Читать книгу The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens - Steve Harris - Страница 12

5

A MATTER OF DISPOSAL

By the light of the torches we saw the black hulk laying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains the prison ships seemed in my young eyes to be ironed like the prisoners.

— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Some boys leaving Millbank feigned illness in the hope of avoiding the HMS Euryalus and transportation. Others feigned good health in the hope, or chance, that the ultimate destination of Van Diemen’s Land might offer something advantageous. But irrespective of feigns or fancies, they were all being physically taken off the land of their childhood, land they would never step foot on again.

Walking up the gangway, Sparkes and Campbell would have experienced just as Dickens described: ‘No one seemed surprised to see him, or interested in seeing him, or glad to see him, or sorry to see him, or spoke a word, except that somebody in the boat growled at him as if to dogs “give way you!”’1

Their initiation to the floating, rotting Bastille was as if authorities wanted to scrub away their ‘wickedness’. One prisoner recalled:

We were stripped to the skin and scrubbed with a hard scrubbing brush, something like a stiff birch broom, and plenty of soft soap, while the hair was clipped from our heads as close as scissors could go. This scrubbing we endured until we looked like boiled lobsters, and the blood was drawn in many places.2

And any fellow hulk prisoners offering their friendship or services was, as one convict recalled, only ‘with a view to rob me of what little I had, for in this place there is no other motive or subject for ingenuity. All former friendships are dissolved and a man here will rob his best benefactor, or even messmate, of an article worth one halfpenny’.3

No friendships but a new number. Henry Sparkes was now recorded as 2434, and Charles Campbell, when he came aboard 1500 boys later, was 4012.4

No friends and no comforts. The hulks were wretched, foul-smelling places, with boys sleeping on bare boards, given brackish water and a poor diet with often tainted meat, scant medical care, and little or no religious or moral instruction. Mortality rates had been reduced but there was always on hand a ready supply of empty coffins. Thousands succumbed to typhoid and cholera, or became bearers of disease to Australia.

There were few concerns about numbers squeezed on board — some hulks held as many as 600 to 700 juveniles over three decks ‘without overcrowding’,5 at least according to official reports. The Euryalus had been home to 264 navy personnel but now it officially housed 400 offenders. Its design and small size — just 49 yards x 12.5 yards (45 m x 11.5 m) — defeated any attempt to adequately classify and separate prisoners. And in any event their age, size and convictions often provided few insights as to true ‘badness’ and where they ought to be housed: the upper deck designated for first-time offenders, the middle deck for those with more than one offence, and the lowest deck for the ‘worst’.

In what reforming journalist Henry Mayhew described as conditions ‘very like those found in the zoological gardens,’6 the first Euryalus chaplain, Reverend Thomas Price, presciently said that without greater classification and management based on criminality and behaviour, and adequate separation of the worst from the rest, his task of improving their morals and correcting the ‘evil….cannot possibly be accomplished’.7

Price was not optimistic about managing poor children ‘taken out of our streets, not only deplorably ignorant of all religious knowledge, but with habits opposed to every moral and social restraint’. It had been put to him that ‘such was the depravity of the boys that every attempt to moralise them would only terminate in disappointment’, and ‘I find much reason for the remark’.8

Sparkes and Campbell found themselves among boys of all ages, some listed as ten years or older but perhaps as young as eight or nine, and others as old as seventeen or eighteen, divided into small sections and corralled below deck for long periods. Their days were run on a military-like schedule under constant surveillance. Each morning around five, a wake-up call sounded for boys to open their portholes and stow their hammocks. Another signal sent them in small groups to hear prayers in ‘chapel’. Mustered on deck they waited in silent ranks for breakfast at about 6am, usually some gruel and a hunk of brown bread, before being ordered to clean the decks and begin their day’s labour around 8am, picking oakum or ‘tailoring’ crude clothing for hulk prisoners.

