by Graham Seal
Ann Thurza Alf William[s] sends their kind love to you but William has got long white curly hair and he was not called William for nothing for he is a little rip right …
Despite her irritation with William’s family, no doubt worsened by the financial and social disparity between her family and that of her husband’s brothers and sisters, Myra is careful to write that
your Brothers and sisters sends their kind love to you …
After the personal and family business, Myra turns to local news. This is closely related to William’s situation. Even though some of the letter has been torn away, it is clear that Myra is describing another affray between poachers and keepers, not unlike that which got William transported:
This took place on Lord Warncliffs Eastart the Keepper was Shot.
This affray involved a man named Beardshaw, presumably known to William Sykes. The consequences of the incident included a suicide:
Berdshaw’s Father took it so much to heart that he went and through himself on the rails and the trains past over him and Kiled him
Myra’s brief reference to this case obscures the fact that it was an even bigger local event than the Silver Wood affair. On the night of 11 December 1867, half a year before Myra sat down to write to William, there was a ‘desperate encounter’ between poachers and keepers on Lord Wharnclife’s estate near the village of Pilley.14 Beardshaw was one of a group of poachers who had been surprised by Lord Wharncliff’s keepers. The usual fight ensued, ending in the death by gunshot of a keeper. On the information of Beardshaw’s father a man named Gregory was eventually apprehended for the murder. The elder Beardshaw was described by his wife as ‘very low-spirited’ and ‘very uneasy about his son, who was arrested for complicity in the Pilley murder’. On the day of his death Beardshaw had wandered along the canal towpath for many hours and had then gone to the Rotherham railway line near Iron Bridge. Here, he laid his head on the rails. The train driver felt no change to the motion of the train but Beardshaw’s body was found beside the track, his head between the lines.15
As with the proceedings against William Sykes and his companions, the trial of Gregory and the other surviving poachers elicited enormous local sympathy and unrest. According to the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, ‘The amount of sympathy manifested for the man charged with being concerned in the murder … is almost unprecedented in the history of crime.’16 The article went on to say that ‘Among the lower classes generally, and those of poaching proclivities in particular, it is believed the keeper provoked his own destruction.’ Sympathisers met to compose and distribute through local public houses a printed appeal for funds to secure the poachers a quality defence and ‘for the support of their wives and children, who are left destitute and without any aid to support them’.17 On 10 February the Telegraph reported that Gregory, until then a fugitive, had surrendered to the police. He was taken from the police station accompanied by ‘a great number’ of friends and relations, ‘between fifty and sixty persons’, who shook the accused man’s hand ‘over and over again’. When the train arrived to take the police and their prisoner to Wakefield ‘the eager crowd pressed round him, hugging, shaking hands, kissing and crying’.18 The people of Gregory’s village, Shire Green, were losing one of their own.
Gregory, and probably the other members of his gang, was well known to William Sykes and company, though perhaps not especially cordially. A notorious poacher, Gregory had given evidence against William and the others during their murder trail. He purchased the nets that the Silver Wood poachers had used from Teale the night after the affray and had been involved in the sale of Bone’s dog to a man named Platts, also a witness – if an inebriated one19 – at the Silver Wood trial.
This murky tale of poaching, murder, betrayal and suicide highlighted the local networks of the poaching fraternity and the refusal of many to condemn men such as Gregory and Sykes, despite their illegal actions. Many blamed the now almost ritualised inevitabilities of these affrays on the game laws. A correspondent to the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent even drew the attention of editor and readers to a long-ago poaching affray of 1819, saying, ‘It bears a striking resemblance in point of time, place, and incidents, to the late poaching affray and murder of Lord Wharncliffe’s keeper … In fact it seems the same tragedy reproduced, with scarcely an alteration.’20 He provided the paper with a report from the by-then defunct Sheffield Iris in which almost exactly the same events occurred close to 50 years before, in much the same location and with the same fatal consequences for a keeper.
Beardshaw and Gregory were lucky. They were eventually found guilty only of night poaching and received, respectively, sentences of 18 and 15 months hard labour. They heard this sentence with ‘unmistakable signs of relief’.21
We cannot know with certainty what William made of this news. He probably nodded grimly to himself and put the letter carefully away in his few possessions. He was still on the road gang near Bunbury and was still suffering the loss of his tobacco issue. Even though he had only served a few years of his sentence and had been in the colony for a much shorter time, all this talk of keepers, poachers and lords’ estates would already have been starting to seem distant and unreal, as would Myra and the children. Now it was William’s companions of crime and their keepers who would be the reality of his life and labour.
10 Rebels and Rangers
Western Australia is a vast and unknown country, almost mysterious in its solitude and unlikeness to any other part of the earth.
John Boyle O’Reilly, Moondyne, 1879
Building roads to and from Bunbury, often in chains, was the best a Swan River convict could hope for. But it was not a pleasant experience. Just how unpleasant we know largely by a coincidence of history.
