The Native Son Downunder

I have always had a soft spot for the story told by Beatrice Tunstall in her Romantic Novel ‘The Shiny Night’ (1931).

A CHESHIRE LAD WRONGED / GONE WRONG

Quite apart from anything else, The Shiny Night presents a cameo portrait of Cheshire dairy farming in the period 1840 – 1885, recounting the struggles of a farmer through such events as the 1865 – 1866 Rinderpest Epidemic.

It is told quite largely in Cheshire Dialect such that the hero, Seth Shone, having entered the cow shippons for the morning milking, and having been devastated to find that his cattle have died overnight during the outbreak, sobs to his wife that ‘t(he) kine an gone jed’’.

But the story is also interesting for its links to witchcraft – and Australia. It starts with Seth standing near Beeston Castle watching the fire on the crag and the bonfires that have been lit across the countryside to mark the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837.

Seth has recently returned to England from Van Diemen’s Land following a seven year sentence of Transportation for poaching. It is suggested that he was wrongly accused and convicted to defraud him of his rights of succession to the family farm.

Facing a hostile establishment, with the help of a friend, he establishes squatter’s rights to a cottage that he builds on the village Common. Having built it overnight and met the condition that smoke should be seen from the chimney at daybreak, he is free to keep it and graze a few young stock.

He then sets about rebuilding his fortunes and recovering the family farm. But not before cursing the three people who he believes conspired to deprive him of his freedom and farm. These include the local Squire who was the sentencing Magistrate; a rival for his betrothed; and his Derbyshire relatives who want to move down from the moors to the fat pastures of Cheshire.

The story is set in Bunbury, Cheshire (called Clock Abbot in the book) and draws on the local legend of the Image House. This house is known for the sandstone images that have been attached to the brick frontage. The images are taken to represent people who were cursed by the house’s original inhabitants, following a local dispute.

The main theme of The Shiny Night is the unfolding of the curses – and their eventual undoing of Seth himself – but not before he has risen to prosperity and respectability, and settled the old farm successfully on his son Yedmunt (Edmund).

SETH DOWN-UNDER

Well, from the ‘facts’ we can deduce that Seth probably spent about 10 years in Australia, with seven of these at ‘his Majesty’s pleasure’ and remainder working to pay for his fare home. He would have been sentenced then around 1827, probably at around the age of 20. He was therefore born around 1807 - and was 58 when he lost his dairy stock to the rinderpest and had to start all over again.

A typical surviving record is the one referring to his ‘Shropshire Cousin’, Samuel Shone, who was one of 130 convicts transported on the ship the Sir Charles Forbes, 23 November 1824. Samuel had been sentenced for a term of 7 years at Shrewsbury Quarter Sessions. Like Seth, his ‘Place of Arrival’ was Van Diemen’s Land.

Governor Philip (1788-1792) had founded a system of convict labour in which people, whatever their crime, were employed according to their skills - as brick makers, carpenters, nurses, servants, cattlemen, shepherds and farmers.

Educated convicts were set to the relatively easy work of record-keeping for the convict administration. Women convicts were assumed to be most useful as wives and mothers, and marriage effectively freed a woman convict from her servitude.

The discipline of rural labour (for which Seth would have been well-placed) was seen to be the best chance of reform. This view was adopted by Commissioner Bigge in a series of reports for the British Government published in 1822-23. The assignment of convicts to private employers was expanded in the 1820s and 1830s, the period when most convicts were sent to the colonies, and this became the major form of employment.

In the mid-1830s only around six per cent of the convict population were 'locked up', the majority working for free settlers and the authorities around the nation.

Even so, convicts were often subject to cruelties such as leg-irons and the lash. Places like Port Arthur or Norfolk Island were well known for this.

Convicts sometimes shared deplorable conditions. One convict described the working thus:

'We have to work from 14-18 hours a day, sometimes up to our knees in cold water, 'til we are ready to sink with fatigue... The inhuman driver struck one, John Smith, with a heavy thong.'

However, good behaviour meant that convicts rarely served their full term and could qualify for a Ticket of Leave, Certificate of Freedom, Conditional Pardon or even an Absolute Pardon. This allowed convicts to earn their own living and live independently.

For the period of their sentence though, they were still subject to surveillance and the ticket could be withdrawn for misbehaviour. This sanction was found to work better in securing good behaviour then the threat of flogging.

Governor Brisbane (1821-1825) codified the regulations for eligibility. Convicts normally sentenced to seven year terms could qualify for a Ticket of Leave after four years, while those serving 14 years could expect to serve between six to eight years. 'Lifers' could qualify for their 'Ticket' after about 10 or 12 years. Those who failed to qualify for a pardon were entitled to a Certificate of Freedom on the completion of their term.

