These Few Lines

by Graham Seal

  But he was no longer the English poacher. His time in the Swan River Colony had made him one of a class that characterised colonial Australia and that has remained as a mainstay of the great Australian legend. William Sykes, coal miner, foundry worker, poacher and transported felon had become a bushman. The short stories and poetry of ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Henry Lawson, ‘Dryblower’ Murphy and a hundred like them are peopled with rugged, independent males living alone in a bush hut with only a dog, a rifle and a few regrets to keep them company. Comforts were few and consisted mainly of the grog and bad food. Not surprisingly, many of these men lost their reason and became ‘hatters’, a type that features in many a bush yarn and that was canonised in Lawson’s story, ‘The Bush Undertaker’. Lawson, who spent some time in Western Australia on two occasions – in 1890 and 18968 – wrote of a crazed old bushman recovering the mummified body of an old mate. He takes one too many pulls on the brandy bottle and is chased by a flock of black goannas that may or may not be an hallucination.

  The characteristic bushman was a tough, lean, taciturn individual who depended on himself for as many of his few needs as possible. He was used to getting by on not very much and making do with very little – somewhere to roll a swag, some tucker, a dog and a good knife were nearly all that was necessary to sustain a harsh life in the unwelcoming bush of Australia. Personal possessions and the emotional life of the inner man were given scant regard. This pared-down existence and stoic outlook suited the self-contained soul of William Sykes.

  After 23 years of exile in a harsh and distant land, William had little to look forward to for Christmas 1890. As far as we know he had neither been writing nor receiving letters to or from the faraway place that was still, however faintly, home. He had been unwell for weeks now and the advancing heat at this time of the year was only making him feel worse. A few days after Christmas, on 29 December, the Newcastle police learnt that William was lying ill in his hut at Clackline Junction, unable to help himself. They sent somebody out to bring him into the hospital. He was diagnosed with a hepatic ulcer and chronic hepatitis of around two months’ duration, probably the legacy of his hard drinking. Four days into the New Year of 1891, William died.9

  Convict 9589 no longer had any need of numbers, nor of the £1/14/10 found in his pockets, nor of his gun, his dog or the kangaroo-skin pouch that enfolded a bundle of old letters. The Inspector of Prisons and the Superintendent of Poor Relief were informed; they duly filled in the appropriate paperwork and organised a coffin and burial at government expense, though not much of it, just £2/15/-. The dog was sold and the proceeds, plus the £1/14/10 were remitted to the authorities towards the cost of burial. At the end of her Unwilling Emigrants Alexandra Hasluck described the convict’s last resting place:

  William Sykes has no monument. He was buried in a nameless grave in the cemetery at Toodyay [Newcastle], at the back of the Anglican section, outside the consecrated ground, in a part reserved for convicts, paupers and suicides, on the slope of a hill covered in summer with dry yellow grass.10

  Nine months after he was laid anonymously away the police also sold William’s gun, the £1 it fetched going to the Inspector of Prisons. In the end, the death of William Sykes had cost the good citizens of the Swan River Colony precious little.

  In one of her earliest letters to William, before he had been transported across the seas aboard the Norwood, Myra had written:

  If you have the chance to earn Any money in Australia you must save it all up and I will do the same, that if there is a chance of our rejoining you we may be able to do so.

  Myra never lost hold of the hope that she and William could some day be reunited. She clung to it throughout the decades of silence and worry, and she passed it on to her children as well. To one of the boys, at least. Even though it is not clear which of Myra and William’s sons initiated the action, it was almost certainly William’s namesake, the ‘little rip’ and writer of the anguished letter to his unknown father in 1875 who visited the Reverend Beard at Greasbrough Vicarage one autumn day in November 1890. Young William Sykes asked the clergyman to use whatever influence his position held to approach the government for the return of his father to England. The family hoped that William would at least be allowed to die in the land of his birth and among those who loved him.

  In a clear hand, the obliging vicar wrote to The Right Honourable G Mathews Esquire, local member of parliament:

  A parishioner of mine has been to see me relative to his father William Sykes who, at the Christmas Assizes at Leeds in 1865 was sentenced to transportation (I believe) for life …

  He repeated the case made to him by the representative of the Sykes family:

  He has 2 sons and 2 daughters and they would gladly pay his fare home if the Government would permit him to have his liberty.

  Beard went on to state the mitigating factor in William’s case, as put to him by the family:

  I believe that his sentence was owing to his complicity in a poaching affray which resulted in the murder of a keeper.

  The vicar was no doubt following the wishes of the family in underlining the word ‘complicity’ in his petition. Together with their peers in the local working-class community, they held to the belief that William had only played a part in the death of Lilley. Woodhouse’s treachery, as far as they were concerned at least, was a sure sign that he had struck the fatal blow and had perjured himself in return for freedom and the pieces of silver represented by the £350 reward. While these burning beliefs did not appear in the official correspondence from Reverend Beard they were certainly the emotional fuel that powered the family’s resolve.

  Mathews duly set the wheels in motion. On 5 February 1891 a Whitehall bureaucrat wrote to the governor of Western Australia, informing him of the petition for Sykes’s release and asking for details of his record during the last quarter century or so of his obscure life.11 The writer (his signature is indecipherable) stated that the original trial depositions could not be found and provided details of the case from newspaper accounts and ‘other documents in the Home Office’. These were rather less favourably couched than those of the family and the vicar or even the more carefully phrased request of the local member:

  Sykes was one of a gang of poachers, and he and another man took the most active part in an affray in which a game-keeper was beaten to death with sticks; Mr Justice Shee, who presided at the trial, remarking in passing sentence, that few persons would have disagreed with a verdict of ‘murder’.

  In fact, quite a few people had disagreed with that verdict, including, most importantly, the jury, which had refused to convict Sykes of murder. However, the Whitehall bureaucrat allowed a glimmer of hope in the following paragraph:

  Sykes is now 61 to 63 years of age, and it is perhaps unlikely that if allowed to return to this country he would relapse into crime …

  Whether the faint optimism of the Whitehall bureaucrat would have been justified, no one would ever know. Even as the letter writer carried out his official duties, William Sykes had already been dead and buried a month. The bare facts were laid out in the officialese of the colonial secretary’s Office Minute Paper No 551/91 of 5 February 1891. From the Home Office on the Subject of the Release of Wm. Sykes to return to England, the minute contained a note from the superintendent of prisons to the governor, together with a copy of William’s ‘prison reports’. The note quoted another minute from the resident magistrate at Newcastle (Toodyay):

  the Superintendent of Poor Relief conveys the information that Sykes died in the hospital at Newcastle on or about the 4th, or 5th, January last and that his effects are but of trifling value.

  The note was dated 14 March 1891. Documenting his extinction, these minutes flying high above the now uncaring station of William Sykes were also the last official recognition of his existence.

  By now, news of William’s death would have reached Myra, the children and William’s family. They might have prayed that it was another false alarm, but t
his time it was officially confirmed. The family’s grief and mourning would have been no less bitter for the separation of time and distance. But at least that was an end to all the long years of suffering, the waiting and the worrying, the long and ever-longer gaps between William’s letters and the sheer need to just carry on, to get by.

  It seems that neither the Western Australian nor the British government made any attempt to return to Myra those ‘trifling’ effects of William’s that had not been sold. Perhaps the family tried to find out about them, perhaps not. In any case, there is no evidence. So it came about that Myra’s letters, William’s diary of the Norwood and a few other items in the kangaroo-skin pouch of an old lag came to be lost behind the shelves of the Newcastle Police office until that day in 1931 when they were found once more.

  Unlike the convict Magwitch of Dickens’s Great Expectations, William Sykes never returned to England. But, as we now know, while William’s story came to an end in the heat of the Western Australian summer, Myra’s continued in a northern industrial town on the other side of the world.

  13The Sting in the Tale

  Dear father you would hardly know Greasbrough now if you seed it …

  William Sykes the younger to his father, 20 October 1875

  During all the years William Sykes had been cast away in the struggling Swan River Colony, Sheffield and the surrounding area expanded massively. The population of the region trebled in the last decades of the century, buoyed by a seemingly insatiable world demand for steel products. The number of souls said to be living in Sheffield in 1831, a year before Myra was born, was just under 92 000. When William died in 1891 there were almost 410 000 and the villages and fringe suburbs and villages of his earlier days were enveloped by the growth of Sheffield and Rotherham. Factories, forges, railways, roads and seemingly endless rows of cramped houses had multiplied across the fields and streams, obliterating almost all traces of the woods and wildlife the poacher and his mates had once known. In 1895 much of what remained of Silver Wood was chopped down,1 leaving a sparse remnant, itself increasingly pressured by roads, farming and residential development

  But the costs of this development were higher than the rewards. Industrial blight, ferocious smog and widespread water pollution accompanied some of the deepest poverty and squalor the Industrial Revolution had spawned. A description of Greasbrough at this time is provided in J. S. Fletcher’s A Picturesque History of York:

  at Greasborough … the full tide of industrial life surges upward again. This place was famous for its coal-pits 100 years ago, and is still distinguished by its sombre aspect and smoke-laden skies … 2

  Fletcher also provides a description of nearby Masborough, where the happier part of Myra and William’s marriage had been spent so many years before:

  But as the traveller reaches Masborough … he passes within the absolute boundary of the industrial bee-hive, and may regard himself a stranger to everything but smoke and flame, the clank of steam hammers, and the clang of machinery, until he leaves the southern edge of Sheffield behind him.’3

  Health, sanitation, nutrition and education were all poor as well. The privately supplied water of the area was an ongoing problem until, in 1888, local government finally succeeded in taking it over.4 People managed as best they could, depending on a combination of their own exertions, friends, family and whatever help institutions were able to provide. From her first surviving letters it is clear that Myra has a host of burdens to bear other than the transportation of her dear husband. In March 1867 her mother was very ill. Myra has been invited to the home of William’s brother, Joshua, but has not been able to find the time to go. A few years later one of her brothers, Alfred, suffered from the same unnamed disorder as that of another of her brothers, the now-deceased Manuel.

  Money is a perennial worry. Myra is unable to journey from Sheffield to Portsmouth for one last sight of William because she does not have the money – she has had to pay the rent. Myra says that she is willing to spend that amount of money as long as she can be sure of seeing him. If not, ‘it will be a serious loss to me situated as I am’. She promises to come if he has not sailed before the next ‘reconing’. But she will have to come alone as

  none of them say anuthing about coming themselves, or assisting me to do so either so far

  another of the numerous references to the strained relations between her and William’s family.

  In April 1867, Myra walks to Sheffield ‘in the hope of getting a good shut knife for you’ but, oddly in a city famous for its cutlery, is unsuccessful. Later in her letter she hints that her failure to obtain the knife had more to do with money than availability:

  If Saturday had been pay day I might perhaps have been able to get a trifle more for you.

  As well as raising the children, Myra was a working woman and she needed every penny she could get. Without the income from Ann and Alfred’s jobs – he was getting 10 pence a day, a good wage, it seems – life would have been even more difficult for Myra and her large family.

  Life was a continual struggle for most working people, especially for a woman raising four children by herself. Myra’s letters tell a fragmentary but intelligible tale of her success in raising the children without their father. Alfred and Ann, the older children, are in work in 1869, by which time the family has moved to Greasborough. Alfred is now in the mines and Ann continues in domestic service, possibly in a lodging house. The younger children, Thirza and William, are attending school and Myra has had her brother Ellis and his son lodging with her while they search for work, 10 miles away from their home town of Barnsley.

  At this time there is also a faint and brief glint of hope for William’s case. In a number of her letters Myra mentions the hopes of some of William’s friends and family to find a way of having his situation reviewed by the authorities. The election of 1868 throws up a candidate named Anthony John Mundella, resident in Nottingham and keen to represent the trade unions, Reform League, teetotallers and some dissenting religions. An important plank in Mundella’s platform is his opposition to the game laws.5 There was little rioting at election time that year, though the elections of 1865 and that of 1880 led to a reading of the Riot Act and the summoning of the army. There is optimism that if he gets in, ‘Mondeller’, as Myra spells his name, may do something for William, a suggestion that local feelings about the case was still strong. It is also hinted that William’s successful brother, Joshua, has access to Mundella, or at least the political machinery that put him into Parliament as the member for Sheffield. But no more is heard of this.

  In that year, there is a piece of news that Myra may have written to William. It is news that explains many things, including William’s denial of his marriage upon arrival at Fremantle and the worsening relationship between Myra and William’s family.

  On 16 July 1868, one-and-a-half years after her last known contact with William, Myra gave birth. The baby was named Frederick.

  How Myra’s transported husband learnt about this, we do not know. A disbelieving and despairing William may have read of the birth in the letter he received from Myra written in September 1868. After a moment or two of incomprehension, perhaps he ripped the frail page to shreds, casting it angrily away; a sheet of paper is missing from that letter. Perhaps Myra did not tell William at all, hoping that somehow the news would not travel to the other end of the earth. Perhaps he had word from his own people. The only certainty is that in William’s surviving correspondence to his family there is no mention of Myra, or of their children, or of hers.

  The record is silent and continued to be silent about Frederick Sykes. Myra’s later letters are full of news about the doings of Ann, Thirza, Alfred and William, but in these letters Frederick does not exist. Yet this last child grew up in Myra’s household alongside the children of William Sykes. He was certainly there in 1871 when the census records his presence at ‘The Village’, Greasbrough, as the three-year-old son of the head of the household, Mirah6 Sykes. He wa
s still living there 10 years later, now said to be aged 12 and already earning a much-needed crust for the family as a labourer. By 1891 23-year-old Frederick had joined his brothers and many of his other collier kin in the hot black pits.

  It is not hard to imagine what Myra’s in-laws made of these events. The respectable and pious Unitarian Charles Hargreaves, no doubt backed up by Elizabeth, would have delivered numerous homilies. John, the rapidly progressing elder brother, may have shaken his head ruefully and counted his blessings that he and his family had not come to such a pass. Joshua’s reactions were probably similar, though perhaps not so severe. Myra’s family may well have accepted such realities with the equanimity of those who expect little from life and are not surprised when they receive less. It was Myra’s mother, who was living in the family home at that time, who informed the registrar of Frederick’s birth.7

  Myra’s emotions must have been bitter-sweet. Fiercely loyal to her convicted husband she had nevertheless been unfaithful to him as he rotted in the mosquito-infested forests of Western Australia’s south-west region. The joy of a baby boy was mixed with the disapproval, perhaps even the disgust, of William’s family, and the no-doubt busily wagging tongues of friends and neighbours.

  Not once does any suggestion of these emotions appear in Myra’s letters. Among the local and family news, the insistent requests for more correspondence from William, the loving good wishes of herself and the children – in Myra’s mind now including Frederick – there is never a mention of these things. Myra presented to William and to the world, a person of stoic, even steely, determination, dedicated to doing the best she could for her children and herself in circumstances of the most distressing and difficult kind.