It is not known how Hudson survived for almost nine years before he came to official notice. Like most working class children, he was
illiterate and kept no diary or written record of his life.
Holden quotes the Old Bailey Session Papers of 1783, where his brief interview with the judge at the time of his trial provide the first documented account of Hudson's existence and some indication of how he lived:
Court to Prisoner: “How old are you?”
“Going on nine.”
“What business was you bred up in?”
“None, sometimes a chimney sweeper.”
“Have you any father or mother?”
“Dead.”
“How long ago?”
“I do not know.”
Coffins of black
As a chimney-sweep, permanently blackened with layers of soot to provide some protection against the fire and heat of chimneys, Hudson was among the most visible of child labourers. But in many other respects his life was not much more wretched than that of his peers. Most children, less visible in mills, mines and foundries, commonly worked 12-hour days, many from an early age.
Many chimney-sweeps were recruited from the age of four. Small boys were needed with bones soft enough to crawl through the tiny chimney flues or “coffins of black” as the poet William Blake called them. Some chimney openings were as small as 9 x 14 inches (23 x 35 centimetres).
Holden provides a picture of the horrendous conditions facing chimney sweeps and the terrible toll it took on their health. “[E]mployed to scrape the soot from the sides of the flue, [the boys also had to] replace the mortar which had become dislodged and repair cracks in the brickwork. Oven chimneys were particularly unpleasant as deposits of congealed fat and soot made it difficult to get any firm grip. Constant lacerations were a permanent part of life. For some a relatively quick death by asphyxiation or by smoke inhalation may have been preferable to the long-term sufferings which were an occupational habit and which might have included asthma, inflammation of the eyes, burned limbs, malformed spines and legs and tuberculosis. Most horrifyingly, these young children often developed cancer of the scrotum.”
The most profitable aspect of the mastersweep's business was extinguishing flue fires. To do this the mastersweep would force the children to climb up the chimneys and extinguish the fires from the inside. “For this task, the boys entered the mouth of the chimney carrying a candle in their teeth and a scraper in their hands. They climbed by way of their knees and elbows to the top and then worked their way down.”
Indicating how much the children hated this work, Holden refers to a chimney-sweep in 1819, who gladly consented to the amputation of a leg crushed in a fall, after being told that he could not ascend another chimney with only one leg.
Hudson was a “sometimes” chimney-sweep because it was an itinerant occupation and their masters traditionally cast out apprentices during the warmer months, usually from May 1 on. The masters then set up as night-carters, a business that did not require small-limbed apprentices, and the boys left to roam the streets. The boys were also dispensed with as soon as they outgrew the narrow flues and chimneys.
Is it surprising that Hudson took to petty theft? Was there any other way to mitigate the wretched circumstances of his life? As Holden concludes, John Hudson in 1780s England was a “little black slave” with nothing to lose.
Transportation to Australia
In 1783 Hudson was charged with breaking into a London house one October night, and stealing, with an accomplice, “one linen shirt, value 10s., five silk stockings, value 5s., one pistol, value 5s., and two aprons, value 2s.”
Lucky to avoid a death sentence, one of the penalties for burglary, Hudson was convicted of the lesser charge of breaking and entering and sentenced to seven years transportation. He had to endure the labyrinthine stages of the British penal system—first in Newgate prison and then on a number of prison ships—before leaving for Australia three years later.
The vastly overcrowded Newgate, Holden comments, was synonymous with “suffering, despair, viciousness and death". The recent revolt of the American Colonies, which halted the traffic of convicts across the Atlantic, resulted in a 73 percent increase in Britain's domestic prison population.
British prisons were run on a private enterprise basis—the provision of food, clothing and medical care graded according to those who could afford to pay—and the children locked up with hardened adult criminals. That Hudson survived was due, Holden notes, to the fact that the living conditions and experiences in Newgate were not much different than if he had been still at large.
Finally, Hudson, along with almost 50 other children, some convicts, others children of convict women or marines, boarded the First Fleet, arriving in the new Australian colony in 1788. Hudson was by then aged 13.
In Australia Hudson became another government statistic with only one more official reference, made three years later on Norfolk Island. Fear of starvation led to a division of the First Fleeters into two convict settlements. Half remained in Sydney, the others sailed to Norfolk Island, hundreds of miles off Australia's east coast. Hudson was one of those transferred to Norfolk Island, a penal settlement that became notorious over the next hundred years for homosexual rape and child abuse.
The last official government reference to Hudson, a record of punishment meted out to him, provides a clear enough picture that the conditions he endured remained unrelentingly brutal. A single line entry records Hudson's punishment on Norfolk Island as: “50 Lashes for being outside his hutt after nine oClock.”
Hudson's case was not unusual. At least six children aged between nine and 12 at the time of their sentencing were transported to Australia on the Second Fleet in 1789. In 1831 a nine-year-old boy was publicly hanged for arson and in 1837 five children between eight and 11-years-old were sentenced to up to 10 years' transportation. Children under the age of seven were the only ones exempt from the death penalty.
Holden has said that he wants his book to “give voice to those who have not been given a speaking part in our historical drama before". This chilling story about those previously considered to be mere historical “footnotes” is an important contribution to Australia's real history. By exposing what happened to these children, Holden has also provided a powerful argument against all those currently attempting to turn back the clock and abolish the hard-won democratic and legal rights of children.
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