The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women

by Deborah J. Swiss

  Children dashed around the wynds playing tag, hide-and-seek, and peever—the Scottish version of hopscotch. Boys picked up sticks to bat whatever they could hit in the air. An old barrel hoop started a contest for who could spin it the farthest. Street waste offered an abundance of possibilities for games and entertainment. Clever mothers sewed dolls from scraps of cloth. Discarded shoe heels, hammered with nails resembling eyes and a mouth, formed the perfect face for the doll. Pieces of rope were snatched up for skipping along the bank of the River Clyde. Nothing went unused, and nearly everything was used again and again with renewed purpose.

  Among the laboring class, a child’s role included the duty of earning a living. By age seven, Agnes would have been expected to contribute to the McMillan household income. Every penny mattered. Children her age, and younger, worked full time as chimney sweeps or factory workers, hired for the ability to reach small crevices and machine parts. Weans sometimes earned more than their parents because of the market value attached to their small size. Mine owners employed five- and six-year-olds to crawl through muddy scum deep inside the shafts and scurry back with a heavy load tied over their shoulders.

  Hunger and hopelessness incited families to commit unthinkable acts. Some parents relied on punishment to make their children earn money or commit a crime, whatever it took to keep the family afloat. Five-year-olds were forced to stitch gloves until the midnight hour. Six-year-olds were booted into the streets and ordered to steal a pocketbook or grab a loaf of bread. Small bodies with fast legs made good criminals. Other parents made valiant attempts to protect their sons and daughters from miscreant street influences, sometimes hiding their clothing so they could not venture outside.

  Most Glasgow families lived in poverty. Even with two incomes, subsistence wages were not enough to lift a family out of destitution. Absent the availability of homegrown meat or vegetables, the average city dweller spent at least 60 percent of earnings on food, some spending up to 90 percent. Members of the laboring class, like the McMillans, lived on oatmeal for breakfast and potatoes for dinner. Bread, beer, and lard rounded out their diet. Luxury items like milk, butter, cheese, or a piece of pork were rarely purchased. The largest meal portions were reserved for Michael McMillan, the primary breadwinner, especially when he could afford meat. When food ran short, mothers and children were expected to go without and sacrifice for the survival of the household.

  A Glasgow father spent very little time in the home. When his shift ended late into the evening, he generally headed straight for the flash house to “swallow a hare” at the pub. Workmates in tow, he drank heartily into the wee hours. Glasgow taverns, one for every fourteen people, guaranteed escape from the bleakness of a one-room flat. “Drunken statistics” published in the Scotsman revealed that Glasgow residents drank more than five times the amount of their London counterparts because of worse housing and less assistance for Scotland’s poor. Like their parents, the young took solace under alcohol’s haze, as described by a fourteen-year-old stonecutter: “Usquebaugh (whiskey) was simply happiness doled out by the glass and sold by the gill.”4

  The comfort of the bottle expanded Glasgow’s generation of abandoned children. Police commissions investigating the cause of juvenile delinquency in the early nineteenth century linked alcoholic parents to criminal children. “It is likely that drunkenness was often the result of indigence rather than simply bacchanalian pleasures. Many families of juvenile delinquents seem to have been engaged in a fight between destitution and respectability in the struggle to keep their heads above water from day to day.”5

  Among the poor and middle class, it was a woman’s duty to try to protect the family from the lure of the bottle, to ensure that a man’s paycheck wasn’t spent entirely at the pub. On payday, she would wait, children in hand, along the rail tracks or outside the factory exit. Money spent on prostitutes was another problem. Marriage in the Regency era was a loose concept at best, fidelity an uncommon one. As unemployment rose, so, too, did wife beating. If a woman found the courage to take her mate to court, he claimed that she had been drinking, fully aware that drunken wives could be gaoled by their husbands’ testimony. Desertion was commonplace among men. Without warning, many ran away from the Glasgow tenements in search of better employment or an easier life.

