The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (6 page)

By the summer of 1834, the child who had entered Mr. Green’s mill eighteen months before was now a woman of almost fourteen. In a blur of yesterdays and tomorrows that all looked the same, Agnes completed her sentence. With stupefying repetition, 548 days, 8,222 hours of picking wool, had somehow passed. Strand by strand, the fifteen-hour days toughened her hands and fingers. She’d had enough of Glasgow. Agnes and Janet launched a new plan the day the left the mill. They would save their coins for lodging in Kilmarnock, a lovely town where Agnes’s mother Mary had once lived.

2

Crown of Thieves

Glasgow Green

Agnes felt light-headed as she stepped across the threshold defining the boundary between the mill and the street. Over and done at last; the sooner forgotten, the better. Eagerly she took in Glasgow’s June breeze, a welcome relief from the stale air in Mr. Green’s bothy. Today even a whiff of coal dust smelled like freedom. Her shabby shift felt comfortable and familiar compared to the coarse factory uniform she had tossed behind her. Relief, however, was fleeting. Her newly found liberty was sweet, yet it quickly left a bitter aftertaste.

Agnes’s hair was a dead giveaway to her status as thief. The thirteen-year-old was marked, and there was little she could do about it. Her closely shorn locks invited suspicious looks from shopkeepers and street vendors alike, who knew all too well what such short hair meant. It would be months before it grew back to a length that allowed her to blend into her surroundings. Even a bonnet was only a temporary disguise. Her workhouse haircut effectively barred her from any honest occupation. Nobody had any interest in listening to an ex-mill girl sing. What’s more, her spot by the Glasgow Green had been taken over by another anonymous young balladeer, and it would take a tussle to get it back. Everything had changed, and nothing had changed.

In 1834, a young girl came of age when her “crowning glory” grew long enough for an up-do, complete with layers and layers of cascading ringlets. So valued was a woman’s hair that the wealthy saved every strand to weave into ornamental bracelets, hair adornments, and watch fobs. Agnes, however, wore the crown of thieves, branded for as long as it took her hair to grow back. The shorter a lass’s locks were, the more recent her gaol time.

During her eighteen months at the mill, Agnes had, in the eyes of society, graduated from ragtag orphan to reprehensible thief. Gone were the days when a concerned mother offered a cup of milk or a kindly shopkeeper tossed a penny her way. Begging was a lost cause for a young adult. She would only be swatted away with an angry “Gae straecht to hell, ye sneak!” Besides, the blind, the crippled, and the infirm staked out the prime street corners for donations from passersby.

In
Sketches by Boz
, published in 1836, Charles Dickens observes the tragic drama of two London girls the same ages as Agnes and Janet: “These things pass before our eyes, day after day, and hour after hour—they have become such matters of course, that they are utterly disregarded. The progress of these girls in crime will be as rapid as the flight of a pestilence, resembling it too in its baneful influence and wide-spreading infection. Step by step, how many wretched females, within the sphere of every man’s observation, have become involved in a career of vice, frightful to contemplate; hopeless at its commencement, loathsome and repulsive in its course; friendless, forlorn, and un-pitied, at its miserable conclusion!”
¹

Meandering through the morning’s damp mist in search of Janet, Agnes considered her options—though certainly with a bit more optimism than Dickens, or she might have given up entirely. Fortunately, she’d been blessed with a bit of talent, and her singing brought in a few shillings every now and again. Yet her days as a street performer were dwindling. Though there was nothing cuter than a wean belting out a lively tune from a doorway, she was a betwixt-and-between awkward adolescent, emaciated like everyone else but not nearly as pathetic as young mothers crooning with babes in arms.

Agnes could not return to the mill. She’d rather die in the alley. Nearly fourteen, she was old enough to work as a housemaid or cook, but she needed references to be considered. Moreover, why would anyone risk hiring a convicted criminal with so many others in line for a job? From an economic perspective, it made sense to be a thief. For girls her age, the rewards of theft were higher than those of millwork—and the hours much shorter. Thieving was also preferable to prostitution.

