The Baby Farmers

by Annie Cossins

  For the police, it was hot, sweaty and arduous work, made all the more difficult by the ‘dreadful odour’ when each grave was opened. They had uncovered more than enough evidence to make trouble for the Makins. Although the papers around Australia reported the horror of the ‘Shocking Revelations’ as ‘Wholesale Infanticide in Sydney’,5 what they and the police did not realise was that these discoveries represented a snap-shot of what was happening to hundreds of babies in the Australian colonies.

  While the digging had been taking place, a crowd of people gathered on the vacant lot next door (number 27). Like so many flies, they were drawn by the pungent smell of decaying bodies and the macabre spectacle unfolding in front of them. Nothing quite like it had happened in the colony before. By the time the last body was found, close to 100 people were jostling on the other side of the six foot fence, trying to remove the palings in order to get a better look, the people nearest the fence pushed and squashed by those behind.

  There are many mysteries to this story and the questions are still tantalising today—if the Makins were responsible, how did the seven babies arrive in the Burren Street house with the neighbours none the wiser? Why had no-one heard the crying of seven babies in a street where the houses were so close together? Or heard the sounds of seven baby graves being dug?

  With local reporters waiting outside, the police loaded the bodies, interred in small boxes, into a police van which took them to South Sydney morgue. The reporters had probably interviewed the locals and found out that the Makins had recently lived in Burren Street for nearly seven weeks. Had they buried seven babies in those short six weeks and six days? The reporters wanted information and, although Joyce gave a small press conference, it seemed he had other things on his mind. He told them he did not believe the Makins had been baby farmers for long before they arrived in Burren Street. But ‘to make assurance sure’, he and his men would search all the houses the Makins had lived in for the past 18 months. He also announced that when he first visited the Makins in 6 Wells Street, Redfern, he made ‘a sensational discovery’—he had found a hole, freshly dug, in their backyard from which a most offensive odour came.

  While Joyce was now a local hero, more importantly he had enough evidence for an arrest. But he needed more to ensure the Makins would be convicted. So he set about finding it.

  The arrests

  Constable Brown arrested Sarah Makin, aged 46, in George Street West at 3 p.m. on 3 November. The time of the arrest indicates that Brown was travelling in the horse-drawn police van with the four freshly dug bodies as he made his way to the morgue. Sarah would literally have received the shock that would change her life when Brown told her what he was transporting in the police van. It appears it was a mere coincidence that he had noticed her in nearby Parramatta Road not far from the Makins’ new residence in Chippen Street, Chippendale where they had moved rather quickly after Joyce had interviewed them in Wells Street three weeks earlier.

  Two hours after Sarah was conveyed to Newtown police station, Joyce and Brown arrested John, aged 50, in Chippen Street along with his two daughters, 17-year-old Florence and 18-year-old Blanche.6 The only other Makin child who was living at home, Tommy, aged two, was left with a neighbour after his father was arrested.

  When the rest of the Makins arrived at Newtown police station, John and Sarah were charged on suspicion of having caused the death of an infant, one of the bodies that had been found that day. Blanche and Florence were also charged. The shock of this produced ‘a pitiful [scene] when the children found themselves and their father and mother taken into custody on such a suspicion, and the girls wept bitterly when placed in the cells’. But why were charges laid in relation to only one of the dead babies? Joyce had re-examined the Burren Street backyard because Horace Bothamley, known as Mr Wilson, had contacted the police after reading in the newspaper that he and Minnie were said to have reclaimed their child from the Makins and ‘to prove what the family asserted was untrue’ by telling the police his child had died in the Makins’ house at Burren Street.

  Had their baby received the same funeral rites as the other buried babies—a hastily dug grave late at night in the Burren Street backyard?

