Surviving the Silence: The Benjamin Stanton Story 1819–1891

By Jeff Hopkins

Convicted of stealing a coat in 1832, Benjamin Stanton was sentenced to seven years transportation to Van Diemen’s Land. He spent twelve months on the prison hulk, ‘Euryalus’ and then another four months on the convict transport ship ‘Isabella’ before arriving in Hobart Town on the 14th of November 1833.

In January 1834 Benjamin was one of the first sixty-eight boys to be incarcerated at Point Puer, across the bay from Point Arthur, where a Boys’ Reformatory was being established. His years at Point Puer with its deprivations, misbehaviour and severe punishments are examined in detail.

With further offences, Benjamin Stanton managed to stretch his original seven years transportation to sixteen years’ incarceration at Point Puer, Port Arthur and on a Hobart Town chain gang, before eventually receiving a Governor’s pardon in 1849.

As a thirty-year-old he left Tasmania and settled in Geelong, Victoria where he took a common law wife and had two sons, Benjamin, and George. Both these boys had large families with intriguing histories of their own. Eventually one of George’s daughters, Roseanna Stanton, gave birth to her fourth illegitimate son, Charles William, in 1908. That boy became Charles William Hopkins who was my father.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Nov 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781922912206

Jeff Hopkins

Jeff Hopkins (1950) is a retired schoolteacher. He lives in Walyalup, Western Australia. Walyalup which means 'lungs' is the Whadjuk name for Fremantle, and is part of the Noongar Nation. As the drama master at Hale School in Perth, he wrote ten original musical plays and produced and directed them at the school.In 1992, he researched and wrote a family history, 'Life's Race Well Run', and after retiring in 2006 he has written twenty novels, a memoir, and three 'faction' biographies.

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JEFF HOPKINS

This is an IndieMosh book

brought to you by MoshPit Publishing

an imprint of Mosher’s Business Support Pty Ltd

PO Box 4363

Penrith NSW 2750

https://www.indiemosh.com.au

Copyright 2022 © Jeff Hopkins

All rights reserved

Licence Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author and publisher.

Disclaimer

This work depicts actual events in the life of the subject, Benjamin Stanton, as truthfully as can be verified by research.

Occasionally, dialogue consistent with the character or nature of the person speaking has been supplemented for creative and storyline purposes.

The author, their agents and publishers cannot be held responsible for any claim otherwise and take no responsibility for any such coincidence.

Cover concept by Jeff Hopkins

Cover design and layout by Ally Mosher at allymosher.com

Cover artwork by David Lin through the auspices of ‘Whataportrait’

Additional cover images used under licence from Adobe Stock

For My Shared Great,

Great, Grandfather

Foreword:

Charles Dickens, Benjamin Stanton,

and Bill Sheen

Charles Dickens’ own story is one of rags to riches. It is a distinct contrast to that of Benjamin Stanton, even though they were almost contemporaries. Dickens was born in Portsmouth on 7th February 1812, to John and Elizabeth Dickens. His good fortune in being sent to school, at the age of nine, was short-lived because his father, John, inspiration for the character of Mr. Wilkins Micawber in ‘David Copperfield’, was imprisoned for bad debt. Along with their patriarch, the entire family, apart from Charles, were sent to the Marshalsea Prison which was located on the south bank of the River Thames in the London borough of Southwark, near London Bridge. Charles was sent to work in Warren’s Blacking Factory and endured appalling conditions as well as loneliness and despair. Benjamin Stanton, seven years Dickens’ junior was sent to Van Diemen’s Land and suffered in a similar way to the young Charles Dickens. After three years, Dickens was returned to school, but the experience was never forgotten and became fictionalised in two of his better-known novels ‘David Copperfield’ and ‘Great Expectations’. Benjamin Stanton never returned to England after his transportation and would spend the next sixteen years of his life incarcerated as a convict before receiving his ‘Certificate of Freedom’ in 1849.

Like many others, Charles Dickens began his literary career as a journalist. His own father became a reporter and Charles began with the journals ‘The Mirror of Parliament’ and ‘The True Sun’. Then in 1833 he became a parliamentary journalist for ‘The Morning Chronicle’. With new contacts in the press, he was able to publish a series of sketches of London under the pseudonym ‘Boz’. In April 1836, came the publication of the highly successful ‘Pickwick Papers’ and from that point on there was no looking back for Dickens. His energy was inexhaustible, and he spent much time abroad, writing and lecturing against slavery, inspecting the prison system in the United States and touring Italy.

As he grew up and worked in London and the areas which encompassed it. He wrote, recorded, and reported upon the ever-expanding city, finally writing novels about the metropolis and its surrounding districts. Eventually, because of his writing and social commentary about life in England’s capital, the first half of the 19th century would become known as ‘Dickensian London’.

