Yard Two
Other than Agnes’s arm draped over her shoulder, the luxury of comfort remained out of Janet’s reach. After a last moment with Agnes and Ludlow at the nursery, the weeping mother was returned to Yard Two’s stone washtubs, where she’d complete her six-month punishment for giving birth to a baby now deceased. As she scrubbed in the half shadows of Yard Two, a deadened Janet felt neither the stone scraping her skinny elbows nor the muddy groundwater seeping over her toes.
Slowly, as summer faded into fall, Janet began to feel again. Numbness wore away and exposed a rage on the edge of eruption. The grieving mother seethed with fury toward a system that forced early weaning and placed baby William in the overcrowded infant ward, where he received insufficient nourishment and little attention. For a time, she dutifully carried out twelve-hour work assignments, collapsing in her low-slung hammock for fitful sleep. Every night at mandatory chapel, the mourning mother faced Holy Willie, the reverend who had successfully lobbied for the punishment she now endured for unwed pregnancy. Janet’s emotions certainly ran full bore as she damned Heaven and the Fates for their cruelty. Above all, she must have detested the Reverend Bedford from the depths of her soul. On his recommendation, Superintendent Hutchinson condemned and punished all pregnant convicts, regardless of the circumstances.12
On March 17, five weeks after she’d buried her son, Janet lashed out against the convict system. Her refusal to leave her hammock and get to work brought six days back in solitary confinement.
The bloody bastards, what more can they take away?
Godfrey Charles Mundy, a colonel in the British army, toured the Female Factory and recorded his observations about solitary confinement in the book Our Antipodes. At first, he applauded “bread-and-water discussed in silence and solitude—things that no woman loveth,” deeming it “merciful” and “discreet” punishment.13 But the colonel would later eat his own words when he asked the turnkey to unlock a series of massive doors in the solitary ward. After inspecting two cells where women sat glumly at work, they pried open a third cell door. Mundy described what he saw:
It looked like the den of a wolf. . . . From the extreme end of the floor I found a pair of bright, flashing eyes fixed on mine. . . . It was a small, slight, and quite young girl—very beautiful in feature and complexion—but it was the fierce beauty of a wild cat! . . . I fear that the pang of pity that shot across my heart when that pretty prisoner was shut again from the light of day, might have found no place there had she been as ugly as the sins that had brought her into trouble. I had no more stomach for solitary cells this day.14
Janet’s solitary chamber held a mildewed mattress on the floor, a stool, and a bucket for waste. But no punishment could be worse than the loss of her child. The despondent mother quietly curled up against the cold stone, drawing herself into the fetal position.
One week after her release from solitary, up to her elbows in dirty washtub water, a despairing Janet heard the whisper of a familiar voice. A cheeky Agnes had simply walked out of the Liverpool Street nursery and represented herself as a free woman when stopped by a suspicious constable. For this, a magistrate escorted her back to Cascades to begin four months once again in Yard Two. Since the passing of William, whom she’d come to adore like a nephew, she’d seen in rapid succession six more children carried from Liverpool Street to St. David’s Cemetery. At an age at which she had good reason to think about a family of her own, Agnes couldn’t face another infant death.
Reunited with Janet back in the valley, Agnes tried to cheer her mate, regaling her with tales about the dark-haired dashing prince she’d spotted on the night he galloped through Oatlands on a wild horse. Janet found a bit of comfort in her friend’s girlish giggle as she described a freed convict named William Roberts, who sported dark bushy eyebrows and a smile full of mischief. Agnes had fallen deeply in love.
The Glasgow lasses were nearing the end of their seven-year sentences. They probably knew their paths would part as they approached the day each would hold a Certificate of Freedom. There was no sense thinking about Scotland anymore. Those days were over. In spite of the suffering they’d been forced to endure, they found love and a sense of belonging in the colony down under.
For the last decade, their unwavering friendship provided each other with just enough sustenance to endure another year, always holding out hope that the next would be better. The petty theft that transported them to Van Diemen’s Land paled in comparison to the crimes they saw nearly every day, which went, for the most part, unpunished. Girls raped by their masters, Holy Willie’s hypocrisy, bribes taken by the Catos and others—so much seemed unjust. Angry frustration ebbed and flowed for both Janet and Agnes, though their misconduct was relatively tame compared to the records of many transported with them.
There was all manner of mayhem and insurgency as 1842 unfolded. It began building in 1839, when Ellen Scott and other members of the Flash Mob attempted to throttle Mr. Hutchinson. The night after Janet was released from solitary, just a week before Agnes’s latest infraction, the rebels at the top of the valley decided to throw a party. It was precisely the type of disobedience that drove the aging superintendent to tear at his whiskers.
The weather was perfect, mild and dry, and for three weeks not a drop of rain had fallen. Under a bright moon, shortly after eight o’clock on the evening of March 24, Superintendent Hutchinson heard a ruckus coming from one of the wards. He hurried out of his second-floor quarters across the yard to investigate. As he drew closer, the disturbance grew louder. Stopping outside the ward, he peered through the grates and saw a group of prisoners cavorting in a state of wild abandon. Horrified, he waited silently until he could identify at least five of the women who’d joyfully removed their shapeless grey shifts and tossed them in a pile. Singing, cursing, and dancing naked with one another “in imitation of men and women together,” they barely noticed the skinny specter of a man whose mouth flapped agape.15
Among the bawdy performers were two well-known Flash Mob members who’d assisted with Ellen Scott’s 1839 turbulentinsubordination. There was raven-haired Eliza Smith and the fierce green-eyed Mary Devereux.16 Devereux also sported a tattoo, two small blue dots between the finger and thumb of her left hand.17 Frances Hutchinson from County Kerry, another known troublemaker, displayed the same emblem, along with rings tattooed on her first two fingers.18 Among the twenty-five thousand women transported, eight other Irish females etched nearly identical blue dots between their fingers.19 Each encoded a message, perhaps of solidarity or shared heritage, one that could be neither stripped away nor removed by their captors.
This night, each naked dancer received a sentence of either six or twelve months’ hard labor for her final curtain call. Mr. Hutchinson, a Methodist minister by training, could tolerate no more of their saucy insurrection and made it a point to separate the five rebels and house them in separate wards. After release from hard labor, Eliza Smith continued her rebellion, thumbing her nose at authorities through foul language and absconding with great regularity. Finally, in February 1845, she was punished once again for misconduct. Only this time, she was dead within the month. The last entry in her conduct record was scribbled haphazardly over other entries: “Died in Factory Launceston, 5 March 1845.”20 She was twenty-seven.
Punishment rarely stopped merriment when it erupted behind the Female Factory walls. In fact, it sometimes encouraged elaborate schemes designed to torment Superintendent Hutchinson and the others in charge. Repeat offenders harbored no fear for what they’d face in the Crime Class, as explained in the True Colonist newspaper: “Many women prefer this class to the others, because it is more lively! There is more fun there than in the others; and we have been informed, that some of the most sprightly of the ladies divert their companions by acting plays!”21
The always simmering readiness for revolution, fueled by absolute disdain toward their captors, persisted throughout the year into winter’s long nights. Under the big bright moo
n of August 23, 1842,22 the Flash Mob was at it again. Mr. Hutchinson sent his wife to investigate the boisterous sounds of song and dance, undoubtedly fearful of what he might see. The instant Mrs. Hutchinson opened the latch to the crime ward, it fell quiet, and she was unable to tell where the noise had originated. By the time she returned to her residence, the clamor started all over again. Back to the ward she trudged, only to face silent women sitting in their hammocks doing nothing at all. This went on for some time before Mr. Hutchinson made an appearance. In a feeble attempt to end the standoff, he demanded the names of the ringleaders. Without a word, he later reported, the women squatted down, “shouted and clapped their hands, stamped and made noise with their feet and this took place to such an extent that I conscientiously say it was a riot.”23
Somehow managing to quiet the mob, Mr. Hutchinson left the room, only to be followed by a fresh outburst of clapping and cheering. Tension reached the boiling point, and he called in the town police. The women greeted the officers with a solidarity chant: “We are all alike, we are all alike.”24 The stalemate lasted four hours until the now-crumbling and defeated Ann Maloney turned in the insurgent ringleaders. Her fun and games inside the Female Factory were over, and solidarity was not enough to keep her strong. Although she’d joined Ellen Scott’s infamous 1839 revolt and reveled in the wild sisterhood, Ann descended ever deeper into drunkenness and violence as her life sentence endlessly unraveled. The optimistic lass who’d so lovingly inscribed two hearts and two doves on a coin had long since departed.
The sisterhood of rebellious unity was not enough to counteract the darkest side of life inside the Female Factory. Hunger, malnutrition, filth, exhaustion, alcoholism, and a lack of personal space contributed to riots, fistfights, and incidents of sexual assault among the women. All sorts of scandals and uprisings kept the Flash Mob on the lips of many colonists. Lady Jane Franklin, though aloof from the prisoners she had promised Mrs. Fry she would help, bristled at Mob headlines splashed across the newspapers she perused every day.
Earlier in the year, an extension of the Female Factory opened in New Town. Known as the Brickfields Hiring Depot, it became the assignment center for transported women. Lady Franklin wasted no time in launching a campaign to institute harsher penalties for the Crime Class at Brickfields. The Colonial Times reported that she had taken over “management of the Female Convict Establishment, in conjunction with a committee of ten other ladies.” On the ladies’ recommendations, “those in the lowest crime yard are to be employed in breaking stones for the finishing course on the roads, not larger than the yolk of an egg, to be passed through an iron riddle according to Macadam’s plan.”25 The newspaper article concluded with a wholehearted endorsement of Lady Jane’s approach: “This is delightful. We shall soon hear no more of ‘send me to the Factory,’ from those heroines, where at present they are engaged in little else than studying how to concoct mischief, and render themselves unworthy the name of WOMAN.”26
Not surprisingly, Lady Jane informed Mrs. Fry that picking oakum or scrubbing at the washtubs was too easy a punishment for the unwed mothers at Cascades. While Franklin’s attitudes toward the transported women grew ever harsher, Elizabeth’s Fry’s views about reform evolved toward a less punitive approach. In 1842, she described her change of heart in a letter to Lady Jane: “With respect to cutting off hair we have not found its effect good in England, for whilst the poor prisoner should be humbled by her faults she should not always carry about it in the view of others the crime she has committed, it hardens and makes them worse than before.”27
Concerned about the separation of convict mothers from their children, Fry continued: “. . . I am of opinion that it would not be right according to the laws of God and nature not only to preclude the mothers of illegitimates from seeing their children or taking them out when able to maintain them. . . . Of course the mothers of the legitimate children should be very differently treated.”28
Even Fry, holding tight to her upper middle-class British upbringing, failed to fully understand the plight of transported women who suffered rape or abandonment by the fathers of their children. Yet at sixty-two, she persisted in radical ideas for prison reform that defied rigid Victorian sensibilities. Informed of plans for new prisons in the colony, she made this recommendation to Lady Jane: “I think your Factory capable of great improvement by being made more a house of correction and I think there might be added to it something of house of refuge for hopeful characters that may arrive in the ship or be anxious to improve in the Colony.”29
Coupling her model behavior aboard the Hindostan with exemplary work in the nursery, Arabella’s mother personified the “hopeful character” inspiring Fry’s optimism. Yet even the perfectly proper and contained Ludlow Tedder would get into trouble. By 1842, the Liverpool Street nursery was packed far beyond capacity. One hundred fifty-three women and children were crammed into a house so dilapidated Mr. Hutchinson feared it might fall down.30 Superintendent of Convicts Josiah Spode finally approved the opening of a larger nursery inside Dynnyrne House, located in a converted distillery down the rivulet from Cascades.
For three years, the compassionate Nurse Tedder had cared for her little charges as if they were her grandchildren. Ludlow’s record had not a single black mark. She took pride in a frequently heart-wrenching though rewarding assignment. Shortly before the Liverpool Street quarters were shut down, Ludlow was privy to several incidents her conscience simply wouldn’t allow her to condone. Convict worker Ann McCarty was housed in the nursery with her nine-month-old child, from whom she’d soon be separated. At this time, mothers were allowed to nurse their babies for nine months rather than six. In an effort to keep each prisoner productive and out of trouble, Mrs. Slea assigned Ann the care of two children who’d been weaned and whose mothers had been returned to the Female Factory. One of Ludlow’s mates from the Hindostan , Mary Larney, reported Ann for abusing the two-year-old under her watch.
Bread and Water
Nurse Ludlow found herself in an impossible predicament when called as a witness before the Hobart Town Lower Court. She was well aware that if she informed on a fellow prisoner, she’d be made to pay one way or another. However, if she lied for the woman who abused a child, she’d face Mr. Hutchinson’s outrage and lose a plum assignment that allowed occasional visits to Arabella. Mothers sent out to settlers at distant locations rarely saw their children while they lived in the Queen’s Orphanage. Ludlow couldn’t risk this.
Standing tall before the magistrate, Ludlow refused to lie for Ann McCarty. On June 14, 1842, she offered the following testimony:
Mary Larney fetched me this morning stating that McCarthy [McCarty] had beaten a child in an improper manner. I went and saw the child. She had beaten it severely across the bottom and back, and it is about 2 years old. . . . She stated that the child had dirtied itself, she gave no other reason. There were marks of the hand across the back and bottom. I have never heard of her doing so before. . . . I also saw her take the child of Marg North out of bed and throw it on the floor not very violently.31
Ludlow was returned to Cascades, but not for punishment. Given her experience assisting Surgeon Superintendent McDonald and her fine work in the nursery, Superintendent Hutchinson saw fit to appoint her to work in the Female Factory hospital. Here babies were delivered, the mentally ill restrained, and prisoners with rheumatism and epilepsy admitted.
Ludlow hadn’t spent much time inside the Female Factory since her arrival in Van Diemen’s Land, but she knew that Ann McCarty was back in the Crime Class, smoldering in anger over the widow who had spoken the truth in court. The levelheaded nurse walked a tightrope every time she strolled through the yards. Her survival (and Arabella’s, too) depended on understanding what went on behind the stone walls and using it to her best advantage. She faced her first test within days of her return. Eliza Morgan, a patient missing a front tooth, persuaded the widow to do her a favor.32 She’d slip Ludlow a few coins in return for the nurse
using her position to pick up a bundle in town. Unfortunately, Ludlow failed to realize she was helping a former shipmate of her nemesis, Ann McCarty.
Seizing what appeared to be an opportunity for building the nest egg she’d need to retrieve Arabella and make a fresh start, Ludlow joined the underground subculture at Cascades. Although marriage allowed a woman early release from her sentence and was the fastest way to regain custody of Arabella, it seemed a far-fetched proposition for the forty-nine-year-old widow. Still, Ludlow dared to dream of her future. If she didn’t pursue the matrimonial path, she’d have to be prepared. Once free, she’d need lots of money to prove she could provide for Arabella. Currency, in a corrupt and distant colony, bought just about anything, including a daughter. Whatever it took, that was her plan.
Many at the Female Factory surrendered to temptations that offered a lifeline in miserable waters. Convict maids learned the ropes by secretly shadowing their captors and listening for how deals were negotiated and sealed. With her position in the center of Hobart Town, Ludlow certainly understood the fine line that often separated criminal from official.
The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women Page 24