The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [83]
Holiday merriment was the last thing on Ludlow’s mind. On the run with her eight-year-old, she lacked the street skills Agnes and Janet had relied on for food and shelter those many nights in Glasgow. With little money in her possession, choices were few. Perhaps they stayed with friends or relatives, moving from place to place every night or two so as not to get caught. Mother and daughter couldn’t stay in one location very long because harboring a fugitive might endanger those who, out of kindness, had provided a temporary safe haven.
For nine days, the pair somehow managed to remain in hiding and elude arrest by London’s bobbies. The widow from the country had lived in the city only nine months and rarely navigated London’s seamy street circus. Options for a bed for the night quickly wore thin. As what little money she had started to run out, Ludlow pondered the prospect of begging on the street in the midst of one of the coldest winters on record.
She was probably searching for a boardinghouse when a bobby wearing an oilskin cape grabbed her by the arm. On Tuesday, December 11, 1838, he delivered the still neatly dressed servant for processing at the Bow Street station house. This was the first stop for prisoners who would be tried in London’s Central Criminal Court, also known as the Old Bailey, for the street on which it is located. Mrs. Tedder was ordered to appear before Judge Baron Parke the week before Christmas. There would be no cooking of the holiday goose this year. For the next six days, she awaited trial in a Newgate holding cell with Arabella as well as dozens of women accused of various crimes.
The following Monday, the seventeenth of December, police officer Richard Lesley ushered mother and child into a packed Central Criminal Court. The wind whistled across the courtroom. Although it was the middle of winter, the windows were wide open because officials feared catching diseases from the prisoners. As the accused approached the bench, jurisprudence seldom smelled sweet. “Juries, counsel and judges chewed on garlic, citrus peel, cardamom and caraway to prevent infection from the prisoners’ breath.”11
Property owners, all men, formed the grand jury that would decide Ludlow’s fate. After swearing them in, Judge Parke rambled on about the common law of England, liberty, and morality under the reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. It was the kind of public spectacle that appealed to sordid sensibilities. The court’s galleries were filled with the curious, who paid a small fee to catch a view of the upper-crust jury, but “what they were really waiting for was the thrill of seeing felons in irons stumble up from the gaol and tell their stories.”12 It was all a rather tedious affair until the accused entered the front of the courtroom to stand behind the bar of a raised platform known as “the dock.” Once the court officer motioned the gallery into silence, the sound of light footsteps resonated through the drafty hall. Unless a female spectator attended the session, Ludlow would have been the only woman in the room.
The accused stood alone under a sounding board used to amplify her voice from the prisoner’s dock.13 Herbs lay strewn across the ledge before her as a means of disinfecting whatever the prisoners touched. There were no public defenders, so only the affluent were guaranteed legal counsel.
Mrs. Tedder stepped forward to raise her manacled hand before the clerk, who asked: “How will you be tried?” She replied as she’d been told at the police station: “By God and by my country.”14 As was tradition, a visibly bored Judge Baron Parke inquired, “Have you any witnesses that will speak to your character?” The only answer that might have conveyed a lighter sentence was: “Yes, sir, I have a letter from my vicar speaking to my good character.” Without that, there was no hope for her acquittal. Ludlow was doomed.
The prisoner stood directly before her accuser. Barrister Skinner was the first to rise from the witness box. With well-practiced intonation and outrage, the