Category Archives: Convict Tales

Lost in Transportation: William Prudence and Robert Armstrong

The Digital Panopticon is a phenomenal tool but its success is ultimately dependent on the quality of past record-keeping. The eighteenth and nineteenth century data on which the project is based is outstanding in its detail and range, but it does contain some holes. Occasionally, individual convicts can fall through these. Here are a couple of examples of convicts who, in different ways, became ‘lost in transportation’.

William Prudence

On 7th July 1784 William Prudence was tried at the Old Bailey for:

‘burglariously and feloniously breaking and entering the dwelling house of William Penn…’

Prudence was found guilty of stealing several items of clothing, four brass candlesticks and a looking glass, but was not convicted of the break-in itself. This was because the crime took place in darkness and the witnesses could not be certain of the burglar’s identity. In spite of these doubts, Prudence was sentenced to seven years transportation. After his trial Prudence was held for a spell in Newgate Prison (TNA HO77 17/07/1784) but there is no record of him arriving in Australia.

In fact, he never left Britain. William Prudence went on to live as a weaver and had several other run-ins with the law. In 1793 he spent 6 months in Newgate Prison and was publicly whipped for stealing four loaves of bread. A year later, he stole 56lbs of salted butter – as punishment, he spent another 14 days in Newgate and was again whipped in public.

This means that Prudence must have been granted a reprieve in 1784. Unfortunately, no record of this survives and we can only speculate about what happened. For instance, Prudence could have filed a petition for mercy and had it upheld; he could have been pardoned in light of new evidence; or he may have had a medical condition which prevented him travelling. We simply don’t know. The absence of this type of record is not uncommon – the date of Prudence’s trial is particularly early and records from this time often do not survive – however, it is a deeply frustrating reminder that there are missing links within the data.

On 22nd June 1796 Prudence was once more sentenced to seven years transportation for stealing several lengths of muslin cloth. Again he not serve this sentence; he died a natural death at Newgate Prison before he could be transported. William Prudence never set foot in Australia; sadly, despite all of the technology at our disposal, we will never know the exact reason why.

Robert Armstrong

After previously being convicted for grand larceny in 1792, Robert Armstrong was sentenced to death for his role in a burglary in 1794. However, on the recommendation of a Judge, his sentence was respited (HO47/19/16). Instead of facing the hangman, Armstrong was transported to the West Indies to serve as a soldier with the Sixtieth Regiment.

Robert Armstrong was quite literally lost in transportation. In 1797 he reappeared at the Old Bailey accused of returning from transportation before the end of his sentence. The defence he gave to the court was truly extraordinary:

‘In 1795, I was pardoned upon condition of serving his Majesty King George, in the sixtieth regiment of foot, to go in the capacity of a soldier; I embarked the 14th of April, 1795; I had the misfortune to be taken by the French, and carried into Guadaloupe; they wanted to force me to serve against my country, and rather than be a traitor to my country I was determined to get my liberty, or die; here are two shots in my neck that I got as I was making my escape.’

Having been captured by the French and then escaping back to London, Armstrong faced one last hurdle – proving his story. His trial was not going favourably until a record kept by the Sixtieth Regiment themselves was produced. This proved that he had been sent to the West Indies and that his account was truthful. The court was clearly unaware of the existence of this document. A reward was offered for Armstrong’s arrest – he was captured and brought to court by Joseph Nash who was clearly hoping to receive some financial reward. Armstrong was fortunate that a military record existed to prove his story; otherwise he would likely have faced the death penalty.

Robert Armstrong nearly slipped through the net because there was no court record of his transportation. This story is another example of how careless record-keeping could make life difficult for convicts and can still frustrate modern researchers.

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Stealing one’s Heart: The story of Samuel Haslam and Elizabeth Ann Fernley

Samuel Haslam's First two Indictments

The beginning of a long day in court for Samuel Haslam and Elizabeth Ann Fernley (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/images.jsp?doc=184202280123).

On 12th August 1839 Samuel Haslam pleaded guilty to embezzlement. For this offence the eighteen year old was sentenced to four months in prison. These are the only details we have of the trial; evidently, the case was open-and-shut and the reporter wasted no time documenting superfluous information.

The reporter was much busier, however, on 28th February 1842 – on this date Samuel Haslam faced no fewer than three separate trials. In the first of these, he again pleaded guilty to embezzlement. His victim was his master John Ord, from whom he stole 27 pounds.

