The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (27 page)

Awakening with a melancholy heart on the following morning, Ludlow lovingly stroked her daughter’s grimy cheek, gravely aware of what was about to happen. Heavy footsteps echoed from the far gate toward the women’s ward.

It was time to kiss Arabella good-bye. After reassuring her brave child that she would visit whenever the rules permitted, Ludlow watched Mrs. Hutchinson lead her bewildered ten-year-old away. Only seven days after arriving in Van Diemen’s Land, her youngest child was admitted to the Queen’s Orphanage. Ludlow vowed to get her back, whatever the cost.

Children were separated from their mothers at Cascades for two reasons. First, it was surmised that if a prisoner spent time on parenting, it reduced her hours of productivity and therefore her economic value. Second, separating girls like Arabella from their mothers fell under Britain’s master plan for a pure moral pedigree in the expanding colony. Under the guise of protecting children from “the convict stain,” the government removed them from their mothers, hoping to prevent corruption of young souls in order to gain strong, healthy, and docile workers.

Children like Arabella were pressed into servitude as soon as they learned to sew a jacket or grew sturdy enough to carry bricks, usually by age thirteen or fourteen. From this day forward, Arabella would belong to the state until her mother received a Ticket of Leave, her passport to freedom. Unlike Agnes McMillan, who had long passed the age of innocence, Arabella was considered young enough to meet Victorian standards for a pure moral canvas.

Young Miss Tedder boarded the orphans’ transport cart along with her good chum from the
Hindostan
, eight-year-old Sarah Smith.
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The two pulled up another young friend, four-year-old Jane Price, and held her between them. Jane’s mother, Ann, was confined to a cell on bread and water for insolence to her master, so the two didn’t even get to say good-bye. Straining their necks for a last look at their mothers’ prison, the three frightened playmates huddled together as the wheels of the cart began creaking away from the factory.

The light cargo jostled down the valley into Hobart Town and then north toward New Town. The tiny cart made steady progress along well-traveled Elizabeth Street, one of the main thoroughfares into the busy little port. Many wagons headed in the opposite direction were loaded with wood, wool, and other products bound for the warehouses by the docks. Several miles outside Hobart Town, the traffic thinned and the prison orphans passed the few homes that constituted New Town’s center. Soon a church revealed itself, centered in what appeared to be a large estate surrounded by fences stretching across the rolling hills. As the cart rattled toward the sternly squared stone spire marking the end of the road, it seemed as if the girls would roll right into what looked like a castle.

This was the gate of the Queen’s Orphan School, housing youngsters whose parents were deceased or had abandoned them, along with a large contingent of children who had been transported with their mothers. Behind stone walls akin to the Cascades compound, more than four hundred children were fed and warehoused. The nearly even numbers of girls and boys were separated by St. John’s parish church in the center of the complex.

The bricks for constructing the orphanage came from the hands of male convicts who labored at Port Arthur and harvested timber from Mt. Wellington. A staff of nine cared for the youngsters, aged two to fourteen.
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Arabella, Jane Price, and Sarah Smith would follow a routine that mirrored their mothers’ at the Female Factory: up by five or six A.M., depending on sunrise; gruel and bread for breakfast; soup and brown bread for supper; in their hammocks by eight P.M.

Mrs. Gazzard, matron for the girls’ ward, handed Arabella a uniform, reflecting the fact that the orphanage was run by the Convict Department. Like mother, like daughter. The telltale blue-and-white-patterned dress, sewn in coarse fabric, marked her as the offspring of a convict. A clean white pinafore proclaimed her moral innocence and protected her dress from the chores and work training expected from all but the youngest inmates.

Matron Gazzard examined the young Tedder’s hair for lice, then cut short the back of her locks and left the front intact. This odd haircut further branded Arabella the progeny of a sinner, thief, or prostitute. Here, the rules at Cascades were mirrored. If Arabella turned sassy or disobeyed the matron, her tresses would be shorn off, just like those of an adult. Although Arabella and Sarah were old enough for the girls’ ward, Jane Price was not. Separated from her temporary guardians, she was brought to the infant branch that housed the little ones, from two to six years old.

Clambering up the stairs to the second-floor dormitory, Mrs. Gazzard assigned Arabella a hammock and handed her two blankets. The young prisoners of the Crown, considered contaminated children, slept in a large room lit by a single lantern hung from the rafters in the roof. Bedding from the orphanage was delivered to the Female Factory for washing in Yard Two, where the disobedient were punished. Once Ann Price was released from her cell, she probably scrubbed the sheets that carried the scent of her own child.

