For almost 200 years there had been a doctor resident in Bow. I was the twenty-ninth.
This is our story
THE MEDICAL GENTLEMEN OF BOW
Ann Parker 1791 -1865
Ann Parker was born in Bow and baptized in Bow Church in 1791.The baptism register describes Ann as a “base child”. Her unmarried mother, a pauper, aged about 30 and also called Ann Parker, had herself probably been born in Bow. Two years later her mother married Edward Wilcox, a widower from North Tawton, again in Bow Church.
[Edward Wilcox was a thatcher in North Tawton, where he and his first wife Ann Skinner had five children. In 1783 there was a warrant for his arrest for having "deserted his wife and family and left them chargeable to the said parish" - North Tawton.
After the death of his first wife, he married Ann Westlake in Bondleigh in 1789. She and their youngest daughter died and were buried together on 28 March 1792.]
Bow Church
Little is known of Ann’s early life; after her mother's marriage to Edward Wilcox, they lived for a while in North Tawton where Edward and her mother had three more daughters. It seems that she was generally known as "Ann Parker alias Wilcox"
By 1806, aged 16 she was still living with her mother and stepfather who had moved to Plymouth. In March that year she started work as a live-in servant for William Hull, a nurseryman who lived in Milford House, Tamerton Foliott.
Hull suspected her of dishonesty, so on Saturday 3rd May that year he sacked her and sent a message to her parents asking them to take her home. The next evening he noticed that a ten and a five pound note were missing from a locked box in his room. The following day, on the basis of what his 11 year old daughter Susannah had told him, he and one of his workmen went to the Wilcox’s house in Plymouth. Ann Parker was there and he took her with her parents to the house of John Hawker, Plymouth’s Mayor and a Justice of the Peace.
From there they all went to the town prison in the Guildhall. George Pardon, the Serjeant-at-Mace then searched her in front of Mr Hull. Hull noticed what seemed to be a piece of paper in one of Ann’s shoes. Pardon took it out and it was found to be a ten pound note.
Hull was sure that it was one of the bank notes that was missing from his box – he remembered that, like this one, it was endorsed in the name of Robert Henderson and had a small tear on the top edge.
Ann Parker could not explain how the ten pound note came to be in her shoe.
The above account is taken from Mayor John Hawker’s contemporaneous notes of William Hull’s deposition (i.e. statement) made on oath in front of Ann, and signed on 5 May 1806 (the day after her arrest) concerning Ann Parker “otherwise Ann Wilcocks”.
Susannah, William Hull’s 11 year old daughter then made her statement. She stated that about a month earlier, on Easter Monday, Ann Parker left Milford House at 8 a.m., and returned at about 6 in the evening. Ann came up to her bedroom and told her that she had been to her mother’s house in Plymouth, where an old woman had told her fortune. The fortune teller had told her that Mr Hull kept his money in a little box and that she (Parker) was to take from it “two shillings and a crown piece and a twenty shilling note to give to the old woman; otherwise the house would be burnt down”.
Susannah also said that over the next few days Ann Parker told her to take further amounts of money from her father for her to give to the old woman. So Susannah took a one pound note from her father’s pocket-book and gave it to Ann Parker. Later Ann gave back to Susannah a seven shilling coin and told her to go into Tamerton Town to buy her some handkerchiefs. Next day she made Susannah buy her a neckerchief and two pairs of black stockings with the change.
Gold coins to the value of seven shillings (a third of a guinea, (21 shillings, £1.05) were only issued during the reign of King George III.
Susannah claimed that Ann Parker told her several times that if she mentioned what she had told her to her father, that the house would be burnt down, killing everyone in it except Susannah, and that she would then be sent to Bridewell for life.
Susannah said that Ann Parker had come into her bedroom early in the morning on the day before she was sacked and showed her a ten pound and a five pound note that she claimed the old woman had taken from her father’s box. Susannah remembered noticing that the ten pound note had a tear along the edge just like the one that had just been found in Ann’s shoe.
Mary Brock, the fortune teller, was also present when these depositions were made.
Ann was remanded in Plymouth for a week. There is an order dated 12th May 1806 for the Serjeants at Mace for the Borough of Plymouth “to convey and deliver into the custody of the keeper of the High Goal at the Castle in Exeter, Ann Parker alias Ann Wilcocks being charged before John Hawker, Mayor and one of His Majesty’s Justices of the Peace, by the Oaths of William Hull with Felony; in stealing a ten pound note and a five pound note, the property of William Hull”.
The trial took place at the next sitting of the Assizes at the Exeter Castle on 28th July, 1806. Ann was found guilty, and sentenced to death. Fortunately she was reprieved and her sentence commuted to transportation for seven years.
She sailed on the “Sydney Cove” – a ship ironically owned by former convicts - as one of 109 women (three of whom died on the voyage) and 4 boys.
Fellow convicts also convicted in Exeter and sent with her on the Sydney Cove were Ann Stanbury convicted of "stealing saffron, cinnamon, and other goods, the property of Mr. Cornelius Tripe, druggist of Exeter", and Maria Smith who had stolen “divers articles of wearing apparel”.
The Sydney Cove set sail from Falmouth on 7 January 1807 and arrived at Port Jackson in Sydney on 18 June 1807 – a journey of 158 days.
Ann Parker then lived in Seven Hills, Parramatta, with another convict, Daniel Brien, 20 years older than her. He had been transported in 1791 for stealing clothes in London.
They had six children together before they were married in 1821, by a Catholic priest.
Her “certificate of leave” in 1826 describes her as: "Height 5 feet. Complexion Sallow & pock pitted. Hair Brown. Eyes Blue". She could neither read nor write.
In the New South Wales census of 1828 she has adopted a more Catholic name - Mary Ann Brian
Their eleventh child was born in 1832. Daniel died in 1837.
In 1839 she married a neighbour, William Smith, another former convict.
One night in July 1865, he came home drunk, and pushed Ann into the fire. She died of her burns two days later, aged 72. He was eventually tried for manslaughter but was acquitted. He died in 1873.
After the Sydney Cove’s convicts disembarked in Sydney in 1807, it was used as a “sealer” i.e. transporting seal oil and skins, mainly from the islands off the South of New Zealand. More about the ship's adventures
here and
here.
Ann Parker alias Wilcox has put Bow alias Nymet Tracey on the map for the hundreds of Australians who are her descendants. Much of the detective work unravelling her history was undertaken by the late William Cuthill of Victoria, Australia.
Various papers relating to her arrest and remand in Plymouth can be seen in the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office under reference 1/695/69.
What became of the Hulls of Tamerton Foliott?
William Hull, who employed Ann, died in 1818 aged 50. Susannah, who as an eleven year old gave the evidence that led to Ann's conviction, married in 1826. Her husband, John Southwood, was a widower. She died aged 42 in 1837. Ironically two of her children emigrated to Victoria, Australia, in 1852.
