TRANSPORTED TO VAN DIEMEN’S LAND – AGED 3

August 1, 2024 By in Human transportation Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

The King’s Orphan Asylum, later known as the Queen’s Orphan Schools, the girls’ school to the left of the chapel, boys’ school to the right, Mount Wellington in the background. The idyllic scene masked the horrors which were imposed on its inmates.

Bruce Lindsay has researched and written about the life and times of his great grandfather, John Lindsay. John was the son of Scots highland Traveller parents, transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) at the age of three with his mother, Mary, in the mid-1830s. Mary had been one of a group of travellers who invaded a home-based store at Sweetie Hillock (just outside Aberdeen), and stole a number of items, including clothing, food and drink. Mary was transported for fourteen years, accompanied by young John. His story throws much light on the little-known life experiences of transports to Australia (whether convicted or not) and is a valuable historical record. Below is an edited version of a chapter from Bruce’s fascinating colonial family history.

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John Lindsay is thought to have been born at Inverness on 15th January 1832, in the year following the marriage of Isaac Williamson and Mary Lindsay. Common Scots naming practice at the time was for the bride to retain her maiden name, although children generally adopted their father’s surname. However, children of female convicts travelled under their mother’s name, and without this convention, we may have never established the connection to our family line. 

John first appears in our records sitting in the tinkers’ horse-drawn cart in March 1835, while his parents and the rest of the troupe confronted the shopkeepers at Sweetie Hillock. After his safe arrival in Hobart with his mother on 25th April 1836, and following a decision by Lt Governor Arthur on 4th May 13 children of mothers confined at the Cascades Female Factory were admitted on 5th May to what was then known as King’s Orphan Asylum (from 1837, upon assumption of the British throne by Queen Victoria, as the Queen’s Orphan Schools). Surviving records show John was listed as “#341, John Linsay (sic), Age 3 at Sept 5 1836, Father unknown, Mother a Prisoner”. Routine practice was to remove children from convict women, either for the term of their mothers’ servitude, or until they reached the age of 14. 

The orphanage is described by contemporary and later observers as a severe and uncaring place, in which young John may well have felt intimidated and alone. Robert Hughes, in his seminal work The Fatal Shore, quotes the Reverend Robert Crooke – catechist with the Van Diemen’s Land Convict Department at the time – as saying: 

“The slightest offence, whether committed by boy or girl, was punished by unmerciful flogging and some of the officers, more especially females, seem to have taken a delight in inflicting corporal punishment… The female superintendent was in the habit of taking girls, some of them almost young women, to her own bedroom and for trifling offences… stripping them naked, and with a riding whip or a heavy leather strap flagellating them until their bodies were a mass of bruises” (p. 525). 

A surviving Report on the state and conduct of the orphan schools dated 30th August, 1848, by the Inspector of Schools, Charles Bradbury, provides depressing details of the physical and educational conditions under which John and the other inmates lived. He said:

 “The punishments employed are the cane, solitary confinement, and in extreme cases the birch; few of the latter only have occurred during the last four years. Solitary confinement is inflicted perhaps once in the course of a fortnight; 48 hours have been resorted to as a severe punishment, but the customary time is about two or three hours. The offences, so far as I could ascertain, appear to be those ordinarily incident to large schools; there are none of a flagrant character, petty stealing, violence, and oppression towards each other; occasional indecent and blasphemous language are the chief varieties of misconduct.”

 (This report was part of a despatch from Lt. Governor Sir William Denison to Earl Grey and was copied from the British Parliamentary Papers Volume 8, pp356-374, held at the University of Tasmania Library).

In her comprehensive study of children’s lives at the orphanage, Joyce Purtscher (Children in Queen’s Orphanage, Hobart Town, 1828-1863) describes a daily regimen beginning at 5.00am in Summer or 6.00-6.30am in Winter, with a mix of play and classroom instruction. Inspector Bradbury recorded that: 

“The industrial training is on a very limited scale: the trades taught are only those of the tailor, shoemaker, and baker. Not one of the boys is employed in farming or gardening. The boys in the shoemaker’s shop are taught repairs alone, not one can cut out, or is acquainted with the making of a shoe. The shoes in the first instance are supplied from the Ordinance Storekeepers’ Department”. 

Since internal records from the orphan schools do not survive, if indeed they were ever kept, we cannot confirm whether John may have undertaken basic training in shoemaking during his time there, even though he later practised the trade with his stepfather, William Higgs.

Schooling took place in large single rooms 50’ X 30’, heated by one small fireplace. Bradbury noted that the only teachers in the boys’ school, girls’ school and infants’ school were unqualified and had never previously been engaged as teachers. This was reflected in the children’s typically poor reading and writing skills, of which Bradbury was scathingly critical. 

Of the children’s very limited scholastic abilities he observed somewhat laconically: 

“I found the members of the upper classes with reference to secular information very deficient, far below the average of the primary schools I am accustomed to visit. Several, especially in the first class, can read with tolerable correctness, though with no expression; but they cannot explain the meanings of many of the commonest words…”, “There is nothing attractive, stimulating, or strengthening in the whole routine, and, at the same time, little actual information is given, that the memory may possibly retain. It would seem, indeed, that, for the ages of the children, their mental capacity and intelligence, are, as a general result, in inverse proportion to the duration of their attendance in the school”. 

He further noted that the children’s capacity to learn was not helped by the fact that they were required to stand in class, there being no seating. 

Care of the boys’ physical wellbeing was apparently as peremptory as their schooling. They slept in hammocks 80 to a dormitory, and bathed their upper bodies in cell-like rooms paved with flagstones, with stone water troughs in their centre. There was no hot water. Once a week, winter and summer, they were taken to the Derwent River to bathe. Bradbury observed

 “In the personal habits of the boys, I think cleanliness and order might to a much greater extent be enforced. In their dress they are mostly untidy, and in some instances so dirty, that it is unpleasant to stand near them, from the odour arising from their outer clothes”. 

The orphanage was always overcrowded, hastening the spread of any disease, and in 1843 (while John was there) 56 children died from Scarlet Fever. Even the handsome convict-built stone chapel – St John’s Anglican Church – was heated only by four small fireplaces, one of which was located conveniently abreast of the Governor’s pew. The children could freeze, but not His Excellency. 