  The police interview

  Today the old Newtown police station still stands in its Victorian splendour in Australia Street. It was built some time between 1884 and 1887 although the exact date is unknown. It may have been built at the same time as the Newtown Court House which was designed by James Barnett, the Colonial Architect, and completed in 1885.7

  It was in this imposing building that the Makin daughters were interviewed, first on their own then in the presence of their parents. The scene must have been tense. Although John and Sarah were practised liars with numerous aliases and stories for unsuspecting mothers, this was not the case for their daughters. While they were accomplices, they were young with a healthy fear of the law, since the first thing they asked was whether they would be sent to gaol. Joyce replied, ‘That depends upon whether you tell the truth or not’.8

  At first Blanche denied all knowledge of her parents’ baby-farming activities and the whereabouts of the child of Mr and Mrs Wilson:

  I don’t know where they live. One afternoon, when I and my sister went out, the child was asleep, and when we returned the child was gone. I asked my mother what had become of it, and my mother said the parents had called and taken it away.

  Constable Joyce then escorted John and Sarah Makin into the room. They would have been watchful, glancing from Blanche to Florence, praying their daughters had told as little as had been agreed.

  Joyce repeated what Blanche had just told him and the information he had obtained from Horace Bothamley. He asked Florence whether her sister’s story was correct. Florence agreed that it was. Then John Makin spoke up:

  There were no children that came to the house in my time. If any person says they gave me £2 for the purpose of burying the child and registering the death, they tell a falsehood.

  Blanche sat across a table from her silent but vigilant parents, their eyes warning her. She had already been told she would be sent to gaol if she didn’t ‘tell the truth’. Joyce wanted to know if her mother had other babies in her care during their time in Burren Street. She was trapped. She looked at her parents. But their eyes were steadfast. She stared at Joyce as he repeated the question. She wanted to save her parents but she also wanted to save herself. So she did a bit of both. She confessed there had been three babies in the house at Burren Street and when they disappeared, her mother and father had told her the babies had been collected by their parents.

  When asked whether this was true, Florence followed Blanche’s lead and agreed. It was enough to satisfy Joyce even though it was a lie. Both girls knew the secrets that had accompanied them to Burren Street on a dark and wet night in June.

  Joyce then wanted to know why Blanche had lied on oath at the inquest the previous week when she had said there had only been one baby that she knew of at Burren Street. Sarah and John probably sweated in their sombre dark clothes, willing Blanche to keep her mouth shut. Blanche was caught out, having just revealed that she had committed perjury. She needed to save herself so she confessed that her parents had ‘told us to say we knew nothing about the infants found in the yard at Burren-street’.

  At the end of the interview, Joyce took the Makins into the charge room. John and Sarah were charged on suspicion of causing the death of the illegitimate child of Minnie Davies and Horace Bothamley. Much to the disgust of Blanche, who had been told she would not go to gaol if she told the truth, she and her sister were also charged ‘on suspicion with being concerned in the death of the said child’.

  The next morning they were taken to Newtown Police Court where they were remanded in custody for the weekend. They were to appear in the City Coroner’s Court on the Monday, the first day of the next set of inquests.

  Peering into the Makins’ souls

  John Makin’s prison card, prison number 556
7, states that he was a butcher and labourer who was born in Camden in 1842, which may have been a lie to disguise his origins and protect his family. On his entry into the remand section of Darlinghurst Gaol on Thursday, 3 November, he weighed 160 pounds (just over eleven stone) and was five feet, six inches tall. With brown hair and a bald patch, he had a round scar on his left elbow bone and on the bridge of his nose.

  Sarah Makin, prison number 5568, also lied about her age that Thursday, with her prison card stating that she had been born in Sydney in 1850, instead of her real birth date of 1845. She was five feet, four inches tall with brown hair and brown eyes. Her weight was not recorded. She could read and write but had no prior convictions and no special marks or features.

