An introduction to an as yet unpublished new abridged edition of Owen Suffolk’s Days of Crime and Years of Suffering by David Dunstan
Owen Suffolk claims in his autobiography Days of Crime and Years of Suffering to have been born in Finchley (now a London suburb) in Middlesex in 1832. One child so named is recorded in the Finchley parish register between 1820 and 1835. This was Owen, the son of William Johnson Suffolk and Ann Suffolk, born on 4 April, 1829, and baptised on 3 May.[1] Suffolk claims he was eight when his father suffered a reversal in fortune due to railway speculations and was sent to boarding school at the seaside resort town of Margate. The father is supposed to have been ruined completely in 1844 and the family left destitute, which compelled the boy’s departure from school and his going to sea. Owen may well have gone to sea, and been brutalised, as he asserts in his autobiography – the vessel cited, the General Palmer, was engaged in the activities he describes in 1843.[2]
What led him then to a life of crime? Official records tell us he experienced an early brush with the law in London. A youth named Owen Suffolk was apprehended on 22 May 1844 and charged with stealing a handcart truck, value £1. This youth was from Finchley, aged 16 (Suffolk was 15), of fresh complexion with light brown hair. He was convicted of stealing on 13 June, with three other charges pending, and sentenced to a year’s detention.[3] Claiming to act on behalf of a master, the youngster had sought to sell trucks he had borrowed or hired. A suspicious dealer, William Gardiner, checked on the master’s address and finding it to be false he alerted the authorities. Suffolk describes his truck stealing in his autobiography but there is no indication that he was convicted for this offence, as we know he was. According to his story, his first apprehension was for the lesser offence of vagrancy and his fall from grace the consequence of a combination of unforeseen events, bad luck, parental neglect, ill treatment, desperate need, and, perhaps, his own wilful pride. The factual record would appear to suggest an earlier and more determined entry into a life of crime.
Suffolk’s next arrest and conviction two years later approximates his autobiographical account but by then his wayward path is well and truly set. Described as a ‘tall, pale-faced and very respectable looking youth, only 17 years of age’ he was brought before the court charged with obtaining £14 from a rope-maker by means of a forged document purporting to be a reversionary deed on the National Bank, Maidstone, valued at £19 1s 6d. Suffolk pleaded guilty to this and another charge and having maintained ‘a dogged silence’ throughout was convicted on 30 March 1846 at the Central Criminal Court, London, for feloniously forging and uttering an undertaking for payment with intent to defraud.[4] He was sentenced to seven years transportation and placed in the juvenile reformatory at Millbank Penitentiary. Along with sixty-odd other juveniles and an additional 130 convicted persons from Pentonville Prison he was selected to board the convict ship Joseph Somes (not Soames as he records) bound for Melbourne and to receive a pardon conditional on his exile.
Melbourne was the largest settlement port of the Port Phillip district and, in 1847, it was still part of the extended colony of New South Wales. Port Phillip had never been a convict settlement in any official way and considerable opposition existed to what was, in effect, a resumption of transportation. Nevertheless, the Joseph Somes sailed from Portsmouth on 4 June, 1847, and unloaded its unpopular human cargo at Point Henry, near the sister port of Geelong, where animosity was weaker than at Melbourne. Suffolk was put ashore ‘not having found work to his liking’.[5] He was transported even though the system of convict transportation to eastern Australia had ended officially in 1840. In reality, it had not. Between 1844 and 1849 a total of 1,751 convicts with conditional pardons were sent to Port Phillip from Millbank, Parkhurst and Pentonville prisons. Known derisively as ‘Pentonvillains’ or ‘Earl Grey’s Pets’ (after the penal institution and the scheme’s political patron respectively) these ‘exiles’ were supposed to be reformed convicts.[6] In one important respect Owen Suffolk had received a benefit. He had served less than a quarter of his original sentence and was now free.