The interior (2014) of St John’s Anglican Church, New Town, which doubled as the chapel for the Orphan Schools. The gallery shown was used to accommodate the orphans, girls to the left of the monitors’ enclosure, boys to the right. Free settlers rented named and lockable pews on the ground floor (now replaced with standard movable pews facing the sanctuary).

Given several damning assessments of the incompetence of the orphan schools’ provision neither of physical care, nor of any stimulating curriculum or training, it is heartening that young John not only survived the time he spent there, but appears to have emerged ready to take his place in the world. From such unpromising parentage, and such inadequate schooling, he appears to have become a sober, hard-working young man with strong ethics and family values. His later service to his large family was augmented by a willingness to become involved in community affairs (when living at Winslow in Victoria), and the generation by the community of genuine respect and affection for the man.

Originally the Chapel for the orphan schools, this handsome building, designed by Colonial Architect John Lee Archer, and built with convict labour in 1835, is now St John’s Anglican Church, New Town – WITH heating.

Boys’ section of the Queen’s Orphan Schools, where John survived 11 years from 1836 to 1847. Photographed in 2012, and externally largely unchanged, it then housed the “Meals on Wheels” organisation.

Joyce Purtscher further tells us:

“When children turned 14 years of age, they were apprenticed out. They had to work for no money until they were 18. They were at the mercy of their masters regarding food, clothing and housing”. 

John was released from the orphanage on 26th August 1847, and apprenticed to Mrs Mary Cox, a remarkable woman who had operated several businesses in Launceston. Her late husband, John Edward Cox, was licensee initially of the Macquarie Hotel in Hobart, and later the Cornwall Hotel in Launceston, owned by John Batman – the co-founder of Melbourne. He also initiated Tasmania’s first coaching service between Launceston and Hobart, and fathered nine children, eight of whom survived. Upon his death in 1837, responsibility for management of family and businesses fell to his wife. 

Assuming that, as outlined by Joyce Purtscher above, John was required to work for Mrs Cox without payment until he was 18 years old, by 1851 he would have been free to live and work where he pleased. We know from the 1848 Census that Mary Lindsay and William Higgs were then living together in Adelaide Street, Westbury (after marrying there in 1844), and Higgs had resumed his trade as a shoemaker. John probably joined them after leaving Mrs Cox. Surviving records do not tell us in what trade or capacity John was indentured, but it is possible that he learned the basics of shoemaking when at the Orphan School. Since on the title to his Westbury property later in the 1850s he is listed as a shoemaker, he evidently joined his stepfather in the trade, although this possibility has not been confirmed by searches for business registrations or commercial advertisements. But we know that at that time he adopted his stepfather’s surname, becoming known as John Lindsay Higgs.

John’s signature on the title deed for 1 Reid Street, Westbury, which he sold on 28.5.1862

Under that name he married Charlotte Wells at Westbury on 3rd July 1857. Charlotte was the free-born daughter of former convicts Robert Wells and Margaret Casey. They married in her parents’ private home “according to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Wesleyan Church”. Although born of convict parents on 13th January 1839, Charlotte never suffered the horrors of the Queen’s Orphan School, having been raised by her parents in Longford and Launceston. 

John appears to have been industrious and successful in his trade, since he managed to acquire property in Westbury, and ultimately to sustain a large family. It seems that the married couple lived on a block of land in what is now Reid Street, Westbury, purchased on John’s behalf by Higgs, where Charlotte gave birth to their first child – John – on 5th July 1858. In 1859, with Higgs subsiding into alcoholism, John acquired the nine-acre block owned by him on Suburb Road, Westbury, from the mortgagees to whom it had been surrendered. They continued to live at Reid Street, where Charlotte produced their second child – Alexander – on 28th October 1859. Their third child – Robert – was born on 5th May 1861. 

John was devastated by his step-father’s suicide on 17th December, 1861. For reasons unknown, he shortly thereafter sold the Reid Street property and acquired a 160-acre rural block at Liffey Plains, near Westbury, from where we presume he continued his shoemaking business. He also deleted “Higgs” from his surname, reverting to “Lindsay”. In the absence of Title records, we must presume he sold the Liffey Plains property late in 1862, then embarked from Launceston with the family aboard the Western for Portland, Victoria, arriving there on 9th August 1862. It is possible that he sought to remove himself from the strong social stigma attaching to suicide at the time, and make a new start with his wife and family. 

They settled at Winslow, a small town north of Warrnambool in Victoria’s Western District, where John probably established a shoemaking business in his own name, and from 1883 he and Charlotte assumed management of the local Post Office. Their family continued to grow and Charlotte produced 14 healthy children over a period of 28 years – the last when she was 48 years old – a quite remarkable achievement now, and even more so on the cusp of the 20th century.

The Winslow Post Office and store, attached to the south east front corner of the house in which John, Charlotte and their family resided from 1893 to 1922.

John died on 20th November 1890, when drawing water from a freshwater lake about 100 metres from the back of the family home in Winslow. To reach the water, it was necessary to descend steps, from which newspaper accounts reported John slipped and fell. One of his daughters discovered his hat and coat floating on the surface, and raised the alarm. By the time help arrived, John could not be revived. His age was given as 56 years, though if his assumed birth-date of 1832 is correct, he would have been 58. 

The sometime freshwater lake in which John drowned while drawing water for his family. The house is off to the left of this picture, about 100m away. Since that time, a tannery operated on the lake’s shore, and the water is now brackish.

So ended the last direct family connection to the redoubtable Mary Lindsay. The large family produced by John and Charlotte developed in ways that Mary as a Highland Traveller could never have imagined. John’s wife Charlotte lived until 7th January 1922, dying at Winslow from a cerebral haemorrhage and pneumonia, aged 83. 

John Lindsay, wife Charlotte and infant daughter, Eliza rest at Tower Hill cemetery near Warrnambool.

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Readers may also be interested in my book Condemned: The Men, Women and Children Who Built Britain’s Empire, which includes the Van Diemen’s Land experience, though not the King’s Orphanage story. My thanks to Bruce for bringing it to my attention and for allowing this part of his family history research to appear on Gristly History.

