These Few Lines

by Graham Seal

  Who was Frederick’s father?

  The birth certificate contains the details of Myra, her address at the time – 39 Midland Road, Kimberworth – the address of her mother and the sex of the child. But the section headed ‘Name of Father’ remains poignantly blank.

  Was Frederick the product of a liaison springing out of Myra’s loneliness? Was he the result of a brief, misjudged moment? Did Myra come to some harm without the protection of a resident husband? Was Frederick the child of the man for whom she kept house and who was to become her second husband, Charles Mitchell?

  Like many of the other mysteries raised in this story, there is no solution, only a few fragments of fading notepaper that offer more questions than answers.8

  In her next, only partly dated letter to Toodyay, Myra gives William the news that he is about to be a grandfather again. Ann is pregnant, although she has been unwell. Another of her many brothers, Herbert, has a drinking problem and she herself is ‘not lucking very well at present’. Myra and William’s eldest son, Alfred, also has a drinking problem and Myra asks William to write to him about it. Alfred is earning good money in the pits, along with Myra’s brother Ellis and Ann’s ‘husband’. At least, that is how Myra described William Waterham, the 23-year-old ‘Lodger’ who was present in the house on 2 April 1871. Myra was living at ‘The Village’ in Greasbrough by this time, together with all five children, William Wareham and another lodger, Frank Sykes, an 18-year-old coal miner, possibly the son of William Sykes’s older brother, Joshua. Myra had work as a laundress, though Ann was a ‘Housemaid out of place’. The 13-year-old Alfred drove horses at the same colliery where William Wareham worked, alongside Myra’s brother, Ellis.

  A few years later, in her letter of April 1875, Myra tells William of the devastating experience of believing him dead and of dressing her ‘little Turza’ in ‘deap black’, only to then discover, gratefully, that he was not dead. Myra blames this on William’s family and his habit of writing to them rather than to her. She is also bitter about lending William’s sister Rebecca five shillings for travel to Leeds and not to have it repaid: ‘I had to do the best way I could for my cheldren and my self.’ Myra says that she is emotionally up and down, probably correctly ascribing this to her age, now 43. She also tells William that Ann is pregnant yet again and that her husband is ‘a unculted man’ who seems to be shy of work.

  In October that year, Myra is too ill to write to William. Young William takes up the pen to tell him that Alfred and Thurza are both stout, while ‘poor Ann is very thin’. He is proud to tell his father that he attends the Congregational church school in Greasbrough, which has developed so fast that William would ‘hardly know Greasbrough now if you seed it’. He wonders why his father never writes to him. In an undated letter, probably of 1876, Myra writes briefly that she is ‘grvd [sic] to my hart A bout my Ann’. Ann is pregnant again and, as on the previous two occasions, much of the burden of care will fall on Myra.

  There are no more letters from Myra after this. The long years of hardship and loneliness had left their mark upon her life. But she had succeeded. Without the male breadwinner she managed to bring up the children, clothe them, feed them and get them an education. At what cost to her emotional well-being can only be imagined. During most of the correspondence between herself and William, Myra had usually reported that she and the children were in work, though we know from the census record and Myra’s letters that such employment was uncertain. This, together with some support from William’s and – perhaps, though she rarely mentions them – her own people, would have supported the transport’s family.

  By 1881 Ann and Thirza had left home, though the boys were still with Myra. They were now living at 3 Scrooby Street, still in Greasbrough, and had the 50-year-old John Evans, an unmarried labourer from Elsecar, Yorkshire, as their lodger. Myra, now 49, had no work but, it seems that between the lodger and the wages of the boys, she was getting by.

  By the time of the 1891 census Myra, even though she could not know it, had her revenge on William’s forsaking of her when he had refused to acknowledge a wife on arrival at Fremantle. In the column provided for recording marital status, Myra indicated that she was of no status, not even a widow. She was now living at Church Street in the home of the widower Charles Mitchell, officially as his ‘Housekeeper’. At the time of that census she and Charles were living in the house with William Sykes junior, the American-born Elizabeth and their three-months-old child, another grandson for William Sykes, though it was too late for him to know that.

  William’s family went on with their lives. So did Myra’s. She was a strong, resourceful woman and one who managed to mostly preserve her emotional balance in circumstances that would have defeated many – and did. When William died in 1891, Ann was 37, Alfred was 34, Thirza 32 and young William, ‘the right little rip’ who resembled his father most of all, was 26 years old.

  Myra was 59. She had spent almost a quarter of a century and more than half her adult life trying to maintain a relationship with a husband amputated from family, home and country for a stupidly savage act. She had not only held a family together for that very long time, but she had also seen them all through whatever education was available to them and the only kinds of employment to which people of their period, place and circumstance could reasonably aspire. She had done so without benefit of a welfare state, with relatively little help from William’s family and only a little more from her own. Myra had done everything that could reasonably be expected of anyone in her unenviable position, and more. With William’s death there was no longer any need for her to pen those difficult letters beginning ‘Dear husband’, or to feel guilty when she did not, or perhaps could not.

