These Few Lines

by Graham Seal

  Soon, the letter becomes a young man’s cry of pain for the father he barely knew:

  Dear father we think you have quite forgot us all my sister Ann takes it hard at you not writing oftener …

  And later:

  Dear father you never name me in you letters but I can sit down and write a letter to you now …

  Young William ends:

  we all send kindest and dearest love to you and God bless you and 1,000 kisses for our Dear father from your Dear son William

  Such a letter and the sentiments it contained must have torn at William Sykes’s heartstrings, no matter how hardened and despairing he had become.

  Elsewhere in his son’s letter, the elder Sykes heard news of his two grandchildren:

  sister Ann as to nice boys the oldest is a fine little fellow

  and of his other children:

  well I mys tell you what a stout young man my brother Alfred as got and Thirza is a stout young womman poor Ann is very thin …

  William junior goes on to tell how he often plays with his Aunt Rebecca’s boy and how she often says that the younger William resembles his father.

  Whether William senior was aware of William junior’s next piece of news is unknown. He tells his father that Rebecca’s oldest boy, also named William, has been dead for 15 months.2 The transported felon also learns that Greasbrough has undergone quite a few changes in the eight years since he left, including the erection of a new Congregational church where young William goes to school, no doubt to the satisfaction of his Uncle Charles and his Uncle John who is still resident at Barrow-in-Furness where he continues to do very well for himself.

  In one section of this letter, the younger William conveys a recurring question from Myra as to whether the authorities would permit him to have a picture, presumably a drawing, of his family

  Dear father Mother would like to no if they would alow you our likeness

  though there is no evidence of any likeness ever having been produced.

  In the same envelope as young William’s letter came a hasty note from Myra. The near-indecipherable handwriting indicates that she was not well in body or in mind and very worried about Ann’s domestic problems. It seems that Ann was pregnant for the third time and Myra was not looking forward to having to look after her during the pregnancy:

  Dear husban I am grvd to my hart A bout my Ann I have had her Both times of her confindments and Ly shee gating on gain

  Then Myra scribbles what were possibly the last words to pass between herself and William Sykes:

  We hall send our nearst and dearst Love to you with A 1000 kiss Dear Husband you must excuse writing

  William may have received a letter from Myra the following year, but if so, it has not survived. What these few lines do tell us is that Greasbrough and the surrounding districts were expanding rapidly along with the general expansion of Rotherham and Sheffield. Life was hard, but it seems that there was work for those willing and able to take it. While Myra was by no means well off, between her efforts and those of the older children and, assisted perhaps by her own family (though probably not by William’s) – and possibly another3 – she was able to get by.

  Her illness would have undermined the fragile balance of working life and family life. There were no social security benefits or sick leave in those days so she would have been thrown back onto the generosity – or otherwise – of friends and relations. As her letter makes clear, though, all was not well with Ann and her marital arrangements. The combination of her unnamed illness and Ann’s troubles no doubt brought about her distressed emotional state during these difficult years.

  They were difficult years for William, too, as we know from the rediscovery of letters he sent to his family in 1876. He had now been separated from home and loved ones for a decade. On 10 March that year, William wrote to one of his sisters, probably Elizabeth, and his brothers, John and Joshua. The letters were written on two sheets of notepaper and sent together in the same envelope, now missing. These are the first, and only, words we hear directly from William in Australia, and they are mostly unhappy. They tell us that he was a troubled man.

  In his letter to Elizabeth he at first talks of being in good health:

  thanks be to God for it and not the dicetfullness of men on Earth

  the latter a reference, no doubt, to the circumstances of his trial and imprisonment. He then begins to apologise for the trouble he has brought upon the family but seems unconvinced by his own sentiments:

  I do not think that I have given you as mutch trouble as you have caused me

  In an ironic twist, given Myra’s complaints about his failings as a correspondent, William is upset that his apparently numerous and sometimes lengthy letters to his family have received no response.

  I have tryed hard to hould a corespndence with you all and I have heard of you receiving my letters but no anseers and it is that what Greaves me to my Hart

  William then goes on to address Joshua:

  My Dear Brother your mother I do believe whas my mother and shee was a good mother and a Father likewise to me God rest her soul

  After this acknowledgement of his mother’s goodness, William suggests that she may be working on his behalf in the afterlife and seems to suggest that some ‘vilen’, perhaps Woodhouse or one of the other false friends, may be coming in for some retribution. He says that, despite his problems,

  I never enjoyed better health myself with all the vileny

  The letter continues, asking Joshua to contact him and send his address:

  dear brother I want you to rite to me will you and send me your directions

  William then regrets that the police had not allowed him to see Joshua at Rotherham before he was tried, apparently believing that this would somehow have allowed him to escape his punishment:

  if I had a seen you before I got tryed I should not have had any Sentence at all and thay new that too: and my sisters nows what they said to them at Wakefield

