Tag Archives: transportation

Australia’s Convict Sites: Shared past, their present, our future?

Our recent trip to Australia for the Digital Panopticon conference was an invaluable opportunity for so many reasons. We were able to connect and learn from our colleagues across the globe, share our work and develop new ideas and, perhaps most rewarding of all, we had the opportunity to visit some of the remaining places and spaces of convict-era Australia.

Australia has a network of eleven convict sites, designated as UNESCO world heritage sites, in which the buildings and areas of land of Australia’s first penal system are preserved and open to the public. These sites are places of both education and tourism. Australia’s convict heritage sites achieve on a much larger scale the kinds of entertainment and education we can find at home in places like the Galleries of Justice, and Dartmoor Prison Museum. Yet Australia’s transformation from British colony to independent state has allowed it to own and present its convict history in a more frank and reflective way than many of our home grown sites of dark tourism. Australia had been able to separate the historic injustices of the system of transportation from the modern Australian state. Something which seems to inspire a readiness to display their convict past in a more open and critical way than perhaps we do for similar in the UK.

I was lucky enough to visit four of the eleven Australian UNESCO convict sites, which gave a great sense for how the convict past can be preserved and presented. Below I share a few thoughts – and pictures – for each of the sites.

Hyde Park Barracks

The old convict barracks at Hyde Park are one of the earliest of Australia’s Convict heritage sites. Opened in 1819 and used for convicts until 1848 the barracks housed the male convicts who arrived at Sydney Cove (very little remains of the first settlement at Botany Bay). While women were sent out to work for private persons, male convicts were required to undertake public works. Thus, during the day they would labour on the roads and building sites of Australia’s first European settlement and at night they would report back to lodgings at Hyde Park Barracks to be counted, fed, and sheltered.

Hyde Park BarracksThe front of Hyde Park Barracks – central Sydney

The barracks now operate as a ‘living history museum’ which members of the public can tour with or without a free audio guide. There are three levels of the building to visit. The first of which gives not only an overview of the history of convict transportation and the development of Sydney, but also insight into how conservation and interpretation work has been carried out. Two further floors explore the residence of Australia’s first convicts (and other uses to which the building was put in the post-convict era). The majority of the rooms inside the barracks are sparsely decorated and furnished. Boards provide information on the uses of each room, but visitors are left to take in the space and imagine how convicts used it.

HPB 3

One exception to this on the middle floor is the ‘bunk room’. A simple timber frame suspend dozens of tightly packed canvas hammocks, the likes of which early convicts would have slept on. Visitors have the option to try a hammock to get a sense of sleeping arrangements for early convicts.

Bunk room

As a museum, Hyde Park Barracks are probably the least atmospheric of the convict sites– and most familiar in format for UK visitors. However they still provided information of genuine interest and importance, and had used some really thoughtful interpretation to encourage visitors to engage with the space and the experiences of convicts who previously inhabited it.

Port Arthur

The beauty and serenity of Port Arthur’s grounds makes it difficult as a visitor to truly comprehend the brutality of life at Australia’s most famous ‘site of secondary punishment’. A place where the worst reoffending convicts were sent. The complex also includes several other sites such as the cemetery island, and Point Puer a site used for juveniles, both of which visitors are able to ‘cruise’ to.

PA ruins PA scenery

Port Arthur Historic Convict Site

For the main part, the buildings at Port Arthur are derelict. Shells of former buildings, in some cases little more than ruins. Surprisingly, this does not detract from the atmosphere or effect of the place, rather it enhances it. While visitors are free to take group tours or special more fun-focussed events like ‘ghost walks’, Port Arthur is also a place where visitors are free to walk round, explore the buildings, and reflect on the history of the site. Interpretation and reconstruction has been left to a minimum.

