Convict Lives

Were convicts members of a ‘criminal class’?

What evidence does Manning Clark draw upon in The Origins of the Convicts Transported to Eastern Australia 1787-1852 in order to present convicts as ‘professional criminals’?

In his article The Origins of the Convicts Transported to Eastern Australia 1787-1852, Manning Clark seems over eager to disprove the theory ‘that convicts were mainly agricultural workers… transported to Botany Bay for minor offences’ (p103). Whilst the picture Clark is attacking may be an unrealistic one, Clark still appears to be attempting to make statistics fit with an argument he has already formulated.

Clark draws on a number of select sources in order to support his case that convicts were from a ‘criminal class’, the ‘offscourings of mankind’ (p107). Clark presents us with the following statistics, that ‘on the average, one quarter to a third [of transported convicts] were second offenders.’ (p105) This supports Clark’s contention that the convicts were career criminals. Clark also refers to ‘informed opinion in Great Britain’ (p105) asserting that  ‘the criminals are one section of the working class for whom crime is an occupation just as plumbing, carpentering, etc., are occupations for other members of the working classes.’ (p105) Clark also quotes Patrick Colquhoun who paints a picture of criminals as ‘tradesmen and others who having ruined their fortunes by gaming and dissipation, [and] sometimes as a desperate remedy go to the road.’ (p106)  

To further fortify his argument, Clark calls on social investigator Henry Mayhew, who in turn draws on the opinions of the Constabulary Commissioners in 1839, and the testimony of the master of the Wandsworth and Clapham Union (pp106-107).

‘Mayhew, using the official reports and his own investigations as evidence, classes them as professional criminals.’ (p106)

The testimony of the master of the Wandsworth and Clapham Union, in particular, supports the argument that honest poor men did not steal, and would sell ‘the shirt and waistcoat off their backs, before they applied for admittance to the workhouse.’ (p107) The inference here is that British society of the time did have measures in place to care for the poor and that those who stole did so from choice rather than necessity.

By 1787, British jails were overcrowded and many ships had been converted into prisons. This image depicts a steady flow of convicts, and the fate of hanging from which convicts sentenced to transportation may have narrowly escaped.

‘Convicts embarking for Botany Bay’ – Thomas Rowlandson

http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an5601547

Clark makes a convincing case, and shows that the view of all convicts as innocent workers accused of minor crimes, is most probably misguided. However there appear to be a number of contradictions within Clark’s article which undermine his arguments.

Whilst Clark condemns previous discussions as ‘magnifying the importance of a negligible minority’, Clark’s own claims rest on classifying all convicts as a single, cohesive group. The heading of Clark’s article states that the focus is on convict transportation between 1787 (when the First Fleet sailed) and 1852 (the year in which transportation to Eastern Australia ends) which produces a picture of generations of convicts over  65 years, a time span which saw many changes in prosecution and transportation policy. It is hard to draw an accurate representation of a cohesive group over such a wide span of time which included so many changes in British and Australian society.  

Clark also argues that because one quarter to one third of convicts were second time offenders, they must have been career criminals, rather than the poor who had turned to crime because of their economic hardships. However if we reverse this statistic, we see that two thirds to three quarters of convicts (the majority) were first time offenders. Clark also fails to note that in a system where recourse to crime may appear the only option, a person is unlikely to find their situation improved quickly, and so are not likely to turn to theft (and Clark argues that the majority of crimes were crimes of theft)  only once. The fact that recourse to crime may have been attempted more than once does not automatically make someone a career criminal. Clark also ignores convict women in this stage of his analysis, the majority of whom were convicted of minor theft and were first time offenders. Earlier in his article Clark sites that the ‘majority of the women were domestic servants’; (p104) all of which would contradict his notion of a professional, criminal class. Clark also ignores at this point, something which he had earlier mentioned - that the majority of convicts are listed as having had occupations, a fact which does not correlate with a theory of lazy, career criminals, unwilling to work.

