Meeting Maggie May
November 21, 2007Liverpool’s maritime history has left the city with a rich folk music legacy, and perhaps most famous amongst the old sea shanties is ‘Maggie May’. Telling the story of a Victorian prostitute who is sent on the prison boat to Van Diemen’s Land in Tasmania, it has become something of an informal anthem of the city and adorns the name of cafés, inspired musicals and even appears as a brief John Lennon led interlude on the Beatles’ album ‘Let It Be’. The origins of the song and whether ‘dirty robbing no good Maggie May’ even existed at all have been hotly debated topics in recent years but one local film-maker believes that he has finally cracked the mystery.
John Gannon has been researching the beginnings of the song for the past year and he has discovered that not only did Maggie May exist, but that she was a young teenage girl who stood at only 4ft 11 inches tall. The results of his findings will help form the basis of a six part series that he has been commissioned to write currently titled ‘Nelly Ray’.
“The song has been around for a very long time, but it’s impossible to say when it started exactly because so many different versions exist. It began as a foc’sle song and it was used to warn other sailors in other ports that when they came to Liverpool to avoid this Maggie May as she would rob from you. It’s never been known whether or not this was just a traditional standard thing or a representation of life as a prostitute in Victorian Liverpool but through looking into this I’ve managed to discover that she was real and she was only a teenage girl.”
The earliest version of the song appears in the diary of Charles Picknell, a sailor on the convict ship ‘Kains’ which sailed to Van Diemens Land in 1830 and protagonist is ‘Nelly Ray’ rather than Maggie. There are no mentions of a Maggie May on the books but John’s ardous research through court records and transport lists meant that he discovered that a Mary Ann Ray, or ‘Nelly Ray’, travelled to Liverpool as a nine year old girl in 1832 from the village of Magheraberg, County Down with John Ray, a married man from the same town who was her original ‘pimp’. She was born Mary Ann Clark and from many hours searching through census records discovered that she was brought to the city as an orphan and left to work the dirty rat-infested streets of one of the most dangerous ports in the world.
Although the age of consent at the time was 12 years old, Maggie found herself constantly in trouble with the police although as referenced in the song, this was as much for her tendency to steal from her customers and anywhere else she could than for her exploits on the streets. The line in one version of the song about ’skinned so many tailors’ refers to the practice among prostitutes to steal silk and then pawn it at ‘Kelly’s pawnshop, number 9′.
“From court records I’ve found that she was indicted twice for theft and was then sent to Van Diemen’s land, which was the penal colony in Tasmania,” he says. “She was sent at the age of 18 to an even stranger but just as dangerous environment and for me her story of struggle is an immensely interesting film.”
According to the record sheet, her second indictment was for the theft of one watch, one purse, one snuff box, one pocket book and one handkerchief belonging to Richard Chrutchley whilst he was receiving her services and she was only caught after running into a policeman coming on-duty in her escape.
The tragic tale of Maggie May is set against the backdrop of Victorian Liverpool, then in the midst of the industrial revolution boom. The colour and the drama of the overcrowded, filthy streets provides a fascinating setting for the story.
“There is an undoubted romanticism about the place although you definitely wouldn’t want to live there. I want to make the film as accurate to the times as I possibly can and putting it into a visual sense I can hopefully give it the context to give a true glimpse of the people, circumstance and times. There are characters who appear in the story such as priests and doctors who try to give a sense of narrative but who Maggie may not have necessarily crossed paths with. I think one of the most important things to remember about Liverpool is that it has never had a trade. All of these towns around the North West had their own trades but our business was humping things from one ship and putting it on to another, and it’s the main reason why prostitution was rife with the endless stream of sailors getting off one boat and getting on the other. The Scotland Road area was rife with brothels, which were typically rooms run by older women who lived with the girls. It was quite rare for a girl to have a outsider male ‘pimp’ in the way that we understand the term now, but by the time she was put on the prison ship she had the branding of twelve different owners.”
John is also using his research to write a book, explaining that sometimes a drama sometimes has to bend the truth in the name of artistic license. “I didn’t want to make a documentary because when you watch a documentary you usually come out thinking ‘oh, that was interesting’, but I want to make a movie that people will appeal to them emotionally. Movies need to spark a reaction in someone, something that may have been lying dormant for their whole life, but which touches them by end. When you write for an audience, you have to think of them en masse but also as one person and I try and think to myself ‘How do I reach this one person?’”
Film writers often feel that characters become extensions of themselves by the time they have finished writing and John is no exception. He talks about the young Maggie May with parental affection and having spent many long days researching and writing scripts he feels undoubted empathy towards the other characters that he has created. “As a father myself, I feel very protective towards Maggie May. To think that she was only a little girl, and she was little, left to fend on the streets on her own and having to steal and prostitute herself for money is tragic and it’s a miracle she lasted so long. She must have been a little star to have lasted so long in what was a very dangerous place and then to be sent to Tasmania as well.”