A few months after William Sykes and the other transports on the Norwood made landfall an Irish political prisoner, or Fenian, named John Boyle O’Reilly was also marched into Fremantle Prison. O’Reilly had been guilty of little active subversion, though he had plotted much. Following a brief career as a journalist, in 1863 he enlisted as a trooper in the 10th Hussars, then headquartered in Dublin. Within two years he had been recruited by the clandestine Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), a forerunner of the modern Irish Republican Army (IRA). Participating in the preparations for a planned uprising that never took place, O’Reilly was arrested along with most of his co-conspirators in February 1866. After a trial he was sentenced to death by firing squad but this sentence was commuted to 20 years penal servitude. With 61 other Fenians O’Reilly was transported to Western Australia aboard the Hougoumont in October 1867.
Sixteen of these men, plus O’Reilly himself, had been members of the British army and were segregated from the civilian Fenians and the common convicts. When advance news of this Irish weight of woe reached the colony, segments of the Swan River community went into a panic. Just as they had in 1849, they feared that the dreaded Irish, especially those with military training, would murder them in their beds The concern was especially high in Fremantle, where the Fenians were to be held. So great was the consternation, and heightened as it was by threats from some quarters to prevent the Irish disembarking, that disciplinarian Governor Hampton had his residence moved from Perth to Fremantle in an effort to calm the more excitable colonists.
When they did arrive, on 10 January 1868, the entire complement of convicts and Fenians was disembarked at dawn and marched in chains through Fremantle to the grey prison that William Sykes and his companions had entered just a few months before. They then underwent the same initiation into servitude. Each was bathed, cropped, barbered and examined by a doctor. Their physical and personal details were recorded and they were issued with the regulation summer clothing: cap, grey jacket, vest, two cotton shirts, one flannel shirt, two handkerchiefs, two pairs of trousers, two pairs of socks and a pair of boots.
O’Reilly and his companions were now probationary convicts. If they behaved themselves for the remaining half of their sentence, they coul
d be granted a ticket of leave, a dispensation allowing them to live and work much as any free colonist as long as they reported regularly to the magistrate. For the manslaughterer Sykes, this similitude of freedom would be a long time coming. For the political prisoner O’Reilly it would never come.
Like William Sykes and John Teale the poachers, John Boyle O’Reilly the revolutionary was, from March 1868, soon sent to work on the road making around Bunbury. Surviving records are sketchy, but it may be that he had contact with the gang that Sykes laboured with, though he was subsequently employed on other tasks elsewhere in the area. There were over 3220 and twenty convicts in the colony at this time,1 though only a hundred or so on the road gangs in the Bunbury area.2 Later in his life O’Reilly would publish a now-classic novel, Moondyne, based on his experiences in this part of Western Australia, a work he dedicated to ‘the interests of humanity, to the prisoner, whoever and wherever he may be’.3 In it, and through some of his other writing, can be discerned something of the hard life that Sykes and his companions lived.
The summer months were hot and dry; even in the fiercest part of the day, temperatures of 40° Celsius and more not uncommon. The convicts had to continue clearing the giant gums and iron-hard jarrahs, one of the colony’s major exports and also in great local demand for private buildings and public works. These were then cut into smaller sections, parts of which were used to line the road, while the remainder provided useful lumber. The ground had to be levelled off or filled with rubble and the road surface pounded to something approaching evenness. Every task was carried out with hand tools of the most basic kind for nine hours every day – day in, day out.
In Moondyne, O’Reilly provides some evocative details of the conditions. He begins by describing the bush and the work of the free sawyers:
During the midday heat not a bird stirred among the mahogany and gum trees. On the flat tops of the low banksia the round heads of the white cockatoos could be seen in thousands, motionless as the trees themselves. Not a parrot had the vim to scream. The chirping insects were silent. Not a snake had courage to rustle his hard skin against the hot and dead bush-grass. The bright-eyed iguanas were in their holes. The mahogany sawyers had left their logs and were sleeping in the cool sand of their pits. Even the travelling ants had halted on their wonderful roads, and sought the shade of a bramble.
He goes on to contrast this with the lot of William Sykes and his fellow convict toilers:
All free things were at rest; but the penetrating click of the axe, heard far through the bush, and now and again a harsh word of command, told that it was a land of bondmen.
From daylight to dark, through the hot noon as steadily as in the cool evening, the convicts were at work on the roads – the weary work that has no wages, no promotion, no incitement, no variation for good or bad, except stripes for the laggard.
Food was basic – kangaroo, cockatoo, possum and whatever else could be foraged from the ancient forests. Accommodation was usually a tent, sometimes a crude hut. Flies, mosquitoes, gnats, snakes, ants, spiders and the many other strange and frequently venomous creatures of the Western Australian bush added to the discomfort and uneasiness of men from the soft green fields and woods of England. Even poachers were not well prepared for this type of outdoor life, so the absconding of William and Teale in search of some respite was not surprising and was a common event in the road gangs.
