Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (69 page)

This precipitated the first attack on Yr Efail Wen, [Efailwen], the attackers calling themselves Merched Beca (Welsh for Rebecca’s Daughters) or merely the Rebeccas. The Whitland Turnpike Trust rebuilt the gate, but a week later, a crowd of three hundred people destroyed it for the second time with the battle cry “Rebecca”.

The disturbances started again in 1842 when the Whitland Trust built a new gate at The Mermaid, on the lime road at St. Clears in Carmarthenshire. This was destroyed in November, as were the tollgates at Pwll-trap and Trevaughan. The gates were rebuilt, but by early December all gates in St. Clears had been destroyed. The government refused to send soldiers, and so the magistrates called in the marines from Pembroke Dock and the Castlemartin Yeomanry Cavalry. The rioting continued.

In the village of Hendy on 7 September 1843, a woman gatekeeper named Sarah Williams had been warned not to collect any more tolls and that rioters were on their way, but she refused to leave. That night she was heard shouting
“I know who you are,”
by a neighbouring family. The rioters set fire to the tollgate and Sarah ran for help, but when she returned, she was shot dead.

By October 1843, the riots stopped, and the government was forced to call a Commission of Enquiry to explore the grievances of the Welsh farmers. This also resulted in the Turnpikes Act of 1844 which consolidated the trusts and simplified the rates as well as reducing the hated toll on lime movement by half.

The wearing of women’s clothes was an established feature of traditional Welsh justice; the Ceffyl Pren, wooden horse, bears many similarities to the Rebeccas, with men wearing female clothing, blackening their faces, and conducting mock trials. Miscreants were sentenced to ride the Ceffyl Pren through the streets to punish members of a community for marital infidelity or informing on a neighbour.

Dylan Thomas wrote the screenplay for a film,
Rebecca’s Daughters
, which was published as a novel of the same name in 1965, though the film was not released until 1992, and starred Peter O’Toole, Paul Rhys, and Joely Richardson.

Fourteen Years’ Hard Labour

by Prue Batten

I
f, like me, the generations of one’s family in Tasmania can be traced back to Settlement, then it is a fair enough assumption to believe there exists a convict somewhere in the family tree. My great-great-grandfather was such a man.

William Owen Millington was born on 10 June 1810. Where in England is not known precisely, but given that he married his first wife, Mary, in Chipstead in 1836 and that he was tried and found guilty of his crime in Chichester in 1837, one must draw a circle around those areas and assume he and his family lived within that circle.

I rather like the description of Chipstead in the
Domesday Book
, its assets being three hides, seven ploughs, one mill, and woodland worth five hogs. I’m sure if William had realised that the whole of the Chipstead estate had been worth so little in the
Domesday Book
that he might not have followed the path he took so many years later. But then we know, don’t we, that value is a relative thing?

What price starvation though?

As a carpenter William was unable to provide as he may have wished. At the age of twenty-seven, he stole two sheep for the sustenance of his growing family. Found guilty of the theft, he was tried and sentenced to transportation to the penal island of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), where fourteen years’ hard labour was to be completed. His marriage with Mary, like that for all transported convicts, was effectively annulled as he left.

Sentences were in blocks of seven years—whether it was for a kerchief or a loaf of bread—and the age of the perpetrator meant nothing. In William’s case, two sheep equalled fourteen years. In addition, under British civil law, a man could be declared dead after seven years of absence. In effect, this made it possible for families left behind to move on with their lives. It also enabled any convict who lived to work out his pardon, the chance to remarry in the colonies without the charge of bigamy.

So William was transported from Southampton on the
William Bentick
and after sailing in miserable hulk conditions to the other side of the world, arrived in Hobart on the twenty-sixth of August, 1838.

Tasmania as a penal colony had been in existence for some 30 years at this point; the town of Hobart had been established, and outlying settlements were growing with the opening up of valuable agricultural holdings. The town of Bothwell in the Central Highlands of Tasmania was one such and it was William’s good fortune that he was a competent carpenter and was sent there to serve his time, indentured to a resident vicar.

Bothwell was a town that served large pastoral estates of cattle and sheep graziers. In the first two decades of its settlement, churches, a school, soldiers’ barracks, and hotels were built, so there was scope for William to earn his pardon.

No convict could work for money; it was a condition of the sentence. At best, he had minimal shelter, clothing, and sustenance and could expect no more, so one wonders why my great-great-grandfather could have been so ill-advised as to present an invoice for his work to the vicar.

