What is "turnkeys"

Usage examples of "turnkeys".

A numerous world, however, for although it had at first been considered that half a dozen convicts would serve as a sufficient blind to cover Mrs Wogan's transportation - to make it seem something other than the most exceptional measure that in fact it was - some of the other bodies or departments concerned had been unable to resist adding to the number, so that it had grown to well above a score, with a superintendent, a surgeon, and a chaplain, besides the usual guards or turnkeys, to look after them.

Now the unfortunate, pompous, brutal, pretentious fellow was dead, and that meant that Jack would either have to shuffle the responsibility for the convicts off on to the useless half -witted illiterate turnkeys or assume it himself.

I asked the turnkeys - God-damned half-baked whoreson lubbers - and all they could tell me was that Barrington, the pickpocket, you remember, was allowed to mess with the bosun.

During the first week the log had recorded the burial of fourteen convicts, the two remaining turnkeys, and a loblolly boy, all of whom had lived or worked forward, and it had recorded them in Needham's fine copperplate: now it was Jack's far rougher hand that wrote the daily list, for his clerk had gone over the side with two cannon-balls to carry him down and his hammock for a shroud, the first of those abaft the mast to die of the disease.

Seeing a stranger, escorted by two turnkeys holding torches and accompanied by two soldiers, and to whom the governor spoke bareheaded, Dantes, who guessed the truth, and that the moment to address himself to the superior authorities was come, sprang forward with clasped hands.

Other turnkeys came, and then was heard the regular tramp of soldiers.