When Charles Dickens was seven years old, in the early months of 1819, in the poverty-stricken east end of London, Benjamin Stanton was born. He would grow up in ‘Dickensian London’. Details are sketchy and not documented, but Benjamin may have been the son of Irish Catholic parents. His first thirteen years of life have vanished in the mists of time, like the history of so many people from the lower classes.

Life and death were cheap and no one, it seems, had the money, or took the time to record the details of people in that lowest of socio-economic groups. Benjamin had two siblings and his mother was dead by 1832. His widower father was trying to look after his three children. He was failing. Benjamin Stanton’s contribution to the cause was to take up larceny as a way of helping his father and his two siblings. On Saturday, 23rd of June 1832, he stole a coat from the premises of pawnbrokers, George, and William Farrant.

The thirteen-year-old was almost shivering with anticipation as he leaned up against the ramshackle wall in the narrow, crowded street of East London. Filthy in his ragged clothing that consisted of a shirt, waistcoat, trousers, that ended at half calf height and fully exposed his well-worn, but sturdy boots, he continued to watch. He had his labourer’s cap pulled down low over his forehead, but his unkempt shock of brown hair spilled out from under the headwear.

The boy’s purpose was not altogether clear to those who passed him by, but it was well established in his own mind. He was ‘casing’ the premises of pawnbroker’s, William and George Farrant and had his eye on a well-tailored coat, that would fetch a pretty penny, if he could steal it and present it to Bill Sheen, the notorious ‘fence’.

Benjamin Stanton was the watcher and potential coat thief. He had observed the shop now for more than an hour, carefully noting the movements of the shopman, Peter Haldane who almost like clockwork on the half hour, came out of the front door of the pawnbrokers and checked the merchandise that was on display in the street. Haldane was dressed in long brown trousers and wore a coat of matching colour over a fawn waist coat. He wore a white shirt, which sported a red neckerchief tucked under the collar and tied in a loose bow at the front. His red hair was neatly cut, in an above the ears style, which was insisted upon by his employers, the Messers. Farrant.

Benjamin noticed that Peter Haldane’s obligatory checks at the front of the store were cursory at best, and he concluded Haldane was not a particularly motivated employee, on that morning at least. After Haldane had completed his 10:30 a.m. observations, Benjamin moved. He crossed the narrow street, dodging the flow of human traffic, which he was about to use to his advantage. Deliberately bumping into one pedestrian going in the opposite direction, he propelled himself into the shop frontage of Messers. Farrant and Farrant. He deftly unhooked the blue three-quarter length coat with contrasting grey lapels and impressive grey buttons, from its hanging position, draped it over his arm and quickly joined the flow of foot traffic going the other way. Benjamin smiled inwardly; he was pleased with himself. In the adrenalin rush that the theft produced, he permitted himself to project forward, in his mind’s eye, to the moment when he handed the coin, from the sale of the coat to his struggling widower father.

His self-satisfaction and self-congratulation were misplaced. Although Police Constable, William Law, had not witnessed the actual theft, he did note the incongruity of a young street urchin, in ‘ragtag garb’, carrying an expensive and well-tailored coat over his arm. Constable Law set off to follow Benjamin Stanton who he suspected was a street thief on his way to a fence, who would turn the ill-gotten gain into much needed money. Back at the pawnbroker’s, Peter Haldane’s 11:00 o’clock check revealed the missing coat and he had the unenviable task of telling his employers about the apparent theft, for which he would receive a dressing down, or worse, for his perceived negligence in his duties.

Police Constable, William Law, followed Benjamin Stanton at a safe distance, not to alert his quarry that he was in fact being tracked. When young Stanton turned into Wentworth Street, Whitechapel, Constable Law was on high alert. Wentworth Street was notorious for the criminal activities that took place at various addresses along its length. The Policeman suspected he knew exactly where the boy he was following was heading. The suspected street thief was going to ask notorious criminal, Bill Sheen, to fence the coat.

William Law observed Benjamin Stanton going into Bill Sheen’s Wentworth Street address and pressed up closer to peer in at the window. He saw the suspected street thief place the coat on the back of a chair and then have an animated discussion with a girl of late teenage years. The thief’s interlocutor did not seem best pleased to see the visitor and the gestures being exchanged indicated an unfriendly encounter. Constable William Law decided at that moment to intervene. He entered the front door of the house, which had been left open and confronted the pair in earnest conversation.

The Constable ascertained that the teenage girl was Bill Sheen’s daughter, Ann, and that the boy was Benjamin Stanton. On interrogating the boy, the policeman was told that the coat he was carrying belonged to Bill Sheen, and he was merely returning it to its rightful owner. Ann Sheen claimed she had never seen the boy or the coat before. This brought an expletive fuelled response from Benjamin Stanton who called the girl, among other things, a ‘bloody black friar’. The constable then asked where the girl’s father was? He was told that Bill Sheen was asleep having been out all night on a job.

