money to go there. They told me he got twenty years sentence, and was sent as a convict to Australia.
After a few years of working for the Government, Fred’s uncle was released. He was then free to work where he liked, so long as he did not leave the country. I Walked by Night goes on to describe how he carried on his trade as a shepherd, saved money, married and settled. When he died, he owned eleven square miles of land, and 40,000 sheep. Certainly, he was able to send money home to his parents. Lilias Rider Haggard added a footnote to the book to say Transportation was looked on as a terrible fate, mainly because the lack of communication and very isolated nature of English villages made the distance even more terrifying.
She also recorded that a bottle of the prisoner’s urine was corked securely and hung up in his old home, then anyone would know how he was getting on. If the urine got cloudy, he was ill; if it wasted, he was dead and the family went into mourning.
Prisons at that time were not for holding convicted prisoners and periods of imprisonment were not a sentencing option; they were used solely to hold those on remand. Once their case was heard, either they were sent to the gallows, transported, whipped, pilloried, put in the stocks or fined. There were Houses of Correction, such as the Bridewell at Walsingham that housed tramps and vagabonds, if they were not considered to be the deserving poor. Originally intended to train inmates to lead useful lives and learn a trade, they became prisons in all but name. Magistrates decided whether the tramps should be aided or punished, and punishment was harsh: they would do the most unpleasant of tasks to earn food, and could be whipped or be pierced through the ears with a red-hot iron.
Juries were beginning to feel uncomfortable about passing the death sentence for less serious offences and so fewer verdicts of guilty were passed. One way round this was to offer a pardon to criminals if they agreed to enter the Army or Navy, or to order transportation.
When transportation to America ceased in 1776, serious overcrowding in prisons led to the use of hulks as floating prisons. To ease this problem, a fleet of convict ships left for New South Wales in 1787. The first ships were desperately overcrowded and the prisoner treatment and conditions appalling; many died on the journey. Inhumane treatment continued while they served their sentence but once free, they could carve out new lives for themselves, or find a way to return home.
With the introduction of punishment by imprisonment in 1853, transportations lessened and by 1868 it had ceased altogether. Between 1787 and 1868, 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia. Four thousand were from Norfolk and most of these were held in Norwich Castle until they left. Men and women were not segregated. While in prison, Henry Cabell and Susannah Holmes had a child. Sadly, by the time the baby was born the rules were tightened and the sexes separated, so Henry rarely saw his child, though he was said to have developed a remarkable fondness for it. Eventually transported in the first fleet to go to Australia, all three were reunited and became one of the colony’s founding families.
Fred’s grandparents also told him tales of smugglers, who like poachers worked as a defiance and a necessity. His Grandfather recalled boats coming in from Holland and Germany with cargoes of spirits and silks. Large quantities of contraband were moved under the cover of darkness. In November 1829, a 39 ft galley was captured at Breydon, with a cargo of 283 half ambers of proof brandy and about 6,000 lb tobacco. November 1832 saw 5,565 lb tobacco and about 650 gallons brandy and geneva (gin) seized from a large tub-boat and lodged in the Custom House at Wells next-the Sea.
These boats were met by luggers out in the Wash and some of the contraband brought across Terrington Marshes to Marham Fen, where the goods were hidden until they could be moved on down the Green roads for dispersal. Undoubtedly, these tales must have coloured Fred’s views on breaking the law.
In 1871, Rebecca, John’s second daughter and Fred’s stepsister, left her employment at Church Farm, Pentney as she was pregnant. John George was born on 2 November 1871 in Gayton, possibly at the Workhouse. On 17 September 1872, the baby died of chronic diarrhoea and exhaustion. Hustler Shaftoe was present at his death. Another illegitimate child and another infant death, it was common at that time but nonetheless very sad.
It may be that Rebecca went home to her father and Elizabeth to have her baby because in the 1871 census they were living in Back Street, Gayton, where John’s occupation is listed as farm bailiff, although Fred recounts in I Walked by Night that his father:
worked forty year on one farm as a Labourer, and never got any higher.
There does not appear to be anyone farming in both Pentney and Gayton, so why was John there, and why, ten years later on the 1881 census, was he back in Greys Cottages, Pentney, listed as an agricultural labourer? At every census John and Elizabeth had moved, so presumably John was not in tied accommodation.
The Census Act was passed in 1800 and the first official census held on 10 March 1801. Held every ten years since, except in 1941 when World War II was taking place, it was the first recording of the English population since the Doomsday Book in 1086. The census becomes open for public perusal after 100 years.
This country had previously resisted a formal count with churchgoers believing it to be sacrilegious, quoting the terrible plague that struck in Biblical times when a census was ordered by King David.
An 1827 map of Gayton shows that the layout of the cottages and the shape of the village are surprisingly similar to how the village is now, but it is not possible to work out which cottage might have been John and Elizabeth’s, as the census does not appear to run logically. Also, as recently as 1906, half of Back Street was called Willow Lane.
Interestingly, Harrods Directory notes that in 1871 a Petty Sessions was held in the Crown Inn on the first Monday of every month. Presumably this ceased when the courthouse in Grimston, the next village, was built in 1881 – a place with which 9-year-old Fred would later become familiar. In those days, he would almost certainly have attended the school in Gayton that was built in 1851, although his name does not appear in the Minutes or Punishment Book.
Sadly, the records for Pentney School are missing for the period when Fred was there, after the family returned, but he recounts in I Walked by Night how he was always up to mischief as a child:
So one day we turned the Master out of school and locked him out. The School was maniged by two of the Farmers and the Clergyman. They came down and stood outside, and promised to lett us off and forgiv us if we would come out. We would not at first, but of cors we had to come out in the end to go home, and wen we did they began on us and we on them. We had aranged to get out by the back way, so we got to the road befor they knew that we were there. There were plenty of stones in the Road, and we verry sone shewed that we could throw them all rite.
Well the end of that was that they turned about six of the worst of us out of school for good, and forbid us to go there anymore, so that was the end of my lerning. A lot we cared as there was plenty of work for Boys in them days.
1870 saw the first legislation about school attendance. At the time, all children were forced to go school, but it was not free. The 1880 School Act compelled education until 14 unless pupils could pass the Labour certificate earlier, proving they had reached an acceptable standard of education. Sadly this meant that bright children who would have enjoyed and benefited from school left early, leaving their duller friends to struggle on until 14.
The introduction of the Act placed schoolteachers in a terrible dilemma. Farmers, who were often on the Board of Managers at the school, were keen to pay low wages because of the Agricultural Depression and this they could do to children, who were capable of stone picking, beet thinning, bird scaring, potato planting, etc. Parents were desperately poor, so they were eager for their children to work and so the schoolmaster had to allow the law to be broken. After the harvest, parents also kept the children