  These were the stresses that robbed childhoods from the thousands of Scottish children who ended up on the street or in a factory. Agnes McMillan was no different. Her father abandoned the family early in her life. She never learned why he left, but there are many possible explanations. Railway men worked fifteen-hour shifts, seven days a week, with only one holiday a year. Michael McMillan’s job of coal porter entailed lugging a wheelbarrow back and forth, loading and unloading mound upon mound of dusty fuel. So pitiful was the pay for this backbreaking work that many resorted to larceny. Men Michael’s age often surrendered to arrest, alcoholism, or the grave. The average life expectancy for a Glasgow native was just under thirty-one years.

  Nearly 30 percent of Glasgow households were headed by a woman. Some were widows and others abandoned wives like Mary. Many Scottish lasses had never married because of the availability of jobs in the mills coupled with a shortage of men. If a woman lost her job or her mate, her options for employment were severely more limited than a man’s. If the sole breadwinner didn’t work, she ended up on Glasgow’s streets. There were no alternatives, no safety nets. If a woman was poor, it was considered her fault. If her children went hungry, it was blamed on her flawed character.

  Poverty was treated as a crime, conveniently alleviating the conscience of the upper classes. Poorhouses were designed to be as miserable as possible to discourage use by people who needed help most. When Agnes was born, local counties couldn’t handle the swelling number of women, men, and children who were without food, a place to sleep, or prospects for employment. The few admitted to a workhouse were called “inmates” and were required to wear uniforms. Each inmate performed hard labor. Men worked breaking stones with axes. Women and children pulled apart old hemp rope that would be reused on ships, tearing their flesh as they teased dirt and tar from the rough fibers. In The Borough, British poet George Crabbe described this “pauper-palace”6:

  Those gates and locks, and all those signs of power:

  It is a prison, with a milder name,

  Which few inhabit without dread or shame.

  If Mary McMillan had lost her job and been forced into a poorhouse, the overseer would have separated her from Agnes. He would have shorn Agnes’s hair to three inches, thereby reinforcing her beggar rank and discouraging a return to “poor relief.” Mother and child would have gone to sleep hungry. Food rations, deemed “an efficient test of poverty,” were half the amount served in prisons, just enough to keep the worker inmates on their feet.7 In gaol, hard labor was generally not required, so, in effect, poverty was punished more harshly than stealing. The workhouse was a death sentence for 23 percent of those who entered, a mortality rate more than double that for the homeless.

  The End of Eden

  For a time, Mary McMillan was able to provide for Agnes by laboring at the nearby woolen manufactory, as the mill was called. The work was stifling and dangerous, but because she was paid based on her productivity, she trudged on. There was no ventilation, nor privies, nor provisions for water. Agnes’s mother considered herself fortunate to have a job, but toxic tedium and twelve years on her feet had finally ground her down. In theory, the Industrial Revolution offered women the potential for economic freedom. In reality, most earned between one-third and one-half of what a man brought home.

  No matter how Mary scrimped and saved, she was always behind. With wages on the order of four shillings per week, there was little chance to make ends meet. Her basic expenses required at least five shillings, exceeding her earnings in spite of working overtime. In neighborhoods like Goosedubbs Street, weekly rent cost one shilling, sixpence; oatmeal and flour, one shilling, ten pence; potatoes, five pence for a large
sack; candles and fuel, one shilling, two pence.

  Facing the numbing struggle to make it through the next day, Mary McMillan found optimism beyond her grasp. Whether it was despair, drink, or a different reason, Mary ultimately gave up on motherhood. Unable to cope with work and parenting, she often left Agnes to fend for herself. By age twelve, Agnes was left entirely to her own resources. Her mother still allowed her to sleep at the flat, but Agnes spent many a night wandering the wynds. Luckily, she made friends easily, thanks to “a spirited demeanor,” as described by her descendants. Deserted by her family and consigned to wretchedness by her government’s grim prediction in Parliament’s Poor Laws report, the Goosedubbs Street girl found protection in what would be called a street gang today.