Constable William Law insisted that Bill Sheen be awoken, which was done and when asked, he denied that the coat was his and further reiterated his daughter’s statement that they had never seen this boy before. Now convinced that the boy was a street thief, who had stolen the coat, the policeman took Benjamin Stanton in hand.

‘Come with me, boy. I am afraid you will have to spend the night in the cells you dirty little ‘tea leaf’ and then you will have an appointment with the ‘beak’ at the Middlesex Sessions Court in the morning.’

‘Get your hands off me, you bloody ‘bottle stopper.’

‘So, it’s the hard way you want to play it, is it?’

With that Constable William Law smote a heavy blow to the back of the small boy’s head and brought any further resistance to a conclusion. Benjamin Stanton was frog-marched off to his first night of prison detention, which would expand to a period of sixteen years’ incarceration into the future.

At the London City Police Station, under an intense and sometimes physical interrogation, Benjamin Stanton finally admitted he had seen the coat at the front of Farrant’s pawnbroker’s shop and thought he recognised it as Bill Sheen’s property. He decided to take it back to Mr. Sheen because he believed it was his and it may have been stolen from him. His fanciful story was not credible, and he was paraded before a Magistrate the next day and then taken to Newgate Prison to await a trial date. In the evening of that same Saturday, Constable William Law returned the coat to Farrant’s Pawnbroker’s shop where the proprietors confirmed it was their property. No one was more relieved than Peter Haldane, who had already been heavily chastised and faced the prospect of having to work off the loss of the coat through the suspension of his wages.

The coat, which was later valued at seventeen shillings, was just a means to an end and Benjamin Stanton had taken it to a notorious fence to try and exchange the purloined article of clothing for cash. A fence, also known as a receiver, mover, or moving man, is an individual who knowingly buys stolen goods, to later resell them for profit. The fence acts as a middleman between thieves and the eventual buyers of the goods, who may not be aware that the items were illegally obtained.

Among his many nefarious activities, Bill Sheen was a fence, famous for his trade in stolen goods. His family, or gang, were also involved in the thieving of items themselves. Benjamin Stanton’s mistake was taking the coat, he had stolen, to Bill Sheen, in the hope the fence would pay him cash for the garment.

In 1832, aged twenty, Charles Dickens was a law clerk and budding journalist, attending and reporting on criminal trials taking place in the Middlesex courts. Dickens would no doubt have seen the procession of boys appearing in the court and being sentenced to seven years transportation, part of which sentence would be served on the hulks moored on the Thames at Chatham, an area which Dickens knew well. As he listened to the proceedings, the material for his future novels was being formulated in his mind. Charles Dickens is reputed to have based his characters, Fagin, and Bill Sikes, in his serialised novel ‘Oliver Twist’ (1837–1839), on Bill Sheen. Sheen was Welsh, probably having lived in London since his late teens. Sheen did not, like Fagin, live in Field Lane, which had a notorious reputation for criminality and would have been known to Dickens. However, Sheen did live in Whitechapel, the location to which young Oliver Twist would be conveyed after being recaptured by Bill Sikes and Nancy. Indeed, the fictional Sikes lived nearby in Bethnal Green.

Ultimately, we can only ever speculate about the extent to which composite elements of Bill Sheen’s life were a contemporary source for Charles Dickens’ characterisation of Fagin and the bully, Bill Sikes, in ‘Oliver Twist’. A telling reference is found in the ‘Morning Chronicle’ in September 1842. Sheen had appeared at Worship Street court to answer a charge from a woman called Ann Raven. Raven, described as an ‘unfortunate girl’, claimed to have been assaulted on Sheen’s orders. The evidence was weak, and Sheen was discharged, but a moment Raven described in her evidence, provides a chilling echo of Dickens’ characters. Raven described being beaten by two women one of who cohabited with Sheen, the prisoner encouraged their violence by clapping his hands and calling out:

‘Seize her, my bulldogs, go it again!’ with similar exclamations.

In September 1835, Sheen was again in front of the Lambeth Street Magistrates accused of robbing a young man called Robert Taylor, who had lodged at Sheen’s house in Wentworth Street and had been shocked by the number of silk handkerchiefs brought in by juvenile thieves.

So, Benjamin Stanton comes on to the public record in the only way that many of the lower classes ever could. He was arrested and sent for trial and for the next twenty years a reasonably accurate record of his life may be found through his crimes and punishments.

