Man Who Served Two Life Sentences

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 910, 1 March 1930, Page 18

Man Who Served Two Life Sentences

ODAY over the world’s breakfast tables the ? V righteous lovers of the law politely argue out the ethics of penal flog-, And in the streets of Sydney walks a man who carries the answer to all their arguments branded in letters of living fire across his back, across his brain, savs the Sydney “Guardian.” He is jack Bradshaw, last man left alive of the bushrangers that harried Australia in the “fifties”: perhaps the only man in the world who has served two life sentences, and now walks free among his fellows. On the old triangle which stands yet at Maitland gaol, stained with the storms of the years, and the blood and sweat and tears of human agony, Bradshaw hung crucified. “I was to be flogged, for disregarding a gaol order. Twenty lashes. . . . maybe it doesn't sound so very much. “Dragged out of my cell at dawn, I was stripped to the waist, and my middle firmly bandaged to sustain the shock. Each wrist was bound to a side of the triangle, and my feet to the base, and I was ready. “‘Strike!’ The order came suddenly. and the ‘cat’ whistled through the air! "Screams broke the sound of the count —‘Two.’ “Flesh broke. Blood eased the agony of the third stroke. “ ‘Four’ sent the blood from my heart, and my brain swimming. "Three minutes' respite, during which a sip of water freshened dulling ■nerves for the rest of the terrible ordeal. “Five, six, seven, eight, nine! And so on through the torture, until the blood soaked the waist bandage and sprinkled into eyes which saw nothing but a world of blood and flying flesh. “A man of God, with a flask of brandy secreted, came to me after in my cell and spoke of hope of Paradise and ease from pain. “And the most terrible part of the flogging was not the contact of the ’cat' with new, healthy flesh, but the festering wounds of a week left by the cruellest of man’s torments.” Scars of Irons The ‘cat’ they used on him. with its 20-inch tails, knotted every six inches and weighted, is in the museum at

Twenty Lashes for Disobedience . . . Last of Bushrangers T ells His Grim History.

Long Bay Gaol. But the scars are still on Bradshaw’s back —long, thick scars, crossing and recrossing—and the memory is still in his heart, so keen that as he speaks his face gleams again with the sweat of torment. It was not his only flogging. His wrists, too bear scars, shiniug scars of heavy manacles, and under the bandages on his ankles the bone gleams white where the flesh was bitten from it by the rivets of his legirons. Jack Bradshaw was horn in Dublin SS years ago, and came to Australia as a cabin boy when he was 14. At 20 he was a married man and a father —and a highwayman with a price upon his head. It was his love—and his folly—that turned the Irish boy to a creature of violence and misery: He wanted £SOO to win the girl of his heart —and robbed a bank at Grenfell.

[ He dodged the western mounted I police for six months, robbing, plunI dering, holding up coaches, and suffering hunger and thirst until he was j run to earth and. sentenced to iini prisonment for life. i From Darlinghurst Gaol to New- ! castle he was taken in irons which | had been riveted on to his ankles. His pitiful screams on the little coaster, however, brought him temporary relief for the captain Insisted ! that a doctor be brought aboard iinmei diately the ship touched port. ' The irons were filed off. pulling t living flesh with them. 1 But when they took him from New- • castle to Maitland Gaol he was again 1 in irons. Dungeons of Misery ; He was transferred to Berrima where the dungeon of “misery lay like a foul stain on the encircling snow. Twenty days’ solitary confinement with a daily ration of bread and water followed a flogging for some infringement of the prison regulations. Other floggings gleam like red doorways of Hell in the long corridor of memory. In Irons he toiled in the road gang, and in ghostly irons goes limping still, with an eerie drag of the leg amid the scurrying crowd. Even in gaol, time moves, though lie, too, seems to march in irons. Twenty years passed, and Jack Bradshaw was free again.

He stole horses, and for the second time heard the dry tongue of a judge wall in his life with stone. He served another 20 years—4o in all: the span of most men’s active life. He spent it in inactivity, as far as the outer world goes, but in between his tasks and his penalties he read and wrote. He still writes, and peddle his books and verses around Darlinghurst and Paddington, a strong and straight old man, whose unbroken spirit rings in his voice and shines in his bright eyes. Faces from the Past He lives in a tiny room in Woolloomooloo, and Morgan and Ben Hall, rufiian friends of his wild past, look down from the walls. And an old muzzle-loader, whose voice rang in the ranges 60 years ago, stands in the corner by the wardrobe.