  These facts and figures, however, do not reveal much about who Sarah and John were. Hungry for gossip, reporters from various newspapers interviewed ex-neighbours of the Makins at the many houses in which they had lived, all of which allows us to fill in the brief sketches from their prison cards.9

  Even though John had told various neighbours he was a labourer who had not worked for the past six months, he was ‘fond of boasting that he was a person possessed of private means’, something that would have distinguished him from his working-class neighbours. While he may not have been believed, he received £4 per month under his mother’s will. In today’s money, this is approximately £344 or $512.

  When Ellen (or Eleanor) Makin died on 2 March 1890, this daughter of convict parents who had begun her life in the colony at the Female Orphan School in Parramatta left an estate worth £2888. Today it would have been worth approximately £248,656 (or $375,519),10 indicating she was comfortably middle class. Her will, made the day before she died, shows that she placed all her trust in her youngest son, George, who was the executor and one of two trustees of her estate. When she died, she was a widow who owned various properties in and around Wollongong, including 16.5 acres of land at Mt Keira, three shops and dwellings, a vacant allotment in Corrimal Street and a paddock in Market Street. Her will left her properties to be sold with the proceeds to be divided equally among her remaining children. However, John, the black sheep of the family, and one of his sisters, Emily, were the only ones to receive their inheritance by way of a monthly payment.11 Perhaps John’s bankruptcy and unstable work history meant his mother felt the need to control his spending from the grave.

  In spite of John’s income and their baby-farming activities, ‘the family always seemed to be miserably poor’. What they did with the money from baby farming is something that puzzled reporters. According to some local knowledge it appeared that John did not drink. Sarah was described as ‘a sober woman’ while her ‘daughters also bore the reputation of being well conducted, and dressed according to their station in life’. The only time John was ‘observed under the influence of drink’ was on the first day of the Burren Street inquests.

  On the other hand, John ‘was by no means an industrious man’ and appeared not to have had any permanent job for a few years. While he had had regular work as a drayman for Mr Shortland three years earlier, ‘in spite of this the roving propensity of the family was not to be checked’ even as far back as 1888 or 1889 when they had remained in a house at 113 Bullanaming Street, Redfern for a mere five or six weeks and kept very much to themselves.

  John was last employed as a drayman by Mr Bedford of Great Buckingham Street, Redfern shortly before Christmas, 1891. Mr Bedford, a livery stable proprietor and mail contractor, said he first knew John eleven years earlier when he was working as a drayman for a brewer and supplied Mr Bedford with stout. Bedford’s recollections match the fact that John worked for Mr Stuart, delivering water and alcoholic drinks to hotels and shops during 1882. Although Bedford had employed Makin after John went to him seeking employment, Bedford said ‘the man never appeared to have much heart in his work, and left suddenly in about six weeks’.

  Former neighbours in Levey Street, Chippendale reported that the Makins ‘kept very much to themselves’ although John was often seen ‘idling about in front of the house’ while the family lived there for about two months in late 1891. Mysteriously, other neighbours in Levey Street said the Makins were never seen ‘in front of the house in daylight’ and ‘when any of the family went out they usually went by means of the lane at the back’, thus avoiding Levey Street. In a time when front doors were left open during the day, observant neighbours noticed that the Makins only opened theirs at night.

  John was heard to say in the nearby hotel that ‘he had a fortune coming to him from Wollongong, but that his sister, who was the executrix of the estate, would not give him the money until some person who had bequeathed him the fortune had been dead a certain time’. He also told fellow drinkers he was a lorry driver but had left his employment owing to a strike and ‘did not know whether he would get any [work] again’.

  John was the only one who mixed with the locals since neighbours said ‘they only saw Mrs. Makin once or twice, and some had never seen her at all’. Several neighbours remembered the one time she was seen one evening after dark when Sarah and another woman had a ‘particularly lively’ dispute, with both women fighting ‘like pugilists’.