STEALING THE BONES

July 26, 2024 By in ILLICIT ARTEFACTS Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Cropped from http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-32986578., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Large collections of bones and body parts lie in dark corners of Australian, American and European scientific institutions. They are the remains of First Nations people acquired during colonisation and shipped to medical establishments, private collectors and museums for preservation, study or exhibition. It is thought that 10 000 or more of these corpses or part corpses were sent to Britain alone and possibly thousands more to other countries. 

This grisly catalogue, sometimes called ‘the first stolen generation’, was assembled during the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries by a puzzling assortment of individuals with a variety of motivations. Sometimes the impetus was money. Sometimes it was what is now seen as a misguided sense of contributing to the advancement of science. Always it was simple racial prejudice based on the flawed belief that Indigenous Australians were some sort of ‘missing link’ between modern and prehistoric humanity. 

One of the most active body thieves was William Ramsay Smith, a Scottish doctor who became the coroner of South Australia in the 1890s. He gathered Indigenous remains from many sources, including asylums, prisons and elsewhere. Skeletons, heads and other body parts were sent to Ramsay Smith’s alma mater, Edinburgh University, where his friend, D J Cunningham, Professor of Anatomy, further desecrated them in the name of science. 

When the body of a popular local Ngarrindjeri man known as ‘Tommy Smith’ ( Poltpalingada Booboorowie) disappeared while under Ramsay Smith’s control, an inquiry was established in 1903. Ramsay Smith, or someone under his authority, had filled Tommy’s coffin with sandbags. He had then dissected the body and sent the parts to Edinburgh.[i] Gruesome evidence was also given of heads kept in kerosene tins and of a going black market body snatching rate of ten pounds for a skeleton. Ramsay Smith was reprimanded but suffered no lasting damage to his reputation and continued as the state coroner. He also continued his close interest in First Nations bodies. When he died in 1937 more than a hundred human skulls were discovered at his house.

Ramsay Smith was only one of many bone collectors either trading or acquiring remains for what they usually claimed were scientific, medical or anthropological research. Beneath this delusion lurked the pernicious idea, derived largely from Charles Darwin’s theories on evolution, that European culture was the most developed and advanced ‘civilisation’ in the world. First Nations people were considered to be at the beginning of a hypothetical chain of evolution and so, went the scientific thinking of the time, should be closely studied. Researchers needed body parts to investigate and there was also a morbid curiosity among private collectors for examples of what they considered exotic lifestyles, including skins displaying customary markings, pieces of skeleton – one man’s skull was made into a sugar bowl – and, of course, heads. Full skeletons of adults and children were taken from graves and morgues, boxed up and despatched to waiting recipients across the seas.

Dark as these practices were, even more reprehensible parts of the Indigenous body trade depended on frontier violence. In April 1816, a group of Gandangara people was attacked by a military force at Appin, NSW. Fourteen or more men, women and children died, including the leader, Cannabayagal. According to an eyewitness, he and two other warriors were hanged from a tree. The soldiers then ‘cut off the heads and brought them to Sydney, where the Government paid 30s and a gallon of rum each for them.’[ii] When the National Museum of Australia received three repatriated skulls from the University of Edinburgh, one was that of Cannabayagal.[iii]

The unsanctioned removal of remains is a source of ongoing grief and trauma for First Nations communities. Many are anxious to have the remains of their ancestors returned so they can be given proper burials according to law and custom. Ongoing efforts to ensure that stolen body parts are returned to their country have had limited success. While the Australian government supports repatriation, some overseas institutions have been uncooperative in agreeing to returns. There are also practical difficulties in identifying remains and in deciding on the most appropriate way to honour them should they be returned to their First Nations descendants. 

Here are some links to news stories about some recent repatriations:

From Austria:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-17/aboriginal-ancestors-stolen-from-graves-repatriated-from-austria/102982426

From the Smithsonian Museum, USA:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-04/indigenous-remains-repatriated-from-smithsonian/101272318

From Manchester Museum, England:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-06/manchester-museum-returns-groote-eylandt-indigenous-artefacts/102814024

NOTES

[i] Adelaide AZ, ‘William Smith’s part in Adelaide trading of Aboriginal people’s bodies exposed by 1903 Tommy Walker scandal’, (from ABC Radio National The History Listen), https://adelaideaz.com/articles/coroner-william-smith-s-part-in-adelaide-trade-in-aboriginal-people-s-bodies-exposed-by-tommy-walker-scandal-in-1903, accessed June 2023.

[ii] Grace Karskens, ‘Appin massacre’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2015, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/appin_massacre, accessed June 2023.

[iii] Paul Daley, ‘Restless Indigenous Remains’, Meanjin Vol 73, No 1, 2014, https://meanjin.com.au/essays/restless-indigenous-remains/, accessed June 2023.

DEFYING THE SYSTEM IN SALEM, 1661

May 26, 2024 By in Human transportation Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

In the seventeenth century, those unfortunate enough to be transported from Britain to the American colonies were sometimes sold to their colonial masters in exchange for cattle or corn. They were not slaves but the conditions in which they laboured were slave-like. Some fought back.

Will Downing and Phillip Welch were before the Salem Quarterly Court of June 26, 1661. They were there for ‘absolutely refusing to serve’ their master, Samuel Symonds, any longer. Seven years earlier, Symonds agreed to pay the master of the ship Goodfellow ‘26li.[pounds] in merchantable corn or live cattle’ due before the end of the following October for the two young men kidnapped from their beds in their own country. They were neither convicts or indentured servants and were almost certainly sold illegally into servitude. Nevertheless, Will and Phillip had worked their master’s fields ever since. And he insisted that he had paid good value for them to do so for nine years, not seven.

One Sunday evening in March 1661, Will and Phillip joined the Symonds family in the parlour for prayer, as usual. Before the family and their servants began to worship, Phillip declared to his master ‘We will worke with you, or for you, noe longer.’ Symonds sarcastically inquired if they were not working what would they do – ‘play?’ 