Charles Dickens would continue to prosper and become a celebrated author and performer in London. Unfortunately, for Benjamin Stanton, he laboured under conditions that pressed in upon all the boys of the juvenile criminal classes. There were three great evils. Firstly, most of their families were dysfunctional. One or both of their parents were dead or gone and could not provide the home environment to nurture a boy, through his teenage years, into adulthood. Secondly, there was almost no formal education. Boys who drifted into crime got their basic education from their adult criminal associates. They were taught all forms of larceny, from petty theft to housebreaking and when cornered they relied on violence to get out from under a particular situation. Finally, there was extreme poverty. Too many mouths to feed and never enough money. Hence criminal activity beckoned as a way out. Sadly, in most cases, it proved to be a way into the criminal justice system. Then followed incarceration on diabolical prison ships or ‘hulks’ which simply provided ‘higher education’ for the youthful criminal mind and finally transportation to New South Wales or Van Diemen’s Land, where they could be conveniently forgotten by the people in authority in England.

Even the sentences of transportation bore no relevance to actual events. Sadly, the criminal records of boys transported for seven years, reveals that, with recidivism and reoffending, many of them were incarcerated for ten to twenty years before they could receive firstly a ‘Ticket of Leave’ and finally be pardoned by the Governor of the day and granted a ‘Certificate of Freedom’. Charles Dickens knew of all these evils connected with the hulks at Chatham and the treatment of transported convicts and as a social commentator he wrote about all of them in different novels and contexts. In ‘Great Expectations’, Abel Magwitch does make an ill-fated journey back to England after transportation, few achieved that and so in effect any period of transportation meant ‘for life’.

Benjamin Stanton would not see the city of his birth again after July 1833. His future lay in Van Diemen’s Land and later in Victoria in Australia. When Charles Dickens died on the 9th of June 1870, fifty-one-year old Benjamin Stanton, was working as a shoe repairer and bootmaker in Samuel Read’s establishment in Raywood, Victoria. The former juvenile convict outlived the celebrated author by twenty-one years. This is his story.

Chapter 1:

Benjamin Stanton’s Trial

Benjamin Stanton was Middlesex prisoner Number 229, whose trial date, Thursday, the 12th of July 1832 was set down at the Middlesex Quarter Sessions at Clerkenwell. Clerkenwell Green is dominated by the grand old building that was the Old Sessions House. It was once the largest and busiest courthouse in England. The Middlesex Sessions House, as it was originally known, was designed by the Middlesex County surveyor, Thomas Rogers. The building was built from 1779–1782 and cost a mere £13,000 to complete. The Sessions House was used as a courthouse from 1782 until 1920. The building consisted of two large court rooms, dungeons for holding prisoners, and a grand living space for the resident judges. In contrast to the judges’ lavish quarters, the basement cells were tiny.

Below the Middlesex Sessions House, Benjamin Stanton had shivered his way through the first half of the morning in his tiny dungeon cell. Since being transferred from Newgate Prison and locked in this small space he had spoken to no one. The cell was very cold, and the walls were clammy. The thirteen-year-old prisoner had no idea what was to befall him that day. No one had told him anything other than this Thursday was to be his trial date. He listened to the comings and goings occasionally punctuated by the weeping or wailing of a convicted prisoner who had now learned their fate. Then his moment came. The dungeon door swung open, and he was told to come out and was taken in hand by the duty officers. They took him to the foot of a steep set of stairs and pushed him onto the first tread prodding him to climb with alacrity. At the top of the steps, Benjamin Stanton found himself in one of the two Middlesex Court rooms. He looked around in trepidation trying to take in all the trappings of the legal system that would decide his fate.

To Benjamin’s eye the courtroom was a very large space indeed with a high flat ceiling supported by huge roman columns both to his right and left. Immediately in front of him was the elevated platform that had a concave, curving, wainscoted bench facing the body of the courtroom and sitting behind the bench were an array of magisterial officers. The presiding Magistrate was at the centre of the curve and was clad in black gown and wig. Behind him was an impressive portico held up by two columns either side and topped with a triangular recess at the apex of which was the coat of arms of the United Kingdom. Within the rectangular body of the portico was a large sword, the handle of which was topped with a regal crown. It was all very impressive and nothing like anything Benjamin Stanton had ever seen before.

In front of the Magisterial bench was a semi-circular table topped with a green baize cloth and around which sat eight court officials whose task it was to record and register all the proceedings. To the right was the jury box, but the twelve seats were empty. This was not a case to be decided by ‘twelve good men and true’. The Magisterial Bench would determine Benjamin’s guilt or innocence and, if required, pronounce sentence upon him.

Beyond the large Roman pillars on both sides of the courthouse were the public galleries filled with all manner of humanity eager to see the outcome of the trials, of which there would be many that day. The courtroom was illuminated by the natural light that flooded in through two large arched windows either side of the portico behind the Magisterial bench. The courtroom was surprising light, even bright to Benjamin’s eyes, who had just come up from the dungeons below.

For Benjamin Stanton’s trial, the presiding