The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women by Deborah J. Swiss

harmful to girls like Agnes and Janet. When mill owners produced long lists of witnesses to testify on their behalf, Owens’s efforts produced exactly the opposite of his intentions. He wanted to expose the abuse of children and ignite social reform. Instead, expert witnesses like Dr. Holmes and Dr. Wilson used medical evidence, provided by the factory owners, to conclude that industrial exploitation brought children no harm.
    The committee posed the following question to the physicians it had chosen as experts: “Suppose I were to ask you whether you thought it injurious to a child to be kept standing three and twenty hours out of the four and twenty, should you not think it must be necessarily injurious to the health?” Dr. Holmes replied: “If there were such an extravagant thing to take place and it should appear that the person was not injured by having stood three and twenty hours, I should then say it was not inconsistent with the health of the person so employed.” Dr. Wilson agreed with his colleague, adding that it is “not necessary for young children to have recreation.” 25
    One way or another, most people born poor ended up in a mill or a coal mine before age ten. Factory owners could buy a child for about five pounds from a workhouse or orphanage. Children signed with an X contracts that bound them to the factory owner until age twenty-one. A lad about the same age as Agnes described his feelings about working in a mill: “I think that if the devil had a particular enemy whom he wished to unmercifully torture the best thing for him to do would be . . . keep him as a child in a factory for the rest of his days.” 26
    Sir Robert Peel’s committee never heard the testimony that mattered most. Joseph Rayner Stephens, owner of the Ashton Chronicle , wrote it years later. He documented firsthand accounts of factory children who had labored during the same years as Agnes. Sarah Carpenter, a young adult in 1849, described to Stephens her experiences as a mill girl, including an account of a supervisor known to the children as Tom the Devil: “I have often seen him pull up the clothes of big girls, seventeen or eighteen years of age, and throw them across his knee, and then flog them with his hand in the sight of both men and boys. Everybody was frightened of him.” 27 “Tom the Devil” had pummeled one girl into insanity and beaten two others to death. Another young mill slave by the name of Samuel Davy described the suffering he had witnessed: “Irons were used as with felons in gaols, and these were often fastened on young women, in the most indecent manner, by keeping them nearly in a state of nudity, in the depth of winter, for several days together.” 28
    The powerful in Parliament turned a blind eye toward these abuses because the textile trade helped feed their fortunes as it spurred the empire’s economy. Forced apprenticeship was ideal for the factory owner because the purchased children were paid substantially less than adults. Men earned about seven shillings a week, boys and girls just one or two. Juvenile thieves like Agnes and Janet were a bargain. They weren’t paid at all except for a small contribution to the local “parish,” the county government under the sheriff ’s jurisdiction.
    By the summer of 1834, the child who had entered Mr. Green’s mill eighteen months before was now a woman of almost fourteen. In a blur of yesterdays and tomorrows that all looked the same, Agnes completed her sentence. With stupefying repetition, 548 days, 8,222 hours of picking wool, had somehow passed. Strand by strand, the fifteen-hour days toughened her hands and fingers. She’d had enough of Glasgow. Agnes and Janet launched a new plan the day the left the mill. They would save their coins for lodging in Kilmarnock, a lovely town where Agnes’s mother Mary had once lived.

2
    Crown of Thieves
    Glasgow Green
    Agnes felt light-headed as she stepped across the threshold defining the boundary