Phillip and Will stood their ground. They had served Symonds and his family for the seven years they believed to be their penance for simply being in the wrong place at the time Cromwell’s soldiers were scouring their area for victims. Symonds told them that they were obliged to work for him unless they ran away, a crime with severe punishment. They did not wish to flee; instead they pleaded ‘If you will free us, we will plant your corne, & mende your fences, & if you will pay us as other men, but we will not worke with you upon the same termes, or conditions as before.’ 

This must have been a memorable moment in the life of the family and its servants. All had been living and working cheek-by-jowl and praying regularly together for seven years. There was some talk about business difficulties as Symonds sought to make his servants see what he considered to be sense. His wife backed him up, saying this was not a good time to bring up the subject of money. But the young men remained adamant. When their master asked them to begin prayers together, they refused. Next morning Symonds summoned the local constable to his home, demanding that the rebellious servants be ‘secured.’ The constable wondered whether it was necessary for the men to be taken away, but Symonds insisted a warrant be served on them and that they should be paraded before the court. Which they duly were.

Now William and Phillip had a chance to state their case: ‘We were brought out of or owne Country, contrary to our owne wills & minds, & sold here unto Mr. Symonds, by ye master of the Ship, Mr. Dill, but what Agreement was made betweene Mr. Symonds & ye Said master, was neuer Acted by our Consent or knowledge, yet notwithstanding we haue indeauored to do him ye best seruice wee Could these seuen Compleat yeeres …’

William and Phillip considered they had already served their time, and more, because the usual practice of transport ship masters was to sell their stolen human cargoes in Barbados for only four years servitude. But now for seven years the two men had labored on Samuel Symonds’ ten acres of corn ‘And for our seruice, we haue noe Callings nor wages, but meat & Cloths.’ 

For his part, Symonds testified that he had made a bargain with the shipmaster and he had the ‘covenant’, or contract, to prove it. There was a supporting deposition from the shipmaster who said he had sold Symonds ‘two of the Irish youths I brought over by order of the State of England.’

Some other servants gave evidence. One man who had been kidnapped and transported with Will and Phillip described how they had all been rounded up against their will ‘weeping and Crying, because they were stollen from theyr frends.’ Some of Symonds’s own servants testified to the resentment of Phillip and Will against their situation and their determination to be free. Phillip reportedly said at one point that if Symonds would give him the same share of his estate as he would give his own children, then he would continue to serve.

The intensely personal nature of the relationships of master, family and servants in the Symonds household is clear in these testimonies. But the court, rightly or not, found the arrangement was legal and decreed that Will and Phillip should continue to serve until May 1663. An appeal was notified immediately but the two men agreed to work for Symonds until a date for the hearing could be set. He was bound to give them leave to attend.[i]

Whether this appeal was ever heard is not known. Possibly the full nine years were served before it could be and Will and Phillip were finally unbound. If so, they could then sell their labour in an open market and start the families they wished for in the New World. 

From Condemned: The Transported Men, Women and Children Who Built Britain’s Empire

Notes

[i] Salem Quarterly Court. Salem, Massachusetts. June 25, 1661. Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, vol. II, 1656-1662, pp. 298ff at https://archive.org/stream/recordsandfiles00dowgoog#page/n307/mode/2up, accessed December 20, 2017. Welch’s proper forename was Phillip, as noted in the court records. Some references to these records claim that the youths were referred to as ‘slaves’ –  they were not, see Jennie Jeppesen, ‘Within the protection of law’: debating the Australian convict-as-slave narrative’, History Australia, vol 16, issue 3, 2019, at https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/TYGCVFDNDUFDAY5NSGNN/full?target=10.1080%2F14490854.2019.1636674&, accessed November 2019.

THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF GOBAN SAOR

April 15, 2024 By in Folk Traditions, slang Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

(Image by Sheila 1988, Wikipedia Commons)

Irish stonemasons used a secret language known as bearlager na saor (also as Bearla lagair)., said to have come down from the great ancestor of masons, Goban Saor (variously spelt and pronounced gabawn seer). The mythic Goban Saor – Goban the builder – was, and is, the subject of a body of folktale traditions that present him as a clever and greatly skilled artisan who always outwits those who try to harm him or to refuse his rightful fee for work done. It was he who handed down the closely guarded skills of the stonemason, together with their confidential speech.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, American word sleuths became aware of a curious language spoken by itinerant Irish workers, particularly stone masons. It was neither Old Irish, Gaelic or even Shelta, but seemed to have some similarities to all of these, as well as its own characteristics. One companion of itinerants, named A T Sinclair, inquired further into this among older Irish stone masons in Massachusetts and discovered that ‘On mentioning the subject to some old Irish masons here in Allston, I was surprised to find they could speak this language which they called “Bearla lagair na saor … a large number of other old Irishmen knew there was such a mason’s talk called ” Bearla lagair” ‘[1]

Sinclair’s informants told him this was a language known only to stonemasons and that no apprentice could claim his ‘indenture’, or trade qualification, without being able to speak it. Masons were forbidden to mention this speech to anyone who was not one of their guild, including their own families. The trade secrets also included special signs, skills and ways of using their tools, together with a variety of rules that must be followed and through which a mason could identify himself to another adept of the craft. Sinclair also collected stories about the Goban Saor, including this one which gives the origin of a famous stone mason’s mark:

Sometimes a love of adventure led the Goban Saor to wander incognito as a common workman. His renown as an architect and artistic sculptor was widespread. One simple story which amuses these workingmen is this. The Goban Saor once, in a foreign land, applied to the master- builder of a cathedral for work. ” What can you do? ” asked the master. “Try me and see,” was the laconic reply. Then the builder placed him in a work-shed alone by himself, and, pointing to a block of stone, said facetiously, “Carve from that a cat with two tails.” The shed was fastened at night, and the next morning Goban had disappeared. When the master unfastened the shed and looked in, he found that the block of stone had been most beautifully carved into a cat with two tails. With an exclamation of surprise, he ejaculated, “It was the Goban Saor himself! No other human being could do such superb work, or so quickly.”[2]

Sinclair gave a selection of Bearla lagair words, mostly those similar to the travellers’ language of Shelta, including:

Un twede dut na bini – do you speak Mason’s talk?

