Pod Insights ABC Rewind Great Aussie Cons | The Lady Imposter About this episode Young Alexandrina Grant is an audacious liar.
Host Richard Roxburgh follows this clever and ambitious crook as she travels from the alleys of Aberdeen to a convict cell in Van Diemen's Land, then onto the streets of colonial Melbourne.
It's there that Alexandrina Askew emerges, transformed into a squatter’s wife, with a distinguished pedigree and connections.
But when her disguise is revealed, the newspapers pounce. And this notorious fraudster has serious questions to answer.
Transcript 0:05 Speaker 00 G'day, Richard Roxburgh here, and our series: Great Aussie Cons. Hoaxes, grifters, swindlers, shady characters who are a touch slippery with the facts. Very big on imagination, less so on execution.
0:24 Speaker 00 Let's rewind 150 years to the story of the Lady Imposter. A young Scottish convict who goes on to become a household name in Melbourne. And she really is one sharp lady, but one who can't quite decide on a name for herself.
0:44 Speaker 01 Alexandrina Grant.
0:46 Speaker 02 Alias Jemima Mackenzie.
0:48 Speaker 03 And surprise, surprise, within six months Alexandrina was Mrs Asku.
0:53 Speaker 00 Yes, identity fraud wasn't born with the internet, it's a tale as old as time. This sad story begins in 1840s Scotland with a teenager pretending to be someone she isn't.
1:08 Speaker 01 Here is the tragedy of being unimportant, of being a nobody, when you believe that you are destined to be a somebody.
1:17 Speaker 00 So how did this young street urchin try to be a somebody?
1:22 Speaker 01 Being a fraudster, telling porky pies and getting people to give money.
1:27 Speaker 00 Her name is, supposedly, Alexandrina Grant, and she lives in the seedy back alleys of Aberdeen.
1:36 Speaker 01 She's far too good to be poor. Her sense of where she belonged in society, she had no hope of ever getting there.
1:46 Speaker 00 So who was this Lady Imposter?
1:56 Speaker 03 I'm Colette McAlpine. I'm a volunteer with the Female Convicts Research Centre in Tasmania. We find out where they came from and what happened to them. And our aim is to find out where they died.
2:09 Speaker 03 We really learn about Alexandrina from the National Records of Scotland trial reports.
2:16 Speaker 02 Aberdeen Circuit Court, 28th of September 1844. Alexandrina Grant.
2:24 Speaker 02 Alias Shamima Mackenzie.
2:26 Speaker 03 Her name probably wasn't Alexandrina Grant, and it certainly probably wasn't Shamima Mackenzie either.
2:32 Speaker 02 A good-looking girl of rather genteel appearance and about 19 years of age.
2:37 Speaker 01 She was pretty, she was charming, she was very articulate.
2:41 Speaker 02 Charged with falsehood, fraud, and willful imposition.
2:48 Speaker 00 Oh, this isn't looking good. But Miss Alexandrina Grant has been mischief-making for years before she's caught out. Her speciality is boarding house owners and shopkeepers.
3:02 Speaker 03 She started conning people very young, maybe 15, 16. In Alexandrina's case, what we can glean is from the newspapers.
3:14 Speaker 02 Aberdeen Herald, 1844. This girl is well-known about Inverness. Her feats are somewhat amusing. The first charge was having fraudulently got a lace collar from Mrs Lindsay, lodging housekeeper, Huntley Street.
3:31 Speaker 00 It always starts small. A lace collar one day, a diamond one the next.
3:37 Speaker 01 I'm Janet McAlman. I'm a historian in Australian history. Alexandrina Grant plays on people who want to be associated with a lady. She knows how to read their behaviour. She played on people's snobbery.
3:54 Speaker 02 She put the ribbon upon her bonnet in the shop, and when ready to go, expressed her regret that she had forgotten her purse. She said she would call that night and pay for the goods.
4:06 Speaker 02 And not appearing at the promised time, Mrs McDonald set out in search of her.
4:11 Speaker 01 Alexandrina was born in jail, and both her parents at various times had been transported to Van Diemen's Land. And I thought, oh, this will be easy to trace. And one of the brothers, for instance, was called Dennis. That's Dennis Grant. I discovered there wasn't a Dennis Grant in the whole of Scotland until the 20th century. And she invented a family with seven brothers and a living father of significance.
4:39 Speaker 02 So let's unpack this for a moment. Born in a jail, parents sent off to a penal colony, and an invented collection of brothers. I'm almost feeling sorry for our young fraudster. But she keeps digging that hole. She said she had arrived from England, where her father was a general officer who had sent her to Scotland for her education.
