CHAPTER SIX
The Macdonaldtown discoveries
29 June–13 October 1892
On Monday 27 June 1892, John Makin took a lease on a house in Macdonaldtown for 17 shillings per week. At the time, he and his family were living at 109 George Street, Redfern. Since their rent was in arrears, their landlord had become a far too frequent visitor. The last time he called, he caught the Makins hiding and whispering while he knocked on the front door. A few days later, they outsmarted him when they moved on a dark and rainy night, leaving through a rear lane, hurriedly, secretly. But there were other reasons for the hasty move—they had left behind a backyard of graves and some mothers whose curiosity they were keen to avoid.
From 29 June to 16 August, Sarah, John and three of their daughters, Florence, Blanche, Daisy, and son Cecil (known as Tommy), lived in a two-storey house at 25 Burren Street, Macdonaldtown, one suburb away from Redfern. Their new home was in a quiet, dead-end street which runs parallel to the railway line. The name of the street comes from Burren Farm, the land granted to Nicholas Devine, who took up the post of Principal Superintendent of Convicts in 1790. This appointment put him in charge of the day to day administration of the colony’s convicts. Like many new landowners, Devine named Burren Farm after his native birthplace, which was in Ireland.1 One hundred years later the name would become synonymous with death, and the crimes of the descendants of two convicts.
Macdonaldtown is a tiny suburb squeezed between Newtown and Erskineville in the inner west of Sydney, although it is part of the Newtown precinct. This area was a thriving commercial centre which was first established by Government Gazette on 12 December 1862. By the early 1890s, King Street, Newtown had the longest shopping strip in Sydney with various types of tradesmen and shopkeepers making up 75 per cent of the suburb’s working population.2
The day after his family moved into Burren Street, John Makin visited one of the chemist shops in King Street to buy a potent elixir after a bad night with the baby who cried too much. He also visited the local printer’s shop that day. Back at their new home, Sarah and her three daughters busied themselves with unpacking and acquainting themselves with the local shops and hawkers. They may have heard the call of the ‘rabbitoh’ who pushed his cart, strung with rabbits, through the narrow streets and back lanes, calling out ‘Rabbitoh, rabbitoh’. Two rabbits cost sixpence, a cheap meal for a family of six. Helpfully for housewives like Sarah, the rabbitoh chopped off the rabbits’ heads and skinned them on the spot.
If Sarah needed a long stick to prop up the clothesline, she would have to wait until the clothes prop man called out ‘props today—props today’ when she could buy ‘a sapling eight or ten feet long with a fork in the end . . . to prop the line up’. She could buy bags of fuel from the wood and coal man for the fuel stove in the kitchen and the copper which needed to be heated for washing. When the milkman called morning and afternoon, Sarah might have sent Tommy out with a halfpenny for a bottle, although there was competition between everyone on Sundays when the milko called out ‘Milk for the babies and cream for the ladies and lay-ay-ty’ since cream topped off the Sunday pudding.3
When John returned from his shopping trip to King Street on 30 June, he brought home a bottle of the mixture, made up by every local chemist, called Godfrey’s Cordial, the babies’ elixir that contained such a high concentration of opium it was guaranteed to quieten or kill crying babies. His visit to the printer’s meant he could now advertise Sarah’s skills in their new suburb using cards printed with her name:
Mrs. Makin, qualified midwife and ladies’ nurse,
25 Burren-street, Macdonaldtown.4
When John acquainted himself with his new neighbour, Mr Hill, he would have realised he and Sarah had moved up a notch on Sydney’s social ladder since Burren Street was ‘inhabited chiefly by working men of a good class’.5 Most lived in single-storey cottages which comprised a front room, a bedroom, a small dining or sitting room, a lean-to for a kitchen and an outhouse, the quaint description for the backyard toilet.