Port Arthur PennitentiaryPort Arthur Penitentiary from the outside

Port Arthur cell-space

The inside of the penitentiary showing the location of now absent cells

Port Arthur cellsPort Arthur Pennitentiary Cell

Remnants of penitentiary cells

Of all the buildings on Port Arthur, it is the visitor’s centre, and the separate prison which resemble most closely sites like the Hyde Park Barracks. Beneath the visitors centre a –soon to be reinterpreted- exhibition gives the feel for the story and process of transportation to Tasmania (and contains the odd familiar face too).Hamish Maxwell StewartThe DP’s Hamish Maxwell-Stewart was instrumental in the creation of Port Arthur’s current visitor centre exhibition.

The well-preserved separate prison provides corridors of cells for visitors to see and a separate and silent chapel to explore. With the audio and visual effects kept to a minimum, the eerie quietness of this site gives a fantastic sense for the isolation and tension prisoners must have lived with on a daily basis.

    Port Arthur Seperate Cell Port Arthur seperate cells corridoorThe separate cells
Port Arthur seperate Chapel

Port Arthur’s separate chapel

Cascades Female Factory

Cascades female factory (to the south and west of central Hobart) is one of the smaller of Australia’s convict sites. Much like the interpretation at Port Arthur, reconstruction has been kept to a minimum. Information is available but the ruins of the site are left to speak for themselves. The site at which female convicts were detained when they arrived in Tasmania before being sent out to work, for punishment of a secondary offence, or in case of pregnancy under sentence, sits unassuming and barely noticeable at the side of a road, with little outside signage to indicate the significance of its former years.

Cff front entranceThe outside of Cascades Female Factory

Very litter remains of the factory grounds – barely more than the outside walls. Again, like at Port Arthur, rather than chose reconstructive buildings that let visitors experience the space ‘as it would have been’, at Cascades Female Factory subtle markings and a few information boards tell the story while allowing visitors to take in the size of the plot, the oppressive presence of the steep hills to the rear, and the full force of the elements outside.

Cff yard plan Cff yard remains

The plan of the former yard, and the physical space

Wandering through the remains of three of the original five yards on a cold and drizzling day provided a sense of the bleak, claustrophobic, and isolated existence prisoners would have experienced at the factory.

Fremantle Prison:

The most recent of Australia’s convict sites, Fremantle prison is unique in that its penal history stretches from its convict origin in the 1850s until 1991 when it ceased to operate as a state prison. In that time the prison has become so much more than a convict site. Something reflected in how its heritage is presented to visitors.

FP wing outside Fremantle Prison main entrance

Visitors can only access Fremantle prison by one of three guided tours, only one of which is a general guide to the history of the prison, and not themed like the ‘‘great escapes’ tour. However, due to the nature of the site it is the most complete and ‘authentic’ experience of a convict-era prison as the majority of buildings have been preserved completely.

FP inner wing  FP wing division 2

Fremantle Prison’s ‘Division 2’ Wing

Built by Western Australian convicts in the 1850s and used to detain them until the last convicts to WA in 1868 were freed, the history of the convict experience is intermingled with the history of imprisonment. Distinctions between what facets of prison life belong to the convict era, and which developed later are not always clear. However, the prison provides a fantastic opportunity see original convict cells fitted with replica hammocks and furniture  next to larger, later, cells showing how conditions for prisoners improved in the post-transportation era.

FP condemned cell FP Convict cell 3 FP reconstructed convict cell

The condemned cell, and two examples of convict-era cells at Fremantle Prison

Some other elements including the chapel are also preserved as they would have been in the convict era.

FP convict chapel

Yet due to the prison’s use throughout the twentieth century – a later history still very much preoccupying former prison staff who now act as guides and in other roles around the site – modernisation of exercise yards, kitchens, bathrooms means that unlike other convict sites, Freemantle prison has inevitably lost some of its convict-era identity.

Australia’s convict sites provide some of the best preserved and most fascinating physical reminders of the transportation era. Ultimately, all of the sites are undertaking a difficult balancing act. First and foremost they preserve some of (white) Australia’s most important heritage, and educate visitors about the history of crime, punishment, and convicts in a surprisingly sympathetic way. Yet these sites also succeed in encouraging entertainment-driven tourism so important to funding heritage projects and future preservation.