5:06 Speaker 01 And she was able to spin these fantastical stories in shops in Aberdeen.
5:12 Speaker 02 Our impostor has perfected the art of the tall story, and dare I say it, she's very astute. She creates identities that suit her cons beautifully. The girl knows how to read a room. Mrs Lindsay gave her lodger breakfast and a pair of gloves and a lace collar. Thus equipped, the fair stranger set out to visit her uncle, and she asked her landlady to allow a boy to accompany her. The boy, however, got the slip, and the young lady disappeared.
5:48 Speaker 03 Somewhere along the line, she learnt how to hold herself with poise and to tell a story that was engaging and believable.
5:57 Speaker 02 So where might a young girl born in jail have learnt how the other half lived?
6:03 Speaker 01 Well, I would think she would have been apprenticed as a servant as a child. Now, that's what happened to children without parents. What you've got is someone who invented a complete fantasy self, someone with connections.
6:17 Speaker 02 Her name, she said, was Miss Crookshank, daughter of General Crookshank of Pluzcarda.
6:26 Speaker 00 And after rummaging among the concealed finery of the Three Bells establishment, she fixed upon several articles the amount of about £2.10, the money to be paid on the day following. She set out with her purchase and soon...
6:41 Speaker 01 She'd go around the corner and disappear.
6:43 Speaker 00 Disappeared.
6:46 Speaker 00 Mrs. Ewing found out that she had been fairly duped.
6:50 Speaker 03 These are not normal behaviours, one would suggest, for, you know, someone who was probably only about 16.
6:57 Speaker 01 Today, you can be clinical about it and say she was a compulsive or pathological liar. At the same time, the pathos of what she did and the stories that she developed is what's very moving about her.
7:13 Speaker 00 Alexandrina becomes bolder as her fame and notoriety grow. But, as clever as she is, she eventually slips up.
7:23 Speaker 01 The Scottish adventures didn't last very long. She became unstuck with her deception. She was going into shops in Aberdeen, she got caught out.
7:32 Speaker 03 Alexandrina Grant was found guilty of behaving in a fraudulent manner.
7:36 Speaker 00 The third charge was having defrauded the people in several houses where she had gone to lodge by similar representations. And so, it's straight from the courthouse to the clink for young Alexandrina. Where she has lain for three months.
7:52 Speaker 01 Then, her case was all over the papers. Everyone found her fascinating. Fascinating because she had such a presence. She had such deportment and charm.
8:04 Speaker 00 Kind of like the shifty scammers we revel in today. A pretty young woman, how could she do such things? Our 19th-century fraudster is swiftly sent south to London's notorious Milbank Prison. And then it's all aboard the convict ship Tory, bound for, you know where.
8:28 Speaker 03 And off to Australia.
8:40 Speaker 03 Alexandrina was transported to Van Diemen's Land with 170 other women and 24 children. She was transported for seven years. That was the average sentence that women were sent to Van Diemen's Land.
8:53 Speaker 03 They spent almost four months at sea.
8:57 Speaker 00 Seventeen-year-old Alexandrina Grant fits in beautifully with life on board. The ship's surgeon notes, "Our clever chameleon is orderly but precious."
9:10 Speaker 01 So she's orderly. She knows how to behave. She knows how to do the right thing. But she's got an air about her, had airs and graces and was representing herself to be something that she wasn't.
9:23 Speaker 00 The Tory finally arrives in Hobart Harbour in the winter of 1845.
9:29 Speaker 03 The women would have alighted the ship from the docks very early in the morning, probably as early as 4am. And it would have been cold because it was the middle of winter.
9:40 Speaker 00 Alexandrina and her fellow passengers are destined for the Cascade's Female Factory, a prison workhouse for convict women. Tour guide Sarah Hamilton walks us in their footprints.
9:54 Speaker 04 So they would have walked out in darkness, a lot of them carrying children. And it was known as the Walk of Shame. The reason they were made to walk in darkness was because it was to protect them, because the colony was mainly men and there was a lot of alcohol flowing. So it was quite unsafe for the women. And then as they came up the Hobart Ribulet, they would have seen these large walls looming and our beautiful Kunani, Mount Wellington, in the early dawn.
10:25 Speaker 03 Very luckily, when Alexandrina was walking up there and looking at that view, the mountain was snow-capped. It may even have been snowing. There was a little bit of Scotland still in her view.
10:41 Speaker 00 The prison started its life as a distillery. But in 1828, it's converted into the convict workhouse for women.
