Snowy. Tim Harris
and medical wards were mixed. Every care and comfort was given. Great importance was attached to the need for lots of fresh air – ‘bad air’ was thought to harbour germs. The wards were heated with open fires, which must have made cleaning difficult, for everything was scrubbed each day. It was not at all Spartan, though: there were fresh flowers and pictures on the walls, plus toys for child patients.
In 1863, the year James died, the hospital admitted 344, mostly accidents, with a high rate of recovery after surgery. A year later, B.W. Richardson, MA MD, an authority on pulmonary tuberculosis, came to King’s Lynn. He found a ‘fine hospital giving free treatment to the poor’. The locals dug deep into their pockets and gave generously to support the hospital and feed good nourishing food to the patients. Richardson’s only criticism was of the food – too much carbohydrate and not enough protein (he made no mention of the need for fruit and vegetables).
There is no record of how long James Rolfe was a patient, but it is doubtful he would have had many visitors. The ten miles into King’s Lynn was a long way to walk, particularly in winter, even if the family could afford a day off work, assuming their employer would allow this. Trains would have been expensive and presumably they did not know how long James would linger. Postal services had been running for about twenty years (Robinson Crusoe was Postmaster at Lynn). Would someone from the hospital have written or used the Telegraph system, which began in 1845, to send a telegram to John and Elizabeth to tell them the sad news? As neither could read, who would have read it out to them?
However his parents received the news, James’s body must have been borne back to the village by train or over the muddy roads by cart in the late December half-light. What followed must have been a pitiful but common sight as the little funeral procession made its way to Pentney churchyard, either on foot as a ‘walking funeral’, or possibly in a cart lent by a generous farmer, washed down and filled with straw. James and his father are both listed in the census as agricultural workers, but it is not known on which farms. Not for James the plumed horses, the family dressed in black, the draped crepe, the mutes and all the outward signs of grief beloved by the Victorians.
James’s funeral would have been very much as described in Candleford Green by Flora Thompson:
The women would follow the coffin, in decent if shabby and unfashionable mourning often borrowed in parts from neighbours, and men with black crepe bands around their hats and sleeves. The village carpenter, who had made the coffin, acted as undertaker, but £3 or £4 was covered by life insurance. Flowers were often placed inside the coffin, but there were seldom wreaths, the fashion for those came later.
A meal to follow the funeral was almost certainly provided, and the food then consumed was the best the bereaved could obtain. These funeral meals for the poor have been much misunderstood and misrepresented. By the country poor and probably for the majority of the poor in towns they were not provided in any spirit of ostentation, but because it was an urgent necessity that a meal should be partaken of by the mourners as soon as possible after a funeral. Very little food could be eaten in a tiny cottage while the dead remained there; evidence of human mortality would be too near and too pervasive. Married children and other relatives coming from a distance might have eaten nothing since breakfast. So a ham or part of a ham was provided, not in order to be able to boast ‘we buried ’im with ’am’, but because it was a ready prepared dish which was both easily obtained and appetising.
These funeral meals have appeared to some more pathetic than amusing. The return of the mourners after the final parting and their immediate outbursts of pent-up grief, then, as they grew calmer, the gentle persuasion of those less afflicted than the widow or widower or the bereaved parents, for the sake of the living still left to them, should take some nourishment. Then their gradual revival as they ate and drank. Tears would still be wiped away furtively, but a few sad smiles would break through, until, at the table a sober cheerfulness would prevail.
For John and Elizabeth this sad tableau would have been enacted all too frequently, both their spouses having made the final journey to the churchyard at Pentney within recent years.
As a child Fred loved to spend time with his maternal grandparents, who lived close by:
They were a dear old cupple, and I was verry fond of them and they of me, and would never hear any thing rong of me.
. . . and I used to sit and listen by the hour. I never herd any thing like that at home from my Father, even if he knew any thing. He would never tell me a tale except about religon, I got plenty of that – much good it done.
Wen my Father got to hear that he was tellen me those tales he forbid me goen to see the Old People, but I always managed to get to them some way or another.
. . . I used to hear a lot about the horrors of tranceportation. I often think that the old People of the Eighteen Centuary, used the tales of tranceportation as a Bogey man to frighten there sons. The young generationn now would not even know what it means to be tranceported.
I had an Uncle tranceported some where round about that time for Sheep Stealing, and Grandfather have told me many a time about it. He was a Shepperd and lived at West Acre. It was the time that Amerricca was asken for Emergrants to go out, and he stole the sheep to get the money to go there. They told me he got twenty years sentence, and was sent as a convict to Australia.
After a few years of working for the Government, Fred’s uncle was released. He was then free to work where he liked, so long as he did not leave the country. I Walked by Night goes on to describe how he carried on his trade as a shepherd, saved money, married and settled. When he died, he owned eleven square miles of land, and 40,000 sheep. Certainly, he was able to send money home to his parents. Lilias Rider Haggard added a footnote to the book to say Transportation was looked on as a terrible fate, mainly because the lack of communication and very isolated nature of English villages made the distance even more terrifying.
She also recorded that a bottle of the prisoner’s urine was corked securely and hung up in his old home, then anyone would know how he was getting on. If the urine got cloudy, he was ill; if it wasted, he was dead and the family went into mourning.
Prisons at that time were not for holding convicted prisoners and periods of imprisonment were not a sentencing option; they were used solely to hold those on remand. Once their case was heard, either they were sent to the gallows, transported, whipped, pilloried, put in the stocks or fined. There were Houses of Correction, such as the Bridewell at Walsingham that housed tramps and vagabonds, if they were not considered to be the deserving poor. Originally intended to train inmates to lead useful lives and learn a trade, they became prisons in all but name. Magistrates decided whether the tramps should be aided or punished, and punishment was harsh: they would do the most unpleasant of tasks to earn food, and could be whipped or be pierced through the ears with a red-hot iron.
Juries were beginning to feel uncomfortable about passing the death sentence for less serious offences and so fewer verdicts of guilty were passed. One way round this was to offer a pardon to criminals if they agreed to enter the Army or Navy, or to order transportation.
When transportation to America ceased in 1776, serious overcrowding in prisons led to the use of hulks as floating prisons. To ease this problem, a fleet of convict ships left for New South Wales in 1787. The first ships were desperately overcrowded and the prisoner treatment and conditions appalling; many died on the journey. Inhumane treatment continued while they served their sentence but once free, they could carve out new lives for themselves, or find a way to return home.
With the introduction of punishment by imprisonment in 1853, transportations lessened and by 1868 it had ceased altogether. Between 1787 and 1868, 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia. Four thousand were from Norfolk and most of these were held in Norwich Castle until they left. Men and women were not segregated. While in prison, Henry Cabell and Susannah Holmes had a child. Sadly, by the time the baby was born the rules were tightened and the sexes separated, so Henry rarely saw his child, though he was said to have developed a remarkable fondness for it. Eventually transported in the first fleet to go to Australia, all three were reunited and became one of the colony’s founding families.
Fred’s