The house at number 25 was a little more prosperous in appearance than the neighbouring houses, with two bedrooms upstairs, two rooms downstairs and a bathroom in the rear. The upstairs bedroom had French doors which opened onto a wooden-floored verandah enclosed with decorative iron-lace work. It had been built in December 1890 for Patrick Mulvey, a storeman in the employ of Tooheys, the local beer brewers. The Mulvey family had lived in Burren Street until 5 June but moved out on the advice of Mr Mulvey’s doctor, who was treating him for a chest complaint. Although the houses in Burren Street have since been renumbered, the free-standing house still exists as a sober reminder of its infamous history.
The backyard was a modest 16 by 35 feet and backed onto the railway line. It had a shed and an outhouse at one end with a brick path running down the left-hand side of the yard to the outhouse. An open, shallow drain ran down the middle. The whole yard was enclosed by six foot high wooden fencing on top of which was another four feet of wire so that entry was only possible through the front of the house or a locked side gate.6
The prosperous Mr Mulvey also owned a vacant lot at 27 Burren Street and was the landlord of number 29, which was occupied by Mr and Mrs Hill, the couple who acted as his agents in letting the house at number 25 to the Makins. The Makins arrived in a hurried, clandestine fashion on the night of 29 June. They left the same way a mere six weeks and six days later.
The first discoveries
Most baby farmers were never suspected, let alone investigated, charged or convicted. For the few who were reported to the authorities, usually there was insufficient evidence for the police to lay charges. But the Makins had been particularly careless. After they left Burren Street on 16 August, Mr Mulvey tried to let the house again with no success since applicants for the house complained about an unpleasant smell and said ‘the drains appeared to be in a bad state’. To fix the problem, Mr Mulvey hired two local men to lay new drainage pipes.
On the morning of Tuesday 11 October 1892, James Mahoney and Patrick Cooney began to dig a trench from one end of the long, rectangular backyard at number 25. After some time, Mahoney came across a bundle that had been buried six inches below the ground. Thinking it was merely the remains of a cat he removed the bundle and reburied it near the trench.7
The next day, Cooney dug up a similar bundle which had been buried in a direct line about a metre away from the first. These two bundles are represented by the crosses marked 1A and 2A in the sketch of the Burren Street backyard that was printed in The Evening News of 10 November 1892. Struck by the coincidence of finding a second, Cooney inspected the bundle and found to his great surprise the decomposing remains of a baby. The two drain-layers hurried to Newtown police station about a kilometre away.
When Senior Constable James Joyce and Constable Alexander Brown arrived in a horse-drawn police van, they discovered the bodies of not one but two decomposing babies in the well-wrapped bundles. After delivering the remains to the South Sydney morgue, Constable Joyce made inquiries with Mr Mulvey and his neighbour, Mrs Elizabeth Hill, who told him about the short stay of the Makin family two months before. It is easy to imagine Mrs Hill’s shock when Joyce knocked on her door in quiet Burren Street. Perhaps she repeated her tale to another neighbour, Mrs Parry:
I’ve never been so surprised in all my life when the constables stood on my doorstep and announced two dead babies had been dug up in Mr Mulvey’s backyard. They wanted to know if Mr Mulvey and his wife had any children and I assured them the babies could not belong to them. Likely as not, I said, it must’ve been the Makins because she called herself a midwife and ladies nurse. Mind you, I only ever saw them with one baby, about three months old. But it wasn’t theirs. Mrs Makin was nursing it for a young couple I saw two times when they visited. They seemed a decent enough pair, neatly dressed. One time when I asked about the baby Mr Makin told me the young couple had taken it away. At any rate, I didn’t see any other babies although they
left in a bit of a hurry in August. At this the constables became quite excited though I couldn’t tell them where the Makins had gone.
With this information, Constable Joyce had the lead he needed to commence his investigations. The Makins had been doubly careless—not only had they become used to the smell of decaying bodies, but they had also used their real surname when they rented 25 Burren Street.
The day the police arrived
By mid August 1892, the Makins had returned to live in Redfern, the suburb in which they moved from house to house as sneakily as the local rats. It was also the suburb in which Constable Joyce discovered them just as they began to buy more babies.
