A Commonwealth of Thieves (3 page)

Lord Sydney, later first Viscount Sydney, was a political operator whose real name was Thomas Townshend. He already had a solid political career, having been Secretary of War in a previous government and then Home Secretary under both Shelburne and Pitt. He was thought to be a good man who lived an orderly life in Chiselhurst and avoided the extremes of drinking and sexual adventure which characterised people like Sir Joseph Banks and James Boswell. Oliver Goldsmith depicted him as the sort of lesser talent with whom great spirits such as Edmund Burke had to deign to negotiate. But he shared with Burke a passionate dislike of Lord North, the British Tory prime minister, and applied himself to the settlement of the American Revolution which had begun under North's government. His sympathies lay in particular with those loyal subjects who would lose their American lands, savings, and standing, and he was involved in organising a new home for American loyalists in Nova Scotia, where there would grow a city named in his honour.

In 1779, the most significant witness to appear before the Commons Committee on colonies was Sir Joseph Banks, a great naturalist, commentator, sensualist, and society figure. On Cook's
Endeavour,
as leader of a number of distinguished artists and scientists, the young Banks became so famous from his Botany Bay discoveries of new species that Linnaeus, the famous Swedish scientist, suggested that if New South Wales were proven to be part of a continent, the continent should be called Banksia. Now a man in his early forties, the bloom of outrageous health and intellectual energy on his cheek, Banks was liberated from all want by the rent of small tenants and the agricultural income of family estates at Revesby Abbey in Lincolnshire. Even though, in the journal of his voyage as a young scientist with Cook, Sir Joseph described Botany Bay as barren, he urged the committee to consider that it might be suitable for transportation, and that there was sufficient fertile soil to sustain a European settlement. From there, too, escape would be difficult, he said. The climate was mild, there were no savage animals, and the “Indians” around Botany Bay, estimated at hardly more than fifty, were not hostile.

Sir Joseph Banks was asked whether he thought land for settlement might be acquired from the Aborigines “by Cession or Purchase.” Banks said he thought not, that there was nothing you could give the Aborigines, or Indians, in return for their soil. He told the committee that the blacks were of wandering habits and would “speedily abandon whatever land was needed.” The Aboriginals were blithely nomadic; New South Wales was
terra nullius,
no man's land.

In the end, this Commons Committee left the question of transportation destinations open, but also recommended the building of two penitentiaries, where the prisoners would be kept in solitary confinement with hard labour. By 1786, however, no progress had been made on the sites of the penitentiaries and the government had decided to begin transportation again. Crime levels had jumped because of the sudden discharge of members of the army and navy after the war in America. Lord Sydney was left to write, “The more I consider the matter, the greater difficulty I see in disposing of these people.”

So by the end of 1785, Prime Minister Pitt and Lord Sydney and his Undersecretary, a former naval purser named Evan Nepean, were still looking for a scheme. They considered Africa again, a tract of country on the west coast between 20 and 30 degrees South latitude, near the mouth of the river Das Voltas (now the Orange River), where there were copper deposits. Convicts could be shipped out in slaving vessels which could then proceed up the coast and pick up their accustomed cargo of African slaves to take to America and the West Indies. The many American families that were still anxious to live under British rule could be sent to Das Voltas to serve as the discipliners and employers of the convicts. In preparation, the government sloop
Nautilus
was sent out to survey the Atlantic coast of Africa up to about modern Angola, but its ultimate report was that the country was barren, waterless, hopeless.

In March 1786, Londoners and their aldermen again petitioned against the unsatisfactory solution represented by the hulks. They reminded the government that demobilised and unemployed sailors would make a mob and, imbued with the fancy American ideas of the rights of man, would set convicts free and burn the hulks. The hulks had brought the risk of mayhem and uprising as well as shipboard epidemics to within a long boat's reach of shore.

At last, in August 1786, Cabinet finally plumped for New South Wales, the preposterously distant coast Cook had charted sixteen years past. Londoners rejoiced that a decision had been made to resume transportation. They believed it would mean an end to the river hulks.