10:50 Speaker 00 It's a rough place to be locked up, a tough place to work. But its record-keeping is second to none.
10:59 Speaker 04 So when women arrived here, all of their details were recorded. And this is what it says for Alexandrina. Marital status: Single. Age: Seventeen when sentenced and eighteen on arrival, so born around 1827. Five foot two inches tall, freckled, light brown hair, grey eyes. Native place: Aberdeen, Scotland. Religion: Church of Scotland. Trade on arrival: Housemaid. And here's a note saying that she can read and write. And the Aberdeen prison record, however, says that she cannot read and write. Interesting. She hid it, maybe.
11:36 Speaker 00 Could it be another deception? Because...
11:40 Speaker 01 Very few of the Scottish convicts were illiterate. That's where they were different from the English and the Irish. It goes back to the Reformation and the Reverend John Knox. If you were to be a proper Christian, you had to be able to read the Bible.
11:54 Speaker 00 Maybe Alexandrina is telling the truth for once.
12:01 Speaker 00 Anyway, her skills and good behaviour en route to the colony make her a first-class convict, avoiding the third-class workhouse. Even in jail, you can't escape the British class system.
12:15 Speaker 04 Third class is where the women who were assessed to be poorly behaved on the voyage out, that's where they would go. And in third class, you would undergo severe punishment. In first class, you get the chance to leave this place and go out and work for free settlers out in the colony.
12:31 Speaker 03 When convicts were sent out to service, they lived on-site. First person we know about Alexandrina working for was Josiah Spode at Newtown. He had been the chief police magistrate and, in fact, a member of the Legislative Council. He would have had his pick of the best servants.
12:51 Speaker 00 So how does Alexandrina manage to land such a job first up?
12:56 Speaker 01 What she was to have told them was a pack of porky pies about what she could do.
13:04 Speaker 01 And she probably told them she'd been a ladies' maid, or she'd been a housekeeper, or she'd done this and worked for Lady this and Lady that. And all of it was nonsense, probably spending most of her time trying to make impressions on people rather than doing the work. So they got very cross with her and sent her back.
13:20 Speaker 00 Up to your old tricks again eh Alexandrina? What are you thinking?
13:25 Speaker 03 When she returned to the factory, she got two months' hard labour in the third class.
13:33 Speaker 04 I can actually see on her record here, she would have been in there either sewing or spinning wool.
13:42 Speaker 04 And get this, she was sentenced to six months' hard labour here, and half of that time, three months was spent in a separate working cell. So she was on her own for three months.
13:56 Speaker 00 She talks up her skills, fabricates work histories, and gets caught out by her employers time and time again, always ending up back at the dreaded Cascades. Why does she do it to herself?
14:12 Speaker 00 Anyway, three years after she arrives in the colony at just 20 years old, one of her escapes not only puts her in solitary, but also in the family way.
14:24 Speaker 03 About May 1848, Alexandrina conceived a child, and he was born in the factory. In 1849, she called him John Rotherick Grant.
14:36 Speaker 01 I tried to follow up on the name she gave her son, which is a bit pretentious for someone in her position from Scotland.
14:44 Speaker 04 Look here, so illegitimate son, John Rotherick Grant, born 14 January 1849, Hobart. That we know of, we had 2,166 babies born here. Only 640 survived, so that was a death rate of over 70%.
15:03 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's staggering.
15:09 Speaker 00 Women who have babies in the prison are allowed to nurse them for six months, but then the surviving infants are taken away from their mothers and sent to the orphanage in Hobart.
15:20 Speaker 04 John Rotherick Grant, he didn't go to orphan school, so I can only assume that he died.
15:26 Speaker 00 Losing their baby, whether it's through death or removal, is too much for many of the convict women to bear. But Alexandrina appears resilient. Perhaps creating a fanciful world in her head helps her cope.
15:42 Speaker 01 Well, I think she survived Cascades and everything else because she enveloped herself in a personal bubble of her own fanciful identity. That was not the real her. The real her was something much grander. And so she was able to deceive herself, as well as deceive others.
16:06 Speaker 00 Finally, in 1852, at the age of 25, Alexandrina gets her ticket to freedom and walks herself right out of the Cascades female factory and into a new life.
16:21 Speaker 04 For male convicts, when they were released, they were actually given land. But for a female convict, you had to marry to have any success in the world out there, really. A lot of women, once they were freed, they didn't want to be associated with this story. They didn't want to be thought of as a convict. So they changed their names, they moved away from here, they married. Probably didn't tell their partner they'd been a convict if they could get away with that. They really did try to disappear.
