Convict Orphans by Lucy Frost

Author:Lucy Frost [Lucy Frost]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2022-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

ILLNESS AND INJURIES

Apprentices who became ill or were injured during the period of their indentures were legally the responsibility of their masters. ‘If any person to whom any Apprentice is bound,’ read the Queen’s Asylum Act, ‘fails or neglects … [to provide] medical attendance for such Apprentice … the person so offending shall forfeit and pay a penalty not exceeding Fifty Pounds.’ Nothing was said in the act, however, about reporting why medical attention was required, and references to illness or injury are scarce in the surviving correspondence of the Board of Guardians.

Even when apprentices were admitted to hospital, their illnesses went unreported if they recovered and resumed their service. The admission of Mary Ann Phillips only came to light because her master George Boyes had just died, and with her mistress ‘unable to attend to her’, Mary Ann went back to the Queen’s Asylum after she was discharged. Another apprentice, ‘completely prostrated by a Rheumatic attack’, was nursed by her mistress for a month. When it seemed there was ‘no probability of her present recovery’, the guardians agreed to cancel her indentures, as they did for Jane Stankard, who was subject to fits. Jane was lucky. Instead of being re-apprenticed or sent to New Norfolk, she was discharged to her mother and stepfather, who ‘are willing to take the girl home, in fact are anxious to do so’.

Some apprentices with chronic illnesses were sent to the Invalid Depot. The illness of Anna Sullivan was not recorded, only the cancellation of her indentures ‘consequent upon ill-health’: she was ‘sick in hospital’ and then ‘returned to Depot’. Elizabeth Smith was readmitted to the orphanage ‘on account of urinary debility’, and re-apprenticed almost immediately. Her new master in Fitzroy Place reported her as an absconder, a girl of ‘rather stout build’ dressed in Queen’s Asylum clothes; however, it turned out, according to the Police Gazette, that Elizabeth did not abscond from her service. ‘She was left on the road and returned to the Queen’s Asylum.’ Where she went from there, the records do not say.

Because the health of children was not routinely checked before they were sent to their placements, and because Angelina Brown ‘had never complained’, the guardians ‘supposed’ she had recovered from scarlet fever before she boarded a coach headed north to an apprenticeship in Launceston. She had not. Her indentures were signed on 1 April 1874, and on 22 August—less than five months later—she was dead. Her decline can be followed in some detail because her master, Thomas Cook Just, proprietor of the Cornwall Chronicle, was a man given to complaint and accustomed to writing letters.

At the first meeting of the Board of Guardians after Angelina reached Launceston, a letter was read from TC Just, ‘enclosing a medical certificate, to the effect that the girl lately apprenticed to him was now in the Launceston Hospital too unwell to be at service’. Getting an influential journalist offside worried the board, and its chairman sensibly proposed to ‘see the Government with

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