THE terrible tales of a man and a woman transported from Cardigan in the 1800s have come to light, thanks to a new show about migration.

Human Cargo with Matthew Crampton and Jeff Warner tours Britain in May and June and is coming to Cardigan’s Theatr Mwldan on Wednesday, 16 May.

The show gives voice to past exiles – emigrants, slaves, transportees – to shed fresh light on today’s migrations. Through the accompanying Parallel Lives project, it includes – wherever it performs – local stories of migration and partnership with local refugee and migrant support groups.

In Cardigan they include Elinor James and Richard Edwards.

Elinor was famous for two reasons. First, she was the only woman transported from Cardigan.

In 1822 Elinor was caught stealing clothes from a house in Tremain. It was not seemingly her first crime; her jail report describes her as a thief from infancy.

At the Cardigan Great Sessions in September that year she was sentenced to be transported to Tasmania for seven years. But it was 18 months later when she embarked upon the transport ship Brothers, along with 88 other women prisoners.

In the meantime she stayed in London’s Newgate prison, where she also found fame, as she was seen and described by the great prison reformer Elizabeth Fry.

Fry talked of a woman from Cardigan arriving at Newgate with an iron hoop around her ankle. When this was removed, she fainted from the pain. It was replaced with something even worse – an iron hoop around her waist, connected by a chain to two further hoops, one around her thigh, one around her ankle. At night her hands were fastened to the hoop around her waist.

Fry detailed this excessive cruelty, along with the terrible practice of parading women convicts through London on open carts, where they would be showered in filth by onlookers.

Thanks to the example of Elinor, and others, Fry helped improve conditions for women prisoners and, in time, helped the abolition of transportation.

Elinor herself was one of 89 convicts transported on Brothers on 20 November 1823.

See this week’s south papers for the full feature, available in shops and as a digital edition now