A Note on Sources

This biography is constructed, in large part, around the recorded, typewritten proceedings of the case of Rex vs Jack McLoughlin, as heard in the Johannesburg High Court in 1909 and preserved in the South African National Archives. Despite various alternative spellings in some of the official documents I have chosen to render the name in its authentic, correct, form as McLoughlin rather than any of its variants such as McLaughlin or MacLachlan. Along with supplementary documentation relating to the court appearances, deportation, extradition and imprisonment of McLoughlin – in Australia, India, New Zealand and southern Africa, as found in the national archives of the states concerned – it forms the primary research backbone of the study. The background and development of the McLoughlin family and their associates, in Manchester, have been determined through a search of the United Kingdom census records for the period 1851–91. This, in turn, has been supplemented through the use of other primary sources relating to the courts and prisons as held in the Archives and Local Studies section of Manchester’s Central Library. The precise details relating to individual sources can be traced in the endnotes of each chapter to be found in the main work.

Phantom outlines spirited up from archival vaults, however, have insufficient flesh-and-blood for them to appear on the stage of social history unadorned. For historical ghosts to come to life and move persuasively in and out of relevant historical backgrounds, the accents, attitudes, complexion, language, mannerisms and poise of characters have to be retrieved from everyday, unofficial sources. The voices of authority, control and destiny – all with their own ideological and political inflexions – have to be offset against the everyday beliefs, perceptions and values of ordinary folk and members of the underworld. The deep, bass tones coming from the archives have to be offset by the animating, lighter voices of the choir with the conductor taking great care to hear, explain and understand those which may be discordant or off-key. In the case of Jack McLoughlin, that choir is composed largely from the voices of local – at best provincial – newspapers.

The Victorian era was notable for not only for the number but the quality of its small town newspapers. The morning or evening newspapers, sometimes both, often provided excellent accounts of court proceedings as well as the actions of the local police or regional prison authorities. Read carefully and with critical intelligence, news reports provide a first-class foil to the official voice and provide essential, meaningful detail that is seldom recorded in the archives. Local, small-town newspapers in Australia and New Zealand have, in my experience, been excellently managed and preserved and are readily accessible, in electronic format, to all researchers. In South Africa, however, decay, mismanagement and neglect are the order of the day. Not even the daily or weekly newspapers of the Witwatersrand – the economic engine of South Africa – are being dealt with professionally or preserved in ways that might encourage historians of the future whose intellectual interests transcend hagiography or the achievements of nationalist political parties. Countries get the archives and the historiographies they deserve. Mine will be the last generation of South African historians who can meaningfully offset the archival record (itself in serious disarray) against the everyday experiences of the majority of the population as recorded in the newspapers of the day. The greater the edifice of ‘heritage’ in a country, the greater the rot in its real sources of history.

Of course, all primary and secondary evidence has to be set within the wider context of secondary literature, then and now. This study has benefited from a range of new and exciting new histories not only of individual colonies, but of ‘globalisation’ (a familiar old fellow now sporting a new coat) and the systematic expansion of the British empire. The web of older texts as well the most influential of the new that inform this biography are to be found in the Select Bibliography.