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Annie Cossins is an author, actor and criminologist. She is an Associate Professor in the Law School at the University of NSW and a leading legal expert on evidence law and sexual assault law reform. In 2009 she played the role of Sarah Makin in an episode of a TV series, Deadly Women.
A CHILLING TALE OF MISSING BABIES,
SHAMEFUL SECRETS AND MURDER IN
19TH CENTURY AUSTRALIA
First published in 2013
Copyright © Annie Cossins 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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Contents
Author’s note
Prologue
Part I: Who were the Makins?
1 The hanging
2 Sarah Makin: convict daughter
3 John Makin: son of the middle class with a past
4 The deadly secret in Sarah Makin’s body
Part II: Digging up the baby farmers’ secrets
5 The baby trade
6 The Macdonaldtown discoveries
7 To catch a baby farmer
8 The first inquest: two babies called A and B
9 Constable James Joyce: Joycean fictions and the art of deceit
10 More digging and the strange behaviour of the Makins
11 The next five inquests: the Makins’ lives stripped bare
12 The longest, saddest inquest: clothing and other complications
13 The mysterious Mr and Mrs Wilson give evidence
14 The obsessions of James Joyce: digging, redigging and more digging
15 Mothers, mothers everywhere: the George Street inquests begin
16 The day Miss Amber Murray visited the Makins
Part III: Trials, appeals and various petitions
17 The trial of the century: a judge out of his depth
18 The first appeal: the Makins’ struggle against the hand of fate
19 The law passes sentence
20 Last stop, London
21 Makin’s last chance: an ‘innocent’ man under the thumb of a ‘fiendish’ woman
Part IV: Sarah Makin, reformed woman
22 From convict daughter to convict
23 Was Sarah Makin really an evil, deadly woman?
24 The lives that were left
Notes
Acknowledgements
Author’s note
A many years ago
When I was young and charming
As some of you may know
I practised baby-farming1
In 2009, I played the role of a murderer by the name of Sarah Makin in a television docu-drama called Deadly Women. Despite evidence to the contrary, Sarah was portrayed as the ‘deadly woman’ who murdered all the babies found buried in the backyards of various houses in which she had lived with her husband John. By doing so, the program sacrificed many of the facts as carelessly as Sarah was supposed to have sacrificed 13 babies 120 years ago.
But one must be careful with facts. To kill them off unnecessarily not only robs us of the opportunity of ferreting down many a ‘dunny’ lane, it stops us from slipping back into the world of the 1890s—into the narrow, smelly streets of the inner city where the rustling of long skirts and petticoats can be heard along with hurried ruttings in back lanes or secretive seductions on night walks. We would miss a girl’s furtive cover-ups as her skirts and petticoats stretched to accommodate her growing belly and then the shocked gasp of her first labour pains—perhaps as she served her master’s breakfast or stood on the street, trying to earn a living. Sometimes she was assisted by a kindly midwife in a dim-lit room where she gave birth to a red-faced, mewling infant she neither wanted nor knew what to do with. Perhaps, instinctively, she cuddled him close to her leaking breasts, knowing that she could not keep him.
In an age without telephones, a discreet advertisement in the local newspaper brought the baby farmer out of the shadows, caught briefly by the halo of a gas lamp as he visited his next client. And if we look closely, we will glimpse the luxuriant handlebar moustache of John Makin, his hands in his pockets as he strides past the gas light on his way to the home of one of his last customers just a few days before another man with a handlebar moustache, a constable by the name of James Joyce, brought him undone in the best murder mystery tradition.
As I follow in the footsteps of Constable Joyce, I will take you on a tour through the lives of the most notorious baby farmers in Australia—Sarah and John Makin, not young and from all accounts not always charming but with sufficient gravitas to come across as a most dependable, caring couple. By examining their lives in the economic times of the late 1800s, I reveal some things about Australian society towards the end of the ‘virtuous’ Victorian age that will surprise.
In this biography of murder, I describe the most unexplained, unexamined and unbelievable murders ever committed in the Australian colonies, which came to light in the 55th year of the reign of Queen Victoria. At the time of their conviction John and Sarah Makin were said to have committed ‘the worst crime . . . which has ever disfigured the criminal records of Australia’.2 But based on the evidence presented in this book, it appears the Makins were convicted of the death of the wrong baby.
The crude beginnings of the colony of New South Wales in 1788 meant that it bred vice, crime and corruption which, 104 years later in 1892, still moulded the lives and deaths of the poor, the weak and the dispossessed. This was the Sydney of Sarah Makin, John Makin and a cast of other characters who took part in surreptitious pacts to deal with the unwanted babies from seduction and prostitution, imitating what had been happening in Mother England for generations. It was also the Sydney of the obsessive but secretive Constable James Joyce, who changed the lives of the Makins and the course of legal history.