Groups of boys were monitored by older ‘head’ boys, chosen because of perceived ‘good conduct’ in prison. They were obliged to report any misbehaviour, real or perceived, such as a breach of the ‘silent system’, insolence, theft, refusing to work or fighting. Summary punishment was quickly decided and delivered. Officially, ‘in cases of convicts misbehaviour, mild and persuasive means of correction are first tried’. Such mild and persuasive means might mean reduced food rations, ‘confinement in a dark cell with no other food than bread and water, for not more than seven days…or moderate whipping which, in any case, is not allowed to exceed twenty four [sic] stripes.’9

Whipping or being ‘flogged’10 on the breech, usually by birch, was not a new punishment for most boys, and confinement in a small cell for up to a week in darkness and silence, with only bread and water as company, was more feared. Authorities saw this black hole as a greater terror for the wicked than the gallows and gibbet, one which might ‘break’ recalcitrant boys in the hope that solitude and silence would allow a small voice of conscience to be heard. But it could also instil an unbreakable resolve to resist and rebel.

Offences and attitudes were key features of new additions to a boy’s penal biography, an incessant and indelible inking of ‘badness’:

On board each hulk, a book is kept by the Overseer, in which are entered the names of all convicts; and on the first Sunday of every quarter, they are mustered, and the character of each convict, for the previous three months, is marked against his name, as follows: v.g. (very good); g. (good); in. (indifferent); b. (bad); v.b. (very bad).11

At noon the boys were fed more oatmeal gruel or boiled ox-cheek or soup, then allowed to trudge around the deck for an hour of air and exercise ‘with the least noise’12 until 1.20pm when they were again mustered before more labour, or for illiterate boys some basic lessons, until 5pm. After a cursory wash supper was served at 5.30pm, usually a repeat of earlier meals. After another brief stint of silent walking on deck — popular ‘games’ of cards, dice and marbles were strictly forbidden — and a final muster to ensure they held no weapons or stolen goods, they were ordered to file below to the foul and cramped berths to prepare their hammocks and listen to an evening prayer before a final lock down at 8pm. By 9pm, with ‘profound silence’ ordered, the ship was ‘as quiet as if there was not a soul on board’, the eeriness broken only by the lap-lap of the Thames and the strike of the bell and an ‘all’s well’ call by guards every half-hour.13

On Saturdays the boys had a weekly wash ‘all over in tepid water and soap’.14 A few had visits from family vainly pleading for their boys to be released, but family was a foreign concept for most.

Authorities budgeted for each boy to have a roughly made shirt, jacket and pair of breeches, but just as police had often confiscated the stolen goods of street boys, hulk officials often pocketed the clothing money. When John Howard, inspirer of the Howard League for Penal Reform, inspected boys on the hulks he found ‘many had no shorts, some no waistcoats, some no stockings, and some no shoes’.15

As at Millbank, older and more villainous youths formed bullying gangs and implemented their own code of behaviour, often more abusive than overseers. Younger and smaller boys had to sharpen their footwork and harden themselves or accept being victims.

For boys like Sparkes and Campbell, what had passed for childhood had long become the pursuit of ‘manhood’. They had been inspired by wondrous tales of ‘robbers, pirates and loose women’ in the popular penny dreadfuls and colourful street theatre, and street gatherings where boys would ‘sit for six or eight hours together, relating and hearing tales of criminal heroes’.16 And in the flash dens of the Fagins they lived with older and more desperate offenders, and the ‘libidinous desires’17of puberty became contemporaneous with crime, with the needs and wants of food, shelter, alcohol and sex being met by criminality.

