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.
He made his last voyage in 1898, at the age of fifty, serving as mate on the steamship Jourcoing on a voyage from Portsmouth to Sardinia. He never went to sea again. Prone to continued and increasingly severe fits of depression and alcoholism, he found work of any sort hard to come by, and died a pauper in Hull, aged sixty-six, on 25 June 1914.
Ned Brooks continued to exhibit himself in museums and travelling freak shows for a few more months, but as the case of the Mignonette faded from the public memory and the showmen sought ever newer and more exotic attractions, he soon found himself out of work. He returned to Southampton and the money he had earned brought him no lasting benefit.
No record exists of the wife and children he was rumoured to have abandoned at the time of the Mignonette’s voyage, but he did marry in 1891, and found work as a rigger and yacht hand, and as a seaman on the Isle of Wight ferries. He even sailed on a yacht, the Una, for a while with a cousin of Richard Parker.
He continued to live in and around Southampton and at one point was living in Richard’s old village of Itchen Ferry, in a house on Smith’s Quay. ‘Curly’ Bedford, another relative of the dead boy, reported that he would often hear Brooks staggering home drunk and crying out in the night, ‘I didn’t do it.’
Like Edwin Stephens, Brooks died in poverty, succumbing to a heart attack in Southampton Parish Infirmary on 22 July 1919, aged seventy-three.
In memory of Richard Parker, an inscribed tombstone was placed over the previously unmarked graves of his parents in Pear Tree Churchyard, Itchen Ferry. It was maintained in pristine condition for many years. No one in the parish knew who cleaned the stone and tended the grave at dead of night, but local tradition had it that, before leaving England, Tom Dudley had arranged for someone to do so. Although Tom was in poor financial straits at the time, he retained none of the surplus money from the defence fund, donating it, as he had pledged, to pay for the education of Richard’s sister Edith.
The inscription on the boy’s gravestone originally read: ‘Sacred to the memory of Richard Parker, aged seventeen years, who died at sea after nineteen days’ dreadful suffering in an open boat in the tropics, having been shipwrecked on the yacht Mignonette’.
Beneath it was a quotation from the Book of Job: ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.’
At the insistence of Richard’s elder brother, Daniel, a second inscription, from Acts VII: 60, was added: ‘Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.’
Author’s Note
The sinking of the Mignonette and the death of Richard Parker are true events, and much of the dialogue has been based on the court transcripts and other papers accumulated at the time of the trial.
I have taken some small liberties with the course of events, however. I have omitted the surname of the Falmouth pilot Gustavus Lowry Collins to avoid confusion with Tom’s defence lawyer of the same surname, and I have also used dramatic licence in the two incidents where ships approached the castaways but did not stop.