A chance to see the buildings and surroundings, so important in the lives of the individuals we study, was a real privilege. Each visit was a moving – and thought provoking – experience, the likes of which are still largely out of reach in the U.K. What seems to make convict sites so unique is that, East, West, and South, Australia’s convict heritage is presented as an unpleasant feature of the British past – something modern Australia has come to terms with and learnt from while remaining wholly separate to– in terms of both justice and human experience. An important factor which hasn’t been fully achieved in many UK sites of crime and justice heritage. After all, while Australia is preserving its convict sites as places of history, heritage and education, some of the most famous remnants of our own convict era, prisons like Brixton, Pentonville, and Wormwood Scrubs, function not as tools for learning and reflection, but still in their original capacity.

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.

James Littleton and the Problems of Automatic Record Linkage

James Littleton's Conduct Record from 1842 (TAS CON33-1-17)

James Littleton’s Conduct Record from 1842 (TAS CON33-1-17)

In 1832, James Littleton was indicted for theft. This, according to a series of records automatically matched by the Digital Panopticon, marked the beginning of his exceptional story. Littleton was accused of stealing 10lbs of beef, 3lbs of mutton and five eggs from a wine-merchant named Thomas Wood. He was caught red-handed as Police Constable Cornelius Wintle amusingly explains:

I was on duty in Holborn, on the morning of the 27th of September, and heard a gentleman call out “Police!” opposite King-street – I crossed, and stopped the prisoner; some eggs dropped out of his hat; I took him to the area of Mr. Wood’s house, and the beef and mutton were in the area – Mr. Wood was looking out of the window.

Littleton offered no defence and was found guilty. The sentence passed down was lenient; he was imprisoned for one month. As he was aged just 16 and this was his first conviction, this judgement was a wrap on the knuckles to deter any future criminal activity.

Less than two months later Littleton was back at the Old Bailey. On 29th November 1832 he was charged with the theft of 37 cigars from a Tobacconist in Holborn. Again, he was caught in possession of the stolen goods by a Police Officer. This time, however, the court did not give him another chance; now aged 17, Littleton was sentenced to seven years transportation.

The next trace of James Littleton is a record of his transportation. On 13th December 1832, Littleton was one of 216 convicts transported aboard the Lotus to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). After sailing for 154 days and stopping at Rio de Janeiro, James Littleton arrived in Van Diemen’s Land on 16th May 1833.

The next linked record, placed Littleton back at the Old Bailey in November 1840 charged with the murder of Mary Nicholls. He was reported as being aged 27, a figure which, allowing for some error, corresponds to his previous records. The crime also took place close to Holborn, the scene of his previous offences. Found guilty of this brutal killing, Littleton was then sent back to Van Diemen’s Land to serve a life term.

Before he was shipped, Littleton was detained aboard the Prison Hulk ship Leviathan moored at Portsmouth (TNA H09 09/12/1840). These floating prisons were used largely because the English prison system was grossly overcrowded and there simply was not enough space to house convicts on land.[1] Mentioned as an aside, it seems that Littleton escaped from the Leviathan on the 27th January 1841. There is little record of this daring escape but evidently Littleton was on the run for a considerable period; he was not transported to Van Diemen’s Land until September 1841. Following his arrival in February 1842, Littleton’s conduct record is full of incident. He was found guilty of attempted murder and was hanged at Hobart on 31st December 1842.[2]

This is the truly extraordinary story of James Littleton according to the records linked automatically by the Digital Panopticon. It is a fascinating account of a how a youth involved in petty crime transformed, on his return from Australia, into a hardened criminal. With an escape from prison and a sorry end at the hangman’s noose, James Littleton’s story has all the hallmarks of a box office epic. However, on closer inspection, all is not as it seems.

James Littleton arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in May 1833, having received a sentence of seven years. The conduct record for his first stint in Van Diemen’s Land, whilst very difficult to read, indicates that he was still there on 12th May 1839. In theory he could have completed this term and made the four or five month voyage to Britain in time to commit murder on 18th October 1840, though this seems unlikely. The transcript of his murder trial makes clear that:

the prisoner [James Littleton] and the deceased [Mary Nicholls] lived together, and slept in the same bed’.

