Evidence Type: Newspaper Report
DATE: 24 May 1845
POLICE INTELLIGENCE.
TUESDAY.
RICHARD CLEAVER (attacted [sic: attached] to the Stockade), who from being by trade a shingler, may always be said to be at the top of his profession, was charged with having allowed his fond and adoring partiality for the specimens of Nature’s beauties resident in Mr. SMYTH’s* boarding school and laundry establishment**, to lead him to the commission of some slight infractions of the code of By-laws devised for the preservance [sic] of good government in that establishment. As this depot had, previous to a change been run by the Bell being told out, been a regular misnomer and called a Factory, because there was no work at all done at it, and young ladies doomed, by adverse circumstances to reside in the colony, had preferred spelling there to doing needle work in an employer’s service, the Visiting Justice resolved to make it what it really was intended to be, a gaol, and although there was no objection to patronising such fine arts as getting-up ladies and gentlemen’s shirts, all essays in the Belles lettres, in the shape of correspondence with sweethearts, was strictly forbidden, as likewise atmospherical lectures on the virtues of Negrohead, Cavendish, Twist, or colonial tobacco, and it being suspected that the Stockade prisoners employed in reparations at the building were the postmen conveying the billet douxs [sic]*** and the purveyors of the noxious weed, strict injuctions [sic: injunctions] had been given to the gatekeeper to examine them on their entrance and exit to and from the building. On the previous day CLEAVER had given the “searching” enquirer the go by, and on being called on to stop, started off on a regular steeple chase “up stairs, down stairs, through the ladies’ chamber,” through kitchens, corridors, halls, and yards, and after he had caused the unfortunate pursuer of a gatekeeper—rather a corpulent man—to lose about a couple of pounds of good exportable tallow, he surrendered himself, and stating that he had “broke cover” in the chase, and intimated that he might then search him, as what he then had on him was lik emany [sic: like many] people’s charity—nothing to nobody.
CLEAVER, as a matter of course, denied all intention of wishing to break through the established rules, and affirmed the chase was a mere running joke between himself and the gatekeeper, but as it appeared that CLEAVER had, only three weeks previously, for some delicate attentions paid to the ladies in the laundry, put that portion of the building “in hot water,” been sent to the cells for ten days, a second dose of a similar medicine for individuals labouring under feverish excitement, was administered.
* GEORGE SMYTH
** The Parramatta Female Factory
*** billet doux (‘sweet letter’ i.e. love letters)
CITATION
Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Law Report of RICHARD CLEAVER,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/law-reports/p18450524, accessed [insert current date].
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