Five years after the death of her husband, Sarah’s mother, Ellen, died at the age of 77,49 two years before Sarah’s baby-farming activities were discovered. After Sarah and John Makin were arrested, John revealed an interesting snippet of family history—that Ellen Sutcliffe had been a midwife or ladies’ nurse and Sarah had learnt the craft from her mother. If so, Ellen’s skills may have supplemented the Sutcliffes’ income in rural New South Wales.
Ellen Sutcliffe met her end in the Newington Asylum in Rydalmere, where she died from senile debility and diarrhoea.50 She was blind when she died and was given a pauper’s burial at Rookwood Cemetery, suggesting that Sarah had little contact with her mother at the end. There was no love lost between Sarah and her mother since John Makin’s sister-in-law had once witnessed Sarah ‘knock her own blind mother down with a chair’.51 Somewhere along the way Sarah had learnt that violence was a legitimate way of dealing with conflict.
CHAPTER THREE
John Makin: son of the middle class with a past
26 April 1824–23 June 1872
John Makin was born on 14 February 1845 in Dapto, a small coastal town south of Wollongong in New South Wales. He was the fourth of eleven children born to William Samuel Makin, a publican, and his wife Ellen Selena, née Bolton (or Boulton), also known as Eleanor. William married Ellen on 23 January 1837 at St Philip’s Church, Sydney. Not much is known about the origins of John’s father who, according to family history, was an ‘elusive’ man, a sawyer by trade who may have been from London and whose mother’s name was Agnes.1
There were two William Makins who arrived in New South Wales as convicts. The first, an army deserter, arrived on board the Lloyds in 1833 after being sentenced to seven years’ transportation with 400 lashes. He was 32 years of age when he arrived, making him just about the right age to be the 35-year-old William Makin who married John Makin’s mother in 1837. However, this William Makin was working in a chain gang at Berrima at that time and did not gain his certificate of freedom until 1842.2
The second William Makin arrived as a convict on board the Earl Grey in 1836 with a certificate of freedom granted in 1843. However, the only person with a similar name listed in the 1837 Convict Muster is William Macken, who arrived on the Earl Grey aged 16 years, making him far too young to be John Makin’s father. There are no free settlers by the name of William Makin listed in the immigrant passenger lists for New South Wales although a Samuel Makin arrived from Liverpool, England via Hobart on 1 April 1833.
William Samuel Makin’s elusive origins are also reflected in the different information contained in the family trees which contain John Makin as one of their descendants.3 In one family tree William Makin was born in 1815 in Ireland to an Agnes Makin. Three other family trees state that he was born in 1812. Yet another says he was born in 1815 in Birmingham to a mother called Agnes and an unnamed father, suggesting that John Makin’s father was illegitimate. Even when William died on 20 January 1887 in Wollongong from ‘diarrhoea and debility’, his granddaughter (the informant for his death certificate) did not know the name of his father or the surname of his mother who was only known as Agnes. While William may have started out life with dubious working-class origins, he became a well-to-do hotel owner and agent for the Illawarra Steam Company, having lived for 60 years in New South Wales when he died at the age of 85.
Much more information is known about the origins of John Makin’s mother, Ellen, whose father, William Bolton, was transported to Van Diemen’s Land for the two unrelated crimes of sacrilege (theft of a bible and a prayer book from Shenstone Church) and coining. Born in 1772 in Birmingham, he had married Mary Tysall on 19 October 1795 at St Martin’s Church in Birmingham. Mary, born in 1774 or 1775, bore six children before William disappeared from her life.4 Since the making of counterfeit coins amounted to treason against the king, it carried the death penalty. It was also William Bolton’s second conviction for such treasonous acts. Convicted on 15 March 1821 in Stafford,5 William Bolton was one of many whose death penalty was converted to transportation for life. He arrived in Hobart on 26 December 1821 on the Lord Hungerford to serve his sentence at the age of 49.