On 12 October 1892, the Makins were living at 6 Wells Street, their fourth address in four months. It had not taken long for Constable Joyce to track them down, most likely using tenancy records, because by four o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday 12 October he had arrived at Wells Street to conduct his inquiries.8
The door was opened by an 18-year-old girl. When Joyce asked her whether the Makins lived there, she said they were not in and gave her name as Priscilla Edwards. Joyce said he would wait for the Makins to return, taking a seat in the front room. ‘Priscilla’ waited with him, batting back his many questions. Were there any infants in the house? She admitted there were three upstairs with their mothers. Joyce then wondered if she was related to the Makins but she replied she was only a friend. Joyce pressed on, curious about how long she had known the family. The girl faltered. She confessed she was fibbing and that her real name was Blanche, the eldest daughter of the family. It would not be the only time Joyce caught her out as she calmly practised the Makin family trait of artful lying, a skill her parents would later rely on.
At 6.30 p.m., John Makin arrived to face the unexpected—the ominous presence of a well-built police officer in his house. With the bravado he would later become known for, he readily admitted he had lived at 25 Burren Street for about two months but denied that he and his wife were in the habit of taking in children to nurse. As Joyce pressed him for details, John agreed that during their stay at Burren Street his wife had nursed one baby for ten shillings per week, more than half their weekly rent, although it was the only child they had ever taken in since they had enough children of their own. According to his improvised story, the baby had been returned three weeks later to its parents, Mr and Mrs Wilson, who said they were going to live in Melbourne.
Constable Joyce reappeared at the Wells Street house about ten o’clock that night to interview Sarah. It must have been a tense scene since Joyce stayed until midnight, pestering the family about Sarah’s whereabouts. Joyce’s persistence and odd work hours provided the first hint that he was a police officer who did not rest. Already he had enough evidence to suggest the Makins moved frequently and could easily do a late night runner. When Joyce returned early the next morning, he was in for disappointment. In her interview on 13 October, Sarah Makin’s answers were identical to her husband’s.
At the end of his interview with Sarah, Joyce was puzzled by a number of things. Although the Makins denied being in the business of nursing babies, they had three babies in their home in Wells Street and demonstrated the peripatetic behaviour of baby farmers by moving frequently. Yet their story about only having one child in their care was confirmed by Mrs Hill, their former neighbour.
When Joyce attended the morgue later that day he examined the material in which the two dead babies had been wrapped, as well as their garments. As he was doing so, he noticed that a flannel worn by the first baby unearthed in Burren Street had been sewn with black thread. He realised the sewing was remarkably similar to the stitching he had seen on a white apron worn by Blanche Makin when he was at Wells Street.
The Makins must have felt the cold hand of the law tightening around them when Joyce returned to Wells Street a fourth time. He searched the house and the backyard and removed the white apron with the black stitching. Even by the standards of today, Joyce was an observant detective. It was his obsession with the case and its ever growing number of loose threads and bits of clothing that explains why the Makins, out of the dozens of baby farmers operating at the time, found themselves facing the law’s piercing blue eyes as Joyce pried into their furtive world.
CHAPTER SEVEN
To catch a baby farmer
1892
Eighteen ninety-two was a busy year for the Coroner’s Court in Sydney. Apart from the usual murders and suicides, the newspapers reported the regular discoveries of dead infants who had been abandoned on the streets of Sydney Town. So frequent was infanticide that The Evening News carried a weekly column entitled ‘How the Babies Go’, which reported on the number of dead babies found in the city each week.
Previously, infant deaths had attracted little police attention. But things changed with the enactment of the Children’s Protection Act in New South Wales on 31 March 1892 after a Parliamentary Committee Inquiry decided that legislation was needed to protect the colony’s children from rapacious baby farmers. During the inquiry, sensational evidence was presented by the president of the New South Wales Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. He revealed that the Society had tested the extent of baby farming in Sydney by placing a false advertisement in The Evening News asking for a ‘kind mother to adopt child for life’.1 The Society received 80 replies with most baby farmers requesting lump sums from £3 to £30, although one asked for £50. Seventy-five replies promised the child would never be heard of again.
