The Lost Girls: The Devastation of Milborough Trilloe

While researching my ancestral parish of Much Marcle, Herefordshire, I uncovered a court record that told a story far more desperate than my own family's hardships. It was the story of Milborough Trilloe, a widowed agricultural labourer, whose life reveals the struggle of survival faced by the rural poor in the 1840s.

My Evans family line moved to Wales from this same parish. My ancestor Richard Evans, a one-handed farm labourer, knew relentless toil and tragedy, losing three children in a month in 1861. His life frames the harsh reality Milborough inhabited, but her plight was more precarious still.

In 1841, Milborough was living in Much Marcle with her three young sons, John 10, Thomas 9, and Alfred 2. She worked the fields to feed them after being widowed.

The following year, pregnant by a man from Ross, she confided her fears to a friend. On June 24, 1842, she gave birth alone. She later recounted that the child "gaped once or twice and died shortly after." The child still attached to her, with a pair of scissors, she cut the cord. In a state of shock and physical trauma, she took a broken spade to her neighbour's garden and dug a shallow grave.

Apprehended two weeks later, she led the constable to the spot. A doctor's postmortem claimed the child had been strangled. At her trial for wilful murder, her defence argued the death was involuntary, caused by the agony of childbirth. The jury returned a guilty verdict with a recommendation for mercy. The judge, however, sentenced her to hang.

A public petition succeeded, and Queen Victoria commuted her sentence to transportation for life. After a year of failing mental health from the trauma endured, she was deemed fit to travel, to be shipped to the other side of the world. On November 16, 1843, she departed on the Emma Eugenia with 171 other female convicts, bound for Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania).

Unbeknownst to Milborough, during her probation in the colony, her youngest son, Alfred, died in the Ross workhouse back in England. He was five years old.

In 1846, she married Thomas Parsons in Van Diemen’s Land. He was killed six years later in a bullock cart accident. In September 1852, a full pardon for her crime was finally issued.

I have yet to trace Milborough’s life after this pardon. Did she find stability, or was she forever marked by her trauma? Her two surviving sons in England would have been young men; whether they ever learned their mother’s fate is lost to history.

Milborough Trilloe’s story is more than a personal tragedy. It is a stark lens on the vulnerabilities of poor women, the limited options before them, and the brutal, world-altering reach of 19th-century British justice. Her journey from the hop yards of Herefordshire to the penal colonies of Tasmania was paved by desperation, a moment of crisis, and a society quick to condemn but slow to protect.

Milborough was not alone in her exile. Over 24,000 women were transported to Tasmania and Australia. Most crimes they had committed were for petty theft, a consequence of the poverty they endured. For some they didn’t even have to commit a crime to receive this harsh penalty. During the Great Famine in Ireland, the British Government sent over four thousand Irish orphans, aged between 14 and 19, from workhouses. The most vulnerable girls in society were sent to become domestic servants and wives to boost the population of the colony. Many of whom suffered hardship and abuse.

To discover more about the lives of women and children sent to Van Diemen’s Land, visit the Female Convicts Research Centre, a volunteer charity promoting research into their lives.

Visit the Female Convicts Research Centre