Compared to the convict father of Sarah Makin, William Bolton was a well-behaved man with his gaol report stating his character was ‘not vicious’ and his hulk report praising him for being ‘orderly’. During his sentence he acquired only two misdemeanours against his name. The first was on 28 November 1826 when he was convicted of having a pair of government shoes on his person and not being able to account for them. For this crime he spent two months in a chain gang.6 At the time, William had been assigned to Dr Adam Turnbull, a young Scottish surgeon who had settled on a property at Winton on the Macquarie River.7 On his conviction, John Makin’s grandfather swapped the comfortable environment of the Kirklands for the harsh labouring work in a chain gang on one of the local road or building projects in the area. It was a cruel punishment for a man 54 years of age. It is unknown where he was assigned after his two months in the chain gang. However, on 28 April 1828, he was found absent from the evening muster ‘until half past 8 o’clock on Wed last’. His punishment this time was ‘to labour the whole of successive Saturdays for Govt’.
Unlike most Australian convicts, William Bolton did not see or taste freedom. After nine long years in Tasmania, the Convict Muster of 1830 states that John Makin’s grandfather was ‘Found dead May 1830’. These records were always short and to the point with no explanation about how William died or where he was buried. Perhaps nine years of hard labour had worn him out at the age of 58. His death would have been unknown to the family he left behind—a family which ironically was living just a few hundred miles north when he died.
Ellen Bolton’s journey to New South Wales
William’s transportation in 1821 had left a family of seven without a father, husband or income. It would have been no surprise to the Georgian authorities that, three years later, the whole Bolton family would find its way to infamous Botany Bay, as the New South Wales colony was known in Britain.
Women with children who were left to fend for themselves after their husbands were transported depended on local charity, prostitution or crime to survive. But some did not. Jane Ryan was a native of Dublin living in Chelmsford, England when her husband was sentenced to transportation for life. Since a parish only assisted those who were native to the area, Jane Ryan petitioned the Duke of York, stating that she was in a ‘state of starvation’ with no ‘claim on any Parish to protect her and her infant child’ and begging ‘the first possible passage’ to New South Wales to join her husband. The petition was refused: ‘John Ryan laboured alone “for the term of his natural life” in New South Wales while his family starved to death in Chelmsford’.8
John Makin’s maternal grandmother, Mary Bolton, was luckier. Left alone with her children after William was transported, she turned to crime since her trade as a laundress was insufficient to provide for six children between the ages of one and eighteen years. Worse still was the stigma of a husband’s conviction, which was an embarrassing impediment to ‘securing honest employment’—the ‘respectable’ view persisted that Botany Bay was nothing more than ‘the receptacle for the scum, the sweepings of the gaols, hulks and prison’.9
Mary Bolton was convicted on 26 April 1824 in Birmingham for receiving stolen goods, namely, three pairs of boots, three pairs of shoes and 25 yards of binding. The previous year she had been before the courts on a charge of larceny but was found not guilty.10 Paradoxically, her conviction ensured that she and her daughters would at least be fed and clothed, placing them one step up from destitution during their imprisonment and transportation.
Sentenced to seven years’ transportation, at the age of 50 Mary set out on her long sea voyage on the Grenada on 25 September 1824 with 81 other female convicts, arriving four months later in Sydney Cove on 23 January 1825.11 Four of Mary’s daughters were also transported with her: Anne aged 19, Eliza aged 12, Helen (known as Ellen) age
d 8 and Sarah aged 6.12 It is not known what happened to Mary’s eldest children, William and Mary.
When married women were transported to the Australian colonies they arrived ‘without the protection of a husband, father or family and, to all intents and purposes, [were] single women’. Mary was allowed to travel with her four children, which was unusual because there was an official reluctance to allow convict women to take their children on board the transport ships. This was based on the need to keep ‘colonial expenditure’ to a minimum ‘with no room for pity for the women or concern for the fate of children left behind’.13 Since many petitions to allow children to accompany their mothers to Botany Bay were refused, Mary Bolton was one of the fortunate few who, exiled from her native land, was able to leave England’s shores with her heart intact.