  Now Myra had a chance for a brief moment of happiness. On 19 November 1892, she married Charles Mitchell at St Mary’s in Greasbrough. Mitchell was a local man who had described himself as ‘living on his own means’ at the 1891 census. The marriage records show that he had been a miner. Myra was listed as a widow.

  Although we cannot know if Myra’s last few years of life were happy, it would be good to think they were. Hopefully, they were lived in a cheerful house with a loving husband, surrounded by her children and grandchildren as well as the new generation of her maternal family, the Wilcocks,9 the idyllic happy family of Victorian England. After half a century of hard work, worry and pain, if anyone deserved two contented years, Myra did. It was not much of a return, but it was better than nothing.

  Though, if Myra’s second marriage was a happy one, it was of short duration. Mitchell died the following year, leaving Myra alone once more. The remaining two years of Myra’s life are without surviving documentation. We next hear of her through the church that had played such a central role in her life. For a fee of tenpence h’penny Myra Mitchell was buried at St Mary’s in Greasbrough on 20 December 1894, three days after she died of bronchitis and cardiac syncope. She was 62 years old.10 Her perfunctory death notice appeared in the Rotherham & Masbro’ Advertiser two days later. No mention was made of William Sykes.

  Myra and William’s children lived on. Perhaps Ann’s domestic and marital difficulties faded away and she enjoyed a happy and long life, loved and supported by her numerous children. We do not know if this was the case, but thanks to the research of Dennis Taylor we know at least that little Thirza did marry. Her husband was a Joseph Outram, with whom she had four children. They named one of the girls Myra. A family photograph reveals Thirza as a woman of about average height and not particularly stout. She is seated beside Joseph, a man worn to hollowness by a lifetime of hard work. Her face is pale, her hair dark, parted in the middle and drawn tightly back. It is an open face, though Thirza’s eyes look as though they hold secrets. She wears the standard dark dress of Victorian family photographs: raised to the collar with a white ruff, pinned at the throat with a brooch. Her hands cradle, or perhaps contain, a belligerent boy of about five or six years old, with his hand on the family dog, a villainous-looking mo
ngrel, probably spoiled with affection by a young and growing family. Joseph died in 1908, but Thirza lived on to a ripe old age, through the First World War and a good way through the Second, dying in her early eighties in 1942.

  For the male heirs of William Sykes, young William and Alfred, the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth may have been times of change and betterment. Given the average life expectancies of the time it is unlikely that any of them lived to witness the carnage of the Great War, though Myra’s fifth child may have seen that insanity, perhaps even been part of it. We do not know.

  Although lost in time, there are continuing echoes of William and Myra’s lives in Australia, England and New Zealand. In Rotherham the events of so many years past are still the subject of local interest. The Rotherham Library has published a booklet on the trial of the poachers for the murder of Lilley. A play based on the story has been written. Thirza’s great-grandson, Dennis Taylor, has researched the family history and local records and written a novel based on the life of William Sykes.11

  William, Myra and their families also live on in local history, in genealogical research and even in the modern-day tourism industry. Alexandra and Paul Hasluck’s determination to save the Toodyay Letters and the stories they held has been richly rewarded by posterity.

  From New Zealand, Thirza’s descendants Clive and Jean Outram, have travelled to Western Australia to visit the presumed site of William’s grave. They also attended an unusual observance inside Fremantle Prison. At a ceremony of honour on Foundation Day, 5 June 2000, the Fremantle Prison Guardians presented Clive, William’s great-grandson, with a certificate in the name of William Sykes, convict 9589. A certificate was also presented, in absentia, to Mrs Ida Taylor, the great-granddaughter of William and Myra. The ceremony of honour is an often emotional event recognising the convict heritage of the recipients. It has been held annually since 1992, the 2000 event marking the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the first convicts.12

  It is, perhaps, the final irony of this story. William Sykes, convicted of manslaughter and transported to the colonies for life in the 1860s is an honoured convict ancestor in 2000. Who knows what William would have made of this event, enacted in the confines of the newly-sanitised Fremantle Prison, though otherwise little different from when he entered it in 1867. What would Myra have thought about this feting of the dear husband she had defended in court and laboriously written to through all the years of transportation, drudgery and despair?

  The question of Myra’s honouring also begs an answer. Is not her constancy and – notwithstanding the arrival of young Frederick – her loyalty worthy of recognition and reward? Does not her struggle to bring up five children without a father in the crucible of industrialism deserve at least a little of history’s condescension? William Sykes may have been convicted of the crime, transported and served his time. But Myra and her children served that sentence too, like the family of every prisoner ever bound inside a gaol.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Lost Graves

  Time and change have obliterated almost all traces of Myra and William. Without Myra’s letters, William’s brief shipboard journal and a handful of official documents, their story would have been lost to history. The humble but substantial two-up, two-down where they lived perhaps the happiest year of their lives together in Midland Road, Masborough, is long gone. The land on which it stood is now public open space where the neighbourhood children play. There is still a works operating on the site of what had been Masborough Ironworks, William’s place of employment just across the road from the house.