This relationship suggests that Littleton had spent a significant period of time in London before he murdered Nicholls in October 1840. This narrows the window for Littleton to travel back to Britain and commit the offence even further. The logistics of such a journey work, but only just.

The descriptions of James Littleton upon his arrival in Van Diemen’s Land in 1833 and 1841 differ markedly. In 1833, he was reported as being 5ft 1in tall, with light brown hair and dark grey eyes. He also had a tattoo in the shape of an anchor on his arm. By 1840 however, he had grown 6½ inches and had black hair, while the tattoo on his arm had vanished. In 1833 Littleton’s occupation was listed as a ‘baker’, yet by 1840 he was classed simply as a ‘laborer’.

James Littleton’s trial in November 1840 was high profile and was covered by a number of newspapers. This report is taken from The Standard (Saturday 24/10/1840; Issue 5101):

James Littleton, alias Shamus, a ruffianly-looking fellow, aged about 25 years, who had been repeatedly brought to this court and convicted for violent assaults upon the police… On the prisoner having been placed at the bar, Mr Combe [the Judge] recognised him as one whom he had seen before on charges at this court. Policeman 49, Q division, stated that the prisoner [James Littleton] had frequently been charged at this and other courts for violent assaults, and he had been once cast for death and left for execution. Seven years ago he had been convicted of a rape. The prisoner denied this, and said he had been acquitted of the charge.’

James Littleton did not deny being accused of rape; in fact, he was keen to show how he had been acquitted at a trial. Yet how can this trial have taken place seven years earlier (1833) in London if, as the record linking process suggests, James Littleton was actually on the other side of the world?

This evidence leaves only one possible conclusion; there were two James Littleton’s born within a couple of years and living within a couple of miles of each other. One was a tobacco thief from Holborn – the other a dangerous thug with a string of violent convictions.

A subsequent search for the second James Littleton’s prior convictions mentioned in The Standard, revealed evidence of a trial at the Old Bailey in September 1839. A ‘James Lyttleton’ was convicted of stealing a basket and ‘three pecks of French beans’ in August of that year and was sentenced to six months in prison. The irregular spelling of ‘Lyttleton’ meant that this information did not appear in the records compiled by the computer. It proves that we are in fact looking at the exploits of two people. Our first James Littleton was still in Van Diemen’s Land in May 1839, so cannot be the same person who committed this offence in London in August. There are indications that the second James Littleton may have faced trial in 1838, which would provide categorical proof that there were two people; however the record of this trial is proving difficult to locate.

This search also revealed earlier records of the first James Littleton’s criminal career. Aged just 13, in April 1829, he was accused of pick-pocketing. Despite the loss of a considerable sum of money, the prosecutor failed to turn up to the Old Bailey and Littleton was acquitted. His next appearance in court was in October 1830. This time Littleton appeared as a witness in the trial of two 14 year old youths charged with the theft of snuff boxes and pipes. Although, the two defendants were put to death for this crime, Littleton, despite playing a part in the robbery, faced no charges. These records were not matched because they contain little information about Littleton himself – for instance, they lack specific details regarding his age or appearance. However, they seem to fit with the petty nature of his subsequent crimes.

This complex case illustrates some of the drawbacks of linking records together in this way. By creating matches based on names and ages, two (or maybe more) individuals can be confused for one. Also, this method is ultimately reliant on the searcher themselves. A program can only search what a user inputs. If, in my initial search for James Littleton, I had typed ‘L*ttleton’ to cover other possible spellings, this story would have become a lot clearer a lot sooner.

Such algorithms are extremely powerful tools to identify potential links between individual records and are vital to constructing convict lives, however the links created cannot always be completely relied upon.

