Despite the intense publicity about the Wilsons’ shameful secret, it was one of the painful ironies of the Makin case that Sarah and John were never tried for the death of Mignonette. Horace and Minnie had to console themselves with the thought that their evidence had given Constable Joyce enough information to recommence his investigation into the suspicious activities of the Makins. Eventually, he gathered enough evidence to send the Makins to trial for the murder of another child. The Great Baby Farming Case became the trial of the century, with Joyce’s investigations being the most dogged, persistent and obsessive Sydney had ever seen.
On Tuesday 15 August 1893, Constable Joyce and the Wilsons were able to privately celebrate the demise of Australia’s most notorious baby farmer. On that day John Sidney Makin was executed at Darlinghurst Gaol for the murder of Horace Amber Murray, a four-week-old baby who had been given the name of an adult but the future of a back-street child. At the time no-one realised or cared that John and Sarah had been wrongly convicted.
Before his death John wrote letters and spent ‘the greater part of the night’ in prayer.1 To the end he denied murdering Baby Horace, leaving an intriguing letter in which he ‘solemnly declared’ that the body of the infant for which he was convicted was not Horace but failing to leave any clues as to who the child was, how it came to be buried in his backyard and what happened to Horace.
He left an affectionate letter to his daughters, asking them to be good and to urge their mother to beg God’s forgiveness so that she might join him in heaven. Like his bravado in life, when faced with death he seemed to have every confidence that his crimes would not prevent his entry into heaven. Yet John also declared that his wife ‘did not murder the child supposed to be Amber Murray’s’, leaving an intriguing question mark over Sarah’s need to ask for God’s forgiveness and who, out of John and Sarah, was guilty of what.
At his end, John Makin was fortunate since his execution was a professional job. As he had meted out death so he received his. His death was instantaneous as he swung from the gallows with a broken neck.
When John learnt of his fate the day before his execution, he said he was ready to die: ‘I thought as much. Well, I am quite prepared for the end’. On that Monday afternoon, he was visited by his brothers, Daniel and Joseph, who had done so much to try to save his neck, as well as his step-daughter and step-son-in-law, Mr and Mrs Helbi, and his devoted daughters, Blanche and Florence. He had already said a passionate goodbye to his wife, Sarah, the previous Thursday before she was transferred to Bathurst Gaol to begin her term of life imprisonment.
During the family’s one hour visit, perhaps John’s brothers lamented the unfairness of his death sentence, since they believed that Sarah had drawn an innocent man into her murderous world. No doubt John’s daughters did their best to patch up past accusations as they contemplated the loss of the stern but sturdy presence in their lives.
When their time was up, what followed was ‘a most pitiful leave taking’. As John kissed them through the bars of his cell, he ‘fervently embraced his two daughters . . . saying, “Good-bye my children, I’ll be better off. This is the last time you will see me alive”’. Although it was reported that Makin, a man always in control of his emotions, ‘did not appear to be much affected’, as his daughters left the gaol ‘the bitter cries of the two girls sent a painful thrill through every warder as they passed’.
Like many who are condemned to death, John made a late conversion, spending most of his final day in prayer with Canon Rich, the Darlinghurst Gaol chaplain, who believed he had saved another soul. John then wrote his various letters until midnight.
On Tuesday morning, just before nine o’clock, Mr Howard, the executioner, entered the cell and pinioned John’s arms behind his back. Makin said nothing but his eyes must have shown that his final moment had arrived. Followed by Canon Rich, John walked with a firm step to the scaffold, where one more prayer was said for him.