THE AUSTRALIA OF THE TIMES

The colony of Van Diemen's Land was established in its own right in 1825 and officially became known as Tasmania in 1856. In the 50 years from 1803-1853 around 75,000 convicts were transported to Tasmania. By 1835 there were over 800 convicts working in chain-gangs at the infamous Port Arthur penal station, which operated between 1830 and 1877.

Australia's first census was held in November 1828 in the colony of New South Wales. Previous government statistical reports had been taken from "musters" where inhabitants were brought together for counting. In 1828, the white population was 36,598 of whom 20,870 were free and 15,728 were convicts. 23.8% of the population were born in the colony. 24.5% were women. There were 25,248 Protestants and 11,236 Catholics. Indigenous Australians were not counted.

Of the 36,598, 638 were living in what is now Queensland. There were also 18,128 people in Tasmania.

SOME TIMELINE EVENTS

1829
April 13 - Melbourne's first post office opens.
June 18 - Official proclamation of the Swan River Colony (Western Australia)
August 12 - Mrs Helen Dance, wife of the Captain of the ship Sulphur, cuts down a tree to mark the day of the founding of the town of Perth, Western Australia.

1830
September 20 - The Port Arthur penal settlement was established.
September 23 - The Bathurst Rebellion begins outside of Bathurst, New South Wales, following the escape of a group of convicts known as the 'Ribbon Gang' under the leadership of convict-servant Ralph Entwistle. Ten of the rebels are later captured and publicly hung after being tried and found guilty of murder.
October 7 - The 'Black Line' campaign of the Black War begins in an attempt to capture all Tasmanian Aborigines. The campaign lasts 7 weeks and only succeeds in bringing two Aborigines to the authorities.
Economy in 1830 - Wool exports from Australia reach 2 million pounds.

SOME NOTES

SETH'S SURNAME

Shone (pronounced ‘shown’, as in ‘I was shown the picture’) is an interesting surname. However, it is not common in south and western Cheshire in my experience and Tunstall may have chosen it partly because it rhymes with Done (pronouced 'D-Oh-an)– a very venerable local surname (the Dones were the hereditary keepers of Delamere Forest). My only personal memory of the name is that it was held by one of the reasonably prominent amateur jockeys in the ‘Point-to-Point’ horse racing circuit in the 1955-65 period.

Shone is originally a Welsh surname. Like Jones and Johnson, it is a patronymic of John. The spelling and pronunciation though have a more Celtic ring and direct affinities with the Irish Gaelic forms Sean (John), McShane (son of John) and O’Shea (grandson of John).

Until the 15th Century, cascading patronymic naming predominated in Wales, with a person's baptismal name being linked by ap, ab (son of) to the father's baptismal name back to perhaps the seventh generation. For example, Evan son of Thomas would be known as Evan (ap) Thomas; Evan's son, John would be John (ap) Evan; John's son Rees would be Rees (ap) John; and David's son, James, would be James (ap) David.

In areas where English influence was strong, like the borders of Shropshire and Cheshire, cascading patronymics were abandoned in favour of fixed surnames at an earlier date as settlers melded into the local population and acquired property that they wished to bequeath to descendants.

Overall, the stock of Welsh surnames is very small, which is partly attributed to the reduction in the variety of baptismal names after the Protestant Reformation. The typically Welsh surnames Jones, Williams, Davies, Evans and Thomas were all found in the top ten surnames recorded in England and Wales in 2000. However, some of these names originated in England in the 14th century or earlier, long before they arose in Wales.

LANGUAGE

Seth’s conversations in The Shiny Night appear completely uninfluenced by his exile in Australia. This seems unrealistic. Almost certainly, he would have picked up and incorporated some of the emerging Australian argot.

Apparently as early as 1827 Peter Cunningham, in his book Two Years in New South Wales, reported that native-born white Australians of the time—known as "currency lads and lasses" — spoke with a distinctive accent and vocabulary, with a strong Cockney influence.

Also there were borrowings from the aboriginal languages like 'cooee', hard 'yakka' and 'bung'. The first is used as a high-pitched call, for attracting attention, which travels long distances. Cooee is also a notional distance, as in ‘if he's within cooee, we'll spot him’.

Hard yakka means hard work and the word bung means broken or pretending to be hurt. A failed piece of equipment may be described as having bunged up or as "on the bung" or "gone bung". A person pretending to be hurt is said to be "bunging it on". A hurt person could say, "I've got a bung knee".

Perhaps its worth commenting here though that 'being bunged up' is a common local description of constipation in Cheshire - and one that obviously derives from bunging or sealing a bottle.