Self-interest, self-preservation and self-esteem was the key to life, one in which the boys’ code and hierarchy of conduct and justice saw bigger ‘nobs’ bully the small and weak to gain ‘power’, food rations or sexual favours. Those who did not bend to their will, or ‘noseys’ or ‘skunks’ who informed against them, risked being the victim of a malicious report and punishment by the hulk commandant or the nobs themselves. Thomas Dexter, a convict assigned as a nurse on a hospital ship serving the Euryalus, said the ‘nobs’ ‘have got such an ascendancy’ that boys were less fearful of incarceration than of ‘ill-treatment of one boy to another’.18

I have known it when three or four have been obliged to be locked up in a cell by themselves in order to shelter them from murder…they were called Noseys, that is those whom they considered had been to the officers to tell them anything that was going on, those who were particularly pointed out by the majority of prisoners on whom to wreak their vengeance.19

Bullying led some victims to self-mutilate to gain respite or a fuller meal in a hospital ward. ‘I have had patients come into the hospital who have declared that they have not tasted meat for three weeks together, but have been obliged to give their rations to those nobs, and they have fed upon gruel and the parings of potatoes.’20 Some applied a red hot copper button to their own skin and rubbed the wound with soap until it became septic. Others would claim to have fallen down a ship ladder, but in fact had let ‘the edge of the table drop upon [their arms] and break them in two’ or had other boys do it for them.21

Another put pins in his hand to gain admittance, which further upset the bullies who ‘pricked my eyes with needles…and jagged the needle three or four times in each eye.’ He knew they would do it, the boy said, ‘because they told me overnight they would put my eyes out in the morning…I did not care what had become of me then…because I used to be so ill-used’.22

Ill-use included sodomy, the silent currency of the Royal Navy, prisons and prison hulks. Social reformer and jurist Jeremy Bentham reported that hulk prisoners were raped as a matter of course: ‘An initiation of this sort stands in the place of garnish and is exacted with equal rigor.’ When the Euryalus chaplain complained that boys ought to be better separated ‘for the better ensuring the improvement of their morals’23 he was replaced by a more accommodating chaplain. One hulk convict said sodomy ‘rages so shamefully…that the surgeon and myself have been more than once threatened with assassination for straining to put a stop to it…[it] is in no way discountenanced by those in command’.24 As a dismissive Sir John Carter, mayor of the convict shipping centre of Portsmouth, declared: ‘such things ever must be.’25

The Euryalus’ management of boy convicts was ripe for condemnation. Thomas Wontner declared, ‘If there be any regular and established schools for teaching crime, the ship Euryalus is the place,’26 and William Miles put to Parliament that, ‘however criminal they might have been before their commitments…previous to their imprisonment in that accursed hulk…they were comparatively innocent.’27

Edward Brenton, a former naval captain turned philanthropist who wrote the Naval History of Great Britain, denounced the Euryalus as ‘cruel and vindictive, and I challenge any man to come forward and justify it’. He described a regime where ‘children [are] in iron cages, who should have been in a nursery garden; children pining in misery, where the stench was intolerable; where the human mind is more rapidly brutalized, and where every feeling of humanity is more speedily destroyed, than could be done by any other process whatever’.28

An MP with a strong interest in crime and punishment reform, George Holford, who oversaw the design and construction of Millbank, similarly complained that hulks saw young offenders listen ‘with amazement’ to the sins and outrages of others, ‘but soon familiar grows with every crime’. ‘Let justice rather strike her victim dead,’ he wrote in verse, than send them to a hulk which hardened and corrupted the heart. ‘’t’were better doom him the lion’s den than to this curs’d abode of [the] wicked.’29

But as with Houses of Correction and Millbank, those in charge of the hulks continued to dutifully, and self-servingly, report complete ‘satisfaction’ in a chain of superiors all the way to Whitehall. By the time Campbell and Sparkes were leaving the hulk, chaplain Henry John Dawes was pleased to report to John Henry Capper, Esq., the Superintendent in Charge of Ships and Vessels Employed for the Confinement of Offenders under the Sentence of Transportation, that, ‘the boys continue to behave remarkably well’, lauded their ‘orderly conduct and attention in the Chapel’ and cited the ‘excellent conditions’ provided by the ship’s commandant. Capper in turn duly reported to his Home Department secretary, Marquess of Normanby Constantine Henry Phipps, that the boys ‘have conducted themselves properly and been instructed and employed at those trades as the limited means on board a ship will admit of being put into effect’.30