Although the July 1868 letter William sent to Myra while he laboured in these conditions is lost, it seems from her reply that it is likely he told her none of these things. Nevertheless, when she wrote to him 16 months later on 4 November 1869, she provided a good deal of news about family and friends. But already time and separation were beginning to introduce the inevitable emotional distancing of Myra and William. The slightly stiff and formal opening of Myra’s letter betrays the effects of over a year of having to get on with life in Greasbrough:
Dear husband I take this opertunity of writing you these few lines to let you know that me and all the Children are all well hoping that when you receve this letter you will be in good helgth as this leves us all at present …
During this time the rancour between Myra and William’s family had worsened, deepened by William again sending a letter for Myra care of one of his sisters:
Dear Husband it has been three weeks since I hard that their was a letter came to your Sister and I did wente to the post office to see whether it was right or not and I found out that their had been one but I have never seen it yet and Ann had seen whether hir Ant Bacer [Aunt Beccy, Rebecca] would not let hir see the letter but She said that she would let me nor hir see the letter …
Myra is understandably upset to be told that she cannot see a letter from William. And so are the children. She writes that they
has taken it greatly to heart and they are never done speaking about it and they never give me any pease since but I have been waiting with the greates pacientes till they had all sen your letter that I might know how to write to you but they will not give it up so the children would have me write to you without Seeing your letter …
Myra continues her justified complaint, bringing the troubled daughter Ann into the discussion:
but Ann is the worst of them all about it and She is bothered greatly about it every day in hir life …
Nor was it just the family anxious for news of William. Ann was working at a public house where a number of William’s old friends gathered, just as they had when William still walked and talked among them:
she is serving for all your old friends in Gresbrough they are wanting to know how you are getting on their is some of your old friends in the house where she is every night in the week …
Still angry, Myra repeats her puzzlement at the attitude of William’s family, then defiantly and not without a note of justifiable pride:
But Dear Hysband I have worked hur [hard] for my Children and myself Since you went I have done my uttermost to bring them up as well as any other persons Children about the place and I have done so yet thank God
The children are growing up fast:
Alf is in the pit working and Ann is place[d] and Thurza and William is going to the School and by the time I get a letter from you I hope Thiza will be able to write to you
As Thirza was around 10 years old, this suggests that she had not yet had the benefit of much education.
Myra’s letter concludes with some details about the illness of one of her brothers, possibly consumption – tuberculosis – a common and fatal complaint of the era, much aggravated by the dusty working conditions in the mines and factories or simply from breathing the noxious air. Another of her brothers, Ellis, has been lodging with her at Greasbrough as work in his own area of Barnsley had been ‘slack’, though he had since returned as employment had picked up. With this information the letter abruptly ends.
In early March 1869, John Boyle O’Reilly, the Fenian transportee, was whisked away to freedom in the United States of America by a Yankee whaler. His rescue had been carefully plotted by the free Irish community in Western Australia, in league with elements of the Catholic church, the American-Irish community and its sympathisers.4 O’Reilly celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday in the middle of the Indian Ocean on his secret voyage back to England. From there, under the noses of those authorities who badly wanted to re-capture him, he made his way to freedom and a glittering future. In America he was influential in plans to free the Fenians remaining in Western Australia five years later.
At Easter 1874, six of O’Reilly’s companions were also rescued from bondage by an American whaler, the Catalpa, an exploit still celebrated in the Western Australian Irish community and commemorated in a well-known ballad that makes no bones about its sympathies:
Come all you screw warders and gaolers,
Remember Perth Regatta day.
Take care of the rest of your Fenians
Or the Yankees will steal ’em away.
The verses tell the – exaggerated
– story of the bold rescue of the Fenians:
All the Perth boats were racing,
Making best tack for the spot,
When that Yankee sailed into Fremantle
And took the best prize of the lot.
In fact, the Catalpa went nowhere near Fremantle Harbour, laying off Rockingham, far to the south. When news of the escape reached the authorities they hastily ordered the colony’s only armed vessel, the Georgette, to undertake a pursuit of the Yankee whaler, which proved ineffectual:
The Georgette well-armed with bold warriors
Went out the poor Yank to arrest.
But she hoisted the star-spangled banner
Saying ‘You will not board me, I guess’.
This satirical ballad concludes with the verse:
Now they’re landed safe in America
And there will be able to stay.
They’ll hoist up the green flag and the shamrock
‘Hurrah for old Ireland’, they’ll say.
The politics surrounding the fate of O’Reilly and his rebellious companions were a cause célebrè of the time, resonating with the more romanticised aspects of the Irish struggle against English oppression. The correspondence files of the Colonial Office during this period are full of letters from respectable members of the British middle classes urging the release or pardoning of the Fenians. Particularly, there was a considerable amount of correspondence relating to O’Reilly’s case.5
But while Irish political prisoners had contacts, networks, affiliations and access to funds, Yorkshire poachers had no such advantages. William Sykes, John Teale and the thousands like them had few representations made on their behalf to the powers of authority at the Colonial Office. They remained behind to hew the wood and till the soil of the Swan River, serving out their time and dreaming of flight.