Arabella and the others her age would soon learn how to do laundry for themselves and master the art of knitting, needlework, and other domestic chores. Local settlers hired some of the fully trained girls as servants, kitchen maids, or nurse’s assistants. In the plan to lift the convict stain, religious instruction was nearly as important as work apprenticeship. Protestant girls like Arabella attended mandatory morning prayers in the church before breakfast each day. In addition, on Wednesday and Friday mornings, the children divided into Protestant and Roman Catholic classes and were taught separately. For the rest of the day, they sat for religious instruction and examination, rounded off by an evening church service for the Protestants, who represented the majority.
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Arabella’s surroundings reflected her mother’s life in the Female Factory, where everyone followed a rigid schedule. Each minute of her childhood was accounted for and monitored. The only exception was Sunday, after church, when the girls were allowed free time on the open playground. Still, even the strictest rules couldn’t stop Arabella, Sarah, and her new mates from managing a bit of girlish fun and stirring up some occasional mischief without being caught.

Like their mothers, the girls at the Queen’s Orphanage were deemed less reputable and harder to manage than the boys, demonstrating few of the qualities expected from a restrained and obedient Victorian young miss. In Mrs. Gazzard’s judgment, most of her charges had “fallen into improper courses of life.”
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For the newly streetwise Arabella, witness to her mother’s mistakes, being caught at breaking rules was not an option. Wardens who ran the orphanages were attired in grey military-inspired uniforms and carried canes dangling from their fingers. Caning, solitary confinement, or cutting off of hair served as punishment in this prison for children. Fortunately, just a few years before Arabella’s arrival, a scandal at the orphanage had cleaned out many staff who were “dismissed for misbehavior, cruelty and stealing provisions to sell for their own gains.”
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The living conditions themselves inflicted physical punishment on the youngsters. The year Arabella entered the orphanage, the
Colonial Times
recorded the harsh existence characterizing her young life: “The washing places, or lavatories (to use a word more euphonious for the polite and learned ears of our court contemporary) are highly objectionable: they consist of cell-like rooms, paved with flags, with a stone trough in the center, open at both ends, and consequently, extremely cold and comfortless. Indeed, the prevalence of stone pavement, throughout the lower apartments of the building, is, in our humble opinion, highly detrimental to the health of the inmates; in one room, we saw five little fellows, blue and shivering with cold. . . .”
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The emotional distance created by the prim and proper language of the
Times
reporter accurately reflected the sentiments of the day toward boys and girls of convict lineage. Because so few staff supervised so many children, the sick were often ignored or treated with callous disregard. With only one fireplace to stave off the cold in the oversized institutional wards, the children often suffered from chilblains, a condition marked by inflamed fingers and toes and caused by the shivering dampness. A school inspector recorded what he saw: “On one occasion in my presence the master gave an order ‘Sore hands and feet stand out.’ This dismembered several classes, particularly of the younger children. There were 36 with deep red hands or limping feet, formed a double line, and were marched out for the purpose of some remedial treatment.”
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Managed perhaps more kindly by Mrs. Gazzard since 1833, the orphanage began to hire women who were experienced as teachers. They instructed the children in reading primarily to support the government-mandated religious instruction. The mistresses, as they were called, also taught penmanship and basic arithmetic. Many decades later, the notes Arabella sent to her grandchildren on their birthdays bore the mark of well-practiced and well-learned cursive writing along with perfect spelling and grammar.

No birthdays were celebrated at the orphanage except Queen Victoria’s, each year on May 24. On this one observed holiday of the year, coming as winter approached the Southern Hemisphere, “if the weather permits, the teachers take the children out on a day’s ramble in the neighbouring country.”
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Unheated classrooms, a playground without equipment and supervision, and the absence of parental attention and care made for an austere childhood, save for the friendships that flourished. Yet a bit of education and the regular, spartan meals were more than what these children’s peers and relatives consumed back in the British slums.

Two months after Arabella settled into her routine at the orphanage, another ten-year-old, Catherine Mullins, arrived at its stone entrance. Before long, they were true-blue mates. Together, over the next four and a half years, the girls would mature into optimistic young women, inspired by friendship and monthly visits from their mothers. Every evening, Arabella and Catherine sat down to a meal of soup made with meat and vegetables, “a large piece of coarse, but sweet wheaten bread” and a cup of milk.
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Before a spoon was lifted, the roomful of children said grace out loud in near unison.