  Janet Houston, a year older, adopted the abandoned little songstress. Agnes’s alliance with a surrogate big sister provided a sense of belonging and a semblance of a family, at least for a while. Agnes sang to whoever would listen, and Janet collected coins from passersby. Together the best friends looked out for each other as they managed a lean existence along the River Clyde. Life on the dingy streets was certainly hard, yet these two independent souls had decided that sleeping in an alleyway was preferable to the workhouse or the factory. Now, however, the sunken-cheeked twelve-year-old was under arrest, chains shackled to her wrists. As the iron door closed, leaving her and Janet in the damp silence of the holding cell, Agnes cursed her bad luck. She knew what justice meant for the poor. Bloody Christmas, bloody hell.

  If a society is judged on how it treats children and the downtrodden, the British Empire failed on all fronts during Agnes’s lifetime. Voices of reason were few and rare, even among leading intellectuals. Francis Hutcheson, one of the founders of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, suggested that benevolence arose from the instinctive human commitment toward “the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.” Man’s morality, he believed, would inspire “a determination to be pleased with the happiness of others and to be uneasy at their misery.”8

  Enlightened optimism like Hutcheson’s faded in favor of luminaries voicing more cynical views about the future of humanity. In his famous Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus argued that in accordance with the laws of nature, famine and starvation would weed out the poor, thus alleviating the strain of population growth on modern civilization. He recommended that the underprivileged be prevented from marrying and having children.9 A father of three, he felt exempt from this proclamation because of his wealth. Following his logic, Agnes McMillan should not have been born.

  A controversial celebrity of his time, Malthus advocated against the Poor Laws and any assistance that might help sustain the struggling. This was the brand of popular thinking that permitted the abuses of power under the Transportation Act, including shipping twenty-five thousand girls and women to the other side of the world, Agnes and Janet among them.

  Throughout the British Isles, madness and hypocrisy permeated politics and everyday life. In 1820, a child who stole clothing could be banished and worked to death in Australia, but George IV, a known bigamist and suspected murderer, would be crowned king. King George IV humiliated Queen Caroline when he continued his relationship with a commoner to whom he’d been secretly married years earlier. Her Highness, too, engaged in scandalous behavior, including dressing in see-through gowns during alleged affairs with her servants. Her death in 1821 was widely attributed to poisoning by His Majesty.

  The Industrial Revolution heightened society’s imbalances. It fattened the prosperous and starved the weak, widening the chasm between classes and creating an incubator for juvenile criminals like Agnes and Janet. In earlier decades, parish schools in rural villages welcomed children during the slower farming cycles and fostered a relatively high literacy rate. Had Agnes been born into an agrarian family, hard labor would still have been her fate, but she would have eaten better food, grown up in healthier surroundings, and perhaps learned to read. Though farm hands labored long and hard, there were changes in pace and a variety in chores, unlike the perpetual monotony that poisoned the factory floor. Farm children were valued by their parents, if for no other reason than their ability to work the fields. This bond helped keep rural families intact.

  Factories, on the other hand, demanded labor every day of the week, every month of the year. As industry enhanced technology, it stunted education for the poor, and literacy declined. There were simply not enough hours in the day for children to learn to read and write. The lowest classes, following the lure of progress, traded a self-sufficient agrarian lifestyle for enslavement in an urban jungle. From 1780 to 1830, child labor grew exponentially, largely due to the end of a family-centered economy.

  Well on its way to becoming one of the largest cities in Europe and already Scotland’s most congested, Glasgow had grown to a population of two hundred thousand. As daylight broke, low-lying smog erased the city’s color. Ashen figures wandered hopelessly through a black-and-white world. By Christmas 1832, Agnes’s hometown, unrivaled in squalor, was dirtier and more dangerous than any city in the empire.