  St Mary’s church in Greasbrough, the pivot of so much of Myra and William’s lives and hopes, remains. It is still a place of worship for those Anglicans living in this suburb of Rotherham. But the cemetery where Myra was laid to rest has disappeared, demolished very many years ago, along with the remains of any headstones. Today it is a rather desolate-looking square of grass, relieved only by a few trees.

  But beneath those trees Myra sleeps. A survey of the monumental inscriptions carried out when the old churchyard was converted to a garden of remembrance in the mid-1960s provides only one faint clue to her last lodging. Headstone number 139 marked a double grave. The carving was so weathered when the recorders got to it that they could not read the first initials or any other details. Only the initial letter of the surnames was visible – two ‘m’s. Perhaps Myra and Charles Mitchell lie here together, finally at rest.

  If so, they are not alone. Headstone number 186 marked another double grave. It contains the bodies of the pious Unitarian Charles Hargreaves and his wife Elizabeth. He died in January 1885 aged 64. Elizabeth followed him two years later, only 61 years old. Next to them was headstone number 187, which commemorated the small remains of young William, son of Samuel and ‘hant Becca France’.

  A mile or two away from St Mary’s, across the valley floored with railways and metalworks, is what remains of Silver Wood. The site of Myra and William’s parting is a sparse, much depleted woodland. Here, the local people walk their dogs and, perhaps, stop for a pint at the sports club built in the field close by where it all happened, the club’s concrete carpark hard up against the edge of Silver Wood.

  At the other end of this story, at what is still the far rim of the world, there remains nothing to see and little more to tell. William’s last resting place in Toodyay cemetery is still a mystery. Alexandra Hasluck was told by the Toodyay gravedigger, Ted Chapman, that there were three rows of graves in unhallowed ground beyond the official burial sites. But according to later research William Sykes was buried in the Anglican section of the cemetery. As there are no longer any relevant records extant, this cannot be confirmed. And there is also a local tradition that the grave was moved at some time.

  Toodyay itself is a pleasant bush town, centre of a thriving rural hinterland and busy tourism industry. Its colonial buildings – settlers’ cottages, Connor’s Mill, St Stephen’s Anglican church, the Uniting church and the old library are interspersed with the outposts of colonial officialdom most familiar to William Sykes. The police stables, the gaol and the courthouse are still there, attracting tourists to their restored facades and hollow interiors. The hospital where William worked and from which Dr Mayhew wrote on his behalf for a ticket of leave is gone, along with the old police buildings where the letters were first lost and then accidentally preserved for so many years. The town is full of plaques and markers informing the curious passer-by of the historical significance of this place and that. But there is no mention of William Sykes.

  Through the trivial accidents of history excavated in these pages, the few fragile words of Myra and William Sykes, their children and relatives survive. Today Myra and William’s letters, along with that of young William, are kept safely in the Battye Library, available to anyone who completes the appropriate forms to see, to touch and to read. The paper is sere and pauper-small in dimensions, the handwriting mostly cramped and laboured; the letters are faded, torn and smudged. Through these pathetic pieces of paper and through almost a century and a half, the loyalty of Myra to her dear husband shines on. The letters also tell of the enduring affection of William’s estranged children, especially his namesake. A few thousand scribbled words of two obscure ghosts separated for almost half their lifetimes and by half a world, testify to the human spirit and, most of all, to the power of love.

  APPENDIX

  The Toodyay Letters and Related Documents

  All the known letters of the Sykes family, together with other relevant documents mentioned in the book are reproduced here. Spelling, punctuation and, as far as possible, the layout of the documents have been preserved. Neither Myra nor her husband was adept with pen and ink and it was a considerable effort for them to put words to paper. William had been educated at Sunday school and at a day school, a reasonable level of education for the time and place, but his later life and occupations did not provide many opportunities to prac
tise whatever writing skills he may have learnt. Myra probably had even less formal education and it was clearly a great trial for her to write even a brief letter. Nevertheless, she persevered and when her own hand was not up to the task she had others take down her words, mainly young William, whose schooling was markedly better than that of his parents.

  DEAR HUSBAND

  15 March 1867

  Dear husband i rite these

  few lines to you hopeing

  to find you better than it

  leaves us at present i have

  been very uneasy sinse you did

  not rite my children cried

  When we got no leter. Mrs Bone

  has got two leters sinse I got

  one will you please to rite to

  me and send me wird how

  you are getting on i have bilt

  myself up thinking i shall get

  to you some time or another

  My mother sends her best love

  to you she has been very ill

  but she is better at present

  we all send hour kind love

  to you we all regret very much

  for you i hope their will be a

  lighting for you yet Woodhouse

  has been for giving hiself up

  severl times when he has been

  in drink i hope he will your

  John and Emma send their

  love to you we have wished scores

  of time you was comeing in to the

  house we should syuse you to deth

  for we could like to see that

  Jhon ward lives next door to

  us he sends his respects to you

  his wife his pius womman

  she talks about you very

  often Joshua Sykes has sent

  word for me to go to their

  house but i have not had