Following this verdict Haslam remained in the dock. He was charged with conducting a burglary that took place on 4th December 1841. The crime was carefully conceived and a surprising amount of goods were taken from the home of Joseph Rawlings – this included:

‘1 hat; 1 pair of boots; 2 rings; 2 candlesticks; 2 cups; 2 saucers; 4 jars; 20 thimbles; 4 pencil-cases; 1 brooch; 1 cloak; 2 coats; 1 waistcoat; 1 miniature-case; 1 table-cloth; and 19 spoons’ .

Some of the stolen goods were recovered in a later police search of his house. As a result, Haslam was found guilty. However, he was not the sole defendant in this case – alongside him at the stand were several members of the Fernley family, including his partner Elizabeth Ann Fernley. Twenty-three year old Elizabeth Fernley and Haslam rented the Bethnal Green house where the goods were discovered together ‘as man and wife’.

Fernley was not charged with the burglary itself. Instead, she faced the lesser charge of receiving stolen goods. Four pawnbrokers testified against her; each claimed that she had pawned a portion of the stolen goods in their shops under the name ‘Bennet’. This alias was regularly used by the couple – it was the name under which they rented their house and it was used by Haslam when confronted by a police officer. The testimonies of the pawnbrokers convinced the court that Fernley was intimately involved and she too was found guilty. Incidentally, all the other defendants in the case were not convicted.

Before Fernley and Haslam were sentenced they were indicted for a final time. The similarities between this case and the previous one are striking. Haslam was convicted of burglary and taking a large number of household possessions, while, after the testimony of a pawnbroker, Fernley was found guilty of pawning the stolen goods. Once again she was using the name ‘Bennet’. The same Fernley family members were also indicted but again were found not guilty. Fernley received a sentence of 14 years transportation for her two offences; Haslam was to be transported for life for his role in these burglaries and his two previous charges of embezzlement.

Samuel Haslam and Elizabeth Ann Fernley worked together to carry out these burglaries. They were no Bonnie and Clyde, although they do seem to have been very much in love. Before the final verdict was delivered Haslam made an emotive defence of the couple’s actions:

‘It was intimated in the last case, that I and Elizabeth Fernley lived together as man and wife, it is false; I had been acquainted with her for some months, and the property brought into the cottage, I brought there; she placed the greatest confidence in me, and thought I came by it honestly; we were short of money at times, and I told her to pawn the things; I took the cottage myself, with the idea of our being married, but the rooms being small, and not liking it, we said we would wait some time, and take another…’

Haslam’s statement was meant to encourage the court to exercise leniency. In particular, it emphasizes Fernley’s innocence – he stresses that she was unaware that the goods were stolen and that she pawned them at his instigation. The burglaries, according to Haslam, were motivated because the couple did not have the funds to marry or afford a better house. In short, he suggests that his crimes were motivated by love.

There is evidence that Elizabeth Fernley also protested the verdict. She filed a petition to the court pleading for mercy. This was an appeal which tried to persuade the court to reduce the length of her sentence or overturn it completely – for more information about petitions see the stories of Elizabeth Morley and Robert Jones. Although a record of Fernley’s petition being filed survives (and if you have a subscription to Find My Past you can view it here), sadly the petition itself no longer exists. It seems likely that this petition too would have pulled on the court’s heartstrings and focused on the romantic motives behind the crimes.

Both convicts were transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania); Fernley arrived in September 1842 and Haslam two months later in November. The course of their relationship in Australia is difficult to follow. If the couple married as convicts both would have needed the permission of the local authorities. However, in a search of the convict marriage permissions database, which covers records from 1829-1857, no results were found for either Samuel Haslam or Elizabeth Ann Fernley. Neither Fernley’s nor Haslam’s conduct records suggest that there were any informal liaisons between the pair.

While these crimes may have been committed for love, it appears that this passion fizzled out once both convicts reached Van Diemen’s Land. In all likelihood external circumstances intervened; the couple may even have been separated for the rest of their lives. Here the British penal system extinguished a young couple’s love. In every sense then, this is a case of stealing one’s heart.