He was of course lashed, how many times we are unable to ascertain, but enough to make sure he trod the straight and narrow through the hot highland summers and freezing winters that Bothwell offered, until he became a free man in 1851.

I always wonder why he didn’t hasten then to the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo on the mainland for what is euphemistically called the Great Australian Goldrush—and where, it is often claimed, the true Australian identity began to form. Instead, with the desire for major wealth no doubt beaten out of him, he settled in Hobart and married again—to a widow called Elizabeth in Saint David’s Church of England, later Hobart’s Saint David’s Cathedral. He continued his carpentry trade, but as often happened with carpenters historically, also became a Hobart undertaker.

William Owen Millington was lucky to be sent to Bothwell as an indentured convict rather than be shipped to the misnamed “model” (meaning humane) prison of Port Arthur, lucky too that the infamous hell hole of Sarah Island in the far west had ceased operations in 1833. In both instances he may well have been fortunate to survive at all. His trade was a gift, the opening of pastoral lands with towns close by a godsend, and he lived to tell the tale.

As members of the family have tried to track down William’s descendants in England, it has become obvious that many don’t know that “lost” William was in fact a convict. Perhaps there remains the need to ignore such skeletons whereas here in the colonies, one knows one has truly “made it” if one can show such a thing in one’s own ancestry.

What I find most astonishing is that this many years later, William’s great-great-great-grandson, my own son, is a qualified joiner and carpenter but also, ironically, a working member of a family of sheep farmers.

Scotland Yard and a New British Mystery

by Mary Lydon Simonsen

L
ondon has always been a city of haves and have nots with many unsavory neighborhoods abutting some of London’s poshest addresses. If you walk the streets of Mayfair, you might admire the shiny black wrought-iron gates that surround many of the properties. However, they were not put there for decoration, but, instead, were used to keep the less fortunate from becoming more fortunate at the expense of London’s well-heeled by smashing a window and gaining entrance to the townhouse.

Despite having a significant criminal element, London did not have an organized police presence until 1749 when the Bow Street Runners were founded by Henry Fielding, the author of
Tom Jones
, who was also a magistrate, and his blind brother, John (aka the “Blind Beak”), who reputedly could recognize 3,000 criminals by the sound of their voices.

Fast forward to 1829 when Parliament passed an act introduced by Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel (who gave his name to the “Bobbies”), in which the first true London police force was organized under the direction of Commissioners Colonel Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne. The men occupied a private house at 4 Whitehall Place, the back of which opened onto a courtyard: the Great Scotland Yard. The Yard’s name was inspired by its site, a medieval palace which housed Scottish royalty on their visits to London.

The police were originally viewed by the public as “spies,” but their role in several important cases cemented their reputation with the citizens of London. Inspector Charles Frederick Field became good friends with Charles Dickens, who occasionally accompanied constables on their nightly rounds. Dickens used Field as a model for the all-knowing Inspector Bucket in his novel
Bleak House
.

Following a major scandal in 1877, the Metropolitan Police was reorganized, and the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), a respected unit of plainclothes police detectives, was born. In 1890, the police force moved to its new building on the Victoria Embankment, retaining its name, but as New Scotland Yard.

During the second half of the 19th century, one of Scotland Yard’s most durable detectives, Frederick Porter Wensley (aka “The Weasel”), began his 40-year career and investigated cases including the murder of thirty-two-year-old French woman Emilienne Gerard. On the morning of November 2, 1917, street sweepers found Gerard’s torso along with a note reading: “Blodie Belgium.” (This was during the First World War.) Wensley questioned Louis Voisin, Gerard’s lover, asking him to write “Bloody Belgium.” Voisin made the same spelling error, establishing his guilt.

With the setting of narrow streets and a London encased in a dense fog, the year 1888 saw the first appearance of Jack the Ripper, who was responsible for five murders between 1888 and 1891 in the Whitechapel area of London. More than 160 people were suspected of being the Whitechapel murderer, including Lewis Carroll, the author of
Alice in Wonderland
, and painter William Richard Sickert. Two letters received by the Yard gave detailed facts and were signed “Jack the Ripper.” With no more leads or murders, in 1892, the Ripper case was officially closed.

In 1967, the police force moved once again to its present location, a modern 20-story building near the Houses of Parliament. Today, Scotland Yard has roughly 30,000 officers patrolling 620 square miles occupied by 7.2 million citizens.