Below are alternative timelines for each James Littleton:

James Littleton (1)

1815/6: Born

09/04/1829 (aged 13): Found not guilty of pocket-picking

28/10/1830 (aged 14): Appears as a witness in a trial of two 14 year olds who stole snuff boxes and pipes – involved but not convicted

18/10/1832 (aged 16): Found guilty of stealing food – sentenced to one month in prison

29/11/1832 (aged 17): Found guilty of stealing cigars – transported for 7 years

20/12/1832: Sailed to Van Diemen’s Land aboard the Lotus

16/05/1833 (aged 18): Arrives in Van Diemen’s Land

06/06/1833: Given 12 lashes on the back for being ‘absent without leave’ and for showing insolence to a ‘Mr Pearson’

16/07/1838: Disobeyed orders and showed highly improper conduct for allowing a servant to be drinking in a hut with two female prisoners until one of them was drunk. Sent to a Road Party on probation 21st July 1838

From this point on his story is unclear. His conduct record is dated 12/05/1839 which suggests he was still in Van Diemen’s Land at this point but it gives little clue as to his life after the end of his sentence.

James Littleton (2)

1813: Born

1813-1839: Prior convictions – assaults on Police Officers and/or rape – also a possible trial in 1838

16/09/1839: Found guilty of stealing French beans – sentenced to six months in prison

23/11/1840 (aged 27): Tried at Old Bailey – found guilty of murder – transported to Van Diemen’s Land for life

09/12/1840: Held prisoner on the Prison Hulk Leviathan in Portsmouth

27/01/1841: Escaped from prison

28/09/1841: Transported to Van Diemen’s Land aboard the Tortoise

19/02/1842: Arrives at Van Diemen’s Land

31/12/1842: Executed at Hobart

 

[1] Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868 (Sydney, 1986), pp. 41-2.

[2] For a brief account of this hanging see Steve Harris, Solomon’s Noose: The True Story of Her Majesty’s Hangman of Hobart (Melbourne, 2015), Ch. 10.

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 (HO26records 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.]

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]

Transportation Under the Macroscope

Computers are brilliant microscopes. They make it easy to find needles in haystacks. Want to find references to the famous lawyer William Garrow amongst the millions of words in the printed reports of trials held at the Old Bailey, for instance? A keyword search produces the results in less than a second. Without computers it would take months. Likewise, as I explained in a recent post, through the techniques of data visualisation computers can be used to spot (what would otherwise be largely imperceptible) errors within the massive datasets that we are drawing upon in the Digital Panopticon project.

But computers are also fantastic macroscopes — today’s powerful digital technologies allow us to stand back from our sources and view them in their entirety. We can see the big picture, presenting complex and large-scale patterns in simple but effective ways. Microscopes allow us to see the infinitely small. Telescopes reveal the infinitely great. Macroscopes, meanwhile, peer in to the infinitely complex, allowing us to explore combinations, relationships and interactions between multiple elements.

By visualising the information recorded in the British Convict Transportation Registers, I’ve recently put penal transportation to Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under the macroscope. This has produced some interesting insights into the relationship between Australian penal colonies, terms of transportation and how these changed and interacted over time.BCTR

The British Convict Transportation Registers database provides information on more than 123,000 offenders who were transported to Australia between 1787 and 1867. It’s a fantastic resource, and it will be at the heart of the Digital Panopticon project’s efforts to chart the criminal lives of London convicts sent to Australia. In charting these lives, we need to address some overarching starting questions. How many London convicts were actually transported to Australia for their crimes? Which parts of Australia were they sent to? How many years abroad did they face according to their sentences? Did this change over time, and what was the relationship between these different elements? Visualisations can help us to explore these questions across the long term and a large scale.