The first hanging in Australia took place on the shores of Port Jackson on 28 February 1788, just one month after the arrival of the First Fleet, when Thomas Barrett was hanged for stealing food.2 While capital punishment was common for minor crimes such as theft in Britain and the Australian colonies in the 1700s and early 1800s, by the late 1800s it was only used to punish serious offences such as rape and murder. Between 1841 and 1852, hangings had been public affairs at Darlinghurst Gaol with people jostling to grab the best spot at the front gates in Forbes Street. The expectant audience must have been a horrifying sight for a condemned prisoner as he was led onto the wooden platform of the gallows, built above the gaol gate, exposed to the jeering and clapping crowd. The hangman lived in a cottage just outside the gaol wall. At the appointed time he would climb the steps to the gallows as the crowd jeered or cheered. The gaol’s first hangman, Alexander Green, ‘was frequently drunk and botched many hangings’ by misjudging the length of the rope needed—something that added to the entertainment value of this gruesome public spectacle.3
Unlike the public executions of former times, there were no crowds to witness Makin’s demise since he was executed on the permanent gallows located inside the main walls of the gaol in the corner of the Y-shaped E-Wing which faced the rising morning sun.4
The only witnesses were the executioner, his assistant and the sheriff. The hangman, Robert Rice Howard, was known as ‘Nosey Bob’ since he had no visible nose after being kicked in the face by a horse. Unlike previous hangmen, he took a professional approach to his job and was known as the ‘gentleman hangman’ because he wore a black frockcoat and white necktie to all his executions.5
As Nosey Bob fastened the rope around John’s neck and dropped the cap over his pale face, John’s lips ‘moved in prayer’, as if he still believed he needed help on his ascent to heaven. In order to get him there, the assistant gave the signal, Nosey Bob pulled a lever and the trapdoor underneath John gave way. Abruptly his 12 stone body fell through and ‘hung almost without a quiver’. Without a struggle, John died instantaneously, the ten foot drop and the strong rope snapping his neck at 9.08 a.m. His body hung for another ten minutes before being cut down to ensure that death had indeed paid its visit.
After his death, the Deputy Coroner carried out an inquest to determine John’s cause of death: ‘dislocation of the cervical vertebrae’.6 Unlike many executed prisoners who were buried in unconsecrated ground within the gaol walls, John was buried in the Anglican Section of Rookwood Cemetery with only his brother Daniel and a brother-in-law present7 to witness the burial of the family’s shame.
While the New South Wales Government had been determined to carry out John’s execution, refusing all petitions for his reprieve, Sarah Makin’s death sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment. Although she was convicted along with her husband for the murder of Baby Horace, the law threw a paternalistic cloak around her in its belief that, as John’s wife, she had acted under his direction.
The daughter of a convict, Sarah was now a convicted murderer whose crimes overshadowed the misdemeanours of her convict father. She spent the next eighteen years being moved between Darlinghurst and Bathurst Gaols as her health worsened and her daughters desperately sought her release.
CHAPTER TWO
Sarah Makin: convict daughter
14 January 1834–August 1886
The tale of John and Sarah Makin is better told and their underground world more easily understood if we travel back into the early nineteenth century to discover who their parents were and the times in which they were born and raised.
Sarah Makin was born Sarah Jane Sutcliffe on 20 December 1845 in Sussex Street, Sydney. She was the only daughter of Emanuel Sutcliffe, a convict who had been sentenced to seven years’ transportation for stealing ‘worsted stuff’ (a type of tweed material) in the city of York at the age of 20. Gaol reports noted that he was ‘idle, dissipated, several times in Custody on charges of Felony, connected with a bad Gang’.1
Before being transported, Emanuel had spent some time in the
rotting hulks on the Thames, since Hulk Reports stated that he was ‘Orderly, single, stated his offences’ as house-breaking and being ‘in Custody twice before on suspicion’. He was a typical male criminal in England’s 1800s who hung out with a gang and was arrested for minor offences. Transported on the Southworth to Tasmania, he arrived in Hobart on 14 January 1834 after nearly four months at sea, one of 188 convicts who survived the trip.2 Apparently life on ship did not suit Emanuel since the ship’s surgeon’s report described him as ‘slothful’.
On his arrival in Hobart, Emanuel’s description was recorded by the authorities, something that was done for all arriving convicts in case they absconded. Described as a miller from Leeds, he was five feet, seven inches in height with a brown complexion, oval head and visage, high forehead, black hair, no whiskers, dark hazel eyes, large mouth with full lips and some letters tattooed on his upper arm or forearm.3 His only daughter, Sarah, would resemble him with her oval head and high forehead although she did not inherit his full lips to become a colonial beauty.
Like thousands of others, Emanuel had received seven years’ transportation. This was no holiday in a foreign land but meant seven years of slave labour, sometimes of the harshest kind in inhumane living conditions.