Minkur – low people

Shin – sing

Eolor –  mortar

Glom -yell

Miar – devil, bad luck

Shihukh – whisky, with Sinclair’s comment ‘a large number of other words also’

Skrugal – throat

(NB – diacriticals removed here and throughout)

Bearla lagair was still being spoken by older Irish stonemasons resident in London during the 1970s and was reported to have been widely spoken among Cork stonemasons.[3]

In short, no one really knows exactly where this cryptolect comes from. But we do know that it existed as a secret language among Irish stonemasons and, perhaps, still does. The Stonemason’s Guild of St Stephen and St George maintains a ‘cosmopolitan’ version of Bearla lagaire developed around London and said to be a more sophisticated speech than the ‘argot used by rural rough masons’. The Guild says that the language, which they call ‘bine’, was regularly used in the UK and Ireland until the 1980s and that there are still stonemasons ‘who still hold and use the language today.’ [4]

[1] Sinclair, A. T. ‘The Secret Language of Masons and Tinkers’, The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 22, no. 86, 1909, pp. 353–64. P. 354. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/534860. Accessed 8 Apr. 2024

[2] Sinclair, p. 356.

[3] Mudcat Café thread, ‘Goban Saor’, May and August 2002. See also Brian Cleeve, ‘The Secret Language’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 72, No. 287 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 252-262, 363.

[4] https://www.guildsg.org/bearlish, accessed September 2019.

FRED THE RIPPER

April 8, 2024 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment
Frederick Deeming with a moustache drawn on the image in ink, Victoria Police Museum

Could he have been ‘Jack the Ripper? The remarkably evil life of Frederick Deeming is one of the most chilling stories of Australian, and global, crime. Even if he did not commit the Whitechapel murders of 1888, his known slayings make him one of the worst serial killers of the nineteenth century.

Beaten by his unstable father and imbued with fear of damnation by his God-obsessed mother, Frederick Bailey Deeming got off to a bad start in life almost as soon as he was born in Leicestershire, England in 1853. He was already known as ‘Mad Fred’ when he went to sea around the age of sixteen and soon became a cunning criminal. Fraud and false pretences were his favoured offences, though he also thieved from time to time.[i]

With an ability to turn on the charm and a persuasive way with words, the ruggedly handsome young sailor with blue eyes, fair hair and a ginger moustache had little trouble forming serious relationships with respectable women. In 1881 he married Marie James in England. By the middle of the next year he was in Sydney where he had jumped ship and started work as a plumber and gas fitter. By the time Marie arrived to join him he had already served a six-week sentence for stealing gas-burners. The couple would have four children over the next few years during which Deeming briefly ran his own plumbing business until he was declared bankrupt and serving two weeks for committing perjury. In January 1888 he turned up, alone, in Cape Town, South Africa where, using the alias Henry Lawson, he conducted several successful swindles.

Back in England in 1890, and still calling himself Henry Lawson, Deeming bigamously married Helen Matheson, using the proceeds of a fraud to pay for the wedding. Soon after, he had to quickly leave the country and escaped to Uruguay, South America. He was later arrested there, returned to England and given nine months in prison for fraud, though he  avoided any charge of bigamy.

After release in 1891, Deeming took another alias, Albert Williams, and rented a house in Rainhill, Lancashire. By this time, his deserted wife and children had tracked him down and Marie revealed her husband’s bigamy to Helen. Apparently too embarrassed at the social stigma this would bring upon her, Helen did not inform the authorities. Deeming, now fearing what else Marie night reveal about him, made an elaborate pretence of reconciliation and convinced her and the children to join him at Rainhill. It was a fatal error.

Shortly after the reconciliation ‘Williams’, now posing as an army officer, married for a third time. The unlucky woman was Emily Mather who, after the expensive wedding, sailed with her new husband to India where he said he had a posting. But Deeming changed the arrangements and the newlyweds went to Melbourne instead. Here they rented a house in Windsor. Always ostentatious, even if mostly with other peoples’ money, the outwardly charming ‘Druin’, as Deeming was now styling himself, soon became well known in the suburb. But in January 1892, he and his third wife disappeared.

Now, a chain of events began that would lead to Deeming’s eventual downfall. The next tenant in the Windsor house complained of a foul smell in the premises. A hearthstone in the bedroom was pulled up to reveal Emily’s badly decomposed remains. She had been beaten around the head and her throat slashed. In the house police also found a copy of the invitation to the wedding banquet of A O Williams and Helen. 

In a little over a week, the police tracked Deeming down to the Western Australian mining town of Southern Cross where he was calling himself Baron Swanston and posing as an engineer. After murdering Emily he had committed some further frauds and sailed to Sydney. There the apparently personable murderer soon convinced another young woman to become his fiancée. He then left for Western Australia, arranging with her to follow him when he was settled.

Deeming’s arrest ignited what would become a national and international press sensation. An English journalist used details from Australian sources to backtrack Deeming to his previous rented premises in Lancashire. The authorities there were prompted to investigate. Under the kitchen floor they found the bodies of Marie and the four children, all with their throats cut. The enormity of Deeming’s crimes was now apparent. 

The press certainly thought so and went into one of the regular ‘feeding frenzies’ that have become all too familiar since. A kind of mass public hysteria arose, known as ‘Deemania’. The accused  was called ‘a human tiger’ and his actions dubbed ‘the crime  of the century’. He would also be described, inaccurately, as ‘ape-like’ and a forensic expert would later claim that his skull was similar to that of a gorilla.[ii]

Although entitled to the presumption of innocence, Deeming was effectively tried and found guilty in the newspapers of the English-speaking world. He was tried for the murder of Emily under the name of ‘Williams’. His defence, which included Alfred Deakin, destined to be an early Australian Prime Minister, argued that the accused had been denied a fair trial, which was probably true. Deeming was almost certainly an epileptic, having suffered from fits for much of his life. He may also have been a schizophrenic fantasist who actually became the identities he invented as he committed his crimes. But after an unwise address to the jury from the dock and some unconvincing psychiatric testimony, he was quickly found guilty and sentenced to death. 