  This was a far cry from the pristine paradise enjoyed by Glasgow’s seventy thousand inhabitants just thirty years earlier. The city’s name came from the Gaelic Glaschu, or “clean green place.” English writer Daniel Defoe described eighteenth-century Glasgow as “one of the cleanliest, most beautiful and best cities in Great Britain.”10 Built along the River Clyde, this peaceful enclave was protected by steep rolling hills. Children played in the water, and men fished in the streams by tree-lined meadows. This was an urban oasis defined by nature’s beauty, resplendent in its orchards, cornfields, and terraced flower gardens.

  Agnes and Janet never knew the green, open spaces of a more serene Glasgow. The tobacco and linen trade had set the Garden of Eden on fire. Seldom did the close companions see the magical northern lights, hidden under a murky haze that rarely lifted from their city’s sky. The lazy River Clyde was widened and violated to make room for noisy steam-powered ships bringing sugar and raw cotton to fuel Glasgow’s new industries. The fragrance of buds in bloom was replaced by the stench of the slum. A once-glistening metropolis had lost its luster by the time the Goosedubbs Street girls sat before the sheriff.

  Glasgow residents lived on average twelve years less than their rural counterparts, a fact attributed to urban housing: “damp earthen, muddy floors, walls saturated with moisture . . . small closed windows admitting of no perflation [sic] of air, crowded apartments, thatched roofs saturated like a sponge with water.”11 The physical toll on the tenement dweller was devastatingly obvious. The rich were almost always taller than the poor by four inches or more.12 One-third of Glasgow’s children hobbled along with a disfiguring gait caused by malnutrition and rickets. 13 More were maimed by their work in factories or mines.

  Laborers were pitted against one another for every job, every day. A person willing to work for less landed the job only until someone more desperate arrived at the factory door. Glasgow shipping companies imported starving Irish citizens who eagerly accepted cheap wages, thereby putting Scottish citizens out of work. To make matters worse, peasants from the highlands crowded the city in search of a better life that did not exist. In addition, the shift from hand to power looms destroyed a large cottage industry and left thousands of traditional weavers without employment and their families without food. Bleakness clung to the land like mold on an old loaf of bread.

  The Glasgow wynds did not suffer fools. Like feral dogs, children on the streets learned to live according to their wits and a well-developed talent for exploiting opportunity. Alley dwellers worked their way up the street society according to a criminal hierarchy. Agnes and Janet would have started at the bottom, lifting an apple or two from a vendor cart. With small successes, the novice progressed to stealing items from stores and passersby. The proceeds could be bartered for money through any number of fences who lurked under the cover of candle shops, street stal
ls, and public houses. Many lodging-house owners offered thieves a bed for the night in return for an item that could be pawned easily. Other proprietors, fences themselves, encouraged crime as they made their boardinghouses a safe haven for gangs and a thriving underground economy from which they, too, profited.

  Impoverished girls, Agnes and Janet included, faced three basic paths to survival: mill slave, thief, or “fallen woman.” An article in the Glasgow Courier appeared to sanction the third option. Accounts of fifteen-hour days and floggings by mill overseers led the Courier writer to this conclusion: “If the females when grown up are not ugly they may find relief in prostitution.”14

  Even though she was only twelve, Agnes had been offered the job of trollop many times. Part tomboy, part rebel, Agnes rejected the “loose habits” that would have branded her a strumpet. Stealing carried the risk of gaol, but prostitution was legal. Still, she refused to sell her body, an all-too-common fate for abandoned children.

  Street-smart Agnes and Janet often felt more at ease roaming the wynds, where they at least knew what to expect and where to hide. The boardinghouse might have offered the pair some relief from the worst of the Scottish weather. However, there was no safety in numbers in the rented rooms they could afford. “In the lower lodging houses, ten, twelve, and sometimes twenty persons, of both sexes and all ages, sleep promiscuously on the floor in different degrees of nakedness. These places are generally as regards dirt, damp, and decay, such as no person of common humanity would stable his horse in.”15