John is currently in the process of selling the script to the Australian television company ABC and for his next project he wants to concentrate on her new life in Tasmania. “After her 136 day trip to Hobart on the other side of the world, she lived until she was about 65 and from what I’ve found she marries, has children and constantly finds herself in trouble with the authorities once again. She eventually died in Launceston Invalid Depot of ’senility’. Australia’s history is all about the ships of convicts that came from Britain so I hope that they will be interested in the next part of the film as well.”
John’s background as a writer has taken many forms, from script-writer for BBC Radio 4 comedy programme ‘Weekending’ to magazine articles on crime stories for an array of magazines. His first big break, to his ‘eternal shame’, was a poem that was used in the children’s TV programme ‘Rainbow’. Titled ‘Tea for Two’ and telling the story of a monster who visits a child he met on holiday for a cup of tea, it’s a million miles from Victorian Liverpool but gave him his first shot at writing as a full time career. After a succesful Masters degree for Creative Writing, he has written a variety of well received work, including a script that won the Lynda la Plante award for ‘Best Script’ in 2006. Like many local writers before him, he has found his own home city to be a fascinating canvass to work on.
“The city in the 1800s was such an interesting place, when it was at it’s peak as a world city and a great port. I’ve always wanted to see what the city looked like then and through the story of Maggie I’ll hopefully be able to give viewers what it was really like then.”
If the song is noted as existing in 1830 how can it be about a girl who arrived in Liverpool in 1832 and was deported about 1841? Which isn’t to say that the life of the “Nellie Ray” discovered by John Gannon isn’t interesting or woth a series being made about her. Just that she can’t be the origin of the song. I would guess that there were several possible originals for “maggie may” or “nellie ray” – after all prostitutes robbing their clients isn’t that unusual! Between 20% and 40% of women trasported to Australia are recorded as having been prostitutes (the % refers to the women in each ship) and many were convicted of theft, though not necessarily from their clients.
Hamish
As you might know, folk songs of all kinds were, and are, open to use and abuse: lyrics were changed to fit any number of personal circumstances, a form of ‘Chinese whispers’. In the article, the reference to Charles Picknell refers more to his validity as a witness to the original lyrics of the song, rather than to when he first heard the song. In researching both names, ‘Maggie May’ and ‘Nellie Ray’, in the passenger lists of all the convict ships from the first fleet to the last fleet, I found no reference at all to a female passenger with the surname ‘May’ let alone Maggie or Margaret; the only female named ‘Ray’, of all the passengers in the all the fleets in all the years of transportations (1787 – 1868) was ‘Mary Ann Ray’: of all the courts in England, Mary was indicted in Liverpool: not only was she a prostitute and a thief – she also stole ‘from the person’.
I would agree, on the face of it, ‘theft from the person’ was endemic to the profession: it would seem to go with the territory, and I’m sure their clients knew this only too well. This would then beg the questions: Why the celebratory song about one of them? What made this particular prostitute different enough?
In an effort to populate the new colonies, the court system during the early 19th Century worked a two-an-out-system: the second time you were found guilty at the quarter sessions (for whatever reason, and despite your age) you were transported. As you point out, many of the women transported were recorded as having had a history of being ‘on the town’ (prostitution itself not being an indictable offence): so why did Nellie Ray (according to Charles Picknell) have a song about her? According the record, she had been a prostitute since she was 14; and, at just under five-feet tall, did this make her something of a popular target? Shameful to say, but prostitutes’ clients of the time liked their ladies as young as possible; largely to avoid picking up any unwanted diseases (loss of money through loss of work and the pain and expense of a hopeful cure). Add to this, that her associate, Catherine Mack, was an habitual thief. Upon her transportation (previous to Nellie’s), also to Van Diemen’s Land, she was only 14 (also 4-feet 11) and had been surviving on the streets of Liverpool, through theft, for 3-years previous. Her first conviction was for stealing handkerchiefs and silk from a tailor’s shop in Fleet Street: she was arrested when she took these to a pawn shop in Vauxhall Road whereupon the proprietor held her and brought the police. Her second indictment (for which she was transported) was for stealing a pair of boots and a jacket worth 5-shillings each – she was not a prostitute: if Nellie and Catherine were a ‘team’ on the streets of Liverpool, possibly helping each other to survive, this could be where we get the lines ‘skinned so many tailors’ and ‘pawnshop number 9’ These two were so close, previous to, and after meeting up again in Van Dieman’s Land, when Nellie had her first child whilst still at the female factory, not only was Catherine the child’s godmother, Nellie named her after Catherine.
The evidence presented, I would agree, is circumstantial; however, after 166-years, circumstantial is all we have to go on.