After being refused leave to appeal by the Privy Council, Edward Bailey Deeming, alias Albert Williams and at least four other pseudonyms, was hanged on 23 May 1892. Always a poser, he walked to the gallows smoking a cigar. His last words were reportedly ‘Lord, receive my spirit’. Outside the prison wall, twelve thousand people assembled to await the news that the monster was dead.

His death was celebrated in an English children’s street rhyme based on the then popular belief that Deeming was Jack the Ripper:

On the twenty-first of May,
Frederick Deeming passed away;
On the scaffold he did say —
“Ta-ra-da-boom-di-ay!”
“Ta-ra-da-boom-di-ay!”
This is a happy day,
An East End holiday,
The Ripper’s gone away.[iii]

Deeming was undoubtedly guilty of the horrendous murders of  his children and two wives, with the likely intent to kill another. But could he have been ‘Jack the Ripper?

In the overheated press speculations on the case, the fact that Deeming’s movements in 1888 were murky, together with the grisly nature of his crimes, led to speculation that he might have been the Whitechapel killer. Some credibility was attached to the claim when Deeming told fellow prisoners that he was the ripper and also expressed a murderous dislike of women. This was based on his venereal infection, probably of syphilis, contracted from a prostitute during his extensive travels. When directly questioned about this on the eve of his execution, deeming refused to confirm or deny the possibility.

But the theory has so many flaws that it is taken seriously by very few.[iv] A major problem is that Deeming’s murders bore little resemblance to the butchery of most of the Whitechapel victims. Nor were the women he killed prostitutes. Unlike the Whitechapel murderer, Deeming was not known to have taken trophies of his victims. Finally, wherever Deeming was during those bloody months of 1888 – probably South Africa – there is no evidence that he was anywhere near London, let alone the east end.

But there is no doubt that he slew Emily, the crime for which he eventually hanged, and that he also killed Marie and his children. He never confessed to any of these murders but while in prison during the lead up to his trial and as he awaited execution, Deeming wrote his autobiography, later destroyed, and poetry, which included the lines:

The Jury listened well to the yarn I had to tell, 

But they sent me straight to hell.

Deeming’s death mask

From Australia’s Most Infamous Criminals

[i] Barry O. Jones, ‘Deeming, Frederick Bailey (1853–1892)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/deeming-frederick-bailey-5940/text10127, published first in hardcopy 1981, accessed online 26 July 2022.

[ii] The Argus, 25 January 1930, p. 6.

[iii] Larry S Barbee, ‘Frederick Bailey Deeming’, Jack the Ripper Casebook, https://www.casebook.org/ripper_media/book_reviews/non-fiction/cjmorley/48.html, accessed July 2022.

[iv] Over fifty books have been written about Deeming, often revolving around the unlikely belief that he was Jack the Ripper. See Worldcat Identities, ‘Deeming, Frederick Bailey 1853-1892, https://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n2007021186/, accessed July 2022.

BANDIT LANDS 12 GIOVANNI TOLU

February 21, 2024 By in BANDIT LANDS Tags: , Leave a comment

Ritratto di Giovanni Tolu eseguito a Sassari dal fotografo Averardo Lori e tratto dal libro di Enrico Costa del 1897

As a boy, the neo-Marxist philosopher and writer, Antonio Gramsci  was fascinated by the tales he heard of Giovanni Tolu, the Sardinian bandit. Gramsci went on to a celebrated career, dying in a fascist prison in 1937. Amongst other things, he was an influential theorist of power. Tolu was one of the powerless. Little-known, today, his story is a classic example of the outlaw hero, or ‘social bandit’.

The lofty granite mountains of Sardinia, groves of olives and grapes, scrubland and forested pathways are impenetrable to those who do not know them. Steep valleys and chasms complete this lonely landscape, ideal for bandits. But it was the fractured politics and economic conditions of the island that for centuries made it a byword for bandits.

Giovanni Tolu’s (1822-1896) banditry began in 1850. He was a hard-working and respectable farmer who came into conflict with the local priest, a man named Pittui. Smitten by the priest’s maid, Maria Francesca Meloni Ru, Tolu eloped with her in 1850. Marriage and almost everything else was controlled by the church then and when Pittui found the couple, the pregnant Maria was dragged back to her parents’ home. Enraged and insulted, Tolu later attacked the priest in the street, beating him almost to death. This dire act initiated his thirty or-so year bandit career. 

Despite beating up the priest, Tolu was deeply religious and superstitious. He used violence like a good social bandit should – only when necessary and to defend himself. Like many other bandits in Catholic cultures, he also claimed to have always sought divine guidance before murdering, as his biographer described:

‘One day he decided to murder a certain Salvatoro Moro. As I went to his house … I begged the Mother of God to enlighten me and to show me whether this man really deserved death. I also commended my soul to God in case I should be surprised and killed by my enemy’. Tolu apparently received the answer he sought: ‘After I had slain Moro I loaded my gun afresh, after which I said a ‘Hail Mary’ and prayed for the repose of the departed soul. In this way I learned that I had killed the body but not the soul of my enemy.’[1]

Tolu also murdered one of his accomplices who betrayed him. Despite these killings, he had the reputation of a good bandit. He was pursued for thirty years but managed to elude all those who came after him, killing several Carabinieri. He was later reunited with his and Maria’s grown-up daughter and lived a more or less respectable, and highly respected, life among a supportive regional community until his arrest in 1880. He was tried in a local court for murder but acquitted because he was acting in self-defence.

Shortly before his death, Tolu is said to have delivered his life story to the Sardinian lawyer and writer, Enrico Costa. As Costa tells it, he was sitting in his garden one sunny day when the then 74-year-old brigand appeared and handed him a manuscript, saying  ‘I want … to give in this way a warning to my colleagues, a lesson to flighty young men and a word of advice as to the manner ln which the government should treat the poor people’. 

Unlikely as this incident is – Tolu was illiterate – Costa turned his story into a book that was popular throughout Italy. Although much romanticised, there is no doubt that Tolu was considered a friend of the Sardinian poor and that they actively supported him in his bandit life. Tolu did not leave to see his life in book form, he died in 1896, the year before Costa’s book appeared[2] and became a popular hit in Italy.

