Premier’s Westfield History Scholarship
Smoke and chains: Juvenile convicts
and the Industrial Revolution
Cameron Nunn
St Paul’s Grammar School, Cranebrook
Sponsored by
Introduction
The arrival of the new National Curriculum and its development into the NSW K-10 History
syllabus has presented teachers with some substantially different content areas to teach. The
most significant change has been to Year 9 (Stage 5), with the focus on the Making of the Modern
World. Nearly a third of the course is devoted to a depth study of change and progress in the
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century looking specifically at either the:
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Industrial Revolution or
Movement of peoples or
Progressive ideas and movements
My research had three components:
a) To research William Augustus Miles’ interviews of the juvenile convicts on the prison
hulk the Euryalus with the intention of better understanding juvenile convicts
b) To collect resources for the development of a Web 2.0 site for teaching the industrial
Revolution as part of the new History syllabus
c) To explore the ways that industrial museums have presented history, with an emphasis
on the teaching and understanding of the Industrial Revolution for students.
My proposal was to travel to the United Kingdom to glean resources for the development of the
web-based learning tool that focussed on the lives of a varied group of historical teenagers living
through the transformative period of the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries. The assumption
behind the project is that students learn best when they are able to imagine themselves as
participants in the journey of change.
National Archives, Kew
My time in the UK was divided into two, two-week blocks. The first was spent in London,
primarily at the National Archives in Kew. In 1999 Heather Shore unearthed a collection of
transcripts taken by William Augustus Miles of juvenile convicts aboard the prison hulk, the
Euryalus. The context of the interviews was part of a report for the Select Committee for the
Establishment of a Metropolitan Constabulary in 1834. The significance of this finding cannot be
underestimated because, apart from these records, we have no other first-person narrative that
documents the lives of juvenile criminals in the early nineteenth-century.
The documents provided a fascinating glimpse into the lives of juvenile criminals. Two examples
will illustrate this:
J Holmes from Stepney aged 13 has been four times in prison . . . [I] used to play about in the streets,
[my] father tried to keep me at home – has stripped me, taken away my clothes and tied me to a bed post
– because the Boys used to come round the House at night and whistle and entice me to go out thieving
again with them . . . Two of these boys took me to a house in 3 Compap Court Stepney, kept by a Jew
and he agreed to board and lodge me for 2’/6 a week provided I brought and sold to him all that I might
steal – He has about 13 boys in the house on the same terms . . . The landlord has also the adjoining
House and there is a communication into it from every room – The back kitchen is fitted up with a trap
door to help escape – and in a corner of one of the back kitchens is a sliding floor underneath which
property is hid.
A coat is hung up in the kitchen of public room and Boys practise how to pick the pockets, the men in
the house show them how to manage. – I was about a fortnight in training and afterwards went out to
assist and screen the boys where they picked pockets – In a short time I went out on my own account as I
soon saw how they did it.
Another narrative involves a young convict named Johnson who was transferred from Newgate
Prison with a number of others who he describes as ‘owing him a spite’. He described how they
‘ill-used’ him to such an extent that he formulated a plan to harm himself by putting pins in his
hands in the hope that he would be sent to the infirmary and on his return be placed in a
different cell. For reasons that seem difficult to fathom, he disclosed his plan to some of the
other boys in his cell. Two of them, suggested to him that ‘he will get removed at much less pain
to himself if he would hurt his eyes.’ The next morning they attacked him and blinded him by
pricking his eyes with needles. As a result Johnson was permanently blinded, and the boys who
assaulted him: one received nothing more than a caning and the other spent time in solitary
confinement.
The narrative is interesting in the picture of bullying portrayed on the hulk and the indifference
of the supervisors to the suffering of smaller boys at the hands of larger boys. Theft of food
from the weak, bullying and ‘fagging’ appear to be normal behaviour.
