What did the Makins do with their regular income from baby farming and John’s inheritance? As we will see in the next chapter, opium in the form of various elixirs was easily available and widely used by Australians. For John and Sarah, doses of opium would have been necessary to dull the pain of syphilis. An addiction to opium would also explain the Makins’ constant need for money, John’s irregular work habits, Sarah’s volatile behaviour and John’s mother’s careful control of his inheritance.12
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The next five inquests: the Makins’ lives stripped bare
7–8 November 1892
Throughout the many inquests, the Makins’ behaviour deteriorated. As the veil was lifted on their nefarious lives, they sobbed, collapsed, wailed, fainted, fought, threatened, shrieked and, in desperation, one of them undertook a little spying.
They employed a competent lawyer, Mr Williamson, who represented them at the next five inquests which investigated the deaths of the last five babies unearthed by the police in Burren Street. Williamson was clever and crafty, an ideal match for the Makins. But by the end of the final Burren Street inquest, the Coroner had had enough of him, refusing to let him speak. By this time, the greed and heartlessness of John and Sarah may have been all too hard to bear as the short lives of the five babies were exposed in the courtroom.
The inquests began on Monday 7 November 1892 in the Coroner’s Court.1 The infants were known as Babies 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. The Sydney Morning Herald reported the opening of the inquest in its morning edition and a large number of spectators crowded into the court at 10 a.m. hoping to see the mysterious Makin family.2
The paper also revealed ‘[t]he public interest in the case shows no signs of abating’ with large numbers of ‘curiosity-seekers’ visiting Burren Street on the weekend. This would have caused quite a stir in the narrow, dead-end street and rattled the unsuspecting Mulveys, with people crowding around their front garden, knocking on the door or trying to climb into their backyard to see for themselves the empty graves of the dead infants.
Also published the previous Saturday were the ages and sex of each child, along with a description of the clothing in which they had been buried. This information had been released by the police to encourage ‘any person who can throw the slightest light on the subject’ to come forward. The clothing worn by each baby was central to their identification, as well as connecting the Makins to the children, because decomposition meant the babies were unrecognisable.
After the jury was sworn in, the inquest visited the South Sydney morgue to view the bodies, whereupon ‘the female prisoners became greatly affected’. The Coroner, the jurymen and the Makins then adjourned to the Coroner’s Court in Chancery Square.
The first inquest concerned the death of Baby 1, who was 12–15 months old when she died, according to Dr Milford’s examination of the length of her thigh bones. She had been buried for three to six months between May and August that year.
After Mr Mulvey took the oath, he told the court that when he returned to live in his house in August, no-one could have used his backyard without his knowledge because of its high fencing, the presence of two savage dogs and a locked gate which opened into the Hills’ backyard. He described how he had had to deal with a family who did not pay their rent by visiting the house on 2 or 3 August to speak to John Makin. When the rent remained unpaid he sent a bailiff with a distress warrant for rent. By this time, the Makins had disappeared.
When Mr Hill gave evidence at the inquest after lunch, he revealed that he saw the Makins with a baby in arms on the night they arrived. This evidence contradicted John’s and Sarah’s police statements that they had acquired a baby for nursing the day after their arrival in Burren Street.
The question in everyone’s minds was, did the Makins have any other babies with them when they moved to Burren Street? The newspapers reported that when the Makins moved there they had enough money to pay four weeks’ rent in advance (£3 8s). Yet Sarah had told the previous inquest that the family left George Street because they were poor and could not pay the rent. Did they earn the rent for Burren Street by adopting more babies before they left George Street?
Mr Hill said that a few days after the Makins’ arrival, John had asked to borrow a piece of timber from which he could make a signboard advertising Mrs Makin as a ‘Ladies Nurse and Qualified Midwife’. Having no timber, Mr Hill offered John a piece of tin. A day later, John showed Mr Hill the sign he had painted on the tin and remarked, ‘There’s a good thing to be made out of these children’. He also revealed that Sarah’s mother was a nurse who knew a lot about the business. Makin confided he had ‘passed a rough night’ with the baby in arms having kept him awake half the night, using such language that the newspapers could not print his comments. He asked to be directed to the nearest chemist.