When legislation was subsequently introduced into the New South Wales Parliament to ban the payment of premiums to baby farmers, the sponsor of the legislation, Mr Neild, argued that these payments were nothing more than ‘an incentive for contract killing’:
The plain fact is that these unfortunate, helpless creatures are taken for a sum of money in order to be put to death by the most miserable, the most cruel . . . the most hellish means it is possible for human beings to conceive.2
Parliamentarians debated how widespread this type of murder was in New South Wales, with one member stating that it was ‘a slur on the character of Australians to say . . . that wholesale murder has been taking place among them’. With little understanding of the prevalence of poverty in New South Wales, some believed there was no excuse for infant deaths because, compared to Europe, ‘[h]ere we have bright homes, better chances of life, and a more robust life’. But parliamentarians were unable to account for the approximately 6000 deaths of children under the age of five years each year in the New South Wales colony. Others realised that New South Wales differed little from Victoria, where 7500 children under the age of five years had died the previous year, with baby farming ‘greatly responsible’.3
Only one enlightened member of the Legislative Assembly thought that the government was the proper authority to deal with unwanted babies. Instead of legislation, he argued a properly funded foundling hospital should be established, since registration of baby farmers would not prevent people taking children for the sole purpose of making money.4
Although it was too late for controlling the activities of the Makins, who continued their ‘contract killings’ until October 1892, the aim of the Children’s Protection Act5 was to regulate people who took children into their care. The Act set up a compulsory registration scheme although it did not make baby farming illegal. All persons who took a child under the age of three years to adopt or nurse for a payment could only do so with a written order of a Justice of the Peace. This, in turn, required inspectors to assess houses as being suitable and the owner had to show she was of good character and had the means to maintain the children. Inspections could take place at any time while refusal of an inspection was a criminal offence.
The Act also limited how much could be paid to a baby farmer in order to stop the payment of one-off premiums. Any money paid had to be in the form of periodical instalments and could not exceed the sum of twenty shillings. Baby farmers were also required to register a child within seve
n days of receiving it at their local Births, Deaths and Marriages Register. They were not allowed to move house or relinquish the care of a child without notifying the District Registrar.
There were lots of sanctions under the Act. If a person failed to register a child she could be fined up to £50 with or without imprisonment for six months. It was also an offence to pay a lump sum payment to have a baby adopted or to adopt a child without written permission. If it could be proved that a baby farmer had wilfully and without reasonable excuse neglected to feed, clothe, provide lodging or medical aid to a child, she could be fined or imprisoned, making it much easier for the law to prosecute wilful neglect cases.
Unfortunately, this new registration scheme was not widely enforced or policed. Between 31 March and October 1892, only 71 houses and 74 infants had been registered. Two days after the first babies linked to the Makins were dug up in Burren Street, a newspaper reported that ‘cases of child murder and heartless desertion of infants have of late been unusually frequent’, which was thought to be due to the greater restrictions placed on baby farming by the Act.6
By 1899 only 59 breaches of the Children’s Protection Act had resulted in charges and most of these merely resulted in baby farmers being fined.7 All of these cases were from the inner city of Sydney where the network of midwives, dodgy doctors and baby farmers continued to trade in, and dispose of, the unmanageable problem of illegitimate births. Even registered baby farmers continued to greet death frequently, a fact that was sometimes excused in coronial inquiries on the grounds that a midwife took in weak children who other baby farmers had refused.8
Sometimes the inspection system introduced under the Children’s Protection Act made interesting discoveries about the baby-farmer trail. In one case, Emily S’s baby son, Roy, passed through the hands of three baby farmers with each woman paying a smaller premium than she had received for the baby boy, who was never located by the inspector seeking his whereabouts.9 What the inspector found were unregistered adoptions, unregistered houses and six dead babies. Although five bodies were found buried in the backyard of one baby farmer’s house, there was insufficient evidence to prosecute her for murder or manslaughter. She was merely fined for failing to register the adoption of Baby Roy. In another case, eight infants were found packed away in boxes in the ill-ventilated underground room of a baby farmer who was known to the police.10
The Baby Farmers Page 8