When Emanuel arrived in the Tasmanian colony he stood on one side of a wall of mutual hostility between men turned into slaves and masters who needed free labour. Not only was Emanuel slothful he was also surly and rebellious. Even so, he would have been shocked to know that his unborn daughter, with a temperament that matched his own, would become the most notorious female criminal in the latter half of the century in which he found himself—in the ‘dust-hole of the Empire’ in what was then the most far-flung British colony in the world.4
Unluckily, Emanuel landed in a colony that was not only a place of transportation for Britain but also for the incorrigibles of its sister colony, New South Wales. This meant that convicts and convict labour were at the heart of the Tasmanian economy with disobedience harshly punished.5
As one of Tasmania’s essential slave labourers, the ‘slothful’ Emanuel Sutcliffe was assigned to Mr Houghton in Launceston after his arrival in Hobart. This was a most unhappy liaison since Emanuel was punished several times during his penal servitude. In October 1834, he was brought before Houghton, who had the powers of a magistrate, for disobedience of orders. Most likely delivering a stern warning, Houghton discharged him.
Emanuel was not so lucky the next time. On April Fool’s day 1835, Emanuel received 40 lashes for ‘disobedience of orders for quitting premises without leaves [sic]’. But he was no passive victim of the colony’s brutal convict regime in which ‘many colonial masters treated their convicts like horses to be broken in, fed and watered’.6 Although 50 lashes was the maximum that could be ordered by a magistrate7 , Houghton added 15 more for ‘Impertinence in [the] presence of the Magistrate’. Known as ‘giving a man a “red shirt”’8 , 55 lashes would either break him in or kill him as Emanuel was spread-eagled on a tripod and whipped with a cat-o’-nine tails. Remarkably, five days after this severe punishment, Emanuel faced Houghton again, this time for ‘Disorderly conduct and improperly driving in the Streets of Launceston’. For this crime he was merely admonished.
Even though it was assumed the lash would break a man’s spirit, Emanuel was not suited to slave labour. Resistance was common in the Australian colonies, where convict protest took a number of forms such as physical or verbal attacks, malingering or self-mutilation to avoid work, withdrawal of labour as a form of bargaining for better conditions, retribution against a master’s property or complaints to authorities about perceived invasions of rights.9 One of Emanuel’s contemporaries, William Day, had been assigned to ‘a downright tyrant’ who kept his convicts on starvation rations. Filled with resentment about receiving no better rations at Christmas, Day confessed that:
I loosened the stonework from the oven [and seized] . . . a Yorkshire pudding—bubbling away . . . and [a] nearly cooked bullock’s heart . . . and . . . hastened with my prize to the hut, where I and my mates soon put out of sight the best meal we had had for years.10
Compared to other convicts, Emanuel’s rebellion was less subtle. A month after being lashed, he appeared before Houghton again for ‘Gross Insolence and threatening to Strike his Oversear [sic]’ on 6 May 1835. By now Houghton had had enough. He sentenced Emanuel to twelve months’ imprisonment with hard labour for his defiance. Part of this sentence appears to have involved time spent in a chain gang on Buckingham Island. Such islands were popular forms of ‘secondary punishment’ in the colonies and meant gruelling work, isolation and physical and mental pain.11
Despite this punishment, Emanuel continued to rebel. On 29 September 1836, he was again convicted of disobedience of orders and sentenced to ten days’ solitary confinement, which was meant to encourage a convict ‘to commune with his conscience’.12 For Emanuel it compounded the injustice of his conditions, which now included minimal food and constant darkness in the convict-built Launceston Gaol. He was then returned to the care of the Government, ‘his Master declining to take him back on acct [sic] of his sulky ways’.
On 17 June 1837, when Emanuel was absent without leave, he was admonished, although for whom he was working is unknown. Six days later, it seems Emanuel had shifted from outright resistance to more cunning methods since he was punished for ‘representing himself to be free’ with seven days on a J Wheel. This may have been a reference to Launceston’s treadmill, an alternative to the lash and a dreaded punishment because of its exhausting monotony. Treadmills were used to drive the stone mill wheels for grinding wheat into flour. Residents could bring their grain to have it ground at these convict-powered mills for a fee charged by the government.13
An 1825 description of how the treadmill in Sydney worked captures the punitive nature of it:
It is a large wheel whose horizontal blades are wide enough to allow a certain number of men to position themselves, each next to the other, on the outside . . . [N]aked from the waist up . . . they . . . [hold] on to a wooden crossbar . . . attached at the height of the chin, [and] climb without stopping from one blade to the next . . . forty minutes without a break; the men rest for twenty minutes, then they start up again, and so on for the whole day.