The money to be made from Mrs Makin’s skills as a ‘ladies’ nurse’ appears to have been essential to the family finances, since Mr Hill testified that Makin was unemployed during his stay in Burren Street, although John had said ‘on several occasions that he was going to get a job, or that he had been promised a job’.
As Mr Hill stepped down from the witness box, he told the Coroner he had not come willingly but had been summoned by the police to give evidence:
Mr Hill: [I]t's very hard upon me and my wife to have to hang round here loafing instead of earning 9s a day. Coroner: You must not call it loafing.
Mr Hill: Well, I don't know what else it is, hanging round these verandahs. (Laughter.)
At the end of the first day of this inquest, the unhappy Makin family was taken back to Darlinghurst Gaol in the police cab. Florence and Blanche ‘burst into tears and cried piteously’ while Sarah ‘looked very solemn and crestfallen’ seated in the cab. But John was upbeat as he ‘talked and joked callously about going to gaol again’ while a large crowd watched them being driven away.
The next morning came the most interesting yet puzzling evidence heard so far. Miss Agnes Todd, aged 26, told the court she was a single woman living at 6 Dangar Place, Chippendale. She had given birth to a baby girl, called Elsie May, on 1 January 1892. She had known Makin as Mr Leslie after entering into a written agreement with him on 27 June to adopt her child for £3, five days before the Makins moved to Burren Street. The formal agreement was produced in court:
Redfern, 27/6/92
I hereby agree to take and adopt a baby girl six months old from Agnes Todd, for the baby, name Elsie May, for a compensation of £3. I hereby agree to take her for life, and not to trouble the said Agnes Todd, either in sickness or death of the baby.
J.H.Leslie.
In court, Agnes was able to identify a fragment of linen that had been found on Baby B, the second body discovered by the drain-layers. This was part of a shirt that Agnes’ baby had been wearing when she was adopted by Mr Leslie. The Makins’ lawyer, Mr Williamson, informed the Coroner that Agnes’ evidence had nothing whatever to do with the present inquiry. The Coroner was forced to agree and explained to the puzzled jurymen that he had put Agnes in the witness box since ‘he had been given to understand she was in a position to identify some of the clothing found on the body of the child’ who was the subject of this particular inquest, Baby 1. That appeared not to be the case, although at this stage the Coroner was unaware that the Makins frequently swapped clothing between their baby-farmed children.
Unfortunately, the Coroner had failed to realise that Agnes had relinquished her six-month-old baby to the Makins five days before they moved to Burren Street. No-one seems to have wondered what had happened to Elsie May and whether she could have been Baby 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5. Such were the vagaries of coronial justice in the 1890s.
The evidence given in the inquest into the death of Baby 1 was entirely circumstantial and did not enable the jury to link the Makins to her death. No poisons had been found in the baby’s intestinal contents by the Government Analyst and Dr Milford was not able to give an actual cause of death due to the degree of
decomposition of the body. During the inquest, no-one came forward to claim Baby 1 although if Dr Milford’s age estimation was correct, someone had nursed Baby 1 for about a year before deciding to give her up. As the Coroner told the jury:
The case is a very suspicious one, indeed, but it is only a suspicion, and I will leave you gentlemen to consider your verdict. There is nothing whatever in the evidence which would enable you to say when, where, or by what means this particular child came by its death.
Dissatisfied that so little evidence had been called, a juryman asked: ‘And there is no evidence, beyond what has already been given, likely to come out in the case of the other four bodies?’ The Coroner told the jurors he could not say and then asked them to retire to consider their verdict. The next day, Tuesday 8 November, the foreman of the jury announced:
We find that the said female infant . . . was found buried, but when the death took place, or what was the cause thereof, the evidence does not enable us to say.3
The Coroner replied: ‘That I fear, will be the difficulty in each of these cases’. The Makins could sleep a little easier for the time being in their new, rent-free home in Darlinghurst Gaol.