In 1851 the new colony of Victoria was created. It was excised from that portion of New South Wales that lay south of the Murray River. Taking its name after that of the Queen, Victoria imagined itself free from the convict stain. But, as the historian Geoffrey Serle has observed, ‘it is only in a technical sense that Victoria can be said to have never received convicts.’[7] In addition to exiles like Suffolk there were ‘old lags’ – former offenders, escapers and ticket-of-leave holders – that had ‘overlanded’ from New South Wales, and those who had crossed Bass Strait from Van Diemen’s land (Tasmania). Many of these ‘Vandemonians’ had served time at Port Arthur, the most notorious of all Australian convict settlements. Serle estimates that on the eve of the gold rushes, in 1850, there were possibly six thousand men in the Port Phillip district who had been convicts – ‘that is, about a quarter of the adult male population’.[8] Little wonder that Owen Suffolk found plenty of acquaintances here from the prisons of both the old world and the new.
The youngster was put ashore. He was eighteen. By his own account, he found honest work as a tutor and bookkeeper but lost this when his identity was betrayed by a fellow exile. By his own account Owen adjusts to the changed context of the Australian bush. He becomes an expert horseman and falls in with a shady pound keeper (named Scholes in his narrative) who falsely accuses him of theft. He flees but is apprehended and charged with the theft of a horse, the property of a prominent district squatter. This charge fails in court but Suffolk is convicted on another on the strength of a note he signed admitting complicity in the theft of Scholes’ horse. Colonial records bear this out. Suffolk was charged at Buninyong in September, 1848, with stealing ‘a valuable roan mare’.[9] He was found guilty on 19 December, 1848, and sentenced to five years on the roads.
Sent north to Cockatoo Island, Suffolk enjoins with the Sydney convict experience. This was a common practice with longer sentenced prisoners from Port Phillip until separation. Suffolk claims to have a written and had published in the radical periodical, the People’s Advocate, an expose of conditions at Cockatoo Island, and also original poetry, but this has not been traced. His record notes three offences during 1850: ‘neglect of work’ (5 February), ‘having a letter in his possession to send from the island’ (28 February) and ‘fighting in the square’ (16 August) but no mention of having been flogged, as he records. Of course, this may have been something the authorities might not have wanted to admit or record. Or, it may have been a literary embellishment. These offences earned him a total of forty-nine days solitary confinement.[10] After two years on Cockatoo Island (and by his own account at Bathurst gaol) he was transferred south to Pentridge, just north of Melbourne, on Christmas Eve, 1850.[11]
Pentridge was then a stockade, little more than a collection of enclosed buildings, and not yet transformed into the massive bluestone centrepiece of the Victorian prison system that it would become. Supervision was lax, security inadequate, discontent rife and escapes frequent. Policing and detention of offenders were severe problems in these years. Labour of any kind was scarce and mass desertions to the goldfields were common. Additional stockades had to be established at Collingwood, Richmond and Williamstown and floating prison hulks (like those on the Thames) brought into service in 1852, to which the more dangerous prisoners were transferred.[12] Suffolk was actually due to make an application for a ticket-of-leave when he absconded on a forged pass on 2 March 1851. This incident is glossed over in the autobiography, in which he is simply, and unconvincingly, removed from penal servitude at Cockatoo Island to comfortable circumstances at Geelong. Here he meets up with former criminal acquaintances ‘Christy’ (Christopher Farrell) and ‘Harry Dowling’. They enjoy a brief but colourful interlude as bushrangers. Suffolk and Farrell were apprehended much as he recounts – Suffolk at his quarters and Farrell at the docks. Brought before the court, they were charged with two counts of armed robbery, on 15 and 19 May, 1851, respectively. Both were sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude for highway robbery, the first three in irons.
Returned to custody, a refusal to work saw an additional two months added to Suffolk’s sentence. He was then transferred to the Melbourne Gaol. The overseer here was the Sheriff Claud Farie, who was something of a liberal among prison administrators of the period (which may not be saying a great deal); also, the veteran turnkey, George Wintle, Melbourne’s gaoler since 1838. Wintle ‘more than once…carried his life in his hand when suppressing a mutinous outbreak of convicts in prison’.[13] Suffolk helped Wintle to thwart an escape bid and he became an informant as well. As a consequence Suffolk obtained the cushy situation of prisoner clerk. Both Wintle and Farie supported Suffolk’s bid for a remission of his sentence on grounds of good behaviour.
