were Henry Sparkes and Charles Campbell.
3
A THIEF BY REPUTE
‘Stop thief! Stop thief!’ There is a passion FOR HUNTING SOMETHING deeply implanted in the human breast. One wretched breathless child, panting with exhaustion; terror in his looks; agony in his eyes.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
The names Henry Sparkes and Charles Campbell meant nothing, just two of thousands of otherwise anonymous and forgettable boys caught up in Britain’s passion for hunting, convicting, and transporting its unwanted ‘alien vermin’ to Van Diemen’s Land. But these two would, uniquely, become household names: the only two boys wanted for murder.
Those who loved Dickens’ reportage and characterisation of the injustices facing Oliver Twist boys could sense that when the full story of Sparkes and Campbell’s lives and their time at Point Puer was revealed, it would be a tale worthy of attention of the great author.
Henry Sparkes was born around 1826 in Nottingham, 120 miles (200 km) north of London. Emerging as a world capital of lace-making, with nearly 200 different manufacturers and 70 hosiery makers, Nottingham had been lauded at the turn of the century for its prettiness but had rapidly become an industrialised and over-crowded home for 50,000. The ‘deplorable…defy description’ squalid yards and alleys of its lower classes led renowned water and civil engineer Thomas Hawkesley to judge it the worst town in England.1
In the squalor many families fell victim to Britain’s first outbreak of Asiatic Cholera after sailors brought it from Bengal in 1831 to the port of Sunderland, from where it spread across the country and claimed 52,000 lives.2 In Nottingham the scourge infected those ‘Streets and Courts filthy, ill ventilated and crowded with inhabitants too poor, dirty or dissipated to procure necessary food or use the most common means to secure health’,3 and in just a few months more than 300 people died.4
Disease and deprivation were a double jeopardy for many families and their children. Small boys like Henry Sparkes were too young to fully understand their circumstances and the consequences of thieving to survive. But Sparkes came to learn the realities of how one’s life could quickly change on 31 December 1838. A day that saw the twelve-year-old in a cell, waiting for a bailiff to march him into the Nottingham County Sessions to face Lancelot Rolleston, Esquire and Conservative MP.
At 10am, the clerk of the court commenced the day’s sitting by reading a proclamation in the name of the teenage Queen Victoria, crowned at Westminster Abbey just six months earlier. The proclamation discountenanced ‘all vice, immorality and impiety’, and judges around the country took this as a Royal ‘command’ to ensure everyone would ‘fulfil the duties of religion and support the authority of law’ and allow the country to ‘resist the machinations and the violence of those who have declared war on this country’.5
On this Monday morning, Judge Rolleston told the Grand Jury he was pleased with ‘the lightness of the calendar’6 but the court would still not rise until 7pm, and Her Majesty’s command meant that fifteen boys were not going to get much leniency for stealing clothing and food, even for first-time offences: a fourteen and a sixteen-year-old who stole four fowls were sentenced to a whipping and six months in prison; two boys, aged twelve and fourteen, were sentenced to a week in solitary and a whipping for stealing pork pies; the others, those with prior offences, received transportation for seven or fourteen years.
Henry Sparkes was the last boy to appear, another of the under-sized boys found in inferior districts of towns and cities, with a background heard every day in courts around the country. Just a year or two earlier he had been sentenced to three months in Southwell House of Correction for being found on premises in the night-time, presumably on a thieving foray. Magistrates hoped Houses of Correction — commonly known as Bridewells after the prison and hospital established in the 1500s to punish the disorderly poor and house homeless children in London — would deter young boys from a life of crime by instilling ‘habits of working and moral guidance to reform their character’. Magistrates typically declared to boys they had been found guilty of a crime which not long before would have meant forfeiture of their life but hoped that after an initial departure from the path of honesty an escape from hopeless servitude would make them a more worthy member of society. They then gave what was called a nominal punishment of three or four months imprisonment.
But working the treadwheels, known as ‘everlasting staircases’, and Southwell’s moral guidance had not kept Henry Sparkes on a path of honesty. His own father twice charged him with ‘robbing him of fifteen shillings, and…again charged by him with stealing other moneys’7 — although, this was not uncommon and not always the truth. A few fathers and stepfathers might have been genuinely motivated to keep their boy on the ‘right’ path, but many contrived charges to get rid of children, tiring of a boy thief not delivering enough, or wanting the Houses of Correction to bear the cost of housing, food and clothing. In a report to Lord John Russell, leader of the Whigs, magistrate William Miles explained that:
[some parents] turn their children out every morning to provide for themselves, not caring by what means they procure a subsistence so that the expense of feeding them does not abstract from their means of procuring gin or beer…other parents require their children to bring home specified sum every night to obtain which they must beg or thieve…others hire out their children to beggars for threepence a day (a cripple is worth sixpence).8
The court heard Henry Sparkes had once been charged with stealing a pony but ‘on account of his extreme youth he was not prosecuted’9 but ‘extreme’ youth was no longer his refuge. He was now charged with the theft of a total of three pence from two women on 21 October:
Henry Sparkes, late of the parish of Redford in this county, labourer, for feloniously stealing, taking and carrying away one piece of the current copper coin of this realm called a penny and one other piece of the current copper coin of this realm called a halfpenny of the monies of Mary Fletcher, and one other piece of the current copper coin of this realm called a penny and one other piece of the current copper coin of this realm called a halfpenny of the monies of Ann Chambers.10
For young thieves, life on the street was one of chance, of always ‘calculating all things to a nicety…chances of detection, chances of prosecution and chances of acquittal…’.11 Having been detected and prosecuted, Sparkes was now taking his chances that he might win some leniency by pleading guilty, but such hope dissipated when the arresting constable who had detained him overnight revealed that ‘on bringing him to jail he was found to have taken two pairs of stockings from the constable’s house’.12
Such a perceived wantonness to ignore magisterial admonitions, and an inability to resist thieving even from an arresting constable, was not going to receive a sympathetic ear from Her Majesty’s judges dealing with those who ‘declared war on this country’. Courts were tired of such repeat offenders. Magistrates often declared: ‘Prisoner, what can we do with you? We have done everything to reclaim you. We have imprisoned you over and over again, and given you frequent floggings, yet all is of no use.’13 An offence might appear petty, but, as one Middlesex magistrate explained, if they were ‘well known to be dangerous characters…you sometimes on account of badness of character sentence them to transportation’.14
Tearful pleas and tales of poverty, hunger, abuse and abandonment occasionally pained a judge or magistrate, but often their hearts were, as Dickens termed it, ‘water-proof’.15A common exchange was that of a ten-year-old boy appearing at Mansion House, London, on a charge of pickpocketing a handkerchief. Asked about his parents, the boy replied ‘father lives nowhere’s, ‘cause he’s dead’, didn’t know where his mother was, and ‘I an’t got nobody to go to’.16
Police said it was evident the youngster ‘had no friend
