Part an Irish Man The Regiment

For two innocents who couldn’t speak up for themselves; Michael Flynn, murdered by the Crown in Galway Prison, 17th January 1883; and little Philomena Flynn who died from neglect of Church and State in Tuam, County Galway, 18th March 1947.

This Snake’s no longer in chains

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication

A quick note for E-Readers

Prologue

Island of No Return

Remote Control

Irish Blood, English Heart

Watching the Detectives

London Calling

You’re nobody in this Town

Oliver’s Army

Pleasure and Pain

Whiskey in the Jar

Rebel Waltz

Which Side Are You On?

Heavens Knows I’m Miserable Now

Queen of Hearts

Police and Thieves

Raglan Road

The Auld Triangle

God Save the Queen

The Warmest Room

When I First Met Your Ma

This Charming Man

Redemption Song

The Colours

News of the world

A Lover Sings

I’m a Man you don’t meet every day

Gangsters

It’s a Sin

Tubthumping

The Irish Rover

Gentleman Soldier

Should I stay or should I go?

The Rising of the Moon

Letter from America

Berlin Wall

Perfect Day

The Black Velvet Band

The Snake with Eyes of Garnet

Rough Orders of Magnitude

Acknowledgements

A quick note for E-Readers

The historical records of real people form the basis for most of the characters in this novel. I have taken facts about their lives and tried to weave a story around them. With the exception of the obvious villains, I have tried to do this in a sympathetic manner and hope I have succeeded. I have attached hyperlinks to contemporary newspaper articles from Trove, convict records from the Tasmanian Names Index, trial records from the Old Bailey on Line, documents from The Female Convicts Research Centre and Macquarie University, the Newgate Calendar, published by Ex-classics and the Australian Dictionary of Biography. I also recommend having a look at Anthony J Camp’s website for more information about my hero ‘John Turner Flinn’ and his wife ‘Edwardina Kent’. These sites are a wonderful resource for novelists, historians, and anybody trying to understand where they come from.

Prologue

There was a light on in one of the terraced houses, close to where Flinn judged the back of the stables to be. He banged on the door and demanded entry in the ‘Queen’s Name.’ The sole inhabitant of the house was half-asleep but upon answering the door was startled to see a man with two rifles slung over his shoulder demanding entrance to his back bedroom. However, one look at Flinn’s eyes convinced him of the wisdom of complying with this request. Flinn dashed up the stairs, produced a telescope from his haversack, and was relieved that he had a good view of the stables. From the darkened window of the terraced house, he observed the interior of the stable and swore. It was indeed Giles-Price and it appeared that he had five fellow companions in the cramped stables with him.

Giles-Price, for some reason, was holding them hostage. Handcuffs secured the hostages to a metal chain and they sat on a trestle structure behind the stable window. Flinn was relieved to note that the window did not have bars and that entry would be possible through it, if necessary. Upon observing the handcuffs, Flinn felt inside his waistcoat pocket to confirm that he still had a universal handcuff key there, as this might be important in a rescue attempt. Flinn reflected on the situation and considered options, clearly shooting Giles-Price from this range would be the most obvious course of action, but Flinn regrettably concluded that, because of the congregation of the hostages next to the window, a shot from this range would be impossible without endangering their lives. Flinn checked his watch and calculated that Frank would be walking into Giles-Price’s trap in less than ten minutes. Flinn would, therefore, need to secure a better vantage point, which would allow a shot at much closer range and he looked for a secure position closer to the window. He decided to leave the haversack in the room but placed a small mirror in his pocket, Flinn also blackened his face with the boot polish that he kept in the sack, and picking up the two rifles, one now un-slung, he left the house through the back door.

Flinn stood at the rear wall, which was about four feet high and cursed; this wasn’t an effective firing point either. The reason was that his view of the interior of the room was even worse than it had been from the bedroom, as he no longer had the advantage of height. He reflected for a couple of seconds and swearing to himself, decided that he was going to have to fire at Giles-Price from the window itself. Flinn considered this a poor option as Giles-Price had four or five shots in his revolver, to his two, and he was surrendering the tactical advantage that the vastly superior accuracy his rifles gave him at a distance. Flinn climbed over the wall carefully, he was obviously concerned that if he fell off the wall, the noise would alert Giles-Price to his presence and he might end up with more damaged than his professional pride. As he scrambled over the wall, he asked the rhetorical question, ‘what the hell am I doing here?’