Despite officials’ best efforts, the truth of Euryalus was becoming clear. It was only teaching boys ‘to curse more bitterly that country which gave them birth, and to whose laws they owe their ruin’ 31 and when Naval historian Captain Brenton asked those running Euryalus whether any boy was likely to be reformed: ‘I am told none ever have been, and I infer that none ever will be.’32

Hospital nurse Thomas Dexter was unequivocal. Asked whether any boy on Euryalus had been reformed, he replied with feeling:

I should most certainly say not; and frequently when I have seen it in a Newspaper that a Judge has sentenced a Boy out of Mercy to him to the Hulks, I have made the Observation that was it a Child of mine I would rather see him dead at my Feet than see him sent to that Place.33

Pioneering social and economic reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb, founders of the London School of Economics and Political Science, described the hulks as ‘the most brutalising, the most demoralising, the most horrible’ of all places of confinement in British history.34 Even in Hobart Town, on the other side of the world, convicts’ final British ‘address’ was well known as a ‘school of vice and iniquity…an abode of wretchedness’ where boys have ‘grown and ripened in crime and infamy, and may be truly compared to the fungi of vegetation that grows and flourishes where everything that is beautiful and delicate fades, droops and dies’.35

The wretched lives of boys like Sparkes and Campbell were frequently characterised in newspapers and parliamentary debates in education terms: their progress from a ‘nursery of crime’ on the streets, to the ‘preparatory schools’ of Houses of Correction, to the ‘felony academy’ at Millbank Prison and then seven months at the Euryalus ‘school of vice’ or ‘college’ of crime, as even some of the prisoners called it. Now Sparkes and Campbell were to be sent to the other side of the world to a ‘university of the wicked’ known as Van Diemen’s Land.

Travelling with them was the report card of their lives, just twelve or thirteen years long.

Henry Sparkes, prisoner 2434.

Crime: Stealing a halfpence, Nottingham.

Convicted: 31 December 1838.

Sentence: Seven years.

Received Chatham: 6 February 1839.

Status: Single.

Read or write: Neither.

Gaoler’s report: Character very bad, thrice in prison, a natural propensity to steal.

How disposed of: VDL. 28 September 1840.36

Charles Campbell, prisoner 4012.

Crime: House-breaking, Aberdeen.

Convicted: 25 September 1840.

Sentence: Seven years.

Received Chatham: 15 November 1840.

Status: Single.

Read or write: Neither.

Gaoler’s report: Convicted before. Character bad. Very bad disposition. Disorderly.

How disposed of: VDL. 21 June 1841.37

The final column spoke a severe truth: Britain’s unwanted children were being ‘disposed of’. A rich and powerful country with deep-seated traditions of government, religion, charity, education and philosophy had concluded it could do no more than despatch them to an infant colony on the other side of the world. As Archbishop Richard Whatley caustically told the House of Lords, men in power were often ‘naturally disposed to…any suggestion or hope that may justify them in withdrawing their attention from an unpleasant subject,’38 and delinquency was such an unpleasant subject that Prime Minister Lord Melbourne advised young Queen Victoria not to read the serialization of Oliver Twist because it was ‘all among the workhouses…and pickpockets…I don’t like those things; I don’t like them in reality and I don’t want them represented’.39

One of the men in power, Colonial Secretary Lord John Russell, may have been comforted by odious delinquents being rightly removed out of sight and out of mind, but privately discomforted by the boys’ fate:

Is it reasonable that virtuous England should find her vicious pollution suddenly transmuted into patterns of virtue and innocence the moment they breathe the pure atmosphere of Australia? There is no magic in transportation. The vicious will remain vicious unless adequate means are provided for their reformation.40

No magic in transportation, but Henry Sparkes and Charles Campbell were among thousands now being ‘disposed of’, hustled from the Euryalus hulk to a convict ship at Sheerness, in north Kent, for a long and dangerous voyage of more than 14,000 miles (22,000 km) across unfamiliar and perilous seas to an unfamiliar and perilous destination.