A London alderman wrote to Jeremy Bentham, a young political philosopher with ideas about prisons who was then in St. Petersburg in Russia, visiting his brother, who had a contract building ships for Catherine the Great. Bentham was developing a plan for a panopticon penitentiary, a huge circular prison where every prisoner would be visible from the centre—an idea which Bentham had derived from observing the way his brother had organised his office in the St. Petersburg shipyard. The alderman told him the “government has just decided to send off 700 convicts to New South Wales—where a fort is to be built—and that a man has been found who will take upon him the command of this rabble.”

From the alderman's letter it sounded as if contemporaries saw the task of leading the expedition to New South Wales as potentially destroying whoever was selected for command. The man the government chose was an old shipmate of former purser, now Home Office Undersecretary, Evan Nepean—a forty-nine-year-old Royal Navy post-captain named Arthur Phillip, a man of solid but not glittering naval reputation, with some experience under fire. He had been at sea since the age of thirteen, and had no connection with the British penal system. But that did not worry the non-visionary Tommy Townshend, Lord Sydney. He just wanted a robust fellow to mount a flotilla and empty the hulks for him.

two

T
O CONVICTS,
P
HILLIP WOULD LATER
convey the very breath of civil magisterium, even though his early childhood might not have been much more socially elevated than some of theirs. Not only had he known British seamen, who came from the same class as the convicts, but he had been a child of marginal London as well, the London where the lives of worthy strugglers like his mother were not immune from predatory crime. Arthur's mother, Elizabeth Breech, had been married to a sailor named Herbert. Some claim Herbert rose to captain's rank in the Royal Navy; others that he was a foredeck hand. Seaman or Captain Herbert died while still in his twenties of a fever caught during his duty on the Jamaica station. Indeed, it did not seem he had lived long enough to become a captain. Phillip's mother then married Jacob Phillip, a “native of Frankfurt” and a teacher of “the languages.” If Jacob were, as his name implies, Jewish, this would have laid down another fascinating dimension to his child Arthur Phillip's brand of Britishness. Arthur was born in October 1738, and grew up in Bread Street in the City of London. It was not necessarily an address of privilege, but many good houses and some fine churches characterised the area.

Arthur was admitted to the charity orphan school at the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich in 1751. The school was for the sons of poor seamen, “training them up to a seafaring life.” Young Arthur's presence indicated that either Jacob Phillip gave up his language teaching to become a seaman and died as a British tar, or—far more likely—that Arthur was presented to the school as the child of the Englishman Herbert. Going to Greenwich was therefore a deception which might have added further secretiveness to the boy's manner. To his duty of transporting criminals, Phillip would bring his habits as a thorough-going British captain, but also a nature so complex and hidden behind official formality, for which he had an appetite, that it is hard to find the quivering human within.

His transportees are in many ways far more legible. At least half of them would be London convicts from areas north of the Thames River: Stepney, Poplar, Clerkenwell, St. Giles's and Seven Dials, Soho. (Only a minority came from the South London dockside regions.) In the tenements around St. Giles's parish in Soho—the famed Rookery of St. Giles—and in Spitalfields to the east, in squalor unimaginable, lived all classes of criminals, speaking a special criminal argot and bonded together by devotion and oaths taken to the criminal deity, the Tawny Prince. The Tawny Prince was honoured by theft, chicanery, and a brave death on the gallows. And, of course, by speaking his language,
flash
or
cant,
which was incomprehensible to the respectable persons of the court. In flash talk, a
pal
was a pickpocket's assistant who received the
swag
as soon as the pickpocket had lifted it. A
kiddy
was the fast-running child to whom the pal passed the swag. A
beak
was a magistrate, a
pig
a Bow Street runner.
Tickling the peter
was opening a safe, and a
fence
was a receiver of stolen loot. All these terms mean something to us now through their entry into mainstream English, but at that time they were incomprehensible to respectable persons and officers of the courts.