Having read Miles’ notes in the Archives, I was unaware of any other material on juvenile
convicts that existed. It therefore came as a complete surprise that not only did the Miles archival
box contain an enormous amount of other material, but there were also three other archival
boxes of material that had been presented to the Select Committee from a range of other sources.
While not all the materials involved juveniles, a great deal did, indicating the strong
representation of youth in British prisons. There is a good opportunity for quantitative analysis
of the material that will deepen our understanding of juvenile convicts, especially those
transported to Australia.
Museums of the Industrial Revolution
Coal and iron in the Midlands and Shropshire
From London, I drove through to the Midlands to the heart of the Industrial Revolution and the
‘Black Country’ of Shropshire and Birmingham. It was here that the Industrial Revolution began
in earnest with the coke fuelled blast furnaces of Abraham Darby in Coalbrookdale. Today,
Coalbrookdale is a UNESCO heritage-listed site at the centre of Ironbridge Gorge. In its prime,
Coalbrookdale was the largest smelter of pig iron in the world. Looking at the Severn River
today, winding through leafy banks, amidst hamlets that line the river with cafes, it is hard to
imagine that once the fire and smoke, the lack of vegetation, the stinking river conjured up
images of Hades. In 1787 Charles Dibdin wrote, “Coalbrookdale wants nothing but Cerberus to
give you an idea of the heathen hell. The Severn may pass for the Styx."
I visited most of the nine museums in the Gorge, including the Museum of Iron, the Jackfield
Tile Museum, Ironbridge Museum, the Darby Houses etc. These provided an excellent array of
resources on the Industrial Revolution. However the main attraction for most visitors is the
Blist’s Hill Victorian Village. This is an industrial folk museum, built on the site of an old blast
furnace, mine and incline plane. The buildings are all original and have been transported to
Blist’s Hill from surrounding areas. While the village was superb for engaging students (of which
there were many) in discovering what life was like 150 years ago, like all historic re-creations, it
tended to simplify, sanitise and romanticise the world of the industrial mining towns. By making
the visit ‘fun’, they tend to distort history in the opposite direction to the usual images that paint
a picture so bleak that one wonders how anyone survived the Industrial Age at all.
Less than half an hour away, on the outskirts of Birmingham, is the Black Country Living
Museum. It too is built around an old industrial site. While both museums produce some
interesting resources on nineteenth century life, their greatest benefit is their ability to engage
visitors to actually interact with the site, a role both successfully achieved. However, I was
interested in the fact that despite both museums situating themselves on disused industrial sites
with considerable buildings, mines, furnaces and remnants of transport, neither made much use
of these resources from an archaeological perspective. It was as though the reason for occupying
the industrial site had been forgotten and these original remnants were obstacles to be
marginalised in the desire to create a “movie-set” recreating the past While it is understandable
that their pitch is at school students, families and tourists rather than historians, and that there
are liability issues in working with derelict structures, it was disappointing to think of the
contextual significance so overlooked.
Birmingham
My visit to Birmingham took in a visit to a set of “back-to-backs” - workers’ cottages built in the
early nineteenth-century to house the influx of workers and artisans who flocked to the new
centres. This particular set of “back-to-backs” is the last remaining in Birmingham and one of
the last of the hundreds of thousands built around the country. Each house occupied a different
period between 1830 and 1970, when the last permanent resident moved out. They were set out
in a typical period design with furniture and dressings that gave an idea of what it might have
been like for the various families. Our guide built the commentary around a particular family
who occupied a specific house during the period in which it was furnished. This was particularly
effective because it immediately created a link between the historical environment and the people
who lived there. In many ways the houses and the tour were reminiscent of Susannah Place at
The Rocks in Sydney, a link perhaps not that surprising when you consider that both are run by
their respective Historic Houses Trusts.
Textile mills in Derbyshire
From the Midlands I travelled north into Derbyshire and onto the mill towns of Cromford,
Matlock and Styal. Derbyshire, Cheshire and Lancashire were counties where cotton was king
and mills made both the fortune and misery of the local inhabitants. Cromford and Matlock are
both connected with Richard Arkwright, inventor of the Water-frame and the man who
established the first power-driven textiles factory. Cromford grew up around Arkwright’s factory.
