Dark Days of Georgian Britain

by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)

  Relying on religion and the noose was the philosophy of the whole prison system in the late Georgian period. Religion provided moral guidance and penitence for crimes, and a conveniently placed public gallows provided exemplary lessons in the fate of convicted criminals.

  The system was held back by the fact the British did not really like the idea of prisons very much. It was preferable to launch the criminal either into eternity, or into Botany Bay – hanging or transportation. When it was reluctantly accepted that criminals would remain in prison, the debate began about what to do with them. Deterrence and punishment was taken as read; reform was accepted as an aim, but the method was not agreed. As more criminals spent more time behind bars, there needed to be experiments with different types of punishment.

  Solitary confinement was new, and was in use after Coldbath Fields opened in 1794. The poets Coleridge and Southey condemned it:

  As he went through Coldbath Fields he saw

  A solitary cell;

  And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint

  For improving his prisons in hell.

  Coldbath Fields became perhaps the most feared and hated prison in the country, and the one used by the Spencean Philanthropists to agitate the population before the Spa Fields riots of 1816 as it could be seen in the distance, looming over them.

  Complete isolation was used in many prisons for minor property offences; stealing oats or eggs would attract a month or two in solitary confinement – twenty-three hours a day in a cell on your own with nothing to distract you. It was originally introduced as a method of moral improvement; it would remove the prisoner from the corrupting influence of others, but it was now clear to many that even the briefest period could lead to mental instability.

  Sir Francis Burdett was, inevitably, against solitary confinement. In a debate where a debtor was locked up on his own for eleven days in Lincoln castle in 1812, Burdett pointed out that there was a difference between isolating people from bad influences and driving them mad with loneliness. Henry Grey Benett brought up the situation in 1816 at Petworth House of Correction in Sussex where prisoners had a mere fifteen minutes association a day, and one woman had been in solitary confinement for three years, eventually going insane. Benett’s opponents pointed out that she had been disturbed prior to this having threatened arson to the house of a local gentlemen, and that the isolation at Petworth was due to lack of communal facilities, which were now being built. It did seem that it was the buildings that were deciding the policies rather than the policies dictating what type of prisons were built.

  Benett finished with a strong warning and an accidental prediction:

  the system of solitary was carried to such an extent that even during divine service they were cooped in wooden boxes that no prisoner could see another.

  He did not know that by the 1830s this type of isolation was to become a policy not a criticism.

  It was a constant struggle to inflict a just measure of pain on prisoners. Part of this involved work – work was meant to be redemptive, but it was as difficult to arrange in the prisons as it was in the workhouse. The most common activity was the picking of wet and dry oakum, an activity that was common to both workhouse and prison. It involved teasing the fibres from large tarred ropes, with the raw material extracted being used in shipbuilding to fill in the gaps between the wooden planks of ships. In 1818 a ton of dry oakum could fetch £4 and an 1818 report into the Middlesex House of Correction suggested that the actual value of the work done by prisoners was less than 1d a day. It was one of the few activities that was so uneconomic that free labour on the outside would be extremely reluctant to do it. It destroyed the hands and posture, and was tiring and tedious. Kezia King, committed to Coldbath Fields for passing false shillings at a West End Fair in Hampstead, told a government report in 1818 that she appreciated her post as yard warden, washing and guarding new vagrants, prostitutes, and violent women, because ‘she did not pick the oakum’.

  Another solution to the problem of providing disciplined work and correction was the treadmill or tread wheel. It was first used in the Surrey House of Correction at Brixton in 1816 and was usually called the tread wheel, because it rarely had any milling or grinding apparatus attached it. It was tedious, degrading work that, unlike oakum picking, did not make conversation easy, or encroach on proper work done outside the institution by free labour. No time was needed in teaching new skills and no materials could be stolen. It could be made more difficult by chaining prisoners together or running the wheel for longer. Some wheels could be modified to make physically stronger prisoners work harder. Those who opposed it saw it as an extra punishment rather than a legitimate prison activity, and unjust because it had not been specifically prescribed as part of their punishment. Those who refused to take part at Brixton were put in solitary confinement in the ‘dark cell’, which suggests that solitary was regarded as an even worse punishment.

  Newgate was the Regency prison that has attracted the most attention however, both then and now. On Thursday, 22 October 1818, Newgate contained 376 prisoners; it was normally much more overcrowded. On 7 September the number had been 578.

  In October, there were thirty-six prisoners in the forty condemned cells on the lower ground floor waiting to be executed, or more likely, waiting to see if the punishment would be respited. The condemned cells had been built in the 1770s on the understanding that this was more than enough, but they were regularly full after 1815.

