The Sydney Mail editorialized:
The attack of plague could prove a lasting service to our metropolis, what with the killing of vermin in all directions, the overhauling of our sanitary appliances and machinery, the cleansing of wharves, sewers, drains and streets, the disinfecting of dirty areas, the compelling of the City Council to shut up the vile garbage tip at Moore Park and devise more modern methods of dealing with refuse than Proverbial in old Jerusalem, and the warning which people have got to keep themselves clean, we should expect that in years to come Sydney will never be quite such a dirty, ill-kept and ill-managed city as it has been up to the present.
Despite the authorities’ efforts to eradicate infected rats, the first recorded human case of the outbreak of bubonic plague, a dock labourer, Arthur H. Payne, a labourer for the Central Wharf Company at Dawes Point, was placed in quarantine on 26 January. However, he had only a mild case of the disease and later recovered.
Tom became the second victim. His first-floor premises in Sussex Street lay just behind the harbour and the toilet drained through a broken pipe into the water. On the morning of Tuesday, 13 February, he removed five dead rats from the room. He fell ill while at work the following Saturday and remained at Sussex Street for two days before being taken home to Drummoyne. He died on the afternoon of Thursday, 23 February 1900, at the age of forty-six.
He had fallen heavily at work a few days earlier, damaging his abdomen, and at first doctors suspected peritonitis, but the speed and suddenness of his death, coupled with the earlier case of plague, led to a hasty post-mortem examination. It was carried out at three thirty that afternoon by Dr Frank Tidswell.
From specimens of blood taken from the body, Dr Thompson confirmed the cause of death as bubonic plague, contracted from the fleas the dead rats had carried. According to the doctor, such a sudden death was not unusual for the plague. ‘The symptoms may be rather mild but the poison takes its special effect on the heart.’
Tom was the first Sydney fatality from the outbreak. By the end of June over a hundred further deaths from plague had been recorded in the city.
Within an hour of the completion of the post-mortem, police had sealed off Tom’s business premises and home, and put his family and everyone else found there into immediate quarantine. Five policemen stood guard on the house, where thirteen people had been isolated.
Among them were Philippa and Julian Dudley, now aged seventeen, Alexander Parker, a clerk in the railway department, and his wife, Archibald McDonald, a handyman employed at the house who was ill with stomach pains and being closely watched for symptoms of bubonic plague, Mrs Hoskins, Mrs Ludgate, Peter Gorman, Thomas Carrie and three boys, George Grear, Norman Mackie, and James Cox, who had arrived at the slip in a yacht that morning with a Japanese man by the name of Erakwa Bush. Several of them had gone to the house only to express their condolences, but all were taken into quarantine.
Four more people were quarantined at the premises in Sussex Street: Tom’s daughter Philippa and Arthur Wilson, a friend of the family she was later to marry, Mr Shannon, a sailmaker, and the book-keeper, William Wetherill.
All of them, together with two more people later identified as at risk — an eighteen-year-old girl called Maggie Beattie and Frederick Glebe, a haberdasher who had visited the house during Tom’s illness — were taken to the quarantine station on the North Head above the entrance to Sydney Harbour.
The house and business premises were fumigated by the authorities and Dr Thompson reported that the sewerage in Sussex Street was defective. ‘One morning Captain Dudley removed from the premises no fewer than five dead rats, being assisted in the work by one of the men now at the quarantine station.’
Inadequate sewerage was not unique to Tom’s premises. A reporter extracted a statement from a Board of Health spokesman that not more than one house in every twenty-two was properly connected with the sewers. The statement was hastily withdrawn, but the board later admitted that it had prosecuted 440 owners or occupiers whose sewerage arrangements were ‘insanitary or incomplete’ since the start of the year.
Dr Thompson and Dr Pinkburn supervised the arrangements for Tom’s funeral and interment. His body was wrapped in a sailcloth soaked in a 5 per cent solution of sulphuric acid and placed in a watertight coffin, which was then filled to the brim with more sulphuric acid and the lid sealed down. The coffin was enveloped in a succession of sailcloth sheets saturated with the same ferocious disinfectant and a jacket of ‘asphalt cloth’ was then wrapped around it.
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.
Epilogue
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.