16:52 Speaker 00 And this is exactly what Alexandrina does. Yet again, she reinvents herself.
16:59 Speaker 03 As soon as she got her certificate of freedom, she left the state. Within a month, she was on a ship bound for Victoria. And surprise, surprise, within six months of arriving in Victoria, Alexandrina was Mrs. Askew.
17:13 Speaker 01 All the convicts had to reinvent themselves. She's not told her husband anything. She certainly didn't tell him her real age. She didn't tell him, I'm sure, that she'd already had a baby, who had died, and that she'd been a convict. And then hoped to heavens that someone didn't sidle up along the main street of Ballarat one day and say, "Yeah, I know you", and that they'd be outed.
17:39 Speaker 03 This was an opportunity to leave her past behind.
17:43 Speaker 00 But will Alexandrina take the opportunity? Her new husband is William Askew, a miner who's sailed over from England. And as far as we know, they're living a settled, respectable life in the Victorian town of Bulldog. William's mining, and Alexandrina's busy managing their growing brood. Five children so far in as many years. But it seems she can't quite shake old habits.
18:12 Speaker 02 Lady Swindler.
18:15 Speaker 03 Alexandrina was able to seize an opportunity, even if it meant defrauding someone else, as she did.
18:22 Speaker 00 Ballarat Star, November 1867.
18:26 Speaker 02 A very clever series of depredations has recently been perpetrated by a lady swindler, as she is termed by the victims.
18:34 Speaker 00 At the age of 40, 15 years after she's released from Hobart's Cascades Female Factory, Alexandrina creates headlines in the Melbourne papers.
18:46 Speaker 02 Alexandrina Askew was brought up on a charge of having obtained, under false pretenses, the sum of £18 from Mrs. Wise. The woman, it appears, has been victimising a number of persons in various parts of the country.
19:00 Speaker 01 The second big outbreak of telling porky pies at the time that I picked her up in the newspapers in 1867, where she became celebrated in Victoria as the Lady Imposter, seems to have been after she lost a child.
19:16 Speaker 02 She appears to be substantially dressed, to be of middle age. Her matronly appearance and port may have enabled her to- herself off as a squatter's wife. She was accompanied by a boy about ten years of age, dressed in Highland costume.
19:30 Speaker 00 So what went wrong? Why? After fifteen years of abiding by the law, would Alexandrina suddenly revert to her fraudulent ways? Historian Janet McAlman tries to make sense of it.
19:46 Speaker 01 I think that the pathology was triggered by emotional loss.
19:53 Speaker 00 Now, none of us are psychiatrists, but it appears she may have lost a baby around this time.
20:00 Speaker 01 The newspapers went to town on her. I mean, it was wonderful copy.
20:05 Speaker 02 False pretenses.
20:06 Speaker 01 They found her enormously entertaining. It was fascinating.
20:10 Speaker 02 It appears that the lady has been in the habit of visiting lodging houses and inquiring for apartments. She describes herself as the wife of a squatter, and that she requires the apartments for herself and husband. Having agreed to take the lodgings, she proceeds to pay a deposit, when, on feeling in her pocket, she cries, "I've lost my purse! They have stolen my purse", and forthwith commences to lament and bemoan her loss. The landlady naturally takes compassion on her forlorn condition and promptly offers her the loan of a few pounds to alleviate her distress, until she has time to communicate with her husband. The offer is accepted. After many refusals,
20:51 Speaker 02 and the would-be lodger goes on her way, rejoicing, never to return again.
20:57 Speaker 00 Alexandrina continues from Ballarat to Bacchus Marsh. And then, the self-proclaimed squatter's wife decides to try her luck in the big smoke.
21:09 Speaker 01 She turns up in Melbourne, apparently well dressed.
21:13 Speaker 02 The highly respectable borough of Richmond was honoured with her presence.
21:17 Speaker 03 She was able to convince them that she was from a different class than they were, and that they almost needed to do as she said.
21:26 Speaker 01 She played on people's snobbery.
21:30 Speaker 02 Mrs. Askew was the wife of a squatter, and had come to town to make purchases in anticipation. of the visit of Prince Alfred. Her external appearance corroborated her statement.
21:42 Speaker 01 She said she wanted to buy a buggy in Richmond. They were charmed by her and they ended up having cups of tea in the parlor and wonderful conversation and she told them all about her wonderful life. Married a big grazier and she had cattle and sheep and so on, and that she had a shop. And all of this elaborate wealth that she detailed.