  Two of these condemned cells were occupied by James Higgins and William Mitchell, both 24 years old. They were found guilty of breaking and entering; stealing clothes, shoe buckles, watches, sugar ladles, a wine strainer, and anything else they could carry out of the prosperous household of Edward Dawson in Bloomsbury in September 1818. They would have waited for a reprieve; it could be hoped for, but not expected, and would have been agony. On 19 May 1820 they were transported to Australia. That was a long time on death row. There were twenty-six men and forty-one women imprisoned on 22 October 1818 who knew for a fact that they were going to be transported. Some would be moved to a prison hulk first; a prospect that was even more worrying than Newgate. Those with a fourteen-year or life sentence would have had little to lose and no reason to behave well. There were 114 women in total in Newgate, and the official capacity was sixty. The women were mostly guilty of petty property crimes rather than acts of violence or extensive theft.

  There were thirty female and twenty male prisoners actually serving a sentence for misdemeanours, but by far the greatest number were the transient population of those awaiting trial at the Old Bailey. On 7 September 1818, the newspapers reported the biggest number of prisoners awaiting trial that had been known for many decades. Amongst the murderers and habitual prisoners was gardener William Hayward, who was accused of stealing a cucumber. As there was no classification or separation of prisoners, William would have had to take his chances with hardened criminals. He was 77.

  Lawrence Halloran was in Newgate for forging the handwriting of a member of parliament to fraudulently claim the free postage for letters. His stay at Newgate was short; in December he and 300 other prisoners sailed on the Baring to New South Wales and arrived there six months later. Halloran was a doctor of divinity with a large family, who wrote poems and stories and had, in total, defrauded the state of 10d. He subsequently established a school at Sydney, which he conducted very successfully and, presumably, honestly. He died there in March 1831, aged a respectable 75.

  Laurence Halloran and William Hayward would have been in a gaol at the same time as the pimp Francis Losch, awaiting trial for murdering his wife with a vicious slash to the stomach when she refused to continue being a prostitute. The pimp, the crooked cleric, and the aged gardener would all have been in the same position. They may have shared a kitchen, which had been recently opened to prevent prisoners cooking their own food in any corner of the prison with the subsequent mess and dirt that was produced. Prisoners received no bedding or clo
thes – rich inmates would buy them, the most powerful would steal them, and the weaker ones would soon be naked. There was no supply of soap. If you had no money of your own, there was no supply of anything.

  Perhaps Losch or another hardened criminal could have scared or corrupted Samuel Dukes and John Jones, both 15, who had stolen some teaspoons, beer and cheese and were also transported to Australia.

  Also living with no soap was John Fitzgerald, found guilty of ‘stealing from the person’ on 9 September and was in Newgate awaiting transportation. We know for a fact that Lawrence Halloran and John Fitzgerald did not have a conversation in prison, for John was deaf and dumb. It did not stop him receiving a life sentence in Australia. The two men went out on the same convict ship, from possibly the same hulk.

  Hulks were floating prisons, usually a pensioned off Royal Navy vessel, anchored off the south of England in places such as Portsmouth, Sheerness, and Woolwich. They were used for temporarily holding prisoners before transportation to Australia. They were not the same as convict ships, which still had the ability to sail. The hulk was usually not part of the sentence, and was merely a place to wait until a ship was ready to sail. Most prisoners spent more than three months there, although much longer periods were not unknown and the prospect was terrifying for even the most hardened criminal. If you could bribe the gaoler, it could be arranged for you to spend longer in prison and less time on the ship. If your conviction coincided with the departure of a convict ship, you could avoid the hulk completely.

  The petty criminal James Hardy Vaux was different to most Georgian criminals as he was intelligent enough to leave a biography, and charming enough to be given lots of chances by the gullible.2 In 1809 he was convicted of the theft of jewellery. He had originally been sentenced to death, but like most in the Regency, was respited and given seven years transportation. He tried and failed to get himself aboard the Anne, which was just about to leave for Australia. Instead, he was sent in chains to the hulk Retribution at Woolwich to await the next sailing ship. He left the prison by cart with the eleven others; family would be allowed to say goodbye at this point, their grief made worse by the fact that the transportation of the main breadwinner would mean destitution for the family.

  Like all Regency prisons, Retribution was overcrowded, with 600 men, mostly double ironed. Unless it was a stinking low tide on the Thames, convicts in chains would have rowed Vaux across the river. Vaux was then stripped and washed in cold water, given a coarse, cheap suit to wear and put in irons. Each ankle would have an iron fetter attached by a chain, shackled in the middle to a belt around the waist to stop the chain dragging on the ground. Some men were physically deformed for life by this double chaining; not so much when it was worn as when it was taken off. In theory their old clothes were kept to allow them to sell later; what they did not know was that when they finally got on the convict ship, their clothes would all be thrown overboard.

  Most inmates would be expected to work, mostly at government owned military bases at the Woolwich Arsenal. Ten working hours a day was common in summer. They would perform various labouring jobs in groups of twenty, overseen by prison wardens who were ‘most commonly of the lowest class of human beings, wretches devoid of all feeling, ignorant in the extreme, brutal by nature and rendered tyrannical and cruel by the consciousness of the power they possess’.3 Vaux also reported that prisoners on the hulks were beaten unconscious in a way that did not happen in the prisons.