  Although the family attempted to lead a secluded and secret life, they would have attracted less attention had they tried to act normally, since they were considered to be ‘peculiar’. It seems that neighbours kept a look-out for their mysterious comings and goings because it was known that ‘Mrs. Makin was in the habit of leaving the premises by the back entrance every evening at about 8 o’clock, and not returning for some time’. Whatever Sarah was up to, either collecting babies or supplementing the family’s income with casual prostitution, one neighbour said ‘she had occasion to speak to Mrs. Makin one day, when she struck her as being “quite the lady”’. While none of the neighbours were suspicious about the Makins’ activities, the family ‘left in a mysterious manner one evening’ with no forwarding address.

  The police found it difficult to discover any information about the Makins while they had lived at 11 Alderson Street, Redfern ‘due to the wandering habits of the people’ in the locality. Eventually a Mrs Williams told Constable Joyce that the Makins had not been popular during their short stay from early December 1891 to late January 1892, having quarrelled with one family in the street. When Mrs Williams became involved in the quarrel, she was burned on the arm by a hot poker wielded by Mrs Makin. As Mrs Hill had also found outside a courtroom during the first Burren Street inquest, Sarah, like her father before her, was a person not to be trifled with.

  Former neighbours of the Makins in St Peters described the Makin girls as rude, with more neighbourly discord when they lived on Cook’s River Road in August 1891. During this time John was employed as a driver for Mr Whitehead, a parcel delivery agent, while a sign in their front window advertised Sarah as a ladies’ nurse. There was quite a bit of tittle-tattle about Sarah, who was known to have been married to a seafaring man. Some neighbours believed she had had no less than 16 children while Sarah herself told other neighbours she had 13 children although one or two had died.

  The Makins’ eldest son, William, lived with them for a time in Cook’s River Road but due to ‘some disturbance in the house’ he left home for good to live with John’s family in Wollongong. Neighbours also revealed the Makins moved out of St Peters in a hurry with no notice to the landlord and their rent in arrears, something that was to become a habit of theirs. Their next door neighbour, in particular, reported ‘many disputes with Mrs Makin, owing . . . to the rude conduct of the children’ and ‘no-one was sorry when they left’.

  When the family moved to Wells Street, Redfern, the house in which Constable Joyce discovered them, they found themselves in ‘a much superior locality’ in ‘a cheerful thoroughfare, occupied by the superior class of working people’. Apparently aware of this move up the social ladder, John ‘thought it necessary to apologise to his neighbours for the small amount of furniture he brought into the house’. Al
though he reassured them that more furniture would follow, ‘that promise was never fulfilled’.

  During their short stay in Wells Street, Mrs Makin ‘was rarely seen’ but John was ‘always hanging about, and on occasions evinced quite a friendly disposition’. The neighbours in Wells Street frequently heard the sound of crying babies coming from the Makin house. While in Wells Street, one day John knocked on the door of a young lady and announced ‘I have something to show you’. ‘Have you?’ the young woman replied, taken aback by Makin’s jocular and ‘unceremonious manner’ but not wishing to be unneighbourly. Encouraged, John returned to his house then produced three babies, two of whom, he informed his surprised young neighbour, were twins.

  These were the three infants who had just been born in 6 Wells Street when Constable Joyce first discovered the Makins. This story shows that the Makins were also running a lying-in house for women who were desperate enough to give birth in an establishment with little furniture and few material comforts. It also suggests they may have acquired babies in ways other than by answering ads in the daily newspapers.

  It is hard to say what John’s ‘neighbourly’ behaviour was about. No doubt he needed social contact, since he had once told Mr Hill of Burren Street that, ‘Things are dull out here; I am sorry I came’. His extroverted personality included a tendency to brag, since he later introduced himself to another female neighbour to whom he boasted ‘as references prominent persons in the town of Wollongong’. But when the woman replied she also knew these people, John ‘dropped the subject and left hastily’. Still, the neighbours in Wells Street were generous enough to say that ‘whatever are the Makins’ faults he always appeared to be a singularly affectionate father, more especially to his little boy, 2 years of age’.