He built housing for workers, a large proportion of which still exist. Not far from Cromford is
another of Arkwright’s mill towns, Matlock. whose interesting feature is Masson Mill, which
claims to be the last working mill using machinery from the Industrial Revolution. A factory
located in the basement of what is now a rather old fashioned shopping mall, was once
Arkwright’s largest. It still produces small amounts of high quality fabric but the machinery that
belonged to Arwright’s day is mainly only turned on a few times a day for tourists (and
meandering historians).
From Cromford and Matlock I continued on to Styal on the outskirts of Manchester. Styal is
significant because the ‘Apprentice Cottage’ of Quarry Bank Mill has survived. Children were
secured from various workhouses and orphanages around the country and bonded to the factory
at Styal until they turned eighteen. The children were housed, clothed, fed and given a small
wage. Expecting another replica of Masson Mills, I was greatly surprised by Quarry Bank’s
fantastic ability to represent history in such a way as to ensure school students would understand
the significance of the cotton mill to the Industrial Revolution. This was by far the best historic
site that I visited for the project. The process of cotton boll to fabric bolt was clearly explained
with demonstrations at each visiting point. Demonstrations of cottage industry carding and
spinning were followed up with successive inventions: the spinning jenny, the spinning mule,
water frame, flying shuttle and so forth. Eventually the museum led to the factory floor with
working models of the industrial textile mill in full operation. It was easy to see how the mill
worked and what workers were required to do to keep the factory producing, as well as
demonstrating why it was so easy to be maimed or killed.
The museum also emphasised the importance of the social history of the mill, especially the life
of mill children. Samuel Greg was not an industrial tyrant, but he was an astute businessman,
whose aim was to look after the mill children with the basic necessities in order to provide a
reliable workforce. Children were punished for damaging property, failing to be attentive to their
tasks and for absconding. Injuries were common and the local doctor was paid a fixed sum to
visit and treat the children with basic health care. Nevertheless the working days were long and
monotonous, the diet bland and accommodation basic. What was interesting however, was the
number of children who continued to work in the factory after their apprenticeships had
concluded, sometimes as supervisors of the next generation of child workers.
Courts, workhouses and prisons in Yorkshire
From Styal, I headed East towards Ripon and York to view another aspect of the impact of the
Industrial Revolution: the rise of social dislocation and crime, and the manner in which the
authorities responded. Ripon, just west of York, has three unique museums: a workhouse, a
police museum, and an historic courthouse. The workhouse was established as part of the Poor
Law reforms whereby parishes were required to band together to form unions that were
responsible for building and maintaining government regulated facilities for the poor and infirm.
The Ripon workhouse continued in that role until 1974, when the last of its residents were
transferred to aged care facilities. Everything was done to make the workhouse as unappealing as
possible, as the displays indicated. Entry into the workhouse was intended to be the last resort
before starvation. Regulations were strict, bedding was unappealing and meals bland with the
intention that able bodied people did not view the workhouse as an alternative to labour. The
museum told the stories of a variety of residents through story-boards and interviews. Its
continuance into the recent past meant that the museum had access to oral histories including
those of children who had grown up in the workhouses in the 1930s and 1940s. The workhouse
had a sombreness that only added to the overwhelming sense of misery which an elderly person
or abandoned wife or orphaned child must have felt at having to enter it.
The police museum was also very interesting, with its emphasis on the changing role of
punishment. Fortunately it eschewed the sensational forms of punishment and focussed more on
the development of nineteenth-century forms of incarceration and secondary punishments. One
unusual piece in the collection was a ‘birching stool’. The item is not really a stool but a bench
over which an unfortunate criminal (very often young boys) could be placed. Birching was a
common alternative to incarceration, especially for young boys who authorities feared would be
contaminated by the older criminals if placed in gaols.
