Infinitely Obscure Lives: Disabled Convicts and their Loved Ones

In this blog, Emily Cock reflects on her recent researching findings in Australia and giving voice to those disabled prisoners normally overlooked in our histories.

This year I was lucky enough to swap the cloudy cold of Welsh January for the cloudy humidity of western Sydney in order to visit the New South Wales State Archives. I am researching the experiences of disabled people who were transported to the Australian colonies: how they came to be convicted, what life was like for them on board the ships and in the different settlements, and how the colonial system was able (or forced) to accommodate their different needs as well as benefitting from their skills and labour. I spoke about this project at The Royal College of Physicians (Edinburgh) last year.

Between 1787 and 1868, Britain transported over 167,000 prisoners to the colonies in what is now called Australia. Just under 80,000 of these prisoners landed in New South Wales. The administration relied on copious documentation to keep tabs on all the prisoners, and this is what I am sifting through. They needed to know where everyone had been sent, what they were doing, whether they had been in trouble, and ultimately when and whether they were eligible to leave their sentence through a ticket of leave (a documental of parole), certificate of freedom, or a pardon.

Tying these sources together is helping me to illuminate what the author Virginia Woolf called “all these infinitely obscure lives [that] remain to be recorded”—“No biography or history has a word to say about it” (A Room of One’s Own, 1929). She was talking about women in particular, but men similarly disappeared into the cracks of this voluminous system. Disabled prisoners generally appear in history books when they receive medical attention, are placed in asylums, etc, but this is only a small part of their stories. Family historians have done incredible work, especially since having a convict in the family has turned from a point of shame to one of pride in Australia. This is where prisoners who were able to marry and have children have an advantage—you need descendants in order to be of interest to a genealogist! But several digital history projects have been set up to document the biographies of other individuals, and allow researchers to ‘find ancestors’ or ‘claim a convict’.

Most of the documents we have available were written by administrators, but there are also lots of letters and petitions from prisoners and their families. These provide crucial insights into the experiences and perspectives of the prisoners themselves, and the families they left behind.

James Board, a Dorsetshire farm servant, was only 20 years old when he arrived in Sydney on the Aurora in 1833. Before disembarking the ships, all prisoners were inspected and each person minutely described by the colonial authorities to create documents known as ‘indents’. The information contained in the indents—in combination with the demands of employers—formed the basis of each prisoner’s initial work assignment, and their continued identification. They are available through ancestry.ac.uk, which you can often access through your local library.

From this indent we know that James could read and write, was a Protestant, and was married with one daughter. We also know that he was transported for life for horse stealing by the Dorsetshire Assizes on 26 July 1832, and that this was his first offence. (A little further digging confirms that his shipmate, horse dealer Stephen Tanswell, took the lead in this crime). We also know that James was 5 feet 8¼ inches tall, had a “fair ruddy” complexion, brown hair, grey eyes, a “scar right side of chin, scar left jaw, scar back of forefinger of right hand, scar back of left thumb, [and a] Roman nose.” We also know that he was “rather deaf”. Tracing James’s life, however, suggests that his deafness had very little impact on major life events like employment and marriage.

Once in New South Wales, the vast majority of prisoners were assigned as labour to free settlers (who might themselves be former convicts). One of the options for managing male prisoners with impairments was to send them to the ‘invalid establishment’ at Port Macquarie, or to relegate them to an ‘invalid gang’. But I’ve run some statistics, and established that these were used very sparingly. James was not surprisingly given a general assignment to work for Alexander Kenneth McKenzie at Bathurst in the central tablelands of New South Wales. Unlike prisoners like James, wealthy free settlers like McKenzie have long been the subject of biographies.

It seems that James kept his nose clean and progressed through the system toward freedom and independence: he was still in Bathurst when he obtained a ticket of leave in 1841 (no. 41/1572), and he ultimately received a pardon in 1848 (HO 10/54, p. 38). This is generally the point that the convict administration stopped keeping tabs, and my administrative trail runs cold.

For James, however, there is a twist in the tail. Remember that wife he left back in Burton Bradstock, Dorsetshire? This was local girl, Grace Meech, whom he married on 4 March 1832—only four months before his trial. Their daughter Jemima was baptised on 10 March, which means that they had left the wedding very late indeed…

In July 1875, Grace wrote to the Inspector General’s Office, “verrey anchious to know if her Husband is living[.] he was Transported about 40 years ago”. She had seen a ‘James Board’ listed as dead in a Melbourne newspaper, suggesting that she had held an interest in Australian news all this time and that such news was available back in England. She wrote: “Dear sir i should feel verrey happey should my Husband be still living To hear From him once more and iff you can please To send me all The information you can i shall Be Truly Thankful.” She noted that Jemima was married with a “large Family” and also “verrey anchious” to hear of her father (MHNSW 4/2302, bundle 75/6584). Grace had signed her wedding licence with an ‘X’, so had learned to write in the intervening years. How she had maintained herself and her daughter is unknown.

Grace included a photograph with her letter of a bearded man leaning over a small child in a check frock. On the back she wrote, “This is James Board daughter Husband and child”. That is, it was Jemima’s husband, wool-comber Joseph Butcher, whom she had married on 11 December 1852. Judging by the ages of their six children in the 1881 census, the child may have been one of their youngest sons, Frederick (b. 1869, d. Cardiff 1944).

Fortunately, James had remained in the Bathurst area once free, so he was findable when the letter was forwarded there by the central department (MHNSW 4/4552, letter 75/96). The response from the Police Department confirmed that James was still alive, “living at the Willow Glow near Hill End”. But the other confirmation must have been heartbreaking for Grace to read: “Board was married some years ago in Bathurst, his wife [Catherine] died on the 1^st November last, he has a family of grown up sons and daughters. / Board denies having been married in England, but states he may have a daughter there. / He is in poor circumstances.” James’ denial is probably why this letter and especially the photograph are still in the archive: presumably he would have been allowed (or wanted) to keep it if he had conceded that it was his grandchild.

James and Catherine had a son, James, in 1843, but if they married before this they must not have applied for permission, since this was rejected if prisoners had stated on arrival that they were married and could not provide proof of their spouse’s decease. James’ denial of his English wife is understandable. Bigamy was a criminal offence (there are plenty of convicts whose original crime was bigamy), and he had his children in the colony to think about. The concession of a daughter in England, however, shows a crack in his reserve, and that he certainly hadn’t forgotten everyone he left behind.

The “poor circumstances” of 1875 seem to have been resolved by his death in 1893, where a local newspaper politely noted the “DEATH OF AN OLD RESIDENT”, and that “Mr. Board has resided in the district for about 60 years, and the greater portion of this time was spent at Willow Glen, where he was held in respect by a large circle of friends”. No convict stain in sight.

There are many questions that the convict administration documents do not answer: how James might have felt about being “rather deaf”, how it affected his experience of the world or two marriages, whether he used something like an ear trumpet or not, etc etc. But they clearly show that James was essentially a ‘successful’ convict story: he gained his freedom, and established a family in the colony as a respectable rural settler and community member. Cases like James’ reveal the diversity of experiences of disability among the Australian convicts. Many of the prisoners I’m tracing entered institutions like asylums, hospitals, or prisons, making them visible in the records as defined by their impairments. But for so many others, impairments could be accommodated into a regular pattern of life events, and this is an important and unexamined part of Australian history.