  Something similar was intimated to William’s sisters at Wakefield Prison, presumably while they were visiting him there before his removal to Portsmouth. He then gives Joshua a titbit of information relating to a highway robbery and murder of which he has knowledge, in the hope that Joshua might somehow benefit from the reward

  I wrote one letter with twelve pages in it let me know if any of you got it will you it contained a little information about a Hiway robery and murder and I do not want no police nor detective to get ould it as ther was a reward out at the time

  Added between these lines is the name of the alleged offender and the assurance that

  I have nothing to do with it only I was tould all about it by one of the party the saem night it happend and I always kept it a seacret

  William then says that he is

  the villind no more

  and implies that this is his main motivation for passing on this valuable piece of criminal information.

  Moving on from this odd communication to his apparently upstanding and hard-working brother, William Sykes turns to his older brother, John. William seems to have had no word from or of John until William the younger had mentioned John’s visit in his letter of the previous year. The letter to John begins on a seemingly positive note, with William repeating what he had read in his son’s letter about John’s visit to Greasbrough and that he was pleased to hear that John was in good health. The news, he writes

  gave me grate plesure to hear it as I have often wondered if you wher living or dead

  But this turned out to be a lead-in to what is at first a sarcastic, then pathetic, cry from the heart:

  I could not think if you whear alive that you whould not rite to me

  From here the letter speedily moves to bitter recriminations of what William considers to be John’s refusal to communicate with him:

  I allways thought I had a brother in you but no

  He recalls the night that John had visited him at Rotherham, probably after the first trial, and
what had passed between them:

  I culd call to mind that night when you came to se me at Rotherham and wat you said and then never come to se me no more

  William cannot understand John’s actions and is in great emotional pain, repeating his tortured words:

  I should not have done so to you no i should have come to se you John I should have come to se you John I should never have done as you have

  William concludes with the standard correspondent’s farewell, now given additional weight and poignancy by what he has just written:

  no more at preasent from your afectonate Brother W.S. still untill death part us John I remain so

  Not once does William mention Myra.

  12 A Conditional Freedom

  I can but ask that I may, like others, have a trial on my ticket of leave and I feel assured you will have no future cause to regret the leniency.

  I am Sir

  Yours respectfully.

  William Sykes requesting a ticket of leave, 1876

  Apart from the pains of separation, William’s situation eventually improved a little. Around October 1875, he was sent to Newcastle (now Toodyay) Hospital. Newcastle was the successor settlement to the earlier Duigie, said to mean place of water in the local indigenous dialect and pronounced ‘too-jee’ (as it still is by some locals, though the usual pronunciation is ‘too-jay’). Toodyay was established in 1837 when the colonial government built facilities there. Between 1860 and 1861 flooding of the Avon River led to the abandonment of the official site; another town was created a few miles upstream. This new settlement was named Newcastle Town at first, then quickly became known just as Newcastle.

  In this small but bustling centre of policing, land administration and farming, William Sykes worked as a servant to Dr Mayhew. The medical man had arrived in 1867 aboard the migrant ship Palestine, together with his wife, a teacher with rather a difficult personality by all accounts. Mayhew was eventually appointed district medical officer, a position he was to hold for many years, earning the affectionate local name ‘the Old Doctor’.1 William must have proved a satisfactory worker because on 26 January the following year, 1876, Mayhew wrote on behalf of William to request he be granted a ticket of leave.

  After they had served some of their sentence in a reasonably obedient way, convicts were able to apply for this document. It conferred a form of parole that allowed the holder a limited but desirable degree of freedom from the eye of the authorities. In William’s case, as a lifer, he would need to have served at least six years and nine months as a ‘Very Good’ prisoner (the second-highest category after ‘Exemplary’). As Mayhew’s letter shows, William would have been something of a disappointment to his moralising brother-in-law, Charles Hargreaves. He had not managed to progress from probation to ticket of leave in the minimum time. But by now, with his overseer’s help, he was able to present a reasonably good case.

  William’s request was, presumably, dictated to Dr Mayhew by William himself. If so, Mayhew gave it a polish, a firm, educated pen-stroke and ensured that it was in the kind of grovelling prose the Prison Department favoured for communications from convicts asking for favours:

  Sir

  I have the honour to forward my name to your notice for favourable consideration having now completed 10 years 1 week & 13 days probation out of 12 years 6 months &15 days – I have been a contractor about 2 years and during the whole term of my probation have had but 2 reports for breach of rules.

  I have been under Dr Mayhew now for several months and I hope [to?] say that I have given him every satisfaction.

  I can but ask that I may, like others, have a trial on my ticket of leave and I feel assured you will have no future cause to regret the leniency.

  I am Sir

  Yours respectfully2

  The combination of William’s comparatively good record and Mayhew’s advocacy paid off. On 14 September 1877, a ticket of leave was granted to William Sykes, upon which he was discharged.