‘Metaphysics are the Godfrey’s Cordial of the mind with which old women talk young children to sleep’4
John Makin’s comment to Mr Hill that he had ‘passed a rough night’ with the baby in the house and his inquiry about the nearest chemist take us down another dim and dingy lane into the widespread practice of using drugs to sedate children. It was common in the 1800s for mothers, midwives and baby farmers to drug children with patent medicines or elixirs containing opium, such as Godfrey’s Cordial. In fact, new mothers were advised by an article in The Sydney Morning Herald to ensure they were ‘never without a flask of Godfrey’s cordial . . . in the nursery’.5
Perhaps there was a universal need to dull the senses because of the harshness or tedium of life in the colonies since ‘at the turn of the century Australia was the largest per capita consumer’ of opium-based medicines in the world. White, middle-class women seem to have been particularly partial to opium, since they were the ones most likely to obtain an opium habit, albeit discreetly.6 Many would have agreed that opium was indeed ‘donum Dei’, the name it was given: a gift of God.
The term ‘Godfrey’s Cordial’ was a common part of the language during the 1800s and was used to refer to all manner of complaints, not just those of crying babies. When the ‘whining’ Australian colonies were considering their independence from Britain in 1851, the Colonial Times in Hobart remarked:
the discontented Colonies are all to be cured of their miseries by Constitutions. Whether they will cure their miseries, or only operate as a Godfrey’s Cordial to stop their whimpering . . . may be a sad doubt to us.7
The lack of laws regulating drug use and the relaxed attitudes towards drugs in the 1800s meant that people treated their ailments with patent medicines which were ‘available from chemists or grocers’ shelves, without prescription, if and when the customer wanted them’.8 These elixirs were also widely used because they were cheap—‘about the price of a pint of beer’.9
In England, Australia and America, the most widely used elixirs for children had pleasant names such as Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, Bonnington’s Irish Moss, Ayres’ Sarsparilla and Godfrey’s Cordial, which was also known as Mother’s Friend or ‘comfort’. Despite its disarming name, Godfrey’s Cordial ‘was a sinister preparation’ because of its high opium content, with one grain of opium for every two ounces.10 Named after its inventor, Thomas Godfrey of Hertfordshire, this potent brew appeared in the early eighteenth century during Britain’s cultivation of opium in India for trade with China and consisted of sassafras, opium, brandy or rectified spirit, caraway seed, and treacle.11
The cordial was advertised as a cure for a wide range of children’s symptoms—from fretfulness to colic to diarrhoea. It was frequently used to sedate temperamental babies and many died from opium overdoses either by mistake or as a result of continuous use by ‘nurses to keep infants . . . in a deep state of sleep and thus of no bother’.12 Although Godfrey’s Cordial was definitely the baby farmer’s friend, baby farmers were in common company since its liberal use by mothers and midwives meant that it was one of the major causes of infant deaths in the 1800s.13
Godfrey’s Cordial was commonly used by the working-classes to prevent children from crying when they were hungry14 and to pacify infants so that mothers could return to work in the factories immediately after giving birth.15 Every chemist made his own potion and because the potency varied, overdoses were common. Even so, more children died from starvation than from opium overdose because drugged babies failed to cry for food.16 Chronic use of opium meant that babies failed to thrive and were cheap to keep for baby farmers. If the Makins were using Godfrey’s Cordial to silence their adopted babies, these infants may have ended up similar to Sarah’s own babies before they died—wasted like ‘wizened little monkeys’.