Nineteenth-century British social reformer Mary Carpenter echoed this reality as she lobbied for the education of children like Agnes: “If a helping hand be not extended to raise them . . . these form the perishing classes . . . who unblushingly acknowledge that they can gain more for the support of themselves and their parents by stealing than by working.”
²

Agnes understood, and followed, Carpenter’s conclusion. With true-blue friend Janet Houston, she returned to the life she knew best. Her first heist was for newer clothes. Pawnshops and secondhand stores thrived in abundance around the Glasgow Green. Many residents operated cellar shops located underneath their homes. Entered from a flight of steps off the alley, they were the cheapest places to find used shoes and boots. The prize selection for a girl like Agnes was a sturdy pair of low-heeled half boots that tied just above the ankle. Well broken in by several previous owners, the leather was a soft and pliable shabby brown. Cellar shoppers also hunted for thick wool socks, practical and warm albeit thoroughly dingy. Homeless youngsters either bartered for clothing with freshly pilfered booty or purchased it with coins received from stolen merchandise they sold to fences.

For some, the instinct to survive fueled the unseemly practice of literally stealing clothes off the backs of the weak and gullible. According to Henry Mayhew, a journalist of the time: “This is generally done by females, old debauched drunken hags who watch their opportunity to accost children passing in the streets, tidily dressed with good boots and clothes. They entice them away to a low or quiet neighbourhood for the purpose, as they say, of buying them sweets. . . . When they get into a convenient place, they give them a halfpenny or some sweets, and take off the articles of dress, and tell them to remain till they return, when they go away with the booty.”
³

Known as “child stripping” and performed by those hardened from decades on the street, this lowly act of desperation bode ill promise for both Agnes’s and Janet’s future. The two youngsters, however, spent little time worrying about what might lay ahead. What they dreaded most about winter—the fear of freezing to death during the night—was on temporary hiatus. Now that Scotland’s warmest season had arrived, the closely knit pair felt as though huge boulders had rolled from their backs. They would only need to pilfer food for the day and not bother about buying a bed for the night.

Agnes hadn’t seen her mother since she’d been in the mill and didn’t feel welcome on Goosedubbs Street anymore. Some summer evenings, the grey-eyed lass and the spirited redhead hunkered down in a familiar doorway inside the East End wynds. Other nights they crawled into a sheltered hideaway along the River Clyde. Hours before industry’s stir-rings shook Glasgow from restless slumber, the clear sweet song of the lark awakened the girls.

Soon after dawn, their idyllic river retreat lost its luster. Once the winds picked up, an inescapable stench arose from the raw sewage and industrial waste being dumped directly into the River Clyde. Pollution killed the fish, whose corpses then lay along the shore, adding to the fetid odor. It was time to move on.

Careful to avoid the stinging bristles of nettle plants that had taken over the muddy river’s edge, Agnes and Janet watched glossy black-birds dive and swoop along the banks. Atlantic winds warmed by the Gulf Stream brought an unusual lightness to the air, and Agnes found a bounce in her step. She felt like singing again. This was going to be the best summer ever.

The fair on the Glasgow Green was a week away. This working-class holiday was a bonnie break from the press of sixteen-hour days on the docks or in the tannery. For street waifs, it was a celebration of unlimited possibilities. Young thieves like Agnes and Janet were known as “sneaks.” Lacking the skill for picking pockets and the tools for clean house breaks, they sneaked about seeking ready targets for theft.

Although a good friend, Janet was not an ideal partner. Her russet tresses stood out like a flashing beacon in a crowd. On July 2, 1834, two days after Agnes’s release, a constable caught Janet carrying off a bolt of blue-and-white fabric from a shop owned by James Fraser on High Street. A judge sent the sassy redhead straight back to Mr. Green’s mill for sixty days. Only half the pair was arrested because the lookout did not get caught. Out of the officer’s direct sight, Agnes must have blended into the crowd and made her getaway. It was Janet’s turn to take the fall. Theirs was a friendship but also a business partnership that helped them through another day. The fair wouldn’t be the same without her trusted confidante. Bad luck and bloody hell. Now she was a gang of one.

On her own for two months, Agnes knew enough street people to get by. The summer of 1834 lumbered on as she drifted through the alleys, counting the days until Janet’s release. She had big news to share. No sooner had Janet been freed from Mr. Green’s than Agnes grabbed her hand and dragged her to the corner of Saltmarket and Greendyke Streets. Ta-da! Englishman William Mumford had opened a theater in a ramshackle shed next to the Glasgow Green.

Listening for the sound of musicians who signaled the lifting of a canvas flap, the laboring class and the homeless gathered around and watched a new form of entertainment in a neighborhood rife with brothels and unlicensed taverns. Sword in hand, Mr. Mumford played the lead in
Rob Roy
, a play about the romantic Scottish outlaw born in the seventeenth century. As he poured glass after glass of gin down his throat, he lectured his patrons on the evils of drink.
⁴
Mr. Mumford might have been rather surprised to learn that his primitive theater would become Scotland’s most famous penny
geggy
, a Scottish term for “show.”