Although television cast Sarah Makin as Australia’s first female serial killer, the whole of her secrets was not guessed at in the television program or in any of the documentation from the 1890s. There was much more to her troubled and criminal life than the shame of being a convicted murderer, although you might think that was enough. There were other dead babies, her own, and the deadly secret harboured in her body.
This book aims to be careful with the facts, although at times the facts find themselves in competition with the opinions of the day. Sometimes I have given my own opinions if they are supported by the facts. Yet the lives of those involved in the events surrounding the gruesome discovery of the Makins’ activities have been, largely, lost to history. Many of them were working-class folk who either did not record what happened or, if they did, their letters and diaries have not survived. Without that information it is difficult to imagine the immediacy and drama of the extraordinary events o
f this time.
In chronicling the careers of the Makins, there are large gaps in the decades of their lives when they are invisible. They only appear from the silent under-class when they have an encounter with the law that is recorded in newspapers, trial transcripts or prison records. When the voices of the Makins are heard, it is difficult to know how accurately they are reported and whether they include embellishments made by reporters who might have emphasised certain words and conduct in pursuit of a good story. People have had a long fascination with the ‘bad’ and the ‘mad’, especially of the murdering kind. It was no less so in 1892 when the Makins were arrested and crowds of people clambered to snatch seats in the courtroom when they were finally put on trial.
The main sources relied on in this book are contemporary newspaper reports, including those of the Makins’ trial,3 law reports of the Makins’ two appeals, family histories and family trees of Sarah and John Makin, Sands Directories of Sydney, original sources such as birth, death and marriage certificates, and the findings from the inquests into the deaths of the 13 babies. Other sources include articles from medical journals as well as histories of the social conditions of Sydney, all of which cover the mid to late 1800s.
Prologue
11 August 1892
On the afternoon of Thursday 11 August 1892, an unmarried couple who called themselves Mr and Mrs Wilson bought a bunch of flowers on a lonely train platform for the last journey they would make to 25 Burren Street, Macdonaldtown. Their destination was a small workers’ suburb squeezed in between Newtown and Erskineville along the train line. Along with a telegram in his pocket, Horace had money to pay for a funeral. He and his girlfriend, Minnie, were the teenage parents of a baby girl called Mignonette. While they had hidden her birth, the flowers and a funeral were the final things they were able to do for their daughter, who became known as the baby who cried too much.
Minnie Davies was a domestic servant living at 31 Greens Road, Paddington. Horace, whose real name was Bothamley, was a proofreader for The Daily Telegraph and lived in Oatley Road, Paddington. Perhaps this is where they met since the two streets are on opposite sides of what was once a reserve. Or perhaps they met at a dance at the nearby Paddington Town Hall which opened in 1891, the year their baby was conceived.
Mignonette Lavinia was born on 10 June 1892 at the home of Mrs Taylor, a midwife who lived at 31 Church Street, Newtown, a good distance from Paddington and Minnie’s inquisitive employer. Named after her mother, Baby Mignonette was a strong child with no deformities who took well to the Nestlé’s milk she was fed. To make sure no-one knew of the birth, Minnie gave Mrs Taylor a false name while Horace registered his daughter’s birth in the name of Wilson.
On 21 June, Horace sought a solution to the birth of his illegitimate child by placing an advertisement in The Sydney Morning Herald in the name of Mr Franklin:
Wanted, kind person to take charge of Baby. Apply, stating terms, to 333 Herald Office, King-st.
This advertisement appeared alongside another ad seeking a kind, motherly person to care for a baby and various ads for clothing, lead and old tools. Although unstated, Horace was seeking a baby farmer, someone who purchased unwanted children.
Horace received a letter the next day from Mr John Burt of 109 George Street, Redfern. That evening he and Minnie walked to George Street from Newtown with their baby, whom they had nicknamed Vinnie. When they arrived at the ‘pleasant-looking’ worker’s cottage in George Street, Horace waited outside while Minnie and her daughter were invited into the house. In the sparsely furnished front room, Mr John Burt introduced his eldest daughter, Blanche, explaining that his wife was ill in bed.
After a discussion of terms, John agreed to adopt Mignonette for a payment of ten shillings a week and to allow Minnie to visit whenever she wished. When they talked about what to feed her child, Minnie insisted on Nestlé’s milk. This was a commerically available substitute for breast milk, produced from cow’s milk, wheat flour and sugar. By cooking the wheat flour with malt, Henri Nestlé had managed to convert the indigestible starch of wheat flour into dextrin, which infants were able to absorb.1 Considered to be the world’s first baby formula, it was cheap, although the concentration of the formula was easy to manipulate by those short of money, such as a Sydney baby farmer, to make a tin of Nestlé’s milk last as long as possible.
