hope that he would be transported.’ When the pickpocket victim asked if he could now withdraw his prosecution against such ‘a mere infant’, the alderman said: ‘You surely wouldn’t want to find him starving, and the only way we now have of preventing him is by committing him for trial.’17
Henry Sparkes did not have much time to weigh whether he faced transportation as ‘a dangerous character’ or ‘from motives of humanity’. Samuel Fletcher and his daughter Mary quickly outlined the theft of three pence and the jury found he did ‘feloniously steal, take and carry away [the money], against the Peace of our said Lady the Queen, her Crown and Dignity’,18 and at the end of what had been a long day, the last in another long criminal year, Judge Rolleston swiftly reached his decision: ‘From such a catalogue of crimes, the Court remarked that it was impossible by any imprisonment that he could be reformed.’19 ‘He would therefore be placed in the penitentiary, Millbank’20 before being ‘transported for the term of seven years to such place beyond the seas as Her Majesty by and with the advice of her Council shall direct’.21
Four hundred miles (640 km) away, Charles Campbell had been walking the same familiar life path in the north-eastern port town of Aberdeen, where the Dee and Don rivers meet the North Sea. It had grown rapidly on the back of ships, fish and textiles to become one of the biggest provincial towns in Britain. But, like Sparkes’ Nottingham, it was struggling in the 1830s with juvenile vagrancy and crime. Barely one in twenty-five children were in school, with hundreds begging and thieving. Some sixty percent of children, according to the inspector of prisons, were orphans or children of convicts, or parents who on entering a second marriage had ‘thrown them upon the world without means of support’.22
When he was just nine or ten-years-old, Charles Campbell and another boy were found in October 1837 to have stolen clothing, a gold ring and pawn tickets from a woman’s house in the Green of Aberdeen. They pleaded guilty and were each sentenced to ten days. At the beginning of 1840, as ‘George Hendry Henderson or Campbell’ he was found guilty of stealing a cotton shirt and night cap from a house and sentenced to thirty days with hard labour at Aberdeen House of Correction. But he resumed thieving immediately after his release, pleading guilty under the name of ‘George Campbell’ to stealing clothing from a house in Upperkirkgate. This time he received sixty days with hard labour.23
On 23 September 1840, the name Charles Campbell appeared again on the Aberdeen Circuit Court of Justiciary list. After a ‘very earnest and impressive prayer’, Judges Lord Medwyn and Lord McKenzie and a jury panel began working their way through the thefts, forgery, and house-breaking. One ‘little boy’, William Mitchell, pleaded not guilty but having the ‘habit and repute [of] a thief’, was sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment; another boy, William Burnett, only had to wait five minutes for the jury, after ‘evidence…tedious and uninteresting’, to find him guilty of house-breaking and theft of £17, for which he was sentenced to seven years transportation. Nineteen boys appeared that morning, their guilt and punishment all decided in just two hours, with eight sentenced to be transported for seven or fourteen years.24
Even among under-sized boys, Charles Campbell stood out. He was just 4 feet (122 cm) tall with a shock of red hair barely visible behind the dock railing. He was charged with Alexander Boynes of breaking and entering another house, this time in Shiprow, the street running from the harbour to the heart of the town, and stealing three cotton shifts.
Campbell was warned pre-trial that if he confessed, or was found guilty, he ‘ought to be punished with the pains of the law to deter others from committing the like crimes’.25As Campbell and Boynes could not write, a sheriff prepared a statement on which they put their mark, ‘accepting’ the charges and pleading guilty that each, ‘or one or the other of you’, had ‘wickedly and feloniously’ broken into a widow’s room and stolen a cotton shift from her, and two other shifts owned by another woman.26
Campbell told the court he believed he was eleven or twelve years old. He was a native of Aberdeen but had been ‘absent’ for three months, perhaps a sly reference to his time in the House of Correction, and had only been in the city one night, with no place of residence, when arrested. The truth of his birthplace is unclear, but he was later listed in Tasmanian convict records as having been born in Dublin, and been a ‘cotton spinner’, with a broken finger.27 Thousands of Irish families and individuals did move to England and Scotland to escape the 1831–32 cholera pandemic or in pursuit of work in cotton mills and textile factories, where boys’ small fingers were applied to dangerous machine tasks, 5am to as late as midnight, for perhaps a sixpence or a shilling. Whatever their background, unsurprisingly many boys saw street thieving as safer, more rewarding and exciting.
Witnesses told the court they had seen Campbell and Boynes lingering in the Shiprow building. A Mrs Mitchell said Boynes ‘came to my door asking for charity, but got nothing, I desired him to go to work’.28 She then saw him outside the room of widow Margaret Grant, who had locked her garrett room before returning to find a chair at her door and some boards removed from above the door.
Perhaps in a protective ruse, or mere brazenness, Campbell was also seen going to another room again ‘asking for charity’, with ‘his coat buttoned and something bulky below it…some white cloth sticking out below his coat’.29
Out in the street, Campbell’s number was up when a sailor overheard him tell Boynes ‘I winna tell if you dinna tell’, to which Boynes responded ‘and I winna tell if you dinna tell’. The sailor could see something stuffed underneath their jackets and enjoined a fellow sailor at Trinity Quay to follow the boys and apprehend them. Spotting the sailors, Campbell ‘made off at a quick pace’, while Alexander declared ‘it was not me who did it but that boy’ before running off himself. When Campbell was seized he reciprocated, saying, ‘it was not me who stole them, it was that boy running away,’ pointing to Boyne.30
Questioned at Aberdeen police station each boy continued to blame the other. Notwithstanding their ‘dinna tell’ compact, a sergeant said Boyne told him they ‘had been on the outlook all that day in Shiprow to steal something at Campbell’s suggestion to enable him to procure pies in the evening’.31 He maintained Campbell went into the widow’s room and emerged with the cotton shifts, giving him one to wear or sell in which case ‘he would get a sixpence for it’.32
The ‘it wasn’t me it was him’ ploy was oft-used among street-wise juvenile pickpockets and thieves hoping it would help their chances if they could create doubt or convincingly point to the real ‘baddin’. But the police were not persuaded by Campbell’s efforts to pin the crime on Boynes, or his cunning argument that he had not broken into the garret room because its door was not locked, and knew Campbell ‘to be by habit and repute a thief’, convicted three times under the names of Charles Campbell, George Hendry Henderson/Campbell, and George Campbell.33
When the jury foreman duly announced the charge unanimously found proven, Campbell’s final ‘chance’ rested with Lord Medwyn, a Scottish Episcopalian who had edited a new edition of the catechism: ‘Thoughts concerning Man’s Condition and Duties in this Life, and his Hopes in the World to Come’.
Medwyn initially said ‘in consequence of their youth, [he had] felt inclined to a lenient sentence’ but the boys’ crime was ‘heinous’. He sentenced Alexander Boynes to eighteen months imprisonment, but obviously felt Charles Campbell was the real ‘baddin’: ‘Theft, especially when committed by means of house-breaking and by a person who is by habit [sic] and repute a thief, and who has been previously convicted of theft, is a crime of a heinous nature and severely punishable.’34
It was futile to send his like to a prison which turned young petty offenders into ‘more expert thieves and more hardened criminals’,35 so he ‘could not propose a sentence less severe than transportation’.36
A boy of eleven or twelve who wanted to steal some cotton shifts in order to buy a pie was to return to