  William had managed to put by a respectable sum of money earned from his gratuity. He had £10 in the savings bank at Newcastle. In July the following year he withdrew the lot, plus interest.3 It seems that he needed the money to establish himself in the well-sinking business, a hard but profitable trade in a thirsty colony.

  Sinking wells was a necessity, even in close proximity to natural water sources. The original surveys of land for the colony around Perth and Fremantle had taken this into account by laying out long, narrow blocks with access to the essential waters of the Swan and Canning Rivers. But when settlement spread north, south and inland, this neatly-regulated system generally gave way to a more ad hoc occupation of smaller or larger areas of land. Often the only sources of water were underground springs or flows that could only be reached by sinking artesian bores. These had to be dug through the sand and rock, frequently to very great depths. Like the road gangs, this was hot, hard and very unpleasant work, but we know that William undertook this labour, in partnership with one or more other men, for quite a few years after his ticket of leave was granted.

  One of the letters in the kangaroo-skin pouch concerned William’s business dealings.4 Dated 14 May 1879, it was from a James Ward, a pioneer sheep farmer at Goomalling, about 30 miles from Newcastle.5 Ward had employed William and one of his partners to dig a well for him. Apparently, there was a dispute about the agreed rate. The letter writer admits that he was wrong and that the rate William and his mate had quoted – 5 shillings a foot for every 5 feet dug – was correct. Presumably, this gave William some satisfaction, as well as some more money.

  Unfortunately, the combination of money and relative freedom on his ticket of leave does not seem to have been good for William. Probably believing that all contact with his family, his children and with Myra was now severed, he gradually lapsed into a deepening trough of despair and what would today be called binge drinking.

  In November 1879, William received a caution from the police for being drunk. It was more than 18 months before his name appeared again in the official records but that probably only means he was not caught again until 1 June 1881, when the next entry occurred. That day he was found drunk and absent from his lodgings and fined 10 shillings. On 28 October, he was also drunk and absent from lodgings, a misdemeanour for which he was punished three more times the following year – in February, March and May. On 6 October he was caught ‘out after hours’.

  These events were almost certainly only those occasions on which William was apprehended. The alcohol problem – or ‘the grog’, as the convicts would have said – probably put him into Newcastle hospital for a month in 1883. When released he was in a poor state of health. After this, perhaps as a result of illness, he seems to have sobered up. He received his conditional release in 1885, which meant that William was now able to go anywhere within the colony, except the northern gold regions, but could not leave Western Australia until his full sentence had expired. For William Sykes, that meant never.

  In the year William received his conditional pardon, payable gold had been discovered far to the north in the Kimberley region of north-western Australia. There had been finds and rushes before, resulting in the whole colony living in a perpetual state of expectation that a major strike would be made at any time. There were even rumours of rich reefs in the Toodyay area. Whether William had ambitions to strike it rich or not, he missed his opportunity because soon after receiving his conditional release, he went to work on the railway.

  Construction on the rail link between Perth and its agricultural hinterland had begun in 1881; by 1885 the line had reached the town of York. In 1886, in response to persistent representations by the people and businesses in and around Toodyay or, as many still called it, Newcastle, a spur line was built through the junction of Clackline. It is possible that William may have worked on this construction, which generated a large demand for labour. He was then employed mainly as a maintenance man, or ganger, in and around Clackline Junction.6 He was certainly performing t
hese duties in 1887, a role that probably suited his preference for a low profile very well. When Alexandra Hasluck asked old timers around Toodyay if anyone could recall anything of William Sykes, no one could place him. He was not a man to make himself noticed, a useful skill for a poacher, and for a convict on conditional release.

  By contrast to William’s arrival almost a quarter of a century before, the Swan River Colony was now booming. When transportation was introduced the hope had been that the cheap convict labour would establish a firm economic base. This hope proved to be an illusion and transportation ceased in 1868. Those old lags, such as William, still had to serve out their time, of course, and they did it through the sluggish years of the 1870s and 1880s. But from the mid-1880s the discovery of gold in a number of places in the colony, especially in the Murchison, Yilgarn and at Kalgoorlie, Boulder and Coolgardie, provided the economic and population boost that the colony needed and the basis of its resource-dependent present. The population of Perth was just over 6000 in 1884. By 1891 it had reached almost 10 000 and by 1901 was almost 44 000.7

  Now, living quietly in his small wooden railway hut at isolated Clackline, William may have read and re-read the little stock of Myra’s and young William’s letters. Or perhaps he never looked at them again. But he did feel the need to preserve them and at some time, perhaps during the year at Clackline, he made or procured the kangaroo-skin pouch in which the documents were later found. Apart from these few grubby slips of scrawled paper, the only other comforts he had were a dog and a rifle, the traditional accompaniments of the poacher.