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Robert Jones, a transported thief and loving husband

From Robert Jones's petition, 1792 (TNA HO47/15/32, findmypast.co.uk)

From Robert Jones’s petition, 1792 (TNA HO47/15/32, findmypast.co.uk)

Robert Jones was convicted at the Old Bailey in February 1792 of stealing a pair of silk stockings from the shop of Richard Marsh, and sentenced to transportation for seven years. We can picture Robert and trace his journey to New South Wales from the official records. The Criminal Register (HO26) records that he was 30 years old, 5 feet 9 inches tall, with light hair and black Eyes, he had been born in Wales and was a labourer. The register also notes that he was delivered on Board the Royal Admiral at Gravesend in May 1792, which is confirmed by both the Newgate gaoler’s lists of prisoners and the transportation registers. The Royal Admiral landed in New South Wales in October 1792, and Robert can be found in the early convict records which have been digitised by NSW State Records. (According to some records, the Royal Admiral sailed in May 1791, but this can’t be right.)

But these records include very little of Robert’s own words or voice. During his trial, he spoke only once, to say that he would leave his defence to his lawyer. And, it seems, there may be someone missing from these official registers and records of his voyage.

I came across Robert in TNA’s Discovery summary descriptions for HO47, which noted Robert’s petition for mercy, and was immediately intrigued:

The prisoner requests in his petition, and a covering letter, that his wife be permitted to travel with him when transported. (HO47/15/32)

These records are available on Findmypast, so I just had to take a look at the images of Robert’s petition and letter. (If you have a subscription, here he is.) In rather flowery language, Robert asked that his sentence might be mitigated to service with the East India Company ‘so that he may not be torn from the arms of his disconsolate unhappy wife’, emphasising that he had never been in trouble before, until ‘misfortune and necessity brought him to this melancholy transgression’.

Your petitioner humbly craves your pity to be pleased that he may not be taken from his beloved wife the only happyness that a human being can with dolefull trouble condole with in this miserable unhappy place of abode [Newgate, presumably] where he hopes to make an atonement for his past offences…

The judge’s report gave short shrift to the first part of the petition, since Robert had been ‘convicted upon satisfactory evidence’. But he agreed to recommend that Mrs Jones would be permitted to sail to New South Wales with her husband. According to another letter, she was willing to go, and a number of female passengers did sail on board the Royal Admiral, but at present the project has no further record of whether Robert’s wife was actually among them.

If it weren’t for the rich records of HO47 we wouldn’t even know of her existence – the official lists and registers record only convicts. There are a few other early cases like this in HO47 (eg 1796, 1809), but most existing records of this kind are from later in the 19th century, after the institution of formal procedures for applications for wives and families to travel with husbands to Australia or for reuniting them after the convicts had arrived. This kind of correspondence gives us rare and precious glimpses into the emotional lives of the convicts we’re studying.

[This post is one of a series of Convict Tales, in which we post about individual convicts whose lives the project has begun to link together. It may be updated as we learn more.]
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Elizabeth Morley, a humble petitioner

Elizabeth Morley's petition for mercy, 1795

Elizabeth Morley’s petition for mercy, 1795

In the spring of 1795, Elizabeth Morley (or Morlay) was convicted at the Middlesex Sessions of the Peace and sentenced to 7 years transportation. Because this was not at the Old Bailey, we have very little information about her trial. Her entry in the Home Office Criminal Registers doesn’t include a physical description or even a description of her offence. But Elizabeth petitioned the magistrates for clemency, and from that we’re able to learn quite a bit more about her offence and Elizabeth herself – or at least the version she presented to the magistrates.

Throughout the 18th century and well into the 19th, many convicted criminals petitioned authorities begging for mercy; a few were granted a full pardon and released but a reduction in the severity of the sentence passed in court was more common, whether that had been for death, transportation or imprisonment. Petitioners were successful in changing the punishment initially prescribed in court so often that tracing actual outcomes is a major challenge for historians of criminal justice in the period and, of course, for our project.

The main series of criminal petitions relating to the more serious crimes that incurred the death penalty or transportation is at The National Archives (TNA HO17-18). There is currently an important volunteer project underway at TNA to catalogue HO17, and a large group of the petitions and related records has been digitised by FindMyPast. It’s more unusual to find a petition concerning a sentence of transportation in local archives, though this one is earlier than TNA’s petitions. However, Elizabeth’s petition is very similar in form and style to many of TNA’s criminal petitions.