‘Sincerely repentant’ and ‘determined to become a useful member of society’, Owen Suffolk cultivated his literary skills. His poem ‘The Dream of Freedom’ was published in the Argus above his initials.[14] The poetry-writing prisoner and apparent penitent attracted the sympathetic interest of Chief Justice, Sir William à Beckett, who was himself an amateur versifier.[15] Suffolk’s sentence of ten years was commuted to five and in September, 1853, he received a ticket-of-leave, having served only two years of a ten-year sentence. Shortly afterwards he applied to join the police detective corps.[16] Even considering the shortage of police that existed at the time it is astonishing that he was accepted. But accepted he was and placed in service at Castlemaine, one of the fast-growing new towns of the gold fields. It would be interesting to know more about this time in his life but Suffolk is more concerned with a developing romance at this point in his autobiography than his police work or any local goldfields colour. Besides, it may not have gone down well with his gold generation readers for them to discover he was a police spy when popular discontent was building on the goldfields, to culminate in the miners’ rebellion at the Eureka Stockade at Ballarat late in 1854.
Suffolk’s freedom was short-lived. On 9 November Sheriff Farie reported a discrepancy in the record of warrants and the alteration of the sentences of two prisoners from four months to two. Only the gaoler, two clerks and Suffolk – who had been employed as a prisoner clerk in the office – had access to the warrants. In addition, Suffolk was discovered to have received money from one of the prisoners who had benefited. Their testimony proved conclusive. His ticket-of-leave was cancelled and when brought in he offered no defence.[17] By Christmas, 1853, he was back in gaol. The following year, the newly appointed Inspector-General of Penal Establishments, John Price, recommended his original commutation of sentence be rescinded.
Price is himself a literary and historical figure of note. A former convict overseer in Tasmania and commandant at Norfolk Island, he was notorious for his earthy, unorthodox and disciplinarian ways and an approach to prisoner care that many claim to have been capricious and cruel. It may be that Price wanted the full truth from Suffolk about the prisoner warrants and suspected he was protecting others who were also involved, possibly he suspected Wintle. In any case, Suffolk was devastated, having believed the commutation of his original sentence to have been unconditional. Finally, in 1857, a long, heartfelt and eloquent petition to the Chief Secretary produced a result. In what was to be one of his last official communications before being brutally murdered by prisoners at Williamstown, Price conceded that Suffolk had not been properly informed of the condition of ‘conducting himself properly’. A remission of twelve months on his original sentence was granted with the recommendation that he be given a ticket-of-leave after seven years, less twelve months remission already granted him for good behaviour.[18]
Released on a ticket-of-leave in December, 1857, Suffolk was again convicted of horse stealing, at Portland on 12 February and at Ballarat on 21 June 1858, the latter occasion before Judge Redmond Barry. For these offences he received cumulative sentences of five and seven years respectively. Of these, he served eight years and five months. It was during this last term of imprisonment that he began writing his autobiography. Prison records show that from 20 February to 31 May, 1858, he was held on the hulk President and then removed to the Success. From 8 August, 1859, until 1864 he was at Pentridge prison, and thence the hulk Sacramento for the duration of his sentence.[19] During this his fourth bout of imprisonment in Australia Suffolk again conducted himself well, making himself useful as a writer. But we may doubt that this time he was allowed near the prisoners’ records.
Owen Suffolk received a ticket-of-leave on 4 July, 1866, his third in Victoria, and on 17 August 1866, the Inspector-General of Penal Establishments, William Champ, submitted his application for a full pardon to the Chief Secretary, noting that the prisoner would not normally be eligible for this until 21 April 1868. Suffolk, who was then living in lodgings in Melbourne, claimed to have received a letter from his brother in England that assured him of employment and included a gift of £50 to defray the expense of his passage home. He stated that he had not been able to find employment locally and that his poor health left him unsuitable for manual labour. Anxious to return to England, and able to pay for the passage he feared his money would disappear on living expenses if he was to be delayed, with a return to crime the likely result.[20] Superintendent C. H. Nicholson supported his appeal and Chief Commissioner of Police, Frederick Standish, backed his recommendation.[21] A free pardon was transmitted to him on board the ship Norfolk on 20 September, 1866, after it sailed for London on 17 September. Suffolk was listed as a passenger, his occupation a ‘miner’, nationality ‘British’, and his age ‘27’ (he was 37).[22] This ploy was possibly Suffolk’s last in Victoria. He appears to have done well out of it, having obtained a full pardon nearly two years before it was due to him and a passage home. Probably, the colonial authorities were glad to see him go as well. Suffolk thus obtained the neat distinction of having twice been made an exile by Her Majesty’s governments, in Britain and Australia.