Boxing matches, cockfights, fortune-tellers, jugglers, and players of the “mouth organ” (harmonica) brought a kaleidoscope of entertainment to Glasgow’s teeming East End. These spontaneous, frequently ribald, and sometimes bizarre performances diverted attention from the daily real-life dramas of the weary and abandoned playing throughout the tenement slums.

Agnes turned fourteen during the second week in September, when the deep purple heather burst into full bloom. Her hair had grown long enough to be less conspicuous as she roamed the wynds around the Green. Janet had completed her sentence just in time for Agnes’s birthday and the lingering remnants of summer warmth.

The days were soon shorter as autumn approached and October’s heavy rains returned. By November, the sun all but disappeared. The first snowflakes fell in December and posted a stark reminder of the holiday celebration that had gone so terribly, terribly wrong nearly two years ago, when Agnes was involved with the gang of burglars. This year, Agnes and her blue-eyed chum managed to sing holiday songs and pilfer their way through the season without getting caught.

On December 31, Glasgow came alive in holiday celebration. Agnes and Janet brought 1834 to a close as they bellowed out a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne,” written by national poet and favorite son Robert Burns. Church bells across the city chimed at the stroke of midnight. This was Hogmanay night, Scotland’s most important holiday, elevated in importance because of a long-standing ban on Christmas. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the Presbyterian Church forbade Christmas celebrations, fearing pagan origins among its traditions.

Hogmanay traditions, practiced continually since the 1600s, marked the season of rebirth as days became longer and nights shorter. Scots cleaned their homes thoroughly, paid off their debts, and burned juniper branches to ward off evil spirits for the coming year. Inside Glasgow’s west-side mansions, holiday merrymakers feasted on whiskey and steak pie. This was followed by traditional black buns, a type of fruitcake filled with raisins and currants, covered with pastry. If Agnes and Janet were quick enough on their feet, they’d lift a bun or two from a delivery basket left unattended. After all, Hogmanay was a high holiday for thieves. An abundance of revelers carried bottles of whiskey from door to door, and as midnight approached, inebriated celebrants provided easy picking for their watches and their money.

The upper crust exchanged gifts on Hogmanay and practiced a custom called “first-footing.” Depending on who it was, the first guest to enter a home after midnight brought either good or bad fortune for the new year. Visitors delivered coins and packages of coal, signaling the wish for security and warmth. According to folklore, the preferred first guest was a tall, dark, handsome man, because he was more likely a “true” Scotsman than someone fair-haired, perhaps descended from Viking invaders who terrorized Scotland for three hundred years. A redheaded first-footer was considered bad luck, a redheaded woman the worst of all.

Janet’s bright hair caused her own bad luck, as she stood out in Glasgow’s wynds. She was arrested again for petty theft on February 16, 1835. While Janet plodded through another mill sentence, Agnes took Helen Fulton, a kimmer (young girl) from the Goosedubbs neighborhood, under her wing.

Then, shortly after Janet’s return, Agnes was arrested for petty theft. On April 14, 1835, the comely fourteen-year-old was sentenced to another sixty days in Mr. Green’s mill. The grey-eyed lass fingered the locks that would be mercilessly shorn. Her hair had just started to grow out, and now she was back in chains. Back to the bothy again, bloody bad luck.

Agnes took her place in the cart with the other prisoners. The wagon creaked forward as the workhorse headed down the familiar path toward the mill. Yellow marsh marigolds and white hawthorn buds marked Agnes’s trail of frustration.

Frolic o’ the Fair

Agnes spent the spring in the mill, but was happily released from picking wool before temperatures reached 120 degrees inside the building. Through a stroke of good luck, the fourteen-year-old stepped out of the factory in time for the 1835 Glasgow Fair. It was the one holiday she could happily celebrate without a home. Established by William the Lion in 1190, the fair opened on the second Monday in July and lasted a full week. Everyone in Glasgow was in a better mood, even the shifty-eyed fences who turned stolen goods into a few coins. A halfpenny admission transported the youngsters through a rainbow of fluttering flags. “The air resounded to the strains of bagpipes, trumpets, trombones, cymbals, bass drums, and touters’ horns. Sideshow touters, dressed in threadbare stage clothes of many and soiled colours, were doing their shouting and cavorting best to attract people with pennies in their pockets.”
⁵