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In which we wonder whether Squire was an unlucky guy, a career criminal or framed. Yes, hypothetical arguments can be fun
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If Squire was a chick flick fan he may well have viewed the events of Monday April 11, 1785, as a sliding doors moment. If you don’t get that chick flick reference I totally understand. Sliding Doors was a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and, really, no one needs to remember any of her films. Not even that one where she won an Oscar for a level of hammy acting not seen from anyone who isn’t Porky Pig. Basically this day was when one door closed for Squire but another opened.
That Monday in April 1785 was the day the law came down on Squire. At the incredibly longwindedly named General Sessions of the Peace for the Town and Hundred of Kingston upon Thames he was sentenced to seven years’ transportation. His crime, was highway robbery, and his haul was “four cocks, five hens and divers [and] other goods and chattels the property of John Stacey”. Yeah, he stole some chickens. According to Gillen’s The Founders, this Mr Stacey had just moved into Heathen Street, which meant Squire had ripped off his neighbour. That’s not a smart move at the best of times, let alone when you’ve swiped an animal that likes to crow all the time.
Stacey: Good morning, James. I hear you’ve got some roosters in the backyard.
Squire: Umm, yes.
Stacey: That’s an interesting coincidence, for until recently I too had some roosters in my backyard. Funny how I lost mine at exactly the same time you got yours.
Squire: Yes, yes it is. Hey, John, look over there. [Squire runs away]
Much has been made of Squire’s astonishingly bad luck when it comes to committing crime. He does it twice (including the 1774 charge) and gets pinged both times. But stop to think about this for a minute. Doesn’t it seem a little odd for Squire to commit just two crimes a decade apart? Doesn’t it seem weird that, one day in April, Squire just out of the blue decides to steal some chickens? If you ask me, the answer to those questions is yes. We only know of these two instances (assuming the first charge even happened) because he was nabbed and appeared in court. An absence of any charges in the years between 1774 and 1785 isn’t proof that he committed no other crimes. Indeed, it’s just as likely that he committed other crimes in that period but was never caught.
Maybe I’m a bit of a skeptic but I lean towards the latter possibility; that Squire could have been guilty of more than just the two crimes we know of. He was managing an inn for a number of years that was reportedly the home of smugglers and other dodgy types. Keeping that sort of company makes it a bit hard to swallow that Squire managed to keep his nose clean for a decade and then woke up one morning and decided “bugger it, I’m going to steal my neighbour’s chooks”.
The idea that he committed only two crimes in his life, separated by a decade, and was so incredibly unlucky as to get busted both times is also a bit hard to swallow.
To be fair, someone could also spin the story in another direction such is the nature of the gaps in Squire’s life. He and Martha’s third child, James was born on May 2, 1783, two years before the chicken thievery. Maybe the family had been able to get by when there were four mouths to feed but, when little James comes along, pressure comes to bear on the family finances.
Maybe Squire swipes the neighbour’s chickens out of a desperate need to feed his family. Perhaps it was the latest in a series of petty thefts committed since James’ arrival and Squire got away with those because he wasn’t boneheaded enough to commit them in his own street.
Absent of any court testimony or Ouija board explanation from Squire about his motives, you could go all-out and mount a case for him being stitched up. As we will be able to deduce from Squire’s later successes in Sydney Cove, he is clearly not a totally stupid man. Out of nothing, he managed to build up quite the colonial empire. Were you to put forward the “Squire is innocent” claim, you might well suggest that only a stupid man commits a crime in the very street in which he lives. Perhaps Squire was a patsy for some chicken thief that has disappeared into the fog of history.
But, if you ask me, I reckon Squire might have pinched a bit more stuff than we know about.
Something Squire and his family wouldn’t have known on that dark Monday in 1785 was just where he would be sent. While a sentence of transportation was handed down, there would have been no destination on his boarding pass.
The war in America had put on hold the British penchant of shovelling the dregs of their society across the Atlantic. Between 1650 and 1775, according to Thomas Keneally in his book The Commonwealth of Thieves, the Brits punted as many as 120,000 convicts to America (though other sources do suggest a lower figure than that).
