Courage and conviction
THE printing press, some say, has caused more deaths than gunpowder. The railways moved goods and ideas but they also spread fatal epidemics. The good news is that this kind of historical game playing works the other way around too.
Without wars and a ready supply of seriously injured men much of modern medicine wouldn’t have been discovered. The process of sending convicts to Australia meanwhile created a new kind of mobile society.
THE SECRET HISTORY OF MY FAMILY ( BBC2) tracked down the descendants of three East End sisters locked up for theft in the mid 19th century. Their stories were recorded thanks to the efforts of one William Miles, a Victorian reformer ( or busybody slum tourist, depending on your point of view). Miles, in common with many of his era, believed that poverty and overcrowding were creating a class of incurable criminals.
He felt they needed to be understood in order to be helped and in doing so, he created a vital archive of information about the Victorian poor. Some of it went on to provide background detail for Dickens’s novels. Other bits gave us the inside track on girls like the Gadbury sisters, three Shoreditch pickpockets. Two of the girls were transported to Australia and remained there, passing across the generations into the backbone of the new hardworking nation.
That wasn’t quite the whole story. Caroline Gadbury, who was sent to the mainly convict- occupied Tasmania, experienced no prejudice when she gained her freedom. Her descendants today include supreme court judges and politicians.
It was slightly different for her sister Sarah, sent to the more divided New South Wales. There the “stain” of a convict past endured across the centuries.
Even though her descendants had a lifestyle many of us would envy, they weren’t part of the same influential elites as their distant cousins. Back in England the descendants of Mary- Ann, the sister who hadn’t been sent away, had remained close to their origins.
They were affable, decent folk but it would be fair to say they probably had the least easy lives. It was hard not to think that the practice of sending people away in chains might have freed them somehow, removing them from a kind of caste system that was condemning them to poverty and bad choices.
I wasn’t convinced it could be that simple and I was disappointed by the sketchy detail that this show gave us about William Miles. What makes someone who tries to do good deserve the label of a do- gooder? Is it not achieving what they set out to do? Or just being middle class? I’m sure of one thing though. No Shoreditch pickpocket arrested in 2016 will go on to produce a generation of barristers and politicians.
We Brits are obsessed by class and last night’s MURDER ( BBC2) had disorder written all over it. Despite innovative storytelling and an intricate plot, I knew the minute I set eyes on posh junkie Dominic Cotterall ( Sebastian Armesto) that he had done it.
I also knew the minute I saw his top- drawer daddy Greville ( Peter Bowles) that Dominic’s aristocratic upbringing was to blame. It’s taken as read in BBC dramas at least that “posh” is a by- word for “nasty” which is hilarious both when you consider the backgrounds of the people that make BBC dramas and the backgrounds of most of the people doing time for murder.