Captured: Portraits of Crime 1870-1930 - Flipbook - Page 28
In Sydney between 1865 and 1908, Clifford was convicted and gaoled for various
obscene language and pickpocketing offences. Her modus operandi was to frequent the
city’s ‘large business places’ wearing a shawl over her arm and pickpocket people as
they looked in shop windows. She would then go to a hotel and empty the contents of
the purses she had stolen. Clifford developed a reputation as ‘a nice-looking old
part ... yet a wicked old woman’. Country visitors to Sydney were warned about the
wily ways of the ‘woman in black’ who ‘might pass anywhere for a respectable old lady
of the middle class’. ‘No pockets were too deep for old Sarah’, became a sort of
philosophy for the ageing crook. And each time Clifford faced the courts,
magistrates despaired at knowing what to do. An elderly Clifford told one magistrate
that all she wanted was to go home to her children. She had missed every Christmas
for fifteen years, marking the event in gaol rather than with her family. When aged
in her late 70s, police asked why she had stolen yet again. Clifford conceded that,
“I can’t help it. I can’t keep my hands off things”.
In 1910, aged 76, Clifford was convicted of larceny and sentenced to six months
light labour in the State Reformatory for Women, Long Bay. By this time, her
aggregated prison sentences totalled 36 years, 4 months and 14 days. She was declared
a habitual criminal and under this ruling, was incarcerated at Newington State
Hospital and Asylum until her death in 1916. It was the end of a ‘sad story’ that
extended back to 1851 when she had been convicted in Dublin for larceny and sentenced
to seven years transportation to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). But perhaps the
saddest note of all in the tale of Sarah Clifford was that her son, John Fox,
followed in the footsteps of his mother and father. His first conviction for riotous
behaviour as a 15 year old in 1885 began a pattern of many years’ offending and
incarceration. At the time, such a way of life was accepted as the destiny of the
children of convicts.
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