After saying a painful goodbye to their precious daughter, Minnie and Horace returned to 109 George Street two days later with a pile of baby clothing. This time, they met Mrs Sarah Burt and introduced themselves as Mr and Mrs Wilson. Neither couple realised the other was using a false name. Mr Burt announced the family was intending to move ‘up the line’ to a house they had purchased. He gave Minnie and Horace their new address as 25 Burren Street, Macdonaldtown. During their visit, neither Horace nor Minnie saw or heard the sound of any other babies.
Devoted to their daughter, Minnie and Horace visited her every Saturday when they paid the weekly nursing fee of ten shillings to the Burts. Since they both lived in Paddington, perhaps they arranged to meet up secretly on Minnie’s day off on a street corner, transforming into Mr and Mrs Wilson as, arm in arm, they strolled down Oxford Street on their way to Central train station to catch the next train to Macdonaldtown.
When they visited their baby on 9 July, Minnie and Horace learnt that Mignonette had been seen by a doctor for an apparently ‘turned’ foot, for which they reimbursed the Burts two shillings and sixpence. One week later, their baby had a slight cold but was otherwise in good health. John reassured them that Mignonette was taking her food well and had even been started on solids. Despite spending an hour and a half in the house Minnie and Horace still did not see or hear the sound of any other babies.
During one of their visits, Sarah confessed to Minnie and Horace that she and John had deceived them, revealing that their name was not Burt but Makin. While Mr and Mrs Wilson did not return the confidence by confessing their real names, they may have wondered what the Makins were hiding. Sadly, Sarah’s confession was not enough for them to make further inquiries or reclaim their daughter. If they had, their story would have had a different ending.
As Minnie would later tell a Coroner’s Court, from the middle of July onwards Mignonette’s cold worsened so that by Saturday, 30 July, her daughter was ‘very sick’. So sick that she and Horace returned to Burren Street the next day. On Tuesday 9 August, Makin sent a telegram asking Horace to ‘come at your earliest convenience’. On his own, Horace hurried to Burren Street to hear the worst news. John informed him that his daughter ‘might not live till tomorrow’ as she was suffering from a ‘wasting disease’. Two days later Horace received another telegram:
To 333, HERALD Office, King-st. Letter waiting at address,
King-st. Come at once.
(Sgd) JOHN BURT, ‘Eilleen House,’ 25 Burren-st, Macdonaldtown.
The letter waiting for Horace contained the news that Mignonette had died the day before, on 10 August.
When the Wilsons arrived at Burren Street with their bunch of flowers between three and four o’clock that fine day, John carried the body of Mignonette into the sitting room. She was laid out on a board and dressed in a long white gown. For the couple who could not bear to reveal their daughter’s existence, theirs was a very private grief.
Minnie and Horace asked whether their child had been taken to a doctor. John reassured them that a Dr Agassiz had diagnosed the baby as suffering from marasmus, a wasting disease, ‘to which all children are liable’. When later asked in court if there were any marks on the child’s head, arms or legs, Minnie said no, that her baby appeared well cared for, clean and comfortably clothed. She and Horace had not noticed that their child was wasting away.
While Minnie and Horace viewed their daughter’s body, John asked Horace whether he had made any funeral arrangements. In turn, Horace asked if John could see to the burial as well as organise a death certificate. John agreed to do so for £2. Apparently grateful that someone else w
ould deal with these difficult matters, Horace agreed to pay the money in instalments. When John asked whether he or Minnie would like to attend the funeral, Horace replied they were unable to because of work commitments.
But John did not arrange an undertaker to collect Mignonette’s body as promised. Instead, that night he dug a small grave in the backyard close to the house. As she was laid in the damp clay soil by John or Sarah, Baby Mignonette was dressed in a white flannel gown with scarlet edging, a blue and white striped petticoat and pink and white woollen bootees. Perhaps the Makins’ two teenage daughters looked on in the chilly night. This was the last burial the family would hold before John, Sarah and their four children left Burren Street in a hurry, leaving no forwarding address for their landlord, who was seeking unpaid rent.
John later sent a letter to Horace informing him of his new address at 55 Botany Street, Redfern, where he accepted Horace’s final instalment for the funeral even though he knew where Mignonette’s body lay.
It was several months before Minnie and Horace found out what had happened to the body of their daughter. But first they would have to reveal their shameful secret in a Coroner’s Court packed with journalists and curiosity seekers, and the Makins looking on. When they did, their secret was published in every newspaper in Australia.
PART I
WHO WERE THE MAKINS?
CHAPTER ONE
The hanging
14–15 August 1893
After Mr and Mrs Wilson exposed their secret lives in a Coroner’s Court in November 1892, Sarah and John Makin were committed to stand trial for the manslaughter of Baby Mignonette. But the police were not satisfied with a manslaughter charge. A constable called James Joyce was convinced the Makins were murderers and set out to gather enough evidence to prove it.
The Baby Farmers Page 1