Although I am the author of several Jane Austen re-imaginings, when I read for pleasure, I like to kick back with a good mystery. After having achieved some success with my Austen novels, I decided to try my hand at writing a mystery. In
Three’s A Crowd
, Patrick Shea, a young detective sergeant serving at a police station in Greater London, has his eye on a position with a murder investigation team at New Scotland Yard. Part of Scotland Yard’s attraction for Patrick is an organization steeped in history. If you are a fan of the television series
Law & Order UK
, you will enjoy
Three’s A Crowd
and its sequel,
A Killing in Kensington
.

The Great Stink of London 1858

By Debra Brown

I
greatly enjoy Liza Picard’s book,
Victorian London
. If you want to read numerous great anecdotes, her book is a wonderful source. Her first chapter discusses the smells of London past.

Day and night in Victorian times, she says, London stank. The Thames’ “main ingredient” was human waste. Human excrement was sold as fertilizer to nurseries and farms surrounding London by the night-soil men who emptied the cesspits. A chamber pot might be emptied on your head as you walked through the narrow streets, adding to the stench of dead dogs, horse and cattle manure, and rotting vegetables.

By 1841, there were 1,945,000 people living in London and 200,000 cesspits full and overflowing. Years of waste fermented in miles of sewers in Holborn and Finsbury with no access to the Thames. Even in aristocratic Belgravia, Grosvenor Square, Hanover Square, and Berkeley Square, noxious matter stopped up house drains and reeked. Buckingham Palace smelled from drains that ran below.

Cows were kept in cowsheds all over London in appalling conditions with no space for cleaning. Cattle, sheep, and pigs sold in Smithfield Market walked through London streets leaving behind 40,000 tons of dung a year, and thousands of horses each excreted 45 lbs. of faeces and 3.5 lbs. of urine a day.

A fourteen foot deep pit at St. Bride’s Church was reopened every Wednesday to take in carcasses of dead paupers until it could hold no more. The whole neighborhood stank.

Coal gas stank, and gas mains leaked. In Bermondsey, skins and hides were tanned using a process including dog turds. Refuse from hospitals, fish market washings and offal, slaughterhouse offal, glue-makers, candle-makers, bone dealers, dye works, dead rats, dogs and cats and even—the January 1862 journal
The Builder
said—dead babies stank.

Finally, there was a breakthrough (right?) when water closets became a normal part of a house. By 1857 there were 200,000 of them all duly sidetracking the cesspits and emptying straight into the Thames via the sewers. The result was the Great Stink of 1858.

This at last precipitated actions which helped to turn things around.

The Harlot Who Was Dickens’ Muse, or Even Greater Expectations

by Katherine Ashe

T
his is the story of a British author’s inspiration. It happens his muse was an American woman. She fits into the history of British letters for she was the inspiration for Miss Havisham, the bitter spinster jilted at the altar who is the central character of
Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens. Just how far may a novel depart from the facts of its inspiration? Very far indeed.

Granted, Dickens met her when she was an old woman, a wealthy dowager living in a mansion in New York City’s then fashionable Harlem. She was Madame Jumel, widow of the wealthy French liquor importer, Stephen Jumel, and even wealthier in her own right, for she had cornered the Manhattan real estate market just as farms were being divided into the blocks now demarcated from 14th Street to 34th Street. She was, by her own effort, the richest woman in the western world.

She entertained Charles Dickens during one of his American tours. And astonished him by showing him her dining room, festooned with cobwebs, scattered with green and rock hard crumbs. For the room was her relic of the night she entertained Joseph Bonaparte, the Emperor of France’s elder brother.

Also, in her household was a little girl, actually her sister’s granddaughter, who she was training to entrance men with her charms. A little boy was even provided for the child to practice upon. Thus Eliza Jumel came to inspire the character of the raddled, embittered, jilted-at-the altar Miss Havisham of
Great Expectations
.

Dickens noted what he saw, and wrote the story that sprang to his mind. But the truth of Madame Jumel could not have been further from Miss Havisham.

We know the actual details of Eliza’s life because, after her death, the son, George Washington Bowen, whom she left in Providence, Rhode Island, to be brought up in the brothel of Mother Freelove Ballou, sued to gain her estate. There were a parade of witnesses, from her own servants in New York to the Governor of Rhode Island himself who, from his childhood, remembered her as Betsy Bowen, the tart of the dockyards.

The revelations left New York scandalized, titillated, entranced. Madame Jumel was eccentric, yes. A few years before her death, she had offered charity to homeless men during an economic crash. The men found themselves dressed in uniforms (designed and paid for by Madame) and drilled daily by the lady herself astride her charger. She was preparing to invade Mexico and make herself an empress. If this sounds like utter madness, it wasn’t quite. She was carrying forward the plans of her second husband, Aaron Burr.