In this way, John Makin’s mother, Ellen, began her early life as the daughter of a convict. She was probably imprisoned with her mother before sailing the seas for four months to arrive in a strange colonial outpost on 23 January 1825. Even though they had won the right to travel with their mother, upon their arrival Ellen and her younger sister, Sarah, were separated from the family and placed in the Female Orphan School in Parramatta. The reason was simple—convict women were considered to be a ‘disgrace to their sex’, ‘filthy in their persons, disgusting in their habits, obscene in their conversations’14 and a bad example to their children.
Children of the streets–a colony’s shame
Since 1788 there had been considerable concern within the colony about the ‘growing numbers of neglected and destitute children . . . who were to be found eking out a living in the streets of the main settlements’.15 These children were the offspring of convict women and their various couplings with male convicts, soldiers and sailors. While sex was popular in early Sydney Town, child care was thin on the ground.
When Philip King arrived to take up his appointment as governor on 15 April 1800,16 Sydney’s street kids were estimated to number about 1000 in a population of just over 5000 men and women.17 They were vulnerable to exploitation and abuse in a colony where men outnumbered women by almost three to one. The degree of child neglect in the 12-year-old colony must have been stark since Governor King set about establishing an orphan school within months to teach abandoned girls skills appropriate for their station in life, together with obedience and morality:
Soon after I arrived here the sight of so many girls between the ages of eight and twelve, verging on that brink of ruin and prostitution which several had fallen into, induced me to set about rescuing the elder girls from the snares laid for them, and which the horrible example and treatment of many of their parents hurried them into.18
Nonetheless, the number of orphans and neglected children continued to grow. By 1806, there were 1832 children in the colony, of which 1025 were illegitimate. Not all were abandoned since marriage was uncommon amongst convicts, soldiers and ex-convicts. While King had been prepared to ignore the marriage problem, Governor Macquarie’s arrival in January 1810 signalled a firmer approach to the ‘lower orders’ since he was gravely concerned about their lack of morals, especially ‘the common practice of . . . cohabitation’ and its effect on their children.19 Macquarie’s answer lay in building a larger Female Orphan School, for which he laid the foundation stone on 13 September 1813 on the banks of the Parramatta River. Although the building took five years to complete, it was an architectural wonder, becoming the colony’s first three-storey building. With ‘a charming vista to the river across park-like lawns’,20 it was modelled on Mrs Macquarie’s family home in Scotland and had:
all the necessary out [sic] offices for the accommodation of 100 female orphans, and for the master and matron of the institution, having an extensive garden and orchard and a grazing park or paddock for cattle . . . the whole of the premises enclosed with a high strong stockade.21
While this description evokes a charming rural retreat for the city’s orphaned girls, the cattle in their ‘grazing park’ probably had a much easier life than the 100 inmates. On 30 June 1818, the female orphans from the old Orphan School in George Street were taken by government boats up the Parramatta River to their grand, new accommodation. Far away from the temptations of Sydney Town, they were to be educated ‘only in view of their present condition in life and future destination, namely as wives or servants’.22
The school represented the best and worst of institutionalisation where all rights were forfeited, moral regeneration was the overall goal, contact with the outside world was restricted and life was ordered and regimented.23 Punishment was severe for any transgressions, as young Sarah Patfield experienced in October 1821 when she was accused of stealing the caps and shirts she had given her visiting sister. As a deterrent to the other girls, Sarah was forced to wear a wooden collar marked ‘thief’ day and night. Her head was shaved in the presence of the other girls and she was held in solitary confinement for a month, fed only on bread and water.24
With claims that the old Female Orphan School had produced too many girls who returned to their former prostitution ways, Macquarie wrote the new school’s constitution with rules and regulations that set out its objectives, curriculum, and admission and apprenticeship procedures. Age limits were imposed to restrict admission to girls between the ages of five and eight years since ‘the moral reclamation’ of older girls was not considered to be possible,25 because of the unstated belief that older girls were corrupted by the sexual habits of men.