Not only was it monotonous and tiring, convicts worked in fear of ‘missing the blade and having [their] legs mutilated’.14 This ingenious punishment had its intended effect on Emanuel since it was another year before he was brought before a magistrate—this time for an act of retribution. After working in a flour mill for at least a year, on 5 June 1838 he was convicted of ‘wilfully or carelessly breaking his Master’s Mill to the Damage of £2’. For this he was ‘kept to hard labour on the roads’ for two months and returned to Government. His assignment to a road gang meant a return to the harsh life of living and working outdoors in chains, as well as the indiscriminate punishment of the convict superintendent.
On 19 September 1838, Emanuel was imprisoned for using abusive language and received another two months’ hard labour. But eventually Sarah’s father conformed to the convict regime, since he spent the rest of his penal servitude with no further convictions. He was granted his ‘free certificate’ in 1840, which permitted him to return to Britain or remain in the colony. Although Emanuel stayed and became a free settler, his rebellious and angry temperament remained, having a lasting effect on the girl who would become the infamous Sarah Makin.
An emigrant lass
Sarah’s mother and Emanuel’s wife, Ellen Murphy, was born in Limerick, Ireland in about 1816 and migrated to Launceston from London on the Branken Moor, arriving as a free settler on 4 April 1843. Although the local newspaper reported the names of the most important passengers, Ellen Murphy was not named, only the fact that the ship had arrived with 100 emigrants who were available for the job opportunities promised in the colonies. On 10 April, The Teetotal Advocate carried the following advertisement:
Emigrants
on board the Brankenmoor are open for hire on board the said vessel, from 10 o’clock till 3, every day, Sundays excepted.15
The female immigrants were in for a surprise because with news of a ship’s arrival usually came:
hordes of men . . . assembl[ing] at the docks, waiting to claim their share of the imported goods. Employers seeking domestic servants had to battle with lustful men who had no intention of paying for the services they required.16
The local newspaper reported that female immigrants disembarking in Hobart in 1834 were subject to a gauntlet of men who jeered at them, using ‘the most vile and brutal language’ or ‘stopped [them] by force’ and addressed them in ‘the most obscene manner’.17 For Ellen Murphy, relief at having arrived safely in an unknown land may have been replaced by worry as she waited on board a cramped ship in the hope that someone would want to make use of her skills as a straw hatmaker and servant,18 but was greeted, instead, by a crowd of men jostling and yelling obscenities, and peppered by proposals of marriage.
The colonists of Launceston were spoilt for choice that day with a range of workers and other precious goods available in the harbour. A variety of ‘winter goods’ which had arrived on the Branken Moor were also advertised to the ‘Ladies of Launceston’, including silk, satin and satinetts, an assortment of furs (sable, musquash and squirrel), scarves, shawls and French stays all in ‘the newest style and fashion’.
Ellen, aged about 27, may have met Emanuel, aged 30, on the docks that day. With his certificate of freedom, Emanuel would have been in the market for a wife. Whether he was a brute with a foul mouth or whether he offered a gentlemanly proposal of marriage is hard to say.
Ellen and Emanuel married almost a year later on 20 May 1844 in Launceston during an economic downturn which led to cut-backs in public works and employment in the private sector. As jobs disappeared, many free convicts and ticket-of-leave holders became unemployed. Because the number of convicts in Tasmania had been increasing since transportation to New South Wales had been suspended in 1840,19 Emanuel was now in competition with the newly arrived slave labourers. In this climate, he and Ellen decided to start afresh. They arrived in Sydney on the Palmyra on 26 October 1844. Mr and Mrs Sutcliffe were listed as two of the six passengers who arrived from Launceston along with grain, potatoes and other foodstuffs.20
The Baby Farmers Page 2