Evidence Type: Newspaper Report
25 May 1844
POLICE INTELLIGENCE.
SATURDAY.
MARY GILMORE (bond) and WILLIAM BUTTS (ticket-of-leave) were placed at the bar under the following circumstances.
About a month since GILMORE was assigned from the Factory to the service of MR. HARPER, at Kissing Point. On her arrival, the general appearance of her master’s menage not meeting with her approval, she resolved her sojourn should be merely that of a bird of passage, and therefore resolving, like MACBETH—”that when done ’tis best it were done quickly,” within a few hours took flight. Being a sharp goer, she distanced all pursuit; and all the constables inspired by the knowledge that the production of her body before any one of her Majesty’s Justices of the Peace, was worth ten shillings, searched highway and byeway for her, still GILMORE was non est inventus. However, Constable CHAMBERS, on the morning of the previous day happening to take an early valetudinarian walk to procure an appetite for his breakfast, strolled into a farm of MR. CURTIS’s, near Kissing Point, and close to the hut occupied by the farmer, BUTTS and a man named SALCLIFFE fell in with GILMORE in the act of taking up her bed and walking off. Seizure of her, and overhauling of the blankets, was the immediate result of the constable’s unopportuned appearance, and the bedding appearing both by marks as well as BUTTS’ own confession, to be his property, he had to accompany GILMORE on her pilgrimage to Parramatta, to answer a charge of harbouring. The Bench, however, directed him to be proceeded against by information for the offence under the Act of Council, and discharged him, giving him a gentle hint that, although it was highly creditable of him to covert himself into a “Dorcas Society,” to afford the loan of bed and blanket to distressed women. There was a wide difference in giving these necessaries to ladies lying-in and ladies lying out. GILMORE, for absconding, was sentenced, for two months to the third class at the Factory.
CITATION
Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Law Report of MARY GILMORE,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/law-reports/p18440525/, accessed [insert current date].
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