The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [29]
Intimidating in both its beauty and its function, the Sheriff Court was adorned with highly polished Borneo cedar. The shining waxed mahogany benches reflected the dark silhouettes of the Glasgow hooligans, who would be tried as a group before Sheriff Substitute of Ayrshire William Eaton. John Archibald Murray, Esquire, Advocate for His Majesty’s Interest, read the prisoners’ statements before the court. He droned on in the bored monotone expected from a civil servant, his words reverberating off the walls and perishing quickly. Nobody cared what he had to say, save the four prisoners at the bar.
Agnes dictated her statement because she could neither read nor write. In her arrest report, she admitted to having met Daniel Campbell in Kilmarnock. She pretended not to know Janet and Helen in a desperate attempt to protect her friends, but the die was already cast. Sheriff Eaton announced his judgment for “crimes of an heinous nature and severely punishable.” Barely looking up, he declared that Agnes McMillan, Janet Houston, and Helen Fulton did “wickedly and feloniously steal and theftuously take away” from Kilmarnock merchants two men’s cotton shirts, two women’s cotton shifts, twenty-four braces, a cloak, and seven pairs of woolen stockings. Furthermore, he declared that Daniel Campbell had “wickedly and feloniously” and knowingly received the stolen goods.24
The four were scheduled for sentencing on May 3, 1836, before the Circuit Court of Judiciary. They would spend the next three months locked inside the Ayr County Gaol, an overcrowded holding area that adjoined the rear of the court. With a backlog of cases, it was a long wait for everyone.
Deep inside the cavernous passages, Agnes had ninety long days to contemplate her past and her future. The present looked very black. Agnes would not have known that a Quaker social reformer named Elizabeth Gurney Fry had labored fervently since 1816 to spearhead prison reform for the burgeoning population flooding into gaols. William Crawford, a Quaker who traveled in the same circles as Mrs. Fry, was, in 1835, appointed one of the first inspectors general of prisons for Great Britain. His words had explained Agnes’s situation: “It is very easy . . . to blame these poor children, and to ascribe their misconduct to an innate propensity to vice; but I much question whether any human being, circumstanced as many of them are, can reasonably be expected to act otherwise.”25 Crawford was ahead of his time, yet too late to make a difference for Agnes. Rather than condemning her, he understood that parental neglect, lack of education, poverty, and just plain hunger propelled too many children into a life of crime.
When Elizabeth Fry and her brother Joseph John Gurney inspected prisons in Scotland, they witnessed the practice of housing the mentally ill, violent felons, and petty thieves together. In overcrowded gaols, they were packed into unheated cells, furnished with only a handful of straw and a single tub for every purpose. As was her custom, Elizabeth knelt down on the straw to pray with the incarcerated and encourage them to turn from crime to wage-paying work. During a visit to Glasgow, one prisoner, in particular, conveyed the raw hopelessness that led to thievery and the regret that lingered still. In her journal, Fry describes the “old woman, with the appearance of a menial servant and hardened features, [who] said, ‘No! no use work!’ But these rugged lines were at length relaxed, and I saw a tear fall over the brown visage.”26 She had worked her whole life, and here she was in gaol.
Age mattered hardly at all when it came to being poor. Realities and regrets were embedded in nearly every decision it took to survive. At fifteen, barely a woman, Agnes appeared to have reached the same conclusion. She’d seen what the mills had done to her mother—“no use work.” Little did she know that in a London gaol four hundred miles