The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens. Steve Harris
reduced but there was always on hand a ready supply of empty coffins. Thousands succumbed to typhoid and cholera, or became bearers of disease to Australia.
There were few concerns about numbers squeezed on board — some hulks held as many as 600 to 700 juveniles over three decks ‘without overcrowding’,5 at least according to official reports. The Euryalus had been home to 264 navy personnel but now it officially housed 400 offenders. Its design and small size — just 49 yards x 12.5 yards (45 m x 11.5 m) — defeated any attempt to adequately classify and separate prisoners. And in any event their age, size and convictions often provided few insights as to true ‘badness’ and where they ought to be housed: the upper deck designated for first-time offenders, the middle deck for those with more than one offence, and the lowest deck for the ‘worst’.
In what reforming journalist Henry Mayhew described as conditions ‘very like those found in the zoological gardens,’6 the first Euryalus chaplain, Reverend Thomas Price, presciently said that without greater classification and management based on criminality and behaviour, and adequate separation of the worst from the rest, his task of improving their morals and correcting the ‘evil….cannot possibly be accomplished’.7
Price was not optimistic about managing poor children ‘taken out of our streets, not only deplorably ignorant of all religious knowledge, but with habits opposed to every moral and social restraint’. It had been put to him that ‘such was the depravity of the boys that every attempt to moralise them would only terminate in disappointment’, and ‘I find much reason for the remark’.8
Sparkes and Campbell found themselves among boys of all ages, some listed as ten years or older but perhaps as young as eight or nine, and others as old as seventeen or eighteen, divided into small sections and corralled below deck for long periods. Their days were run on a military-like schedule under constant surveillance. Each morning around five, a wake-up call sounded for boys to open their portholes and stow their hammocks. Another signal sent them in small groups to hear prayers in ‘chapel’. Mustered on deck they waited in silent ranks for breakfast at about 6am, usually some gruel and a hunk of brown bread, before being ordered to clean the decks and begin their day’s labour around 8am, picking oakum or ‘tailoring’ crude clothing for hulk prisoners.
Groups of boys were monitored by older ‘head’ boys, chosen because of perceived ‘good conduct’ in prison. They were obliged to report any misbehaviour, real or perceived, such as a breach of the ‘silent system’, insolence, theft, refusing to work or fighting. Summary punishment was quickly decided and delivered. Officially, ‘in cases of convicts misbehaviour, mild and persuasive means of correction are first tried’. Such mild and persuasive means might mean reduced food rations, ‘confinement in a dark cell with no other food than bread and water, for not more than seven days…or moderate whipping which, in any case, is not allowed to exceed twenty four [sic] stripes.’9
Whipping or being ‘flogged’10 on the breech, usually by birch, was not a new punishment for most boys, and confinement in a small cell for up to a week in darkness and silence, with only bread and water as company, was more feared. Authorities saw this black hole as a greater terror for the wicked than the gallows and gibbet, one which might ‘break’ recalcitrant boys in the hope that solitude and silence would allow a small voice of conscience to be heard. But it could also instil an unbreakable resolve to resist and rebel.
Offences and attitudes were key features of new additions to a boy’s penal biography, an incessant and indelible inking of ‘badness’:
On board each hulk, a book is kept by the Overseer, in which are entered the names of all convicts; and on the first Sunday of every quarter, they are mustered, and the character of each convict, for the previous three months, is marked against his name, as follows: v.g. (very good); g. (good); in. (indifferent); b. (bad); v.b. (very bad).11
At noon the boys were fed more oatmeal gruel or boiled ox-cheek or soup, then allowed to trudge around the deck for an hour of air and exercise ‘with the least noise’12 until 1.20pm when they were again mustered before more labour, or for illiterate boys some basic lessons, until 5pm. After a cursory wash supper was served at 5.30pm, usually a repeat of earlier meals. After another brief stint of silent walking on deck — popular ‘games’ of cards, dice and marbles were strictly forbidden — and a final muster to ensure they held no weapons or stolen goods, they were ordered to file below to the foul and cramped berths to prepare their hammocks and listen to an evening prayer before a final lock down at 8pm. By 9pm, with ‘profound silence’ ordered, the ship was ‘as quiet as if there was not a soul on board’, the eeriness broken only by the lap-lap of the Thames and the strike of the bell and an ‘all’s well’ call by guards every half-hour.13
On Saturdays the boys had a weekly wash ‘all over in tepid water and soap’.14 A few had visits from family vainly pleading for their boys to be released, but family was a foreign concept for most.
Authorities budgeted for each boy to have a roughly made shirt, jacket and pair of breeches, but just as police had often confiscated the stolen goods of street boys, hulk officials often pocketed the clothing money. When John Howard, inspirer of the Howard League for Penal Reform, inspected boys on the hulks he found ‘many had no shorts, some no waistcoats, some no stockings, and some no shoes’.15
As at Millbank, older and more villainous youths formed bullying gangs and implemented their own code of behaviour, often more abusive than overseers. Younger and smaller boys had to sharpen their footwork and harden themselves or accept being victims.
For boys like Sparkes and Campbell, what had passed for childhood had long become the pursuit of ‘manhood’. They had been inspired by wondrous tales of ‘robbers, pirates and loose women’ in the popular penny dreadfuls and colourful street theatre, and street gatherings where boys would ‘sit for six or eight hours together, relating and hearing tales of criminal heroes’.16 And in the flash dens of the Fagins they lived with older and more desperate offenders, and the ‘libidinous desires’17of puberty became contemporaneous with crime, with the needs and wants of food, shelter, alcohol and sex being met by criminality.
Self-interest, self-preservation and self-esteem was the key to life, one in which the boys’ code and hierarchy of conduct and justice saw bigger ‘nobs’ bully the small and weak to gain ‘power’, food rations or sexual favours. Those who did not bend to their will, or ‘noseys’ or ‘skunks’ who informed against them, risked being the victim of a malicious report and punishment by the hulk commandant or the nobs themselves. Thomas Dexter, a convict assigned as a nurse on a hospital ship serving the Euryalus, said the ‘nobs’ ‘have got such an ascendancy’ that boys were less fearful of incarceration than of ‘ill-treatment of one boy to another’.18
I have known it when three or four have been obliged to be locked up in a cell by themselves in order to shelter them from murder…they were called Noseys, that is those whom they considered had been to the officers to tell them anything that was going on, those who were particularly pointed out by the majority of prisoners on whom to wreak their vengeance.19
Bullying led some victims to self-mutilate to gain respite or a fuller meal in a hospital ward. ‘I have had patients come into the hospital who have declared that they have not tasted meat for three weeks together, but have been obliged to give their rations to those nobs, and they have fed upon gruel and the parings of potatoes.’20 Some applied a red hot copper button to their own skin and rubbed the wound with soap until it became septic. Others would claim to have fallen down a ship ladder, but in fact had let ‘the edge of the table drop upon [their arms] and break them in two’ or had other boys do it for them.21
Another put pins in his hand to gain admittance, which further upset the bullies who ‘pricked my eyes with needles…and jagged the needle three or four times in each eye.’ He knew they would do it, the boy said, ‘because they told me overnight they would put my eyes out in the morning…I did not care what had become of me then…because I used to be so ill-used’.22
Ill-use included sodomy, the silent currency of the Royal Navy, prisons and prison hulks. Social reformer and jurist Jeremy Bentham reported that hulk prisoners were raped as a matter of course: ‘An initiation of this sort stands