The total number of London convicts transported to Australia fluctuated greatly over the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Graph 1 below demonstrates. Relatively few convicts were transported in the years 1793–1804 when the Revolutionary War monopolised Britain’s shipping resources. With the end of the Napoleonic War in 1815 there were however large and rapid increases in the numbers of London convicts sent to Australia, reaching a massive peak in the 1830s. Thereafter, numbers gradually fell until the eventual abandonment of penal transportation in the 1860s. Interestingly, this pattern reflects a wider inverse relationship between the numbers of convicts transported and the years in which Britain was engaged in war throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Graph 1

What Graph 1 doesn’t reveal is that the places in Australia where convicts were sent to changed over time. The individual penal colonies to which London convicts were sent operated at different times. As Graph 2 below shows, New South Wales was the first penal colony in Australia, and was later used alongside the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land between the late 1820s and 1840, when transportation to Australia was at its peak. Following this, Van Diemen’s Land was used almost exclusively, until the 1850s, when Western Australia was the sole transportation location in Australia.

Graph 2

If the locations of penal transportation to Australia changed over time then so too did the lengths of time which offenders were sentenced to abroad. Between 1787 and the virtual abandonment of New South Wales as a penal colony in the late 1830s, as Graph 3 highlights, offenders were sentenced almost without exception to a term of 7 years, 14 years or life. Between 1840 and 1850, when Van Diemen’s Land was used exclusively, terms became more varied, with greater use of 10 and 15 year sentences. And especially after 1853, when Western Australia became the sole destination for transportees, an even greater variety of terms were put to use. This more nuanced tariff in transportation sentences was likely introduced to make transportation more favourable to penal reformers who increasingly viewed the practice with concern.

Graph 3

These changes in penal colony and terms of transportation were intimately linked, and the interaction between the two is clearly captured in Graph 4. The colonies operated at different times, and the law which underpinned them and the terms of transportation which could be imposed also changed in accordance. In short, the convicts who found themselves on the shores of New South Wales were primarily one of two kinds: either those sentenced to 7 years transportation; or those sentenced to a whole life abroad. By contrast, London convicts landing some 2,000 miles away on the shores of Western Australia and on the eve of transportation’s demise in the 1850s would each have had subtly different terms to serve out.

Graph 4

Through the macroscope of computer-generated visualisations, we can see these complex patterns and interactions in their entirety, spanning the breadth of Australia and the length of a century, taking in the lives of tens of thousands of individuals along the way.

Adventures with Data Linkage

The British Convict Transportation Registers is a database detailing the journeys of over 123,000 people transported to Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Compiled from British Home Office records, it contains information such as the name of each person being transported, the date they departed, and their final destination.

The early stages of the Digital Panopticon have allowed us to perform some preliminary data linkage between these registers and people sentenced to transportation in the Old Bailey Proceedings. We’ve made the links primarily by name, with a degree of tolerance for spelling. We found that many names actually matched exactly, suggesting that perhaps names were in some cases directly copied from one record to another. A further 7% of names could be matched via an algorithm known as Soundex, which attempts to identify names which sound similar when spoken, but might be (accidentally) spelt differently. A remaining handful were matched by virtue of having a small Levenshtein Distance. Levenshtein is a simple metric by which the variance between two text strings is quantified. Including matches with a very small Levenshtein Distance, where perhaps only a single letter is different or omitted, helps take account of minor clerical errors.

Percentages of names matched between the British Transportation Records and Old Bailey Proceedings, under various conditions.

Results of attempted name matching between the British Transportation Records and Old Bailey Proceedings.

In total, about 70% of the people sentenced to transportation in the Proceedings appear in the transportation records. We can be quite confident of about half of these, because in some cases the date of conviction is actually given in the transportation record. If the date and name match, it becomes very likely that we’re dealing with the same individual. For transportation records where a conviction date is not given, we have to examine five or six years worth of Old Bailey records to make sure we don’t miss a possible match. This greatly increases the possibility of a false positive, so we can be less sure about these links.

One interesting trend is that the number of exact links decreases significantly in cases where the conviction date is not given. A greater proportion of these links had to be made with Soundex or Levenshtein Distance. This suggests that the links made without a conviction date are less reliable, as we might expect. Therefore, for the time being we will discard these.