They’re documents intended to persuade authorities that the petitioner is a worthy object of mercy. This includes extreme deference to authority – they’re always ‘humble’ petitions. It’s hard for historians to know to what extent petitions really represented the ‘authentic’ voices of ordinary people. The flowery language similarly may not be Elizabeth’s own – the handwriting is that of a highly educated person, and the mention of ‘social passions’ wouldn’t have been out of place in literary genres from philosophical tracts to Jane Austen novels.  It’s common for petitioners to stress their age, as Elizabeth does, and perhaps with good reason, since it seems that older prisoners were slightly less likely to be transported. It’s also not uncommon for them to blame someone else for leading them astray!

Elizabeth’s petition seems to have been successful, in that she doesn’t appear in the Transportation Registers or convict indents data, but we don’t (yet) know what did happen to her. However, I think we have a little bit of her previous history. In October 1793, an Elizabeth Morley was tried at the Old Bailey for stealing a variety of items including shirts, napkins, women’s clothes and pockets. She was acquitted; much of the evidence against her was quite circumstantial. In the course of the trial we learn that she was a married woman, with two sons. This is corroborated by her entry in the Criminal Registers, which describes her as

48. 5/2 Hazel Eyes Brown hair fresh Complexion Brentford Married woman

Now, this would of course make this Elizabeth only 50 in 1795, five years younger than the age stated in the petition. But ages in our data, before the age of universal civil registration, are often approximations and it isn’t at all unlikely that the 1795 Elizabeth would be exaggerating her age slightly for sympathy. (It’s striking that she claims to be 55 – Richard Ward has shown how ages in the Old Bailey data tended to be rounded up or down to numbers ending in 0 or 5.)

The context of the 1793 offence is also a good fit. Women were often charged with receiving in circumstances very similar to those of the 1793 trial; thieving and receiving domestic items like these were closely related criminal activities in women’s ‘economies of makeshifts‘.

It isn’t an absolutely certainty that the two sets of records belong to the same woman, but the balance of probabilities is looking good. What do you think?

[This post is one of a series of Convict Tales, in which we post about individual convicts whose lives the project has begun to link together. It may be updated as we learn more.]
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A tale of two Thomas Smiths

This is a bit different from previous convict tales: it’s about two people – who shared the same name. Lucy Williams has previously blogged here about the difficulties that people with identical names (and few other pieces of information to differentiate them) present for historians attempting to do record linkage. But the story of the two Thomas Smiths suggests that contemporary administrators sometimes found this challenging too.

Let’s start at the beginning, in the Old Bailey, with two trials just over a month apart in late 1833. Firstly, Thomas Smith (we’ll call him “Thomas A”), aged 35, was convicted in October of stealing gowns and other clothing, and sentenced to 7 years transportation. According to the transportation registers he was transported on the John Barry, 2 April 1834, to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania).[1]

In November, Thomas Smith (“Thomas B”), aged 18, was convicted along with Benjamin Underwood of stealing lead piping. Benjamin was a year younger, which may be why he was sentenced to 6 months imprisonment rather than the 7 years transportation which Thomas received. In the transportation register, he went on the Henry Tanner, 27 June 1834, to New South Wales.

So far it seems straightforward – there’s enough detail in the register to make linkage quite easy, even though there were four convicts called Thomas Smith on the John Barry and two more on the Henry Tanner. (Moreover, there are upwards of 300 Thomas Smiths in the register database as a whole – and 8 Old Bailey defendants named Thomas Smith in 1833 alone.)

But then, on looking in the Tasmanian Founders and Survivors data at what’s supposed to be the entry for Thomas A, it suddenly gets a lot less simple:

This Man who states himself to have been tried in November came by mistake, in the place of Thomas Smith a Glass Cutter.

The statement is from a conduct record, and it’s corroborated by the corresponding entry in the description lists, where his age is given as 18.[2]

Thomas Smith in the Description Lists (Tas CON 14/1/11)

Which Thomas Smith? (Tas CON 18/1/11)

In other words, the transportation register is wrong: it was actually Thomas B, the younger man, who went to Tasmania. This is also confirmed by the convict indents for the Thomas Smith who went to New South Wales on the Henry Tanner.[3] That Thomas is evidently Thomas A: aged 35, married with several children, and a glass cutter. (In receiving a mature, skilled worker rather than a teenage labourer, NSW seems to have done quite well out of the mix-up.)

So the confusion seems to be cleared up quite readily. But the mystery remains: how could the mistake come about in the first place?