“A leading distinction, which marked the convicts from the outset in the colony,” wrote a military officer named Watkin Tench much later, when a convict colony was at last established in New South Wales, “was the use of what is called the
flash
or
kiddy
language. In some of our early courts of justice, an interpreter was frequently necessary to translate the deposition of the witness, and the defence of the prisoner. This language has many dialects. The sly dexterity of the pickpocket; the brutal ferocity of the footpad; the more elevated career of the highwayman; and the deadly purpose of the midnight ruffian, is each strictly appropriate in the terms that distinguish and characterise it. I have ever been of the opinion that an abolition of this unnatural jargon would open the path to reformation.”

Cant was spoken in the many public houses in the City and Spital-fields that were centres for prostitution, the fencing of stolen goods, and the division of plunder. “Hell houses” was a common name for such places. They were found in a number of notorious locations: Chick Lane, Field Lane, Black Boy Alley. Over their half-doors fleeing criminals were free to toss whatever they had plundered.

There were special conditions which had driven many rural poor to the cities and towards crime. The English countryside was undergoing a revolutionary process known as enclosure. Villages had previously been organised according to a system of scattered strips of open land variously owned by peasants and landlord, and shared common ground. This had been the way since feudal times. Under a series of Enclosure Acts passed by the Parliament at Westminster, villages were reorganised by enclosure commissioners according to new agricultural efficiencies, so that the ground of the chief landlord, of prosperous farmers, and of various small-holders was consolidated and fenced. In reality, enclosure drove small farmers and agricultural workers off land their families had worked for centuries. Many smallholders not only found the expense of fencing with barriers of hawthorn and blackthorn beyond them, but discovered that the “common land” traditionally shared by the community, on which they and more marginal peasants had depended to run their livestock, was now fenced off too. The ancient right of the peasant to hunt and scavenge for game and produce from the landlord's ground also vanished as the crime of poaching came into being. And this process was occurring at a time when the cloth produced in cottages was required less and less, as great loom factories were established. Traditional village, church, and family controls on the way men and women behaved broke down as families became itinerant and set off for cities.

Oliver Goldsmith's famed lament for the uprooting of rustic populations, the poem
The Deserted Village,
was written in 1770 when great numbers of people were seeking parish poor relief because of enclosure, and the dispossessed pooled in big towns. In these times, says a historian, “Everyone below the plateau of skilled craftsmen was undernourished.” And the rural poor became poorer still. Some became the scarecrow people of the countryside, but many more were forced towards the cities, creating a dangerous under-class, who saw crime as a better option than working an eighty-hour week as a servant, or toiling for the unregulated and dangerous gods of machine-based capital.

The precise extent to which the great Georgian dislocation produced Phillip's bunch of convicts is still a matter of debate, but Goldsmith himself, until his death in 1774, had no doubt that enclosure had become the great despoiler of rural virtue in the British. Addressing his rhetorical address to a fictional deserted British village, he declared:

… a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroy'd can never be supplied.
A time there was, ere England's griefs began,
When every rood of ground maintained its man;
For him light labour spread her wholesome store,
Just gave what life requir'd, but gave no more:
His best companions innocence and health;
And his best riches, ignorance of wealth.

Times had changed for the worse, thought Goldsmith. Now, he said:

… The man of wealth and pride
Takes up a space that many poor supplied;
Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds.
Space for his horses, equipage and hounds;
The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth
Has robb'd the neighb'ring fields of half their growth.

As a case in point for Goldsmith's thesis one might look at an adolescent convict like Sarah Bellamy, who came from an impoverished rural family frequently on parish relief in Belbroughton in Worcestershire. They were the sort of people who might once have been cottagers but, since enclosure, lived in housing “occupied by paupers of the said parish.” At the age of nine, Sarah began work for one of the parish overseers, and from the age of fifteen she was employed by Benjamin Haden, a weaver. At that age she was charged with stealing from Mr. Haden one linen purse, value tuppence, as well as 15 pounds 15 shillings in coin and promissory notes. Whether she would have committed the crime if she had still been a cottager's daughter enjoying “ignorance of wealth” can be debated, though people of like mind to Goldsmith would have said her days would have been blithe, habitual, crimeless village days.