With our most reliable links in hand, we can begin looking for patterns between the details of conviction and transportation. One of the most interesting pieces of information contained in the transportation records is the destination of convict ships. An obvious question is whether convicts were directed to particular destinations based upon their offence, gender or age. One might imagine colonies having a need for people with particular skills or attributes at particular times, and the system might have attempted to address these needs. Luckily, occupation is indeed sporadically recorded in the Old Bailey Proceedings.

In fact, the data shows that the overwhelming factor in deciding where a convict was sent was the particular year when they left England. Transportation was almost exclusively to New South Wales before 1831, and overwhelmingly to Van Diemens Land after 1838. There is a brief period from 1832 to 1835 where roughly equal numbers of convicts are sent to both destinations. However, even during that period, there doesn’t appear to be any correlation between the characteristics of a convict and their destination. Neither gender or age, crime or occupation seem to have made any difference. Once a person was in the transportation system, their final destination was entirely arbitrary. There was no easily identifiable tendency to send people with particular attributes to particular destinations.

Sankey diagram, showing proportions of different age groups transported to different destinations, including where the destination is unknown because a link between records could not be made.

Sankey diagram, showing proportions of different age groups transported to different destinations between 1832 and 1835, including where the destination is unknown because a link between records could not be made.

If we cannot find a pattern in where people were sent, perhaps we can find a pattern in how long it took them to be sent there. For every convict there is a period of time between when they were convicted and when they actually set sail aboard a ship. The interval between conviction and transportation is hugely variable. A few people were transported in little over a month. Some people, as we have noted, spent six years waiting to be transported.

Line graph showing the minimum, maximum and average intervals between conviction and transportation over time, 1787 - 1852.

Line graph showing the minimum, maximum and average intervals between conviction and transportation between 1787 and 1852.

The data shows that again, time was a very important factor. Transportation almost halted between 1835 and 1844, as did sentences of transportation. In contrast, the system seems to have been at peak efficiency between about 1814 and 1834, but even then there are a few outliers (represented by the green line) who still had to wait a very long time to be transported.

Detail of a scatterplot variation showing every interval between Proceedings conviction and BTR transporation, represented by horizontal bars running from conviction date to transportation date. Females are blue, males are orange.

Detail of a scatterplot variation showing every interval between Proceedings conviction and BTR transporation, represented by horizontal bars running from conviction date to transportation date. Females are blue, males are orange.

If we look at the data in more detail, we can see that a great many of those sentenced to transportation, at least early in the period, are simply waiting for the next boat to depart. Convicts sentenced at multiple sessions are stored up until, presumably, there are enough to justify a voyage. Nevertheless, there are people who seem to miss multiple voyages; people convicted at the same session as those who depart on the next boat who are, for whatever reason, left behind. Can we detect any common characteristics among these people?

It is not at all easy to find a pattern, but there may be one: Male prisoners below the age of 15 appear to be kept for longer, on average, than those who are older. It’s worth noting that the minimum and maximum intervals show no such trend; there are still people under fifteen who are transported very quickly, and people over fifteen who are held for a very long time. But in terms of the average, there is a definite increase which starts abruptly at the age of fifteen and then accelerates as prisoners get younger. In fact, on average, male prisoners under fifteen are kept for twice as long as those over fifteen.

Age plotted against minimum, maximum and average days between conviction and transportation, for males sentenced at the Old Bailey 1787-1852.

Age plotted against minimum, maximum and average days between conviction and transportation, for males sentenced at the Old Bailey 1787-1852.

This is a finding which we can begin to investigate and verify. Certainly, the pattern is not repeated for female prisoners, whose average transportation time remains remarkably consistent regardless of age. As the project gathers more data and continues its initial investigations, we hope to be able to explore this possible trend in more detail.

This is the very first linking exercise we have done, and there is undoubtedly scope to refine the process. Every dataset we add will help us to evaluate our findings more thoroughly and ask more detailed questions. The next step may be to try and link the Old Bailey and Transportation Registers to the Convict Database, which contains information such as height, and prisoner health. These may well be important factors in determining the treatment of prisoners and providing further clues as to the nature of a journey through the eighteenth century criminal justice system.