It’s time to turn to some large datasets that have recently become available to the project: the several important series of hulk records digitised by FindMyPast and Ancestry. (Prison hulks were old ships, no longer sea-worthy, where convicts awaiting transportation were held, to ease overcrowding in gaols.) The two Thomases were transferred together from Newgate to the Fortitude at Chatham in December 1833. They are both in the quarterly returns for December 1833 and March 1834. In the latter, Thomas A’s entry has a note of his departure, “VDL 26 March 1834”. Thomas B makes one final appearance in the June 1834 register with the note “NSW 21 June 1834”. The British authorities had no doubts about where the two men were supposed to have gone.[4]

In Convict Maids, Deb Oxley describes how clerks built up detailed records of every convict transported, drawn both from judicial records and from individually examining and questioning the convicts several times during the stages of their journey from British gaols to Australia.[5] A key part of this process was the creation of the convict indents shortly before departure, which would travel with the ship to provide the receiving colony with essential information about each convict:

In order to construct his indent, [John] Clark [the clerk contracted to carry out this particular task during the 1830s] collated the relevant documentation, attended the docks several days before the voyage was expected to take place, inspected the convicts and called the roll, and finally questioned them, checking their answers against his paperwork.

I still don’t know exactly how the mix-up occurred, but it’s clear that in the case of the two Thomases, practice must have diverged quite significantly from the ideal. If a clerk had questioned the Thomas who boarded the John Barry and compared the man to the paperwork it would have been pretty obvious that something was not right. He was 17 years younger than he was supposed to be, had been convicted at a different time and for a different offence, and lacked any of the older man’s family and work history. There were some superficial physical similarities between the two Thomases – brown hair, 5 ft 4-5 ins in height, dark complexion – but in addition to the age gap, Thomas A had lost two upper front teeth, which sounds quite hard to overlook.

Surely the mistake had been discovered by the time Thomas A embarked for New South Wales, and yet none of the British-based records were ever corrected. And some of the confusion lingered in their Australian records long afterwards. The NSW records for Thomas A, from his convict indent right through to his certificate of freedom in December 1840 (also on Ancestry), continued to repeat the wrong Old Bailey trial date. Thomas B’s conduct record also retains the wrong trial date, and it also makes him both married and single, and a thief of both lead pipe and gowns (an interesting combination). The conduct registers were created partly from the indents and partly by examining the convict; the clerks seemingly decided to simply leave in all of the conflicting data they had been given.

The British penal system sent thousands of convicts to Australia every year for decades; it would be surprising if even the most well-oiled machine didn’t occasionally slip under those circumstances. It still happens, after all: as recently as July 2015, a prisoner was released ‘by mistake’ from Wandsworth Prison. If it had been anything other than a rarity, there would be far more frequent records of similar errors in the Australian records.

As such, it’s less of an issue for big data approaches than for efforts to trace individuals in depth (and we got there in the end!). Even so, it’s one of those instances where the stories of individual convicts open up wider questions: they force us to think about the problems and limitations of the available evidence. For a start, the case warns against presuming that information is more reliable simply because it’s repeated in several (even official) sources. Secondly, it provides a reminder that keeping track of people who shared the same name was not just a problem for historians today. Maybe it even offers one answer to the question posed by Bob Shoemaker: why was so much information about criminals being collected for no obvious purpose?

[1] TNA HO 11, searchable at the  transportation registers database
[2] Tas CON 31/1/40 and CON 18/1/11, both accessible via Thomas Smith’s record at the Tasmania Archives website.
[3] We are using the convict indents data created by Deb Oxley, which we’ll be including in DP; also searchable with images on Ancestry.
[4] HO9/2, available (as low quality pdf) via TNA’s digital microfilm service (at fol. 77) and searchable with better images at Ancestry; HO 8/38-40, at FMP; and see also ADM 6/421 (f.215) also on FMP.
[5] Oxley, Convict Maids, pp 18-27.

***

[This post is one of a series of Convict Tales, in which we post about individual convicts whose lives the project has begun to link together. It may be updated as we learn more.]
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Amelia Acton, a petty thief with a string of convictions

Some of Amelia's previous convictions, 1866 (TNA PCOM 4/45/7)

Some of Amelia’s previous convictions, 1866 (TNA PCOM 4/45/7)

Amelia Acton can be identified (with certainty) in the Old Bailey Online just once, in a trial for uttering (passing) counterfeit coin in 1854 – even though she was tried using a different name, Amelia Smith, and there is no mention of an Amelia Acton in that trial. We can connect Amelia Smith with the Amelia Acton who was convicted of a string of thefts using several different aliases between 1851 and 1866 because 19th-century bureaucrats were increasingly concerned to identify and record recidivists so that they could be punished more severely. Several of the records the project is using included information about previous convictions.