Island of No Return

‘Embarking in a splendid six-oared whaleboat, we crossed the bay to Point Puer, the boy-thief’s establishment. They were busily occupied in learning and repeating their catechism. At the penitentiary of Point Puer, we encountered Queen Caroline’s celebrated witness, Lieut. Flynn, of the navy, a miscreant who was convicted, in 1839, at the Old Bailey, of forging poor widows’ pension tickets. For this fellow, Queen Caroline obtained the third class order of St. Ferdinand; and since his arrival here, letters have actually been addressed to Sir John Flynn!’ Fraser’s Magazine, Volume 26, 1843

4 October 1843 Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land

John Turner Flinn woke in his billet in Hobart Town. Even though it was mid-morning, there remained a chill in the air. There are always a couple of seconds of bliss upon waking from a pleasant dream, but when awareness of his current predicament returned, Flinn’s heart turned to lead. His first reminder that he was fifty-five years old was a jab of pain in his neck. The pain emanated from a gunshot wound he’d acquired in Naples thirty-six years ago. Even though he was stronger and possessed more vitality than most thirty-year-old men, he felt his age today. Second, he glanced at his shabby room and remembered that he had been damned to spend the rest of his life incarcerated in this out-house of a colony. Thirdly, the prospect of the coming night’s work with John Giles-Price added to his misery.

The entire island colony was, in fact, a vast open prison where only the recently arrived, the reckless, the violent, the defiant, the stupid, the desperate, the unlucky, the very angry or the raving mad were actually locked up in cells or wearing chains. Flinn lived in a billet that was not locked and had, by virtue of his age and previous station in life, been appointed to a position of relative responsibility and freedom, that of ‘Javelin Man.’ His quarters, whilst Spartan, were certainly no worse than the gun rooms and cabins he had occupied on Her Majesty’s ships. He decided that considering the gravity of his purported crime, he personally had no reasonable complaints about his treatment from the System.

Unlike many of his shipmates, Flinn had not been locked up in a dank dungeon, carried a ball and chain, worn an arrowed suit, had his head shaved nor been tied spread eagle to a triangle and flogged mercilessly with a cat o’ nine tails. The role of ‘Javelin man’ was the preserve of ‘gentlemen’ convicts or the criminal elite and he sadly reflected that his former Lieutenant’s commission in the Royal Navy and foreign knighthood, together with his trial report in the ‘Newgate Calendar’ established his credentials both as fallen gentry and as a major villain.

Flinn’s normal duties involved escorting prisoners to and from court, guarding the scaffold at public executions and acting as a turnkey for miscreants who had committed infractions and had been dispatched to the various grim penal intuitions in the town as punishment. He had transferred to Hobart Town after completing the probation component of his sentence, two years in Port Arthur. There, he had worked as an overseer at the Point Puer Penitentiary, the part of the Port Arthur prison precinct reserved for boys. He thought about his son Julius, who was about the same age as the child prisoners, and reflected that he had hated the brutality, desolation, and hopelessness of the place. He wondered what kind of a nation the little boys; jailed and exiled for naughtiness, mischief or youthful stupidity rather than a heinous crime; would end up creating. The desolation that their parents must feel back in England nearly brought a tear to his eye. He saw that many were bitter, cynical and beaten, both physically and mentally, by the cruelties of the System. He had tried to treat these children as kindly as possible even though the little buggers could be a handful to manage. Flinn, with the stern authority of a naval officer, was able to maintain discipline effortlessly but some of his fellow convict overseers had struggled. Poor old Walter Simpkins, a balding and timid draper’s assistant, was serving seven years for ‘borrowing from the cash box’. He dozed off on night duty and awoke to find the gas lamps extinguished and the contents of the communal piss bucket poured over his head. However, Flinn continued to endure recurring nightmares of his own boy Julius in Point Puer and had found his time with the brats disturbing and he was relieved when he was issued with a probation pass and ordered to report for duty as a ‘Javelin Man’ in Hobart Town.

The term ‘Javelin Man’ came from the heavy spear Flinn was obliged to carry. It was similar to the halberd carried by an infantry sergeant, but it was a lot bigger and was so unwieldy it would be useless in a fight. He was required to wear a uniform of a blue jacket with yellow facings and gray trousers, which marked his convict status as clearly as a suit stamped with ordinance arrows or a ball and chain. The ‘swinish multitude’ of convicts referred to the Javelin men contemptuously as ‘Blue Birds,’ in contrast to their own soubriquet of ‘Jail Birds.’ The convicts referred to the police as ‘traps,’ turnkeys as ‘screws’ and the overseers, sometimes as ‘gangers’ but more often as ‘fucking bastards.’ Flinn had recently received new duties, which permitted him to resume dressing as a gentleman in a cravat, top hat, and greatcoat. These duties entailed roaming the pubs of Hobart Town at night and spending a few hours of the afternoon pushing paper around in the police watch-house or the Muster Master’s office.

The climate of Hobart Town wasn’t too bad in summer but in winter, the freezing wind and rain made it brutal. Flinn had always tried to live in temperate climes and, apart from a few years in Scotland as a young acting Lieutenant, had generally succeeded. He had acquired more than his fair share of injuries over the years and he found that the winter on the island caused him to suffer numerous aches and pains.