[1] Aspen Daily Times, 2 March 1898, p. 3

[2] Giovanni Tolu, Wikipedia, https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Tolu, accessed February 2024.

SING A SONG OF JACK THE RIPPER

November 15, 2023 By in MYSTERIES Tags: , Leave a comment

Five millions of people cannot rest in their bed,

The murderer’s knife seems to hang o’er their head,

This demon is hiding in a mysterious way,

Pray Heaven the villain is taken today.

These verses are from one of a number of street, or ‘broadside’, ballads produced about the Whitechapel murders, perpetrated by someone known only as ‘Jack the Ripper’. 

When the Ripper first struck, London’s east end was already a byword for depravity and crime. From its origins and later development into a seething dockland and sailortown the district was rookery of sin which frequently proved everybody right about the bad things it was commonly said to spawn. But this was something especially grotesque.

Perhaps twenty minutes before 4am on 31 August 1888, a passing workman discovered the still warm body of  ‘Polly’ Nichols in Buck’s Row, not far from Bethnal Green. It was a dreadful sight. Her head was almost severed by a savage slash through the throat and her abdomen was deeply gashed with a very sharp instrument.  Her dress was pulled up to her waist, possibly related to her work as a prostitute. The attending surgeon noted a wine glass and a lot of blood in the gutter.

‘Polly’ was the street name of Mary Ann Nichols. She was forty-three years old, though looked ten years younger, and stood just over five feet tall with greying brown hair and grey eyes. An alcoholic, Polly was seen staggering drunk an hour earlier and spoke of her intention to find a client to pay for her night’s doss.

Eight days later, another dead prostitute was found. Annie Chapman has been sliced up much like Polly Nichols, but this time the killer had removed and taken away some internal organs. Alongside her right shoulder lay her small intestine. The uterus and part of the bladder had been removed. The mutilated remains lay in a yard in Hanbury Street and were discovered just before 6am. The attending surgeon thought the horrific wounds must have been inflicted by someone with ‘great anatomical knowledge’.

On 30 September, the remains of ‘Long Liz’ Stride and Catherine Eddowes are found. Swedish-born Stride, 45 years old, has her throat sliced open. She is not mutilated, unlike poor Catherine, whose body is not far away in Mitre Square. In her forties and just five feet tall, her intestines have been sliced out and placed over her right shoulder; the killer has taken a kidney for a souvenir, or worse, along with her uterus. Many of her other organs are also mutilated, including her lower eyelids. When the remains arrive at the mortuary, ‘A piece of deceased’s ear dropped from the clothing’.

These murders were committed in the streets, giving the killer little time to perform whatever dark urges drove him. The next one took place in a lodging house bed in Miller’s Court. With no one to disturb him the serial murderer now dubbed ‘Jack the Ripper’ thoroughly mutilated twenty-five-year-old Mary Kelly, scattering most of her body parts around her and on the bedside table. Both her breasts had been removed.

Several other women had been murdered in the Whitechapel area before Polly Nichols died. The circumstances of their deaths were not the same as those of the five women who are generally accepted as bona fide Ripper victims, but the press, the police and the public all speculated about a serial killer at work in the area. And there were other murders after the death of Mary Kelly, fueling a hysteria and a macabre mystery that persists to the present. These events were also featured in several street ballads. 

The ballad business was in decline by now, finally bested by the superior technology and more effective distribution of newspapers and the sensational ‘penny blood’ magazines. But by the following year, if not long before, at least two Ripper ballads were being sold in Scotland, where a couple of gents were regaled by a ballad seller on his route to Inverness with no less than two classics of the genre. ‘The Demon Jack the Ripper’ focused on the fate of the last victim:

“The demon Jack the Ripper,

Has begun his work once more,

His hate for women is bitter,

He delights in human gore,

The last victim Mary Kelly,

But twenty-six year of age,

Has been served much worse by London’s curse,

You will say I will engage.

Chorus

The demon Jack the Ripper,

Is at work once more,

In Spitalfields Mary Kelly he killed

and left her in her gore.

The rough and ready verses gave a fair account of the state of Mary’s remains:

In the room where she was living.

Her naked body was found,

The Ripper no clue was giving

To those who lived around.

Her body was cut in pieces,

And portions taken away,

Her flesh ’tis shown stripped from her bones,

A terrible sight she lay.

There were some details of Mary’s Irish background and how she ‘fell into shame when to London she came’. Finally, the ballad voiced the question on every mind – when were the police – now considering the use of bloodhounds – going to catch the Ripper?

Where’s the noted bloodhounds,

That such wonders were to do,

That Jack the Ripper is not found

It must seem strange to you.

The authorities in London,

must adopt some more secret plan

Without bloodhounds to hunt him down

For he must be Satan and not a man.

The other song offered by the peddler was ‘The London Murderer’, a catalogue of the Ripper’s crimes and their instant notoriety:

This murderous history has spread thro’ the world.

Of all these poor women to Eternity hurled.

Again, the question why ‘the great men of our modern times’ ‘fail to discover these cowardly crimes’ and the fear in the streets:

Five millions of people cannot rest in their bed,

The murderer’s knife seems to hang o’er their head,

This demon is hiding in a mysterious way,

Pray Heaven the villain is taken today.

The world has ne’er known such cruelty before,

Not even abroad on some savage shore,

Tho’ for a time this monster may flee,

Burnt at the stake this fiend ought to be.

The ballad seller was rewarded with the sale of a shillings-worth of his stock, and a nice tip from his listeners. [1] His songs perfectly reflected the combined fascination with the grisly murders and the fear they produced in the streets of London and much further afield. And they probably helped it to multiply and spread.

[1] From The Inverness Courier, 15 February 1889. See also Paul Slade’s excellent Planet Slade site for more on murder ballads and much more besides at http://www.planetslade.com/index.html. Interestingly, Catherine Eddowes may have been involved with the street ballad trade herself in and around her hometown, see

https://www.casebook.org/victims/eddowes.html

WHAT HAPPENED TO TIMOTHÉE VASSE?

