FELONIOUSLY TAKING FROM HER PERSON

          Mary Ann Wade, 1777-1859

 Going of eleven, Mary Wade was the youngest canary

on board the all-female prison barque, the Lady Juliana.

With a besom to earn her keep, she would sweep the streets,

the stones of London, and cry for a starveling’s crust.

A ragged beggar smirched in dust, her glowering mug in smuts,

On the sharp her squinty eye espies a skulking Mary Phillips,

a runt aged eight and just the muggins, the chance to bully,

filling a bottle with water close by the Treasury’s privy.

Alongside her chum, Jane Whiting, nigh fourteen, Mary did gloat.

She stood over this nipper, stripped her petticoats and other clouts:

a linen tippet value tuppence, a linen cap tuppence, a dark cotton

frock worth three shillings.  Left chilled, the child kept sobbing.

‘Twas the broker who tipped the theft to an officer of law,

who saw the tippet-de-witchet in Mary’s cubby stowed.

So Mary Wade was cobbed and clinked in Bridewell Prison,

the wretched wench sentenced to scrag upon the squeezer.

Says Mrs Wade: ‘I never brought her up to go a-begging.’

The frock they’d pledged in pawn for eighteen pence.

The judge’s verdict: Death!  Robbery was a hanging offence.

Despite her tough but tender years, Mary, unrepentant, found

guilty of robbery void of violence; yet ‘I was in a good mind

to have chucked the child down the necessary,’ Mary owned,

with some snotty-nosed sneering. ‘And I wish I had done so.’

Michael Small

May 4-8, 2014

In March, 1789 Mary received a sudden reprieve.  King George III was apparently cured of a mental disease.  All those women in the condemned cells had their sentence commuted to penal transportation to Australia.  After an eleven-month voyage, the Lady Juliana docked in Sydney Cove.  Mary settled near the Hawkesbury River, where she gave birth to twenty-one children.  At her death she had three hundred descendants in Australia.