Sarah ended up in Worcester prison in the spring of 1785 and heard from within her public ward the beginning of the Worcester quarter sessions, the arrival of the touring judges being a festive event attended by the local gentry, farmers, and other spectators. The judges, said a French commentator, “enter a town with bells ringing and trumpets playing, preceded by the sheriff 's men, to the number of twenty, in full dress, armed with javelins.” All this ritual of legal majesty must have greatly awed a country girl about to be tried.

There was something strange about Sarah's case. Her master, Benjamin Haden, was embarrassed about appearing as part of the prosecution, and it could be that the promissory notes she was accused of stealing were forgeries by him, for he soon appeared before the summer assizes on a bankruptcy charge. When sentenced to be transported beyond the seas for the term of seven years, Sarah “guiltily prayed to be publicly whipped at afternoon at the next two market days,” instead of being shipped away. But this pleading was not accepted.

The relative emphasis put upon property is shown by the fact that at the same assizes one of the listings reads: “Richard Crump for killing Richard Bourn, found guilty of manslaughter, fined one shilling.” January 1788 would find Sarah Bellamy chilblained and pregnant aboard the
Lady
Penrhyn
in the flotilla on its way to Botany Bay.

Humane spirits would have also read as one of “England's griefs” the presence of John Hudson in the first compilation of felons for New South Wales. Hudson had been a child of nine years in October 1783 when with an accomplice he was said to have broken a narrow skylight above a window in a house in East Smithfield, the home of William Holdsworth, a chemist. The glass of the skylight was “taken perfectly out.” Inside, Hudson and his accomplice collected one linen shirt, five silk stockings, one pistol, and two aprons.

Though the English were proud not to have a police force, since police were associated with the French and thus with tyranny, the Bow Street Runners, London's deliberately token police force founded in 1749, arrested Hudson and told one witness it was “the third time they had had him within ten days.” They claimed he confessed to them.

Brought to court, John Hudson found that Justice Wills and the jury wore nosegays of fresh herbs to counter the emanations of gaol fever—typhus—from the ragged prisoners of Newgate.

Court to prisoner: “How old are you?”

“Going on nine.”

“What business were you bred up in?”

“None, sometimes a chimney sweeper.”

“Have you any father or mother?”

“Dead.”

“How long ago?”

“I do not know.”

Mr. Holdsworth the chemist then testified to the court that he had found two toe marks on the glass of the skylight, and on a table, sooty feet marks. Holdsworth said, “I took the impressions of foot and toes that were on the table with a piece of paper as minutely as I could.” One wonders how genuinely probative the impressions could have been.

The judge, Justice Wills, replied: “I do not much like the confession of a boy of nine years old. I would rather do without it if I could.” But a woman witness had seen John Hudson at a water tub, sitting upon it to wash himself. “I told him that it was water we made use of for drinking and I did not choose he should wash himself there.” Then, ascending the stairs by a nearby boarding house, she found the loot from Mr. Holdsworth's bundled in a corner. A pawnbroker identified John Hudson as the boy who had pawned a shirt to him.

The judge instructed the jury that the only thing that fixed the boy with the robbery was a pistol found by the water tub. “One would wish to snatch such a boy, if one possibly could, from destruction, for he will only return to the same kind of life which he has led before, and will be an instrument in the hands of very bad people, who make use of boys of that sort to rob houses.”

He was found guilty of the felony, but not of the burglary, and sentenced to transportation for seven years “to some of His Majesty's Colonies and Plantations in America.” There was no separate child's prison for him pending transportation, and so he was thrown in with the adults at fearsome Newgate.

Lost children like Hudson had lately proliferated in the cities. Chimney sweeps, commonly used by professional criminals to gain entry to houses, were a sign of the disordered times. They were orphans and the illegitimate children of paupers, often sold into service for seven years. Such a child “is disposed of for twenty or thirty shillings, being a smaller price than the value of a terrier.” For boys like Hudson, there was no childhood. William Blake mourned their misuse in two separate poems, both entitled
The Chimney Sweeper.