This list for Amelia is compiled from two sources: TNA PCOM4, Female Prison Licences (1853-83, records relating to women prisoners sentenced to penal servitude and released early on licence), and LMA MJ/CP/B, Calendars of Prisoners in the Middlesex House of Detention (1855-1889). MJ/CP/B is not currently online, and these records are in the process of being digitised for Digital Panopticon. Brief item-level descriptions for PCOM4 can be found on TNA’s website and the images are at Ancestry.co.uk. We will be rekeying more extensive data from these (and PCOM3, the counterparts for male prisoners), including information about previous convictions, health and physical descriptions, and offences in prison.

Another list of previous convictions, 1866 (LMA MJ/CP/B/13, 5 Nov 1866)

Another list of previous convictions, 1866 (LMA MJ/CP/B/13, 5 Nov 1866)

  • Middlesex Sessions, February 1851, as Sarah Smith: larceny (table cloths); sentenced to 4 months
  • Middlesex Sessions (Westmr), September 1851: larceny (shawl?); 12 months
  • Middlesex Sessions (Westmr), November 1852, as Amelia Welsh: larceny; 9 months
  • Central Criminal Court, February 1854, Amelia Smith: uttering counterfeit coin, 6 months
  • Middlesex Sessions, December 1854: larceny; 4 years.
  • Middlesex Sessions, April 1855: felony; 4 years penal servitude
  • Middlesex Sessions, August 1859: larceny; 4 years penal servitude
  • Middlesex Sessions, February 1861: larceny; 4 months
  • Westminster police court, March 1864: 3 months
  • Marylebone police court, July 1864 as Amelia Sayers: 4 months
  • Middlesex Sessions, November 1866: stealing a gown; 7 years penal servitude

I’m not certain that all of these records are completely accurate. I’ve definitely identified the following Middlesex Sessions convictions:

  • Middlesex Sessions (Westminster) 15 August 1859 (MJ/CP/B/6): tried as Amelia Acton, aged 40, trade “ironer”, for the theft of 23 yards of carpet value 15s. of Ann Boyce widow (felony); pleaded guilty to larceny after previous convictions and sentenced to 4 years penal servitude.
  • Middlesex Sessions (Clerkenwell) 5 November 1866 (MJ/CP/B/13): tried as Amelia Acton, aged 54, trade “washer”, for the theft of a gown value 12s of Thomas Gardner; pleaded guilty to larceny and receiving after previous convictions and sentenced to 7 years penal servitude.

Penal servitude was a harsher form of imprisonment in special ‘convict prisons’, including hard labour, which replaced transportation in the 1850s for repeat offenders. Amelia was sentenced to penal servitude on three occasions, in 1855, 1859 and 1866. Prisoners serving penal servitude sentences might be released early on licence (probation), but if they re-offended they were likely to have their licences revoked and be returned to prison. This happened to Amelia in early 1863 – just months after she’d been released on licence in October 1862. She was released when that sentence expired in August 1865, but she was back in the convict prison system again within 15 months. She was released on licence once again to the “Battery House Refuge” in February 1871 and I haven’t found any further offending records.

Are there other trials before 1851 or after 1866 that aren’t recorded in this list? But I’ll keep looking as we get more data… There are other Amelia Smiths who might be the right age in the Old Bailey Online, but no Amelia Acton or Amelia Welsh. If there are more, why aren’t they recorded with the rest? But if not, why did Amelia turn to crime in 1851 and why did she stop in 1871 after barely being able to stay out of prison for more than a few months at a time for 15 years?

What else do we know about Amelia? Quite a lot, though there’s one slight puzzle. In the records before 1866 Amelia’s age is quite consistent, with a year of birth around 1820. But in 1866, her age is given as 54 (y.o.b. about 1812) – she’s gained about 8 years! We know that ages were rarely precise for people born before civil registration started in 1837, but this seems an unusually large variation (there doesn’t appear to be any question that it’s the same woman). It certainly makes tracking her in other records more difficult. But so does the variety of names we have to search for: four different surnames and two given names!