He may have received money from his brother, as he claimed, or it may have been the payment for his autobiography, which the Australasian newspaper published the following year. This was a journalistic coup: a well-written, racy and powerful account of criminal and prison life by an insider. We can conclude from editorial comment, and from the impressive length of its run from January to October 1867 that it was a success.[23] It is not known if Suffolk chose the title Days of Crime and Years of Suffering. Possibly, this was an editorial invention for in the text itself he only admits to the term ‘autobiography’. In any case, the title helped convey the appropriate penitential tone. ‘We do not believe that anybody will ever be tempted into criminal paths by perusal of the history,’ the paper remarked, ‘for there is in it nothing very inviting to that end. Far from offering instances of what is called “good fortune” in eluding the grasp of justice, the whole moral of the tale points to the certain detection and speedy punishment of crime, however carefully planned.’[24]
Fine sentiments, but not taken to heart by the author, it seems. It did not take Owen Suffolk long to resume his career as a swindler, confidence man and thief in the old country. To these distinctions he now added those of the philanderer and deceiver of women. Possibly, he was also a bigamist. On 16 March, 1867, Owen Hargrave Suffolk ‘gentleman’ was married at St Stephen’s Church of England in the parish of Bow, County of Middlesex, to a ‘widow’, Mary Elizabeth Phelps.[25] Not long afterwards, an advertisement placed in The Times sought information as to the possibility Suffolk had ‘left a wife in England when he started for Australia many years ago’.[26] Was the new Mrs Suffolk worried she had a rival, who was still alive, or was she seeking evidence to dissolve the marriage? Suffolk had it in his nature to do such a thing but it is unlikely. He would have been only 16 at the time.
Owen Suffolk had, indeed, acquired another wife, but not prior to his departure for Australia. On 10 August, 1868, Suffolk – who now described himself as a ‘journalist’ – was brought before the Lord Chief Justice of England, Sir Alexander Cockburn, at Ipswich charged with stealing a black mare, a phaeton and a set of harness belonging to the landlady of the White Horse Hotel, Ipswich, and obtaining £10 by means of false pretences. To these charges he pleaded guilty. When called upon to say why judgment should not be passed upon him he ‘begged for mercy on account of his wife, aged 19 and her infant child.’ To which the Chief Justice replied:
Don’t try and impose on me. I know your career. You were married to a widow, obtained all her property, deserted her, pretended by a fake report inserted in a newspaper that you were drowned, went away with your brother’s child, who cannot therefore be your wife (the prisoner here interrupting said, “She is my wife, my lord.”) Then, said his lordship, if you did marry her, you have added bigamy to your other offences, and I sentence you to a term of 15 years penal servitude.[27]
The marriage of which he speaks may have been a common law or de facto marriage. But if it was a marriage then he now had a bride and a child he would have little to do with, at least not for a substantial portion of the fifteen years imprisonment he was sentenced to.
Owen Suffolk was returned to the English prison system where, most likely, he died. No further record of him has been traced in the English prison system. The fate of his wife and infant child is also not known. In Victoria, too, he slipped from view, although ‘the prison poet of Australia’ remained a curio subject for all manner of writers and popular historians.[28] His most substantial literary achievement, Days of Crime and Years of Suffering, was not published in full in book form until 2000[29] – 133 years after the Australasian published it as a serial. This was notwithstanding its original success, its readability and seminal influence on other authors of Australian convict literature, notably Marcus Clarke whose novel His Natural Life (1874) is still the best known of all such works.[30]
Notes
[1] Finchley Parish Register, ref. X001/122, p.127, London Metropolitan Archives.
[2] The Times 8 July 1844, p.8b.