The new curriculum ensured that inmates were not educated above their status but would receive sufficient instruction to improve ‘their economic potentialities’. In February 1810, the Sydney Gazette carried the following announcement:
Plain Needle-work will be taken into the Orphan House and executed by the Girls under the inspection of the Matron, on moderate terms, to be paid for when delivered.26
In this way, the aim of the first orphanages in Sydney was to produce a reliable servant class who would fit into the colony’s well-ordered class system. Ironically, it was this system that produced the problems Governor Macquarie was keen to eradicate—children were abandoned not only because of a ‘lack of family cohesiveness among the humbler classes’ but also because of the desperation of the poor within colonial society.27
Inmates of the Female Orphan School were apprenticed out as servants, without pay, at the age of 13 to ‘Families of Good character’ for a five year period or until they married. Marriage entitled a former female orphan to the gift of a cow from the school’s herd of cattle ‘but only if she . . . had a good record as a bound apprentice’.28 This meant that she had to be careful to survive any number of claims on her female character during her apprenticeship either by her master or other male members of the household to which she was apprenticed.
The relief and grief of arriving in Sydney Town
A few months after their arrival on 23 January 1825, John Makin’s mother, Ellen Bolton, and her younger sister, Sarah, faced a painful separation from their mother. While Mary Bolton was sent to the Female Factory in Parramatta as a newly arrived convict, this institution was not considered to be a suitable place for children. Although the whole family had survived the prison system in England and the dangers of a four month sea voyage, Mary Bolton no longer had any legal right over her daughters.29
In the year of the Bolton family’s arrival, another convict, Ann Kelly, described how her daughter had been ‘wrested’ from her ‘without her consent’ in a petition to the Female Orphan School seeking to have the girl returned to her care and providing a brief description of the distressing scene when female convicts were separated from their children.30
Ellen and Sarah were admitted to the Female Orphan School on 10 May 1825. After being taken by boat up the Parramatta River to one of the most picturesque places in the colony, Ellen and Sarah Bolton would have seen the imposing, three-storey Female Orphan School as the boat drew near, perhaps overwhelmed by its sheer, prison-like size. The first thing to greet th
em as they entered the ground floor hall would have been the noise and sight of so many other girls dressed in identical clothing. Perhaps the Matron, Mrs Walker, reassured them as they held onto each other, and she presented them with the plain uniform which represented their new ‘Condition in Life’: ‘a blue gown, white apron, and tippet [or cape] with a white cotton or straw bonnet’.31 All of this would have been a vast improvement on the clothing they were wearing after four months at sea. They would soon learn that the best part of the school was the food: a daily diet of two pints of milk, three-quarters of a pound of bread, half a pound of meat with vegetables and a pudding one or two days a week.32
At the ages of six and eight, Sarah and Ellen were meant to learn how to read and write from 9 a.m. till noon so they would be able to understand the ‘Holy Scriptures’. The rest of their day was spent learning all the domestic tasks required of a servant and wife, including needlework, washing, spinning and carding, managing a dairy, baking and gardening. Their days were topped and tailed with Bible readings and prayer which took place every morning and evening while Sunday was reserved for church. With hard work and constant moral instruction, the authorities expected that Ellen and Sarah would not repeat the immoral behaviour of their convict mother. But when Ellen later married John Makin’s father she was only capable of writing her ‘X’ mark on her marriage certificate rather than her name, suggesting that the Orphan School had been more focused on producing servants than educating convict children.33
The religious instruction of the school was in the hands of a Methodist missionary, the Reverend William Walker, who had arrived with Mrs Walker in early 1825. Soon after his appointment, Reverend Walker found that things were not to his Methodist standards since the departure of the original master and matron:
Since the departure of Mr Hoskings, [the children] have had no religious care extended over them. When we first came . . . the children were wearing clothes that had not been washed for three weeks or a month before, and these so ragged as to make them no less indelicate than our wild aborigines. Numbers of the children had never been to church for months!! . . . The master that was here before me made several attempts to prostitute the girls . . . plac[ing] an indelible stain of unfitness upon his character.34
The Baby Farmers Page 4