At about the same hour, Ludlow stared into her bowl of broth. Separated from Arabella, a listless #151 resisted swallowing the food she tried to eat. Although she had temporarily lost her youngest child, the Widow Tedder found some solace in devoting loving attention to the tiny babies under her care.

Despite her best efforts, calling upon both maternal instincts and nursing skills, seven more children died before the Christmas holiday. By January, the warm weather that arrived at summer’s peak seemed to slow the spread of illness inside the house Ludlow shared with her young charges and their mothers. The Liverpool Street nursery seemed ever more distant from the Keppel Street quarters she had left just one year ago.

Arrivals and Departures

For a year and a half, Ludlow toiled in the nursery alongside head midwife and deputy matron Elizabeth Cato. By now, Ludlow’s
Hindostan
friend Ann Price had completed her punishment in the wash yard and was also assigned to Liverpool Street. At least once a month, and when they were granted extra visits for model behavior, together the two mothers walked the hilly four miles from Cascades to New Town for Sunday visits with their daughters.

The women’s routine changed abruptly on a foggy autumn morning in April 1841, when Mrs. Cato failed to appear at morning muster. Typically she met Ludlow and Ann immediately after breakfast and issued daily orders for nursery duty. The night before, however, Police Magistrate John Price arrested both of the Catos and charged them with trafficking. During the initial phase of his investigation, Mr. Price confronted the overseer and his wife with the news that he’d seen a letter written by a prisoner, Ellen Watkins, “in which she requests certain articles be sent under cover to Mrs. Cato for her, here accompanied by a fowl for the use of Mrs. Cato.”
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When he requested the Catos turn over both the letter and the chicken, Mrs. Cato responded that “the contents of the letter was too horrible and indecent and that she had thought fit to burn it.”
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Having read the letter himself, Magistrate Price countered her assertion, later noting in his report to Superintendent Josiah Spode: “I must here remark that not an indecent allusion was introduced into that letter.”
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But the excuses were quick and well prepared when Price inquired about the messenger bird. Yes, they were given the fowl for reasons unknown, and “it was a pity it should stink and so I had it plucked.”
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The two senior officials had contrived a scheme wherein convicts were allowed messages from outside the prison if delivered to Mrs. Cato along with a chicken. It was just the tip of a pervasive and thriving underground economy at Cascades. This relatively small extortion delivered notes between the female prisoners and their paramours in Hobart Town, providing many chickens for the Catos. The overseers and the deputy matron either ate the fowl or traded them for other items available via the illicit marketplace.

For years, the local government ignored the corruption inside Cascades as well as the abuse of prisoners who were mismanaged and mistreated. Word of inhumane conditions reached England and prompted Elizabeth Fry to beg for intervention. Four long years passed before Lady Jane responded to Mrs. Fry’s impassioned plea for an investigation into conditions at the Female Factory. In July 1841, shortly after the Catos’ indictment, Elizabeth’s emissary Miss Kezia Hayter arrived on the
Rajah
and presented Lady Jane with a quilt made by the convict women aboard ship. An embroidered inscription on the fabric rendered it impossible to ignore Fry’s mission:

TO THE LADIES
of the
Convict ship Committee
This quilt worked by the Convicts
of the ship Rajah during their voyage
to Van Diemans [
sic
] Land is presented as a
testimony of the gratitude with which
they remember their exertions for their
welfare while in England and during
their passage and also as a proof that
they have not neglected the Ladies
kind admonitions of being industrious
June 1841
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On August 3, 1841, Lady Jane penned a note to Fry, offering an excuse for failing to write sooner: “I had little to tell you respecting the conditions of the female prisoners population here, which . . . would give you any satisfaction to hear, and I shrank from the painful task of being the reporter of evil, and of confessing how little I had personally done. . . .”
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The word “evil” was applied liberally to descriptions of the girls and women exiled “beyond the seas.” The
Courier
announced the arrival of the
Rajah
in the paper’s local news section with this warning:

The female prisoners brought out in this ship appear to be of much better character than usual; their behavior during the voyage was very good, doubtless in a great degree the result of the indefatigable care which appears to have been exercised both with reference to their morality and physical comfort. The Lieutenant-Governor most judiciously afforded every facility to the inhabitants who had applied for servants, to obtain them direct from the ship; this is a most desirable arrangement, for even an hour’s contamination in that receptacle of wickedness, the Factory may prove of lasting evil to the unfortunate creatures who once enter it.
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Although the Catos were dismissed from Cascades for their transgressions, there was nowhere to send the increasingly rowdy members of the Flash Mob. The more they were punished, the more unruly and outrageous their rebellion. Five months before Ludlow’s arrival, the infamous Ellen Scott was charged with “violently assaulting Mr. Hutchinson with intent to kill or do him some bodily harm.”
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The women at the factory realized they had nothing left to lose as their treatment worsened, and the Mob escalated from simple defiance into all-out war.