[3] The Times (London) 4 March, 1846, p.8 indicates that Suffolk was convicted for felony in July, 1843. This does not appear to be correct. But he does appear in 1844. See P/COM 1/50 Printed Sessions 13 June 1844, pp. 252-3, and Newgate Prison Register f 103, PCOM 2/209, PRO. The Times account of his 1846 trial, which Suffolk mentions in his autobiography, does not appear to exist.
[4] The Times, 4 March, 1846, p.8
[5] ‘Assisted Immigrants Register’, February 1842- July 1848, Books 2 & 3, pp. 283 & 285. PROV.
[6] See Ian Wynd, ‘The Pentonvillains’, Victorian Historical Journal (1989), pp.37-46 and The Pentonvillains (1996).
[7] Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: a history of the colony of Victoria 1851-1861, 1963, p.4; also A.G.L. Shaw, A History of the Port Phillip District: Victoria before separation, 1996, pp. 190-1, 207-9
[8] Serle, op.cit., p. 4.
[9] Argus 12 September 1848, p.2; 19 September, 1848, p. 2; See ‘R v Owen Suffolk horse stealing’ 1-57-9, VPRS 30 Box 6, PROV.
[10] See Prison Register Males vol. 1 loc.cit., PROV.
[11] Suffolk’s colonial prison details have been extracted from the following sources: Prison Register Males vol. 1 no.51, p.53 and no. 107, p. 109, Series 515P ; ‘Suffolk File’ 57/1 to 57/1500, VPRs 1189P Box 387; ‘Free Pardon to Owen Suffolk’ VPRS 3991 Box 235, PROV. See also ‘Owen Suffolk’ Allan M. Nixon, Stand and Deliver (1991), pp. 162-165, 186.
[12] See Peter Lynn and George Armstrong, From Pentonville to Pentridge (1996) esp. ch.3.
[13] James Smith (ed) The Cyclopedia of Victoria (1903), pp. 191-3.
[14] Argus 29 May 1852, p.4.
[15] See E. G. Coppel, ‘Sir William à Beckett (1806-1869)’ Australian Dictionary of Biography vol.3., (1969), pp.10-11.
[16] Application, ‘Owen Hargrave Suffolk’, 26 Sept. 1853, VPRS 937, unit 5, bundle 2, PROV.
[17] See D 53/11496 in Suffolk File VPRS 1189/P Box 387, PROV.
[18] See 57/Y1074 in Suffolk file 57/1 to 57/1500 VPRS 1189/P Box 387, PROV.
[19] Prisoner Records vol. 6 1857-58, p. 246. No. 3836 ‘Charles Vernon’, PROV.
[20] The Melbourne Directories of 1865,1866 and 1867 list various small shopkeepers at this address. No. 202 was, however, a boarding house.
[21] File ‘Free pardon granted to Owen Suffolk’ N8247 VPRS 3991/P Box 235, PROV.
[22] ‘Letters Outward Executive Council’ (Victoria), 1 September, 1866, pp. 259 & 286, PROV. See also Victorian Police Gazette 27 September, 1866. ‘Outwards Shipping Lists, Melbourne to U.K.’ September, 1866, p. 3. PROV.
[23] Australasian 7 September, 1867.
[24] ‘The Literature of Crime’ Australasian, 7 September 1867.
[25] Owen Hargrave Suffolk m. Mary Elizabeth Phelps, Parish of Bow, County of Middlesex, 16 March, 1867, No. 400, General Register Office.
[26] The Times 24 December, 1867, p. 1d.
[27] The Times 11 August, 1868, p.9.
[28] See, for example, the observations of Marcus Clarke, Old Tales From a Young Country (1871), p.15n; J.F. Hogan, ‘The Prison Poet of Australia’, loc. cit; Argus the articles written by ‘Old Chum’ (J.M. Forde) in Truth 1910-11 in the Ms Collection (Box 20/7), State Library of Victoria and Truth 16 April, 1910; John Hogarth ‘Owen Suffolk – Poet and Convict’, The Australian Journal 2 August, 1954, pp. 28-34.
[29] See Owen Suffolk’s Days of Crime and Years of Suffering edited and introduced by David Dunstan Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2000.
[30] See David Dunstan ‘Introduction’ Owen Suffolk’s Days of Crime and Years of Suffering.