Neil Hanson - The Custom of the Sea

The coffin was removed that Saturday evening, 24 February, and taken by water, towed in a skiff by a launch, to the quarantine station on the North Head. The interment took place later in the evening, in the cemetery inside the grounds of the quarantine station, a steeply sloping site high above the water, commanding a view of South Head.

Neither Philippa nor any other members of the family were allowed to attend the burial. After the briefest of services, the coffin was committed to the earth, buried in an unusually deep grave, officially known as number 48, with all its numerous wrappings undisturbed.

In all the years since Tom Dudley and Edwin Stephens were sentenced, there have been only two further recorded cases of the custom of the sea.

On 4 January 1893, three of the four survivors who had been clinging to the waterlogged hulk of the Thekla for thirteen days drew lots and killed the fourth. His legless and headless body was still hanging from the rigging when they were rescued. The Norwegian authorities carried out an investigation, but no formal proceedings were instituted either against them, or the survivors of the Drot , which foundered in a hurricane off Mississippi in 1899.

Six of the crew constructed a raft from the wreckage and cast themselves adrift. One went mad and threw himself overboard. Another, apparently dying, was killed and his blood drunk, and the same fate befell a third man shortly afterwards. The three remaining men then cast lots for the next victim. The loser, a German seaman, accepted his fate and bared his breast to the knife, or so the two survivors said after their eventual rescue. The German consul sought their arrest and extradition for murder, but the US authorities first delayed then quietly dropped proceedings, on the grounds that ‘these unfortunate sailors have suffered enough’.

No twentieth-century cases have been recorded, but despite great advances in the safety of ships, survival techniques and search-and-rescue operations, there is no doubt that such incidents have occurred, particularly during the Second World War. Tom Dudley’s prophecy to Arthur Collins, ‘Never again will men return to these shores and freely confess what they have done,’ has proved correct.

There was an echo of the case of the Mignonette , however, at the inquest into the sinking of the ferry, Herald of Free Enterprise , at Zeebrugge in 1987. During his summing up, the coroner referred to the evidence of an Army corporal who had been trapped with dozens of other passengers. Their only way of escape from the rising waters was by means of a rope-ladder but it was blocked by a man who had frozen in panic while climbing it. After repeatedly shouting at him to move, the corporal ordered those below him to pull the man off the ladder. They did so and he fell into the water and drowned, while the others made their escape.

No criminal proceedings were ever contemplated against the corporal or any of the other people involved and, although the coroner conceded that, ‘I think we need to at least glance in the direction of murder’, he went on to describe certain killings as ‘a reasonable act of what is known as self-preservation… that also includes in my judgement, the preservation of other lives; such killing is not necessarily murder at all.’ Necessity — ‘the great law of Nature and self-preservation’ — rejected by the most senior judges in England a century before, might be a defence, after all, against a charge of murder.

Tom Dudley’s body still lies under the rocky soil of the North Head above the mouth of Sydney Harbour, but the inscription on the small gravestone marking his last resting place has weathered away. Nothing now remains to indicate the spot but a few fragments of crumbling stone.

If the Mignonette’s dinghy, the knife with which Tom killed Richard Parker, or the letter he wrote to Philippa on the back of the chronometer certificate have survived to the present day, their whereabouts are now unknown.

Philippa Dudley was released from quarantine on Tuesday, 6 March 1900. She survived her husband by twenty-eight years, dying at Chatswood in North Sydney in 1928 at the age of eighty-six. The two daughters born to her and Tom in Australia died before her, but their three elder children survived her, and their son Julian ran the family business until 1946. It continued trading in other hands until the 1970s.

The other leading characters in the case of Regina versus Dudley and Stephens met with mixed fortunes. Early in 1885, while the two men were still serving their sentence in Holloway, Arthur Collins was duly awarded the knighthood he had been promised. He was elevated to the bench as Chief Justice of Madras the same year. He served there for fifteen years, and was also vice-chancellor of the university from 1889 to 1899, before retiring to England. He died, aged eighty-one, on 12 September 1915.

Sir William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt’s tenure as home secretary ended with the defeat of the Gladstone government at the general election of 1885, but he later served as chancellor of the exchequer in 1886 and again from 1892 to 1895, and was leader of the House from 1893 to 1898. He died in 1904.

Samuel Plimsoll continued his indefatigable campaigns even after resigning his seat in the Commons in 1880 to spend more time with his ailing wife, Eliza, but public attention had moved on to other issues, and he was defeated when he attempted to return to the House as member for Central Sheffield in 1885, following Eliza’s death. The hero of a decade before was now a largely forgotten, peripheral figure. He died in 1898.

Mr Baron Huddleston’s age and failing health — coupled perhaps with a touch of snobbery about his origins and a suspicion that he lacked the dedication and gravitas required of a Lord Chief Justice — denied him his ultimate ambition.

‘The Last of the Barons’ died on Friday, 5 December 1890, aged seventy-three. His obituary in The Times reported that ‘His digestion had become much impaired and it was dyspepsia which brought about the end. He had gone through his judicial work for some time past with great discomfort from pain and sleeplessness but he adhered, perhaps too resolutely, to office.’

His memorial was the leading case of Regina versus Dudley and Stephens with which his name is associated and which remains familiar to every student of the law to this day.

Tom’s two crewmates survived him, but neither lived out their days in happy circumstances. Two days after his release from prison, Edwin Stephens again wrote to the Board of Trade, attempting to renew his certificate of competence.

I now again beg to renew my application for my certificate as I am unable to obtain employment until I am in possession of the same, and having a wife and family dependent upon me, I am naturally anxious to gain that employment as soon as possible.

Trusting that in considering my application, the Board of Trade will take into consideration the trials that I have lately undergone, and grant me the renewal of my certificate as soon as practicable.

A Board of Trade official made the grudging annotation, ‘I suppose we should return the certificate.’

Still in poor physical and mental health, Stephens turned down Jack Want’s offer of a free passage to Sydney and did not go to sea for the rest of that year, surviving on occasional shore jobs and the money his wife was able to earn. He returned to the sea the following spring as master of the Madeline , a yacht sailing out of Cowes, and was back on the ocean later that year, making two voyages to deliver steam yachts to Alexandria in Egypt.

In the early 1890s he worked occasionally on the Atlantic run, but his voyages were punctuated by longer and longer periods ashore, as his mental health deteriorated and he grew more dependent on alcohol. Under those pressures, his marriage had also failed and he left Southampton, living for a while in Leytonstone, north-east London.