Inquests into the deaths of babies who had been poisoned by Godfrey’s Cordial were common during the 1800s. On 25 August 1855, an inquest was held in Hobart into the death of Martha Mills, four weeks old, who, it was found, had been given an accidental overdose of Godfrey’s Cordial after her mother had bought the elixir from her local chemist.17 Other inquests testify to its frequent use either as a daily pacifier or possibly a way of disposing of unwanted children with one family losing five children to overdoses of Godfrey’s Cordial.18 Because of its widespread use, it was difficult to prove that someone had killed a child deliberately using Godfrey’s Cordial, with most deaths being recorded as ‘debility from birth’, ‘lack of breast milk’ or simply ‘starvation’.19
The intemperate use of Godfrey’s Cordial was a concern in England during the 1840s with an inquiry reporting that children were frequently brought to doctors ‘benumbed and stupified with opiates’ using Godfrey’s Cordial. The inquiry found that the problem prevailed over much of England while some reported that babies were given Godfrey’s Cordial from the day of birth with high numbers of infants perishing:
Those who escape with life become pale and sickly children, often half idiotic, and always with a ruined constitution.20
Because of the habitual use of Godfrey’s Cordial for pacifying babies by parents and baby farmers alike, it is almost certain that on the morning of 30 June 1892, John Makin headed for the nearest chemist in King Street, Newtown to purchase a bottle for the baby that had kept him up all night, the baby Sarah Makin had described as being ‘very cross’ and one she was glad to be rid of.
The use of this ‘soothing’ mixture would explain why none of the neighbours reported hearing the sound of babies crying from 25 Burren Street. Godfrey’s Cordial would have been an essential tool for managing a house full of babies, since suspicious neighbours would only bring unwanted police attention. But its use also means that the babies found in the Burren Street backyard could have died from opium overdoses or starvation as they lay drugged, slowly wasting away. Had the Makins intended to kill these infants or were they using Godfrey’s Cordial as a pacifier because they were just too poor to feed seven hungry babies?
John’s confession: truth or another bit of Joycean fiction?
After the unsatisfactory verdict in relation to the death of Baby 1, Constable Joyce and the Makins remained in the Coroner’s Court to observe the next set of inquests, which began on the same day, Tuesday, 8 November.21
Babies 2 and 3 were 4–6 months old and 2–3 months old respectively when they died. Both were in an advanced state of decomposition, having been buried for four to six months with most of their internal organs decomposed. Dr Milford could not determine their cause of death, although spots of blood had been found on the piece of white calico in which Baby 2 had been wrapped.
Baby 5 had died when she was about ten days old. Her right arm was missing, although nothing was made of this. She had been buried for two to three months and was the least decomposed of
the five babies discovered by the police. Dr Milford’s autopsy found that she had a small puncture below her left nipple which had not penetrated her chest. Because her internal organs were not as decomposed as those of the other babies, Dr Milford revealed that her lungs had expanded to fill her chest cavity and overlap her heart. He informed the jury that this expansion occurs when someone has drowned, or been strangled or suffocated, as well as in cases of opium poisoning. When her other internal organs were examined, Baby 5’s intestines were found to be empty, suggesting she had not been fed for some time.
At the inquest into the death of Baby 2, Edward Jordan gave evidence of a confession that John Makin had made while they had shared a prison cell at Newtown police station in the early hours of 4 November. Jordan had been arrested for the carnal knowledge of a girl under the age of 14. Although John had denied any knowledge of the Burren Street discoveries in his police interview, Jordan told the court that he and Makin had spoken of the ‘troubles’ that had landed them in prison. John had confided he was inside for baby farming, revealing that while seven bodies had been found, there was still one more yet to be discovered. He was worried that when that one was found ‘I’ll never see daylight any more’, adding ‘[t]hat is what a man gets for obliging people’. Resigned to his fate, John told Jordan, ‘I don’t care for myself, but for my children, who are innocent’. Perhaps thinking of his options, John mused ‘[h]e could do nothing outside, as they were watching the ground too close’. But he was confident that ‘[n]o doctor can say he had poisoned any of the children’. Makin had been annoyed that although ‘the parents of one of the infants promised me £2 to register the death and bury the body’, they had not kept their promise. When pressed under cross-examination, Jordan also revealed that John had admitted to burying the seven babies in Burren Street.
The jury may have wondered whether Makin really did confess to a man he had only just met or whether Constable Joyce had done a deal with Jordan. The answer depends on what information Joyce knew and when. John’s revelation about the parents of one child promising to pay £2 could only have come from Minnie Davies and Horace Bothamley. Horace had contacted the police before John was arrested since his accusations had informed Joyce’s first interview with the Makins.
The Baby Farmers Page 12