The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    A Glasgow father spent very little time in the home. When his shift ended late into the evening, he generally headed straight for the flash house to “swallow a hare” at the pub. Workmates in tow, he drank heartily into the wee hours. Glasgow taverns, one for every fourteen people, guaranteed escape from the bleakness of a one-room flat. “Drunken statistics” published in the Scotsman revealed that Glasgow residents drank more than five times the amount of their London counterparts because of worse housing and less assistance for Scotland’s poor. Like their parents, the young took solace under alcohol’s haze, as described by a fourteen-year-old stonecutter: “Usquebaugh (whiskey) was simply happiness doled out by the glass and sold by the gill.” 4
    The comfort of the bottle expanded Glasgow’s generation of abandoned children. Police commissions investigating the cause of juvenile delinquency in the early nineteenth century linked alcoholic parents to criminal children. “It is likely that drunkenness was often the result of indigence rather than simply bacchanalian pleasures. Many families of juvenile delinquents seem to have been engaged in a fight between destitution and respectability in the struggle to keep their heads above water from day to day.” 5
    Among the poor and middle class, it was a woman’s duty to try to protect the family from the lure of the bottle, to ensure that a man’s paycheck wasn’t spent entirely at the pub. On payday, she would wait, children in hand, along the rail tracks or outside the factory exit. Money spent on prostitutes was another problem. Marriage in the Regency era was a loose concept at best, fidelity an uncommon one. As unemployment rose, so, too, did wife beating. If a woman found the courage to take her mate to court, he claimed that she had been drinking, fully aware that drunken wives could be gaoled by their husbands’ testimony. Desertion was commonplace among men. Without warning, many ran away from the Glasgow tenements in search of better employment or an easier life.
    These were the stresses that robbed childhoods from the thousands of Scottish children who ended up on the street or in a factory. Agnes McMillan was no different. Her father abandoned the family early in her life. She never learned why he left, but there are many possible explanations. Railway men worked fifteen-hour shifts, seven days a week, with only one holiday a year. Michael McMillan’s job of coal porter entailed lugging a wheelbarrow back and forth, loading and unloading mound upon mound of dusty fuel. So pitiful was the pay for this backbreaking work that many resorted to larceny. Men Michael’s age often surrendered to arrest, alcoholism, or the grave. The average life expectancy for a Glasgow native was just under thirty-one years.
    Nearly 30 percent of Glasgow households were headed by a woman. Some were widows and others abandoned wives like Mary. Many Scottish lasses had never married because of the availability of jobs in the mills coupled with a shortage of men. If a woman lost her job or her mate, her options for employment were severely more limited than a man’s. If the sole breadwinner didn’t work, she ended up on Glasgow’s streets. There were no alternatives, no safety nets. If a woman was poor, it was considered her fault. If her children went hungry, it was blamed on her flawed character.
    Poverty was treated as a crime, conveniently alleviating the conscience of the upper classes. Poorhouses were designed to be as miserable as possible to discourage use by people who needed help most. When Agnes was born, local counties couldn’t handle the swelling number of women, men, and children who were without food, a place to sleep, or prospects for employment. The few admitted to a workhouse were called “inmates” and were required to wear uniforms. Each inmate performed hard labor. Men worked breaking stones with axes. Women and children pulled apart