Gentlemen convicts like Flinn placed the System in a dilemma. The senior civil servants who notionally ran the colony were apprehensive that educated prisoners represented a significant threat to the established order. Their most pressing fear was that genteel convicts might induce a situation where familiarity bred contempt for the officer classes. Therefore, like the Army and the Navy, the authorities made every attempt to segregate those who had once held a position from the ‘rabble.’ Most of the early governors and bureaucrats were, in fact, serving army or naval officers but that was beginning to change. Both the new governor and John Giles-Price had never worn the Queen’s Uniform. This made them, from Flinn’s perspective, less trustworthy.

The convict, ticket of leave and ‘emancipist’ population of time served or pardoned prisoners, out-numbered ‘the Quality,’ (the colonial officer class), a thousand to one. The rank and file soldiery, on whom the Quality depended for muscle were mainly Irish peasants or dispossessed Highlanders who had taken the King’s Shilling and enlisted as red coats to avoid starvation or the monotony of a desolate potato patch. These remnants of a routed Celtic race had little love for effete English ‘officers and gentlemen’ and there were perennial rumors that Irish dissidents were trying to sow disaffection in the ranks. The policy, therefore, was to keep the army as far away from the convicts as possible and the daily management of prisoners was left to fellow con’s, much like the prefect system, where older boys supervise younger ones in an English public school. This policy meant that it was serving convicts who patrolled the streets of Hobart Town in police uniforms, who turned the keys of the cell doors and drove the poor buggers sent to labor on the iron gangs.

The elevated status of the Quality depended upon a perception of invincibility and a mystique of intrinsic superiority. As in Ireland, Perfidious Albion consolidated its power base by employing extensive networks of spies and informers and by doling out savage punishments to those who bucked the System. This practice came with the bonus of psychologically demoralizing potential dissenters and provided an object lesson on the ‘divide and conquer’ premise. The System also destroyed the resolve of rebellious convicts by often employing the most cynical, thuggish or vicious professional criminals to act as traps, screws or gangers. The majority of the convicts were ordinary working people whose crimes stemmed from desperation, drunkenness, or stupidity but in the colony; villains, far worse than they were, supervised them.

Another tool to demoralize the convicts was an implacable bureaucracy. Flinn reflected that the psychological war started on the decks of arriving convict ships. The convicts, both male, and female were made to stand naked in front of condescending or leering clerks, who made detailed records of their features, measurements, and descriptions and noted any scars or tattoos. The clerks scrutinized reports on their conduct in the jails of their hometowns, the prison hulks where they had awaited exile, and aboard the prison ship on the long voyage from England. The naked, humiliated, and shivering prisoners faced an interrogation about their trade and family backgrounds and their offense. The message of this degrading process was that escape was not possible because of the detailed descriptions taken and that the System was ‘all knowing’ and therefore ‘not worth fighting.’

This message continued with the Governor, Sir John Franklin’s speech. After the prisoners had donned convict uniform, the Governor had stepped aboard Flinn’s ship, the Lord Lyndoch, and delivered a terrifying homily on the consequences of misbehavior. For minor misdemeanors, convicts could expect solitary confinement, a diet of bread and water, labor in chains on road gangs or a flogging. Major non-compliance might incur an extension of the term of transportation, the gallows, or possibly an even worse fate, secondary transportation to the penal settlement at Norfolk Island. The ‘stick’ component of convict policy dispensed with, Governor Franklin then described the ‘carrot.’

Franklin informed Flinn and his shipmates that there were, for male convicts, four rungs on the ladder to freedom. The first step was confinement to Port Arthur for lifers or an isolated Probation Station for seven and fourteen-year men.

Good behavior for two years led to the issue of a ‘Probation Pass.’ This document permitted convicts to work for wages in comparative freedom. The pass system was, however, a double-edged sword as the local economy was in recession and many pass holders were wandering the Island looking for work and were often on the brink of starvation.

A ‘Ticket of Leave’ was the next rung on the ladder, which Governor Franklin said was similar to a Lance Corporal’s chevron in the army in that it took a sustained effort to obtain but could be lost easily. A ticket conferred the privilege of being able to pick and choose employers rather than seek permission and single men might apply to marry. However, a ticket involved restriction to a police district, a lot of surveillance and could like a lance jack’s stripe, be snatched away because of a minor slip or at the whim of a petty official.