  The diet was as cruel as the workload. The hulks were run by private enterprise contractors who bought the cheapest provisions they could find to feed the inmates. Vaux reported that breakfast was boiled barley which was so bad that there was often some left to feed pigs; there was meat four days a week but it was from animals that had died of old age. On days when no meat was served (banyan days in navy parlance) there was a vegetable or corn bread stew called burgoo; when there was cheese, it was an inferior type made with skimmed milk.

  Thomas Holden, who was sent to the hulk Portland in 1812, agrees about the food in this letter to his wife:

  We have nothing but oatmeal and barley boiled for our breakfast and supper night and morning for our whole time; and we have about half a pound of very bad beef and a pound and a quarter of brown bread four days a week for dinner, and the other three days we have the same bread and seven ounces of very bad cheese.

  Prisoners were not allowed visitors and letters were censored; when Vaux was there for a few months he claimed to have witnessed one murder, one suicide and many ‘unnatural acts’. The aspect of the hulks that really terrified Vaux was the fact that bonds of solidarity and camaraderie that he enjoyed in prison dissolved immediately on the hulks; Vaux noticed that former friends would rob and cheat one another and that it was every man for himself on the prison ships.

  On 15 June 1810, his memoirs suggest that he was highly delighted to be put on a convict ship of 200 prisoners and transported to Botany Bay. He preferred it to the hulk, but probably would not agree with Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough, who suggested that transportation was akin to ‘a summer airing by an easy migration to a milder climate’.

  Life continued on the Retribution after James Vaux had left for New South Wales. The contractors were offered an extra 3d per day to feed the prisoners in October 1810. In 1811, the authorities spent money bringing the Retribution up to the standard of the other hulks by building wooden barriers to separate the decks, stopping the prisoners on the three decks from communicating at night. The inmates rioted and tore them down and they were not rebuilt. At that time, inmates were sleeping on straw, and the stench caused by the hundreds of dirty men sleeping on three crowded decks would make the most hardened prison officer wretch. There was so little oxygen in the ship that candles would not light. At night the inmates were left to their own devices.4 It was commented in the 1814 report that morale on the Retribution was higher than the Captivity at Portsmouth and the Laurel at Gosport because there was work for all inmates at the Woolwich Ordnance and this was not the case on the Solent, where too many people were left unsupervised during the day.

  By 1814, Retribution was the only hulk with no purpose-built chapel. The guns had gone, and instead of sails there were ramshackle workshops, chimneys, and drying washing. Death rates remained higher than on any other ship. In 1816 dysentery struck, but in 1817 the Pentrich prisoners noted that it had a chapel and was not as bad as was reputed. In Great Expectations, set in 1812, the desperate criminal Abel Magwitch escaped from a hulk on the Thames – described by Dickens as ‘a black hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains.’ This sounds like the Retribution, and the whole prison system sounded like retribution.

  Chapter 18

  Child Labour

  Even before industrialisation, children worked and were expected to earn money for their parents. Labour was the obligation of all; in a very religious age, the fourth commandment, by the very act of allowing one day of rest implied six days of labour a week. Young children working was not a problem to people at the time and it would be anachronistic for us to see it in that way. The only real difficulty with child labour was that there often was not enough of it.

  Children in the rural areas would start work when they were physically able to do it. Their work consisted of bird scaring, weeding, sowing crops, feeding animals, and driving horses or working in gangs to bring in the harvest. If domestic textile work was being done, the children could assist by cleaning and carding wool, flax or cotton.

  Thomas Bachelor reported on child labour in his native Bedfordshire in 1808. In a good year there was plenty of work for children. Non-working children were a cause of poverty, and Bachelor believed that the low poor rate and general prosperity of Bedfordshire was due to the wide availability of children’s work.

  Bedfordshire was unusual in this period because it had two expanding rural industries when most others were declining. Straw plait ma
king was a major industry, thanks to the local wheat that produced straw of distinctive colour and high strength for the production of hats in nearby Luton. It was an easy task for children, although adults did it as well. Picking and grading of straw for plaiting could begin at 4 years of age; plaiting began at 6 or 7. Some believed that many girls failed to go to school and learn to read due to the easy availability of work.

  Lace making was also an option for girls. They would start about 6 or 7 years old and learn the trade in lace-making schools and two years later were adept enough to make lace commercially. This would earn their families about 2s per week. They would work a fourteen-hour day in both summer and winter, starting at 6 am in summer and a few hours later in winter. So, when these families migrated to towns and encountered the working conditions in cotton mills, the hours of work would not surprise them.

  Boys in Bedfordshire worked in agriculture. A ‘boy of all work’, aged about 12, would live in the farmer’s household for £2 to £3 a year. He would receive board and lodging, usually eat at the same table as the family and be treated like one of them. Other agricultural jobs would be ploughing and harrowing, and other transport work that involved guiding a horse or an ox under the supervision of an adult.

  In non-agricultural work, children around 14 were apprenticed to trