1800s: Rough justice for petty criminals

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John Dallison, of Derby Local Studies Library, takes a brief look at the history of transportation and some Derbyshire felons who found themselves on the other side of the world.

In 1817, the leaders of the Pentrich Revolution were executed in Derby as traitors. That is a well known, harrowing part of our county’s history.

But, perhaps less well known is the fact that 14 of their followers were sentenced to a harsh and prolonged punishment – transportation to the penal colony of New South Wales, Australia.

By the early 19th century, the transportation of British prisoners to distant continents was not new. The practice already existed in 1722 when Daniel Defoe’s bawdy book, Moll Flanders, appeared. His criminal heroine, Moll, is transported to Virginia, North America, where she, amazingly, manages to prosper.

Nevertheless, the idea of creating a whole colony that should consist of what were described as “the outcasts of society and the refuse of mankind” was still quite novel in 1817 – New South Wales having been set up as the first penal colony just three decades earlier.

The brutal double purpose of the colony was that it should act as both a deterrent and a new dumping-ground. (The independent United States of America had no desire to continue playing host to Britain’s felons).

It was also claimed that deportation would prove good for the criminals’ souls. Unfortunately, some hardened villains committed crimes in the very hope of being deported to Australia!

Many of those 14 Pentrich rebels who endured transportation to New South Wales were not hardened villains, but were desperate or foolish men.

They included a farmer, framework knitters and other craftsmen, miners and a clerk.

The clerk, Joseph “Manchester” Turner, of South Wingfield, was the youngest at 18. The oldest, at 64, was Thomas Bacon, a framework knitter from Pentrich. Eleven of the rebels were transported for life; the other three, for 14 years each.

It is not difficult to imagine those wretched men’s feelings as they set sail for the southern hemisphere, leaving behind families, friends and homeland.

However, the Pentrich rebels were not the earliest Derbyshire people to face the rigours of a 15,000-mile voyage to the penal colony – that doubtful honour went to two young women.

Elizabeth Clark, from Ashbourne, was sentenced to seven years’ transportation at Derby on January 11, 1785. Her crime – the theft of clothing valued at 6s 6d. She was aged 19.

Ann Beardsley, or Beadley, was sentenced at Derby on August 5, 1786, to five years’ transportation.

She had stolen “one black satin cloak and other goods” from a house in which she had probably been a servant. Ann was aged about 20 years old.

The two women left England on board the women’s prison-ship Friendship in May 1787. Their vessel was part of the famous First Fleet of 11 prison-ships that sailed to Botany Bay.

Their epic voyage, which took 252 days, was a historic one. The 1,500 or so people who survived it became, in effect, the founders of the modern nation of Australia.

Incidentally, it was observed that Elizabeth and Ann “...decently clothed...set off in high spirits, not seeming in the least dismayed at the length of the voyage, etc.”

But, by the time they reached Rio de Janeiro, early that August, they would have felt less exuberant. It is recorded that the clothing of all the women convicts, having become infested with lice, had to be burned. They were then issued with new clothes, made from rice sacks.

Sadly, unlike Defoe’s Moll, in Virginia, the Derbyshire women did not prosper in their new land. On May 27, 1788, Elizabeth was charged in Sydney Cove with abusing one Private William Norris while she was “...very much in liquor”. She was sentenced to be flogged in public.

Fortunately, the punishment was cancelled when it became known that Norris and Elizabeth had become intimate during the voyage and that Norris had later struck her and called her a whore.

Documentary sources are contradictory regarding Elizabeth’s year of death – but it is on record that an Elizabeth Clark was buried in the colony on September 4, 1788.

If that is the truth, then her life had been brutish and short, indeed.

Ann’s life was better and longer, if hardly comfortable. She was well behaved and responsible. In 1790 she was ordered to sail to Norfolk Island, taking with her a baby daughter, Harriet, whose father was the marine John McCarthy.

Ann and John lived together on the island where Ann had three more children, two of whom probably died in infancy.

A surviving child, Mary Ann, was aged 10 in 1802 but, by then, it would seem that Ann herself had died. As for John, he lived on until 1846, dying at his great-granddaughter’s home near Melbourne.

Transportation to New South Wales ended in the early 1840s. But Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land) received another 37,000 convicts, the last of them in 1853.

It is estimated that, during the period 1787 to 1853, more than 150,000 convicts were transported to Eastern Australia – a huge number by any standards!

A few decades ago, many Australians did not care to dwell on their nation’s distant past. But, in the 1980s, attitudes began to change, and a splendid monument was erected at Botany Bay commemorating the First Fleet.

Nowadays, my colleagues at Derby Local Studies Library, on Iron Gate, regularly help visitors from overseas who wish to study our city’s historic records.

Recently, one such visitor, having researched our collection of Derby’s Calendars and Sentences of Prisoners, proudly claimed descent from a transported convict. Things have truly changed!

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