We know a lot about Amelia from the PCOM4 records (which are amazingly rich). She was already  married with a child by 1855; Acton was her married name, and her maiden name may have been Welsh (or Welch). Her mother was living in Nightingale Street, Lisson Grove in 1855. Her complexion was dark, with dark brown hair and hazel eyes, and she was just over 5 feet tall. She put on weight as she reached middle age – she went from being described as ‘thin’ in 1860  to ‘stout’ in 1866. She was a laundress (or in closely related trades) according to several of the records. In 1870 she suffered from rheumatism – maybe age and poor health are the main reasons why she didn’t reoffend after 1871.

Beyond the criminal records, there are some possible matches in Census and civil registration records. There is an Amelia Welsh, aged 20, living in the St Pancras area in the 1841 Census. And there is an Amelia Acton, a widow aged 70 (consistent with the older age given in 1866), and whose occupation is given as laundress, in the 1881 Census. Sadly, this Amelia was a pauper in St Marylebone Workhouse. It looks like, for her, crime really didn’t pay. Finally, possibly, there is a death record in 1888 for an Amelia Acton, aged 79, at Guildford, Surrey.

Do you know anything about Amelia? Please let us know!

[This post is one of a series of Convict Tales, in which we post about individual convicts whose lives the project has begun to link together. It may be updated as we learn more.]
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John Camplin, a young thief transported to Tasmania

John Camplin was aged 15 when he was tried at the Old Bailey in June 1818 for stealing a watch. John’s defence in court was not terribly convincing:

I found a brooch, took it into the shop to ask if it was gold, and found the watch on the floor. I was going to knock, and the prosecutrix took me.

John was convicted and sentenced to death. Perhaps because of his youth, the sentence was subsequently commuted to transportation to Australia for life.

The transportation registers tell us that John was one of 160 convicts who left England on board the Surrey in autumn 1818, bound for New South Wales or Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen’s Land).

John arrived in Tasmania in March 1819 and a number of records document his life there.

A description list [C128-157] records that he was 5′ 3″ tall, with grey eyes and brown hair, and that he came from Tottenham. It gives his age on arrival as just 14 (it’s very common for ages to vary from one record to another!). It also notes that he received a conditional pardon in 1828.

But his conduct record shows many episodes of bad behaviour including theft, insubordination and other abuses, which resulted in whippings, hard labour and an extension of his sentence, so he was still in Tasmania at least until 1839. He was described as a “confirmed thief” and his master complained about his “wanton” destruction of property. [NB: large image, may be slow to load]

camplin

We don’t know any more about John in Tasmania or what ultimately became of him, though we may find out more as the Founders and Survivors project progresses.

But we do have one other record, one that provides a more personal perspective than the administrative trail of criminality and punishment. John had left behind him in England a memento for his family, an engraved convict love token:

Dear Father Mother
A gift to you ~
From me a friend
Whose love for you
Shall never end
1818

Do you know anything about John Camplin? If so, we’d love to hear from you!

[This post is the first in a planned series of Convict Tales, in which we post about individual convicts whose lives the project has begun to link together. It may be updated as we learn more!]

See also:

The Real Artful Dodger?  and John Camplin, a misguided youth? (Prison Voices) [archived pages]

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Convict Tales: small stories and big data

View near Woolwich in Kent shewing [sic] the employment of the convicts from the hulks, c. 1800. From the collections of the State Library of NSW.

View near Woolwich in Kent, c. 1800. From the collections of the State Library of NSW.

We’ll soon be starting a regular series we’re calling Convict Tales. Every week (or thereabouts), we’ll tweet and blog about individual convicts whose lives we’ve started to link together in our database. Some of their stories might be exciting, others will be quite unexceptional (and short).

We have several reasons for doing this. Firstly, we want to share with you some of the material that we’re starting to gather; the range and variety of sources will expand along with the development of the project. At the same time, it may be a reminder of the many gaps and silences in the records. We expect many lives to be fragmentary, or for links to be not quite certain. This can all be smoothed over, perhaps misleadingly, in the aggregate and the data visualisation. The final reason is that amidst all our visualisations and statistics, we don’t want to lose sight of the multitudes and the diversity of real people and individual stories – lives like those of George Fenby – that make up the monstrous regiments of ‘Big Data’.

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