In days gone by our ancestors apparently believed wholeheartedly in the class system (or at least some of them did). This included the belief that there was such a thing as the criminal class, meaning that an inclination to criminality was somehow encoded in your DNA (though of course they didn’t know about DNA then). The logical conclusion of this totally unfounded belief was that once you had revealed yourself as a criminal by, say, stealing a loaf of bread you might as well be hung straight away before you did something worse since, having been born one of the criminal class it was inevitable that you would end up a murderer or rapist if allowed to continue. There was no possibility of reforming you since criminality was inescapably part of your make up.
As a result of this blinkered thinking the number of crimes carrying the death penalty numbered hundreds. It was, in practise, quite unmanageable to execute the sheer numbers who fell foul of the law (it was not until the 20th century that anyone thought of industrialising the process of execution and creating death factories such as Auschwitz and Buchenwald). Our legal system commuted many death sentences to life imprisonment but since the government didn’t want to incur the cost of an extensive prison system to house such prisoners many were sent abroad as slave labour in the new penal colonies of our expanding Empire.
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| Transportees being rowed out to a convict ship |
The first recipient of our convicts was the colony of Virginia in North America but once the Americans parted company with us in a little dispute over taxation, the British government had to look elsewhere and settled upon the newly discovered continent of Australia. The first convicts landed in Australia in 1788 and the practise continued for almost one hundred years.
This song commemorates the misery of being sent out in chains aboard cold, damp convict ships and the longing to return to loved ones who remained behind in Britain.