Using America as a jail had been working well for the British, largely because it cost them bugger-all and the crims ended up as someone else’s responsibility. In his book, Botany Bay: The Real Story, Alan Frost says the government foisted off the responsibility of transporting the convicts to third parties, paying them £5 per convict and then washing their hands of any further obligation. “[Transportation] was essentially a private business,” Frost writes, “for the role of central government ceased once merchants had signed contracts and taken custody of the convicts”.
Still, the merchants saw the convicts as a way to make money, because their labour would be sold at auction on arrival. The average going rate for a male convict was £10 while a woman could fetch a merchant £9. Those younger men with skills like carpentry or blacksmithing could go for £15 to £25.
Sometimes the chance to make elephant bucks was so easy that the merchants told the government it could forget about the £5 per prisoner fee, they’d take them for free. “... At times, when the demand for labour was strong in the colonies,” Frost writes, “the merchant might transport the convicts for no fee, knowing he could cover his costs and make a profit by selling the labour of his charges at a higher than usual rate”.
From the mid-1770s, the British government was fishing around for another place to dump their detritus. They considered Gibraltar and an area along the Senegal River in Africa. They also considered another location in West Africa called Lemane, somewhere in Canada or the West Indies. This place called New South Wales that Captain James Cook had discovered was briefly considered but rejected because, unlike shipping the convict scum to America, sending them to Australia would cost too much.
In the meantime, the government passed laws that allowed those sentenced to transportation to be moved from prisons to ships – which were called hulks – moored in the Thames, in sight of Londoners, as well as at Plymouth and Portsmouth. It seems this was a bit of a PR exercise, a way of saying to the populace “See, we’ve gone and put them on the boats and as soon as we find a place to send them, they’re out of here. Honest”. Yet it didn’t work out that way for, unsurprisingly, Londoners didn’t like boatloads of convicts living just a brief longboat paddle away. Funny that.
Finally, in August 1786 – more than a year after Squire was sentenced – he found out he was heading halfway around the world to this place called Sydney Cove (because the English had run out of other options). A place so far away that no English person had visited it since Captain Cook in 1770. Despite just one visit nearly two decades earlier, the British figured they’d send them there. “It might cost us a bit,” they may have said, “but at least they’ll be a long, long, long way from here. With any luck, maybe most of them will be eaten by cannibals. We know there are black people living there and all black people are savages and cannibals, unlike us civilised white folk.”
Despite his sentence of transportation, Squire wasn’t on any of the hulks parked in the Thames. He had been locked up in Southwark jail since the courts had passed judgement on him. And the prisons in England at the time were weird, weird places.
For starters, they often weren’t run by the government but licenced to private operators. And those operators could charge prisoners a sliding scale of fees. Those fees including “extras” like food, bedding or even the removal of leg irons. Oh, and beer too.
Some prisons had a taproom where the licencee would sell inmates a beer if they had the cash. Prison reformer John Howard found that, in one jail, the landlord had sublet the taproom to one of the prisoners, who was doing a roaring trade.
According to Tom Keneally, the English at the time viewed prisons as a bit of a tourist attraction, as a place to go to see how the other half lived and to revel in the vicarious thrill that you weren’t them. A low-rent Disneyland, if you will.
“Every day, sightseers came to view the spectacle, as we might now visit a zoo, while prostitutes worked their way around to service visitors and prisoners who had the cash, and turnkeys received a pay-off from this traffic as well.”
Prisons were not just weird places, but awful ones as well. Reformer Howard described cells measuring five metres by 1.8 metres housing at least two dozen inmates with nothing more than a few holes in the door to provide air and light. After some visits, Howard said his notebook was so tainted by the fetid stench of the prisons that he had to lay the pages out before the fire to dry and disinfect them.
The jail system seems almost enough to make transportation to a country no Englishman had been to for more than a decade look attractive by comparison. Well, except for the fact that they had to say goodbye to their families and everything they knew – most likely forever – and journey to this strange land a long, long way away. The modern Australian has no qualms about travelling to and from our country. But it was a very different story for the people who would become the first Australians (okay, the first white Australians). Their journey from England to Australia has been described as the 18th century equivalent of going to Mars, and that’s pretty close to the money. Leaving the familiar – even if it’s the familiarity of a stinking jail or overcrowded hulk in The Thames – to journey to a place almost no one in England had been to would surely have seemed like a step into the unknown.
But it was one Squire wouldn’t have to make on his own.