Finally, the courthouse, the smallest of the museums, was set up as though conducting an assize
trial in the early nineteenth-century. It told the story of a young man charged with theft who
finds himself sentenced to transportation. Despite the modest nature of the museum, there are
few smaller assize courts that have survived to give a clear picture of what the legal process was
outside of the big metropolises of places like London and Bristol.
I then continued to York, a fascinating city for any historian, especially of Viking or medieval
society. However, my interest was in York castle. The castle was used as a prison for most of its
existence rather than as a defensive fortification and significant part has been preserved in the
eighteenth-century style. York castle’s most infamous resident was the highwayman Dick Turpin
who was hanged there in 1739. Again, the curators have chosen to eschew the sensationalist and
often exaggerated role of torture and capital punishment and instead tell the stories of a number
of prisoners. What I thought was particularly interesting was the diversity of those stories: a
debtor; a juvenile thief awaiting transportation; a woman condemned to death but reprieved
when she was found to be pregnant (conception having taken place in prison); a Luddite; and a
woman accused of murdering her own husband, condemned to be strangled and burnt. Each
prisoner told their story via video projection of an actor in different cells the visitor enters. Every
story is drawn from historical evidence and contains a postscript of what became of the person.
The stories were both moving and engaging, particularly knowing they represented those of real
people.
More coal in Newcastle
My final stop was Beamish Open Air Museum, the main strength of which is the size of its
location. Instead of cramming a collection of different purpose buildings into a single street,
Beamish has built four separate communities, each examining a different aspect of the industrial
North: a manorial farm; a high street; a colliery community; and a yeoman’s cottage and farm. By
separating the four communities, Beamish visitors are able to explore their distinct characteristics
without the need to meld them together leading to a more historically authentic representation.
However, like Black Country and Blist’s Hill the need to present a sanitised view of the lives of
people made the representation more enjoyable for children but perhaps a little less factual.
Reflections
One of my key interests was to consider how museums presented history and the ways in which
they engaged their audiences. Over the two weeks I travelled through the north of England, I
saw the entire spectrum of presentations from the dull and lifeless to the engaging and fun. It
was interesting that England has three industrial folk museums, two of which are little more than
half an hour apart and all three within two hours of each other. Each did a good job of
representing the past and particularly in engaging school groups, which were the most frequent
audience. It is interesting that Sydney’s one venture into presenting a living history museum
about our colonial past was an eventual failure despite numerous attempts to support it
financially. It is hard to believe that we cannot sustain interest in such a vital part of our history.
We have had better success at preserving a number of our historic buildings that seek to recreate
images of past occupancy. However, at the core of these buildings are static displays of
furnishings, usually roped off at the doorways. It is therefore little wonder that our colonial past
seems so remote and uninteresting to school children. Our museums have limited opportunity
for interaction, virtually no use of technology, tell few stories, and rarely invite any empathy with
the lives of children. Sydney is surrounded with historical sites, full of fascinating stories and
alive with the remnants of the past. Despite mandating site studies in the NSW History syllabus,
we seem virtually unable to present history anywhere that would build a yearning in children to
know more about our colonial past. It is likely that a student would learn more about convict life
from a visit to York or Ripon than they would at nearly any of our convict buildings in Sydney.
If we are going to make inroads into children valuing the history of our first European
settlement, we need to do far more to engage them with that history and that must begin with
how we represent and present the past.
Conclusion
The research opportunity at the National Archives was unparalleled in its potential but the
timeframe impossible to do justice to the task. I found myself a little daunted at the sheer
volume of information available. It had never been my intention to create a database or even to
conduct quantitative analysis of juvenile experience, yet in examining the research it was apparent
that the sheer quantity of material probably needed to best be represented through statistical
analysis. That will best be held over to a future date and the possibility of one day returning to
the Archives for further investigation.
I hope my research and its contribution to the teaching profession may also be useful in building
a greater awareness in NSW school students about their colonial past and the role of teenagers in
building our nation.