Whilst we cannot discount the ‘informed opinion’ of the period, Clark’s use of it is questionable. Clark does not quote working class people, admitting that there was a criminal class amongst them, he references those of the upper and middle classes whose views of working class criminals are prone to prejudice, and bias regarding their own interests. Clark sites Henry Fielding’s An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), which appears to verge on sensationalism rather than informed, rational opinion, with unsubstantiated statements such as these:

‘What indeed may not the publick apprehend, when they are informed as an unquestionable fact, that there are at this time a great gang of rogues, whose number falls little short of a hundred, who are incorporated in one body, have officers and a treasury, and have reduced theft and robbery into a regular system.’ (p33)

Yet despite the possibility of bias, Clark uses these arguments as ‘unquestionable fact’ to support his argument. Clark has taken arguments from ‘informed sources’ appearing on only one side of the debate. Other primary sources from the era give a different picture – take John Howard’s The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (1777)

‘I have now to complain of what is pernicious to their MORALS; and that is, the confining of all sorts of prisoners together: debtors together: debtors and felons: men and women; the young beginner and the old offender…’ (p34)

It would appear from this source that Howard does not see prisoners as coming from a criminal class, though he appears to fear that they may become one. Here is a real hole in Clark’s argument – if there was no ‘criminal class’ in Britain, conviction and transportation created the possibility of labelling convicts as a criminal class, and thus the boundaries were blurred between where the convicts originated, and the way in which they have been imagined.     

References:

Section 2, ‘Outpost of Empire’ in Deborah Gare and David Ritter (eds), Making Australian History: Perspectives on the Past since 1788, Thomson, South Melbourne, 2008, pp33-34.

Section 4, ‘The Convict Stain’ in Deborah Gare and David Ritter (eds), Making Australian History: Perspectives on the Past since 1788, Thomson, South Melbourne, 2008, pp95-107.

Competing Arguments About the Foundations of Australia

Histories of Australia so often focus on what happened following the arrival of the First Fleet, that we often overlook the reasons for the sending of that First Fleet in the first place. Because prisoners from England’s overcrowded jails were transported to Australia, it is simple enough to say that this is the reason Australia was colonised. However as Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance suggests, there must have been far more to the decision than that, as the prospect of cultivating this land as a prison should not have been incentive enough to outweigh the concerns, potential risks, inconveniences and considerable expense involved in establishing a penal colony in New South Wales.

According to Blainey, Britain would have found it easier and less expensive to send its surplus of prisoners to one of its already established colonies in Canada or the West Indies. However the transport of convicts was not merely a case of getting rid of people, but of making use of convict labour – transported convicts became useful to Britain -whilst it was expensive to feed, keep, and guard prisoners in England, with no expectation of a return on the investment.

If England were to establish a colony in New South Wales, then it would have a presence in the south seas, and (as Blainey argues) most importantly, it would have access to strategic raw materials. The most important of these raw materials were flax – for making canvas, sailcloth and ship’s cables, and timber – especially the tall pines growing near the shores of New Zealand  and Norfolk Island – which could be made into ships' masts.

Norfolk Pines growing on the island's coast.

Image from the National Library of Australia - http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn4589991

Blainey makes a convincing argument that Australia’s worth lay in more than its apparently empty spaces for use as a remote prison settlement. If Britain established a colony in New South Wales, then they would have a new sea base from which they could conduct trade in the south-east, which could also be useful as a sheltering port in times of war. At this time, Britain’s relationship with its European neighbours was often uncertain, and as Britain was heavily reliant on its navy in order to exert power and influence, to trade and to maintain and expand its empire, access to materials such as flax and timber from a colony it controlled must have seemed an attractive prospect. Since the American revolution England had lost access to pine for masts from Maine and New Hampshire, and access to flax was also uncertain. Blainey compares the importance of flax and good timber to Britain’s military might, to the importance of oil and steel today.      

The Flax plant native to Norfolk Island.

Illustration by John Hunter.

Image from the National Library of Australia - http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an3187030 

As Deborah Gare and David Ritter, point out in their Making Australian History: Perspectives on the Past Since 1788, Blainey’s arguments caused great controversy when The Tyranny of Distance was first published. It seems that a supply of flax and timber for British ships could not be the only reason for founding a colony so far from Britain, however Blainey does not argue that these are the only reasons for establishing the colony, only that they are important reasons which have often been overlooked. Blainey acknowledges that Australia was thought useful as a site for a convict colony; that a settlement in Australia afforded England certain trade opportunities and access to China, the Pacific and the East Indies; and that colonising Australia would continue Britain’s expansion of Empire. 

The fact is that many of these motives are interrelated. Establishing a penal colony in New South Wales would help Britain to ease the strain on its overcrowded prisons, yet the convicts could also be put to use in harvesting and preparing strategic raw materials such as timber and flax. These raw materials, a labour force and safe harbour were in turn essential to British trade and the expansion of Empire.