Tag Archives: Pardon

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.]

Bound for Botany Bay? Old Bailey penal sentences and their implementation

The opportunity to connect each Old Bailey convict from their trial, to the ship they sailed on, to the records of their lives in Australia is only one of the benefits of the huge data -linkage efforts currently being undertaken by the Digital Panopticon. However, as this process develops we are presented with a second opportunity – to see where data is missing, and to follow those who seem to disappear between datasets. So far, this has been most apparent in the case of those sentenced to transportation but who are absent from records of convict vessels, or convict arrivals.

Leading historians of transportation, such as Digital Panopticon partner Deborah Oxley have estimated that anywhere between one quarter and two thirds of those sentenced to transportation were never actually sent to Australia. Initial investigations indicate that between1782-1800 3,801 men, women, and children, were sentenced to transportation at the Old Bailey. Yet just over two-thirds of these convicts (2468) do not appear in the next relevant data set – the British Transportation Registers.

It seems clear that the road from arrest to Australia was rarely so straight forward as suggested by many contemporary and later popular accounts. Testimonies given by the officials who ran the transportation system tell us that it was predominantly those below the age of 50 years (45 years for women), and those convicted of the most severe crimes that were selected for transportation.  Historians have also provided evidence to suggest that it was not only the young, but also the practically skilled that were preferred for transportation to Australia. Yet the disparity between sentencing and implementation of transportation suggests that, at present, histories focussing on those transported tell only half of the story. For a fuller picture of how this penal process worked we now have the chance to start tracing those that were left behind.

Preliminary findings suggest that the missing convicts can be traced to three main groups.

The first group of convicts did not even make it to the secondary phase of transportation – that is detainment on the hulks or in holding prisons. Instead their ill health saw them detained in Newgate hospital ward until eventual death a few weeks or a few months after their trial. In the cramped and insanitary conditions of Newgate Gaol, fever was rife and infection spread quickly. Most of those who died were only recorded as having very generalised ailments. Coroners would regularly record a death with little detail, listing simply fever, decline, despondency or ‘natural causes.’

Inside Newgate Gaol

There are of course some exceptions that give us a little more detail. For example, forty-year old Thomas Kennedy was tried at the Old Bailey on 12 July 1797 for the theft of a silver watch. He was found guilty and sentenced to seven years’ transportation. He died in Newgate in April 1799.

Most of those who died in these vague circumstances were the elderly, at least in transportation terms.  These generic fevers, fits, and decline listed as causes of death for those in Newgate could be a myriad of infections that could be found in any of the densely populated areas of London. Sickness such as typhus, typhoid, dysentery, pneumonia, and tuberculosis spread quickly and fatally in the confines of the gaol. Those without strong immunity – especially the elderly or very young were especially at risk.

There were also other convicts who died in gaol as the result of pre-existing illness such as venereal disease, heart problems, and jaundice. Robert Fosgate was sentenced to seven years transportation in October 1787 for the theft of a large amount of clothing. After a year waiting in the gaol suffering from venereal disease, he died of its effects in November 1788. Similarly Peter Rock whilst awaiting transportation in Newgate but three months after of trial he succumbed to the effects of jaundice, and dropsy – a common symptom of heart failure.

A second group of missing prisoners were delivered on board the floating prison ships, the hulks. Some died after accidents on board the ships, others drowned after falling overboard or during escape attempts. Both occurrences could be common upon such vessels. Other men could have remained on the hulk either until the expiration of their sentence – the collection of new data regarding the hulks will allow us to more fully understand why this might have been – or some would have died from illness or infection in the hulks which were described as ‘the most brutalizing, the most demoralizing, and the most horrible’ of British penal history, and where the death rate was estimated to be twice as high as that of the English population in general. [1]

Inside Hulk

The third and final group that our initial linkage has shed light on are those who received pardons. At present our understanding of this process is limited. For women, pardons were complete, dissolving the woman’s conviction and setting her at liberty. However a pardon could come a substantial time into the sentence. Those awaiting transportation could wait years before their sentence was commuted or their crime pardoned. Hannah Findall was sentenced to seven years’ transportation in 1793.   It was not, however until September 1797 that she was pardoned. For male convicts, a partial pardon was more common than a full one. There could be several conditions attached to such freedom. Commonly this might be service in the army or on the high seas. On the level of individual cases it is impossible to say with any certainty what the criteria for pardons or commutation might have been. However, when the data linkage process is more complete, it will be possible to analyse these convicts in aggregate, and view the commonalities in their ages, crimes, sentences, and skills.

Making it from the courtroom to Australia, then, was not just about being young and healthy. It seems to have actually been about not already being sick, vulnerable to illness via age or an existing condition, and perhaps about not being useful to the state for something else. As the work of the Digital Panopticon continues, there will doubtlessly be other disposals we discover which will again change how we think of the transportation process. As the data-linkage on these records progresses we are hoping to produce more accurate proportions of sentence implementation – or failure – and will be able to visualise whether this changed over the convict period. We have the opportunity to gain some new perspectives on transportation that don’t just note numbers of those not eligible for transportation, but also give more of an idea about who they were and what fate awaited them.

 

[1] T. Forbes ‘Coroners’ Inquisitions on the deaths of Prisoners in the Hulks at Portsmouth England in 1817-1827’ in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (1978), 33, 3, p.358. See also B. Webb and S. Webb,  English Prison’s Under Local Government (Longmans,Green, and CO.: London), pp. 45-46.