Margaret Catchpole (14 March 1762 – 13 May 1819) was an English servant girl, chronicler, and deportee to Australia. Born in Suffolk, she worked as a servant in various houses before being convicted of stealing a horse and escaping from Ipswich Gaol. Following her capture, she was transported to the Australian penal colony of New South Wales, where she remained for the rest of her life. Her entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography describes her as "one of the few true convict chroniclers with an excellent memory and a gift for recording events".
Early life
Catchpole was reputedly born at Nacton, Suffolk, the daughter of Elizabeth Catchpole and according to one source of Jonathan Catchpole, head ploughman.
Catchpole had little education and worked as a servant for different families until being employed in May 1793 as under-nurse and under-cook by the writer Elizabeth Cobbold at her house on St Margarets Green in Ipswich. Cobbold's husband was a brewer and member of the prosperous Ipswich Cobbold family. Catchpole was close to the family and was responsible for saving the lives of children in her care three times. She also learned to read and write while employed by the Cobbolds.
Catchpole's letters describe Hawkesbury River floods, frontier conflict with Indigenous Australians, the countryside and its wildlife, economic developments such as the use of convict miners at Coal River (Newcastle), and the savagery of colonial manners and customs — "by her writings [she] added greatly to Australia's early history".
In culture
The History of Margaret Catchpole, a Suffolk Girl
Rev. Richard Cobbold (son of her former employers) made Catchpole the subject of a novel, The History of Margaret Catchpole, a Suffolk Girl (London, 1845), which has often been reprinted. While Cobbold says in the preface that "the public may depend upon the truth of the main features of this narrative", he takes some liberties and also gets some things wrong, for example:
Education: Cobbold's heroine speaks and writes as a cultivated woman, when her letters (see above) show that her education was limited.
Marriage: He believed Catchpole married in 1812 and had children — this appears to have been a genuine conviction rather than poetic licence; however, there is no record of a marriage, she invariably describes herself as being on her own, and she is unlikely to have started a family at the age of fifty.
Death: Cobbold maintains that Catchpole lived until 1841; however, the register of burials at Richmond leaves no doubt that she died in 1819: "Margaret Catchpole, aged 57 years, came prisoner in the Nile, in the year 1801. Died May 13; was buried May 14, 1819. — Henry Fulton".
Other appearances
Later works, many of which rely to varying degrees on Cobbold's novel, include:
1854: Margaret Catchpole, the Female Horse Stealer!, a popular drama produced in London around 1854.
1949: Margaret Catchpole, the Girl from Wolfkettel, a novel by George Goldsmith Carter. Wolfkettel is, or was, a Saxon name for the area around Nacton.
1966: The Extraordinary Margaret Catchpole, a novel for children by Ruth Manning-Sanders that concentrates on her life before she was deported.
1972: The Smuggler's Wench, a bodice-ripper by Monica Mugan adapted from the Cobbold novel.
1974: Margaret Catchpole, a novel for children by Australian author Nance Donkin with illustrations by Edwina Bell, depicting Catchpole as a pioneering convict woman.
↑J. M. Blatchly, "Cobbold, Elizabeth (1765–1824)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, January 2014. Accessed 15 Jan 2015]
