Prison Life in Victorian England by Higgs Michelle

Author:Higgs, Michelle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750984744
Publisher: The History Press

The convicts returning to the hulks after a day’s work. (From Mayhew & Binny)

EXILES

Not all convicts sentenced to penal servitude were to serve out their sentences in prison. On 11 September 1843, James Brake, a twenty-nine-year-old attorney’s clerk from Somerset, was convicted of embezzlement of £27 and upwards from his employer at the Stoke Newington Quarter Sessions. He was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude but was given the opportunity of a conditional pardon if he went to Australia. James agreed and with fifty other ‘exiles’, he sailed on the Stratheden.14 An ‘exile’ was ‘a prisoner who had served part of his sentence in Britain before being transported to New South Wales, Moreton Bay, Van Diemen’s Land or Port Phillip’ before 1852.15

James arrived in Williamstown, a suburb of Melbourne, in 1845. As an ‘exile’ with a conditional pardon, he would only have had to report to a police magistrate periodically. He would have been granted a full pardon after the term of his sentence had expired. After marrying, James became the first head teacher at Wannon National School. He died suddenly in June 1854.16

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