July 28, 2023 By in MYSTERIES, MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING Leave a comment

The ships of Nicolas Baudin’s expedition to Australia, “Géographe” and the “Naturaliste”, at Kupang, Timor. State Library of South Australia

In April 1801 French navigator Nicolas Baudin’s expedition was sailing off the south coast of what is now Western Australia. In the spirit of the age, Baudin was making a voyage of scientific investigation, as well as discovery. He was, of course, also spying on the British colony of New South Wales, though that was not verified until much later.[1]

The voyagers hoped not only to find new places and chart new coastlines but also to make contact with any Indigenous inhabitants they encountered. Equipped with his flagship  Géographe and Naturaliste, under the command of Jacques Félix Emmanuel Hamelin, he was originally accompanied by a large group of scientists, artists and gardeners, though many of these became too ill to complete the voyage, five dying. Many of Baudin’s sailors were also at various stages of the extended expedition. One was lost in the large expanse of the Indian Ocean Baudin named Geographe Bay. 

Or was he?

Timothée Armand Thomas Joseph Ambroise Vasse was born into a bourgeoise family in Dieppe, France in 1774. He grew up and was educated between Rouen, where his father was a legal official, and Dieppe, where members of his extended family lived. During the French Revolution he joined the army, was wounded and later discharged. After a few years as a civil servant, he vanished and joined Baudin’s expedition as a junior assistant helmsman on the Naturaliste. Vasse was in trouble by the time Naturaliste reached Isle de France. Captain Hamelin planned to dismiss him there but lost so many other sailors through desertion that he was forced to keep the troublesome twenty-seven-year-old aboard his ship.

On 30 May 1801, the voyagers encountered what is now Geographe Bay. They landed in small boats and set up camp while the scientists conducted their investigations of the flora and fauna in the area. A few days later, one of the boats was sunk at the Wonnerup Inlet and had to be abandoned. The shore party was rescued but some equipment was left behind. 

Three days later, Vasse was aboard a small boat attempting to recover the equipment. But once again the small boat was swamped by the surf. The crew were washed ashore and only saved by a heroic sailor from another boat who swam ashore through the dangerous waters carrying a rope by which the castaways were able to haul themselves into the other boat. 

Except for Timothée Vasse. Said to have been drinking, he lost his grip on the lifeline and sank into the surf. With no further sign of him, Vasse was presumed drowned and Hamelin made sail, apparently without bothering to confirm the fatality.

The fate of Timothée Vasse would have been simply another footnote in the long history of lost sailors if not for the rumours. Soon after the return of Baudin’s expedition to France in 1803 Parisians began hearing stories that Vasse had not drowned but had survived and been cast away on a strange and very distant shore. Baudin himself was dead by now, but the official expedition account, written by the zoologist on the expedition Francois Peron, discounted the possibility that Vasse had survived. But the rumours persisted and were published in European newspapers. According to these accounts, Vasse lived with the local people for some years then walked hundreds of kilometres of coast to eventually be picked up by an American whaler, handed to the British and subsequently imprisoned in England.

No other Europeans are known to have visited Geographe Bay until after the foundation of the Swan River colony in 1829. When early settlers came into contact with the Wardandi (Wardanup and other spellings) people of the southwest region they began to hear other stories. In 1838 George Fletcher Moore was told while visiting the Wonnerup area that Vasse did not drown. With the help of the local people, he lived for several years and died of natural causes somewhere between present day Dunsborough and Busselton. 

He seems to have remained almost constantly upon the beach, looking out

for the return of his own ship, or the chance arrival of some other. He pined away gradually in anxiety, becoming daily, as the natives express it, weril, weril (thin, thin.) At last they were absent for some time, on a hunting expedition, and on their return they found him lying dead on the beach, within a stone s throw of the water’s edge.

They describe the body as being then swollen and bloated, either from incipient decomposition, or dropsical disease. His remains were not disturbed even for the purpose of burial, and the bones are yet to be seen.[2]

There were other versions of the tale. In one, Vasse was thought to have eventually been murdered. A ‘society in Paris’ was said to be offering a reward for the recovery of his bones – ‘the natives know where they are’, wrote one of the Swan River colony’s early settlers, Georgiana Molloy, in 1841.[3] In another, based on European features observed among Indigenous people around Geographe Bay, it was suggested that Vasse had fathered children with Wardandi women.[4]

Some attempts have since been made to resolve these conflicting possibilities. Among several books and articles on the subject[5] is one written by a descendant of Timothée Vasse. According to Alain Serieyx, family tradition holds that the lost sailor did survive and eventually return to France.[6] The book is a speculative fiction based on this belief but adds another thread to a fascinating tale. 

Whether or not Timothée Vasse lived, pined, and died as a lone white man on a distant continent will never be known for sure. Whatever his fate, his memory is preserved in the name of the Vasse River and of the Vasse region of southwestern Australia.

[1] Jean Fornasiero and John West-Sooby (transl. and eds.), French Designs on Colonial New South Wales: François Péron’s Memoir on the English Settlements in New Holland, Van Diemen’s Land and the Archipelagos of the Great Pacific Ocean, The Friends of the State Library of South Australia Inc., Adelaide, 2014. 

[2] The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal 5 May 1838, p. 71.

[3] Alexandra Hasluck, Georgiana Molloy: portrait with background, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1955.

[4] Oldfield, Augustus. “On the Aborigines of Australia.” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, vol. 3, 1865, pp. 215–98. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3014165. Accessed July 2023, P. 219. Oldfield mistakenly thought Vasse was one of Baudin’s scientists, but his opinion was based on his own observations of the Geographe Bay area.

[5] Thomas Brendan Cullity, Vasse: An Account of the Disappearance of Thomas Timothée Vasse, 1992; Edward Duyker, ‘Timothée Vasse: A Biographical Note’, Institute for the Study of French-Australian Relations, https://www.isfar.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/51_EDWARD-DUYKER-Timoth%C3%A9e-Vasse-A-Biographical-Note.pdf, accessed July 2023; 

[6] Alain Serieyx, Wonnerup: the sacred dune, Abrolhos Publishing, Perth, c2001, translation [from the French] by David Maguire.