Among those involved in the May 6, 1839, riot was Ann Maloney, the Londoner who had left behind a penny for her loved one W. F., engraved with two hearts and two doves. Fourteen years into her life sentence for larceny in a boardinghouse, Ann turned bitter and ornery, her optimism long departed from the days she inscribed the love token inside Newgate Prison. A year after being admitted to Cascades, she attempted escape with a friend named Martha Griffith. While scaling the prison wall, Ann broke her leg, and the constable sentenced both girls to bread and water in solitary confinement. In 1829, Ann had married and was remanded to her husband’s oversight for the remainder of her sentence, an escape clause for female convicts. But when the couple was caught running a brothel in Hobart Town, she was returned to Cascades and the company of her Flash Mob mates.

Malnourished, neglected, and increasingly angry women were packed tight behind the stone walls. Seething frustration toward hypocrites like the Reverend Bedford, controller and abuser of many, fueled the Mob’s fury. Five others participated in the insurrection directed toward the often-tired, paper-pushing superintendent. Each was charged with insubordination for “forcibly, violently and in a turbulent manner resisting Mr. Hutchinson and refusing to obey his lawful commands.”
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He immediately sentenced Ann Maloney to twelve months at the washtubs and sent Ellen Scott to Launceston for two years’ hard labor.

The Hobart Town newspapers printed in-depth stories about the Mob’s escapades and included more details in the police report section. In an article about Ellen Scott and her conspirators, the
Colonial Times
wrote:

We have appended to the title of this article, the term “
Flash Mob
;” that this term is technical, is sufficiently obvious; but few of our readers,—few, indeed, of any who possess the ordinary attributes of human nature, can even conjecture the frightful abominations, which are practised by the women, who compose this mob. Of course, we cannot pollute our columns with the disgusting details, which have been conveyed to us; but we may, with propriety, call the notice of the proper Functionaries to a system of vice, immorality, and iniquity, which has tended, mainly, to render the majority of female assigned servants, the annoying and untractable animals, that they are.
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Despite these declarations of condemnation, the
Colonial Times
filled many columns with tasty tidbits about the women so often deemed unworthy of its time and attention. Ellen Scott was not alone in providing fodder for gossipmongers. Whisperers were all about town in the shops, gardens, and pubs.

After the departure of the Female Factory’s dark heroine, a new cast of colorful characters emerged more vibrant than ever from this theater of unimaginable horrors. Each player took an unspoken oath to torment her captors and stand by her sisters. Like Ellen Scott, Catherine Henrys reached legendary status inside Cascades and across Van Die-men’s Land. Twenty-nine, with deep pockmarks across her face, she was transported from Ireland in 1836, the same year as Agnes. She quickly became a master of ingenious escapes, like tunneling her way out of solitary confinement with a sharpened spoon, and using tied blanket strips to scale the stone walls. Tall for her time at five feet, six inches, Catherine sported two tattoos on her right arm and was nicknamed “Jemmy the Rover.” During one escapade in 1841, she put on men’s trousers, tucked her hair under a boy’s cap, and headed into the bush to work as a timber cutter. Before her return to the Female Factory she lived free for a year, chopping down trees with Samuel Dobbs, a freed convict whom she would later marry.
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The Flash Mob tended to attract the conspicuously rowdy, but someone literate like Ludlow Tedder would be highly prized for her skills. Her ability to write and deliver messages during her regular pilgrimage from Liverpool Street to Cascades undoubtedly assisted love affairs and contraband smuggling. Such a proper matron was ideal to convey colored scarves and gaudy jewelry for the rebels with a sense of humor and a cause at Cascades.

Ludlow quickly figured out the survival maze inside the prison and how things really worked for those on both sides of the walls. Her regular trek up and down the valley afforded plenty of time to hatch a plan for Arabella’s return. For today, it was August 1841 and all of Ludlow’s attention was focused on a lovely Scottish redhead and a new baby boy who had been born at the Female Factory. The mother was called Janet Houston, and she had named her son William.
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