22:05 Speaker 04 Maybe she was just a really good actor. She could put on an accent and walk the walk and talk the talk.
22:11 Speaker 00 Maybe on some level she really believes it all. I'd cast her in something.
22:18 Speaker 01 And then when she had to go and pay the deposit, oh my goodness, I've lost my purse. And then tears and all that sort of thing.
22:26 Speaker 02 But that her purse was gone, and what in the world was she to do? Oh, of course, she left it at home.
22:35 Speaker 01 And to make the story more powerful, she would have her little boy with her, dressed in Highland dress.
22:42 Speaker 02 Charlie, did you see my purse at home when we were leaving?
22:46 Speaker 01 Yes, Mama, I saw it on the dressing table.
22:49 Speaker 02 But what was she to do now?
22:51 Speaker 01 And on cue, he would burst into tears, she bursts into tears and he bursts into tears. And of course, the people felt so terribly sorry for her and she said they would lend her the money.
23:12 Speaker 01 She manipulated her victims into offering things freely to her. So it was a loan that she had not even solicited. So that meant the police had a very difficult job to rein her in in Victoria.
23:28 Speaker 00 The Bacchus Marsh Express, January 1868.
23:32 Speaker 02 Mrs Alexandrina Askew is now clear from the penalties as a borrower of money from various people.
23:40 Speaker 00 When they find out they've been conned, Alexandrina's victims are mortified, far too embarrassed to pursue charges. And the ever faithful Mr. Askew promises to pay it all back. And she keeps on keeping on with one fraud after the other.
23:58 Speaker 02 This certainly goes far to
24:00 Speaker 00 Prove her insanity.
24:02 Speaker 01 Well, it is a form of insanity, or today they would say a personality disorder. But the behaviour, which would have been compulsive, is triggered by depression. It seems to have been, in her case, triggered by loss.
24:18 Speaker 00 By now, she's infamous. Whenever the name Alexandrina appears in the paper, the public rushes to read all about her latest ruse and who fell for it. And the reporters keep their feeding frenzy going. Now, is this sounding familiar?
24:36 Speaker 01 She went on for about nine months with this spree before they finally got her on charge of vagrancy. By then, she'd become notorious.
24:47 Speaker 00 Alexandrina is now 50. Can she change her ways? Perhaps it's time for the family to move on. A clean start?
24:56 Speaker 01 They then decide that they need to get out of Victoria and go to Sydney.
25:01 Speaker 00 In Sydney, Alexandrina buys and runs a boarding house in Paddington. She goes quiet, disappears from the records for a few decades.
25:15 Speaker 01 She went on to have around, in the end, about nine children and seems to have been a devoted mother, and they were devoted to her. I mean, she probably was a very good storyteller. She probably was quite magical, making things up and wonderful stories about Scotland and Major Grant and all this stuff that she would go on about.
25:36 Speaker 00 But then, a reveal. It turns out she kept up the act to the grave. It takes historian Janet McCallman years to locate Alexandrina's death certificate. And when she does, surprise, surprise, things don't add up.
25:57 Speaker 01 She lived finally to be about 86, and her children wrote on her death certificate that her father had been a teacher in Aberdeen. But the information on her death certificate was all fantasy. There's no evidence that her family knew her true story. But of course, that applied to a huge number of descendants of convicts. The thing about history and genealogy is it's cruel because we go and dig out all the things that people wanted hidden. And in the Australian story, there's a lot of people who had things they wanted hidden.
26:37 Speaker 01 I admire her for making the best of it and sticking with it.
26:43 Speaker 04 A lot of women turned to alcohol to cope. They became institutionalised or they died really young. So it takes huge courage and perseverance for a woman like Alexandrina to forge a life for herself, having endured such incredible hardships in a place like this.
27:05 Speaker 00 Alexandrina's fantasies became her reality. She had the skills to turn her life around. And sometimes, she put them to good use to achieve the destiny she deserved.
27:19 Speaker 01 The point is, she kept going, she kept working, she loved her family, they loved her, and she lived to be 86, while very few of the convict women were able to thrive or triumph in the way Alexandrina did.
27:33 Speaker 00 And I do wonder how many of us have family stories like this, hidden deep, behind documents washed clean of all the dirty bits, for history to bury.
27:51 Speaker 00 The Lady Imposter, in our series Great Aussie Cons, was produced by Roz Bluit. The sound engineer was Russell Stapleton. I'm Richard Roxburgh, and next time, we bring you the sorry tale of the only Australian spy ever to be outed in public by ASIO. See you then.
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