The penultimate step to freedom was a ‘Conditional Pardon’ which meant that one was free to leave the colony, but not permitted to return to England; and finally

Upon expiration of fixed-term sentences, seven and fourteen-year men received a ‘Certificate of Freedom’ which meant that freedom was restored in its entirety. The majority of the convicts were doing seven-year sentences for petty theft and the career thieves, who had stolen items of value, were serving fourteen. Notionally, these categories of offenders were free to go home to England after serving their time but had to pay their own fare, which few could afford. In addition, the living conditions in Australia were generally better than those of a Lancashire pit village or London slum. Flinn had heard that fewer than two percent of the damned ever returned home.

The only way that a lifer might be able to return home was through receipt of a ‘Free Pardon.’ Free Pardons usually took some major service to the Crown, such as capturing a bushranger or plunging into a burning building to save poor blind orphans, to secure. Most lifers accepted that the ladder stopped at ‘conditional pardon’ and that they should give up any hope, however illusory, of ever returning home.

Possession of the comparatively rare skill of literacy meant that former ‘gentlemen’ were often steered into clerk’s positions on arrival. Flinn’s lifer status, and the grave nature of his conviction, namely defrauding the Chelsea Hospital through forging and uttering, precluded this option. The Javelin, therefore, represented an effective compromise. Towards the end of his term at Port Arthur, Flinn had considered volunteering for the police as this was another occupation where literacy was a notional requirement. However, his old friend ‘King’ Jorgen Jorgenson had visited and dissuaded him from this course of action.

Flinn had met Jorgen thirty years ago, when Jorgen had been a paroled prisoner of war in Edinburgh and the Royal Navy had posted Flinn there. Jorgen was a Danish sea captain, captured by the Royal Navy and sent to Edinburgh in 1808. At the time, Denmark was at war with Britain and Flinn’s naval duties required him to take charge of Edinburgh’s paroled prisoners of war. Jorgen was an inveterate gambler and boozer and devised an ingenious means of obtaining some money to fund his addictions. This entailed persuading a British merchant ship owner to sail to Iceland, a Danish colony, where there were food shortages and potentially large profits. On arrival, the fundamental weakness of Jorgen’s plan became evident. Iceland’s Danish Governor decreed that the Icelanders might not trade with a British ship because commerce with the enemy was illegal and Denmark was at war with Britain. Jorgen dismissed this erudite legal argument by promptly arresting the Governor and declaring himself the protector of the Island. Jorgen then attempted to establish a utopian liberal democracy on the freezing island and the Icelandic people were too ambivalent to object and pleased that a food shipment had arrived.

Flinn was one of the men sent on HMS Talbot to extricate Jorgen and upon return to Scotland, Jorgen had his parole revoked for a year and Flinn lost his cushy posting for allowing Jorgen to escape. Upon his release, Jorgen worked for Flinn on the Continent, but Jorgen’s predilection for the bottle and the card table rendered him a liability. Flinn was obliged to dismiss Jorgen in 1814 but the pair remained friends, even though Jorgen was obviously hell bent on a headlong dive into degradation and depravity.

In 1820, Jorgen faced court for theft and Flinn had helped to secure his release upon condition that he left England for good. However, a tragic romantic, Jorgen was infatuated with an English girl and refused to leave her behind. He appeared in court once again for ‘being at large in Great Britain.’ This time, the judge sentenced Jorgen to death, and it took all of Flinn’s connections within the British Establishment, to obtain the Royal Prerogative of Mercy and have the sentence commuted to transportation for life. On arrival, Jorgen helped the colony’s government to detect a number of forged treasury bills. His reward was a ticket of leave and job with the Van Diemen’s Land Company as a policeman cum explorer.

Flinn had asked Jorgen about the Black Line operations, which involved a two thousand strong motley crew of soldiers and convicts trying to form a one hundred and twenty-mile-long daisy chain to chase the blacks out of the settled districts. Flinn reflected that anybody who has attempted to lead an infantry squad of thirty crack troops across hostile country, or even Salisbury Plain, would recognize the futility of attempting to retain command and control of such an operation. In addition, the men would have to be deployed at least one hundred yards apart, and with a musket range of only sixty yards, the pursued only had to go to ground and let the line move over them or retreat until nightfall when the groups would bivouac around campfires and sneak through the supposedly impenetrable line.

Jorgen confirmed that the entire episode had indeed been a shambles and that after six weeks in the bush, the force had only captured one old man and his grandson, who had been observing mainly out of curiosity. Flinn and Jorgen found the episode a hilarious illustration of the stupidity of colonial administrators and were both chuckling until Jorgen turned the subject to the plight of the poor Aborigines. Jorgen ascribed the near eradication of the Island’s indigenous population to the devastating impact of common diseases like influenza and smallpox that the white man had brought to a native population, who had no resistance to European germs. Jorgen had been emphatic that Flinn was too decent a man to join the police and participate in the suppression of the Indigenous population or the bullying of helpless fellow convicts. Jorgen had said that Flinn,