Mr Justice Edmund Lushington’s court-room notes on the trial of a Manchester baker, Elizabeth Dewhurst, for passing forged banknotes - a crime that would subsequently result in her transportation to Botany Bay.
Small notebook, attractively bound in roan (94x168mm), hinged along the short side. On the front pastedown is written: ‘E H Lushington March 23.d 1812’. On the foreedge 1/3 - this was presumably the first of three notebooks. The paper has vertical chainlines and a Britannia watermark with a date beginning ‘18’. Lushington has used 80 pages of the book, c11,000 words with 4 preliminary and 3 terminal blanks. The notebook is interleaved throughout with a further 40 sheets of blotting paper allowing for quick, unsmudged court-room note-taking.
Lushington begins his notes: ‘Lancaster spring Assizes. 1812 S S Le Blanc Judge. Parry v Sidebottom’ - he seems to have been sitting alongside Sir Simon Le Blanc who presided over several of the minor cases detailed here such as ‘Atkinson v Ridley and Hart’ regarding goods owned by Ridley ‘a considerable merchant owner of many Ships trading to the West indies…’. However Lushington himself presided over the case which fills nearly two thirds of this volume, the trial on March 24, 1812: ‘The King v Eliz.th Dewhurst Forgery or offering a forged note’. His notes form a summary and sometimes verbatim record of the Prosecution and subsequent Defence of Dewhurst against the charge of passing a forged note to Joseph Hailwood.. ‘I saw her in Long Millgate Manchester… She asked me for a loaf sugar butter soap. I supplied her. The whole am.d to 3.10 - She gave me a £2 Bank note… I asked her if it was a good one’. Hailwood took his suspicions next door to his neighbour W Ogden who ‘said the note looked middling but the paper rather thin…’ Multiple witnesses are examined including an 11 year old child, apparently Dewhurst’s daughter, neighbours on Millgate, the Deputy Constable of Manchester, Thomas Mather a soap-boiler and W Glover, a bank note expert who certifies the forgery. Dewhurst’s testimony is recorded, and her claims to have got the note on the ‘old Bridge’. At the end, Lushington notes ‘Verdict Not Guilty’, a contradictory outcome given his record of apparently overwhelming evidence against Dewhurst as exhibited by the contents of this manuscript and, sadly for the defendant, a verdict that was quickly superseded when she was arrested shortly afterwards across the Pennines in Leeds and this second time found guilty of the same offence.
The story of Elizabeth Dewhurst (1788-1869) after her Manchester trial is well documented. She sailed on board the transport ship Wanstead in August 1813, convicted of ‘uttering forged notes’. Shortly before she sailed, she dictated a letter on board the Wanstead at Deptford, 8 July, 2013, addressed to the Bank of England which has been printed in Prisoners’ Letters to the Bank of England, 1781-1827: ‘Worthey Sir this is to inform you that I am now on board of the Ship a going to Botoney and I have not troubled you before so I hope your Goodness would be kind enough to think of me now as I have two small Children to Leave Behind me and very much distress for Cloaths and not a friend to assist me in anything I was taken in Leeds in Yorkshire and not any found on me I was tried at Lancaster in March Last so I hope your goodness will not forget me I am Sir your Most Humble Servant Elizth Duert’. Dewhurst arrived in New South Wales in January 1814, living into her 80s, dying in 1869.
At the time that he wrote this manuscript Edmund Henry Lushington (1766-1839) was newly returned from acting as the second Chief Justice of Ceylon. He was a grandson of Edmund Law, Bishop of Carlisle; and he went on to act as Master of the Crown Office, having married Louisa Phillips at Manchester Cathedral in 1810.
