favour of William unlikely and that ‘the questions put to her on that point were all very properly answered’.
The judge, now in accord with local sympathies, had clearly developed an aversion to Woodhouse. He returned to this theme again during his summing-up when he called Woodhouse ‘a good-for-nothing man’ and stated, ‘You cannot rely on what a man like that says.’ The judge said he disliked Woodhouse particularly ‘because he was in a superior position to the other men, a sub-contractor, and the very man who ought to be the first to prevent them doing a wickedness of that kind’. And a little later: ‘Woodhouse came before them as bad an accomplice as ever made his appearance before the jury.’ He went on to cite Myra’s testimony as possibly incriminating Woodhouse in perjury.
The jury retired for half an hour, then returned to the court with a query. Was there a charge of assault to be determined? Yes, said the judge, in relation to who hit the keeper Butler.
There is no proof that I can see that either Savage or Booth assaulted him except that of Woodhouse, and perhaps you may think there should be a verdict in their favour on that count.
With this endorsement of the community prejudices and perceptions ringing in their ears, the jury retired for another 50 minutes and returned a verdict against both prisoners of ‘guilty for night poaching, armed, and not guilty of the assault’.2
This time, at least, the jury had followed his clear direction now that it agreed with local sentiment. But the judge was still unhappy with the disregard of his instructions to the jury in the first trial.
On Thursday Mr Shee delivered his sentence. This was his opportuni
ty to further berate all involved for ignoring his previous injunctions to the jury. Referring to the affray at Silver Wood he said that
the whole neighbourhood said it was murder; you even talked of it yourselves as a murder; the instinct and feeling of the whole neighbourhood declared it to be a murder. All the facts of the case were distinctly proved, and we had the melancholy spectacle – melancholy as regards the administration of justice – after all the facts were proved, of seeing one of the murderers clap his hands in the dock, because what all the people in his neighbourhood declared to be a murder, had been declared in this Court to be only a manslaughter.
Booth, whose actions on the night and subsequently the judge also viewed with considerable distaste, was sentenced to seven years penal servitude. Ginger Savage, ‘acting under the influence of that good-for-nothing man’, Woodhouse, received only five years.3
Mr Shee’s outburst perfectly reflected the class divide of the time and place. While the middle classes – of whom Woodhouse should have been a staunch member – saw the event as a straightforward murder, the local working-class community had a much more ambivalent view. That view was tempered by centuries of conflict over the game laws, the appropriation of the commons and the increasingly obvious gap between those who had and those who had not, opened up by the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution.
While the various legal proceedings were being conducted, the country all around was riven with class antagonisms. The newspapers carried a perpetual litany of strikes, lockouts, demonstrations and other forms of social and industrial action. On 9 January there had been a stormy reform meeting at Derby where ‘The friends of Parliamentary reform mustered in strong force’.4 Another large meeting took place at Leeds on 29 January. In October the home of a saw grinder in Sheffield was bombed by trade unionists because he was considered to be treating his workers unfairly. This was one of many attacks that were part of the ferment of union activity in this area5 and which became known as ‘the Sheffield Outrages’.6 Sheffield was chosen as the location of a national trades union conference in July, 1866. These and similar disruptions around the country sparked, in 1867, a Royal Commission on the Trade Unions.
Also at the local level, yet reflecting national matters, were black-edged newspaper editions mourning the death of the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, and an ongoing panic at the Fenian outrages. These brought about a boosting of police numbers in the area.7 Local controversies continued over the supply of water to Sheffield and the poor quality of the smoky air. So did protestations about the game laws and their savage consequences. Writing to the editor of the Sheffield Daily Telegraph in early May 1867, a correspondent only willing to call him or herself ‘Treble X’ expressed a widely-held view:
Sir,
I see another case of alleged game trespass in your paper of Wednesday; and in that case the gamekeeper brutally assaulted a poor man who was said to be doing no further harm than gathering herbs … I am weary of seeing every week reports of charges made against poachers and trespassers in pursuit of game. I say it would be better that not a single hare or pheasant, not a rabbit or head of grouse should be left alive in the land rather than that men should be tempted into poaching in this way.
The letter writer went on to reveal the hidden costs of maintaining the game laws and the privileges of those who benefited by them:
Why should ratepayers be called upon to protect the Duke of Omnium’s or Mr Anybody’s game? Practically, it comes to that, for the country has to support the innumerable prisoners who are sent to gaol in game cases, and the parishes have to support their families. Sir, I have great respect for the rights of property, but surely no man has the right to maintain for his amusement a property which becomes a public injury and a public nuisance. This is the centre of a game-preserving district, and not a week passes without producing its crop of offences against the game-laws. I wonder our local agitators don’t take up this matter and bring it under the notice of our members.
I remain, yours, &c.8
As Treble X noted, the papers were full of ‘desperate affray’ accounts of violent clashes between poachers and game keepers.9 These events continued long after the fates of William and Myra Sykes were settled by the courts,10 though one such affray was to play a part in their sundered lives.
6 Dear Husband …
you must not delay riteing if you can it will ease my mind
Myra Sykes to William Sykes, 15 March 1867
William Sykes, narrowly convicted of manslaughter, was sent back to West Riding Prison in Wakefield. He had been imprisoned there with the other poachers while awaiting trial at Leeds. As number 8740 he would now idle away his time in solitary confinement, awaiting arrangements to transport him to far distant Swan River.
Wakefield is relatively close to Rotherham, so Myra was able to visit William during this period though it is not clear that she did. But she certainly wrote to him. In the original bundle of letters discovered at Toodyay there is an envelope from Rotherham, postmarked 9 September 1866. The letter and envelope are now long gone from the archives,1 but it confirms that Myra and William were in at least some contact with each other. Travel was difficult and expensive. There were serious industrial disputes, cattle plagues, Fenian scares and cholera outbreaks throughout the region at this time,2 further unsettling the country and adding to the possible hazards of even a relatively short journey.
Soon after Myra posted her letter, William was transferred from Wakefield to Portsmouth Prison where he would await transportation to the Swan River in Western Australia. Conditions at Portsmouth were probably preferable to those of Wakefield. Portsmouth was a much larger establishment, used almost solely as a holding house for those awaiting transportation. The cells were iron boxes 6 feet high and 7 feet by 4 feet, with dark corrugated iron walls. Most had only the light from a small window in the door and seem to have been without heating or ventilation. These conditions encouraged ill health in many prisoners, as Surgeon Saunders from the convict transport ship Norwood would shortly discover during the course of his duties.
According to a former inhabitant of Portsmouth Prison, writing in 1866, the prison routine was oppressive and exhausting. Morning cell cleaning was completed in darkness, with few facilities and in a great rush. The morning cup of cocoa, gulped down, was followed immediately by chapel and then a few minutes break. Then there was a rush for the few toilets – ‘the grand scramble’, he called it. After this the convicts went to work doing heavy manual labour in the docks – lifting, carrying, cleaning. The work was hard and dangerous; many were injured. In these respects prison experience reflected the hardships and risks of industrial labour; inmates may have noticed little difference between occupational work and gaol work, or the disciplines of either. As far as we know, William escaped any serious physical injury, though he must have been emotionally wounded, no matter how well he hid it.3 So, having survived a sojourn in Portsmouth Prison, William was next to board a sailing ship for transportation to Western Australia.
The extreme severity of the British legal system during the eighteenth century had caused the country’s prisons to overflow. When the American Revolution succeeded in 1783 the British were deprived of a colonial dumping ground for their convicts. The overcrowding of prisons and hulks, combined with the strategic necessity of establishing a military presence and settlement in the antipodes, led to the decision to establish a penal colony at Botany Bay, part of present-day Sydney.
The First Fleet sailed in late 1787, celebrating Christmas at sea and making landfall in January 1788. Almost 1500 male and female convicts, military personnel, guards (some with families), accompanied by assorted naval folk and administrators founded modern Australia as a gaol. Conditions for convicts aboard the First Fleet were relatively pleasant as some care had been taken to provision and resource the fleet for its epic journey, in some ways equivalent to a modern voyage to the moon. But many subsequent convict voyages became notorious for their cruelty, inhumanity
and depravity. And life was little better for the survivors when they arrived in New South Wales. For the first years of the colony, crime, corruption and abuses of all kinds were the normal fare of everyday life and a convict’s lot was often not a happy one, as many of their surviving accounts testify.4
Eventually, the excesses of the system led to government inquiries, as a result of which conditions were improved to some extent, though it became clear by the 1840s that the transportation of convicts to New South Wales would have to cease. The growing numbers of free settlers were concerned by transportation and had higher aspirations for their colony than its status as a vast penal institution. In the early 1850s transportation to the east coast of Australia officially ended.
By the time William was delivered to the Swan River, the darkest days of transportation were far in the past. The barbarism of Norfolk Island and Port Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land survived only in the more painful memories of a diminishing few former convicts and gaolers. But the continuing need to ease the pressure on British gaols, combined with the economic problems of the Swan River Colony, resulted in the introduction of transportation to Western Australia. From 18505 convicts – male only – had been despatched to the Swan in an effort to kill two birds with the one stone. And while the transportation trade was now a regulated and relatively trouble-free business, the lengthy sea voyage and the lot of the luckless transports once landed were difficult, as William would soon discover for himself.
Myra Sykes now speaks directly to her ‘dear husband’ for the first time in this story. On 15 March 1867 she writes to William, labouring in Portsmouth Prison. She introduces the despondencies and worries that will concern her through all the long years of erratic correspondence with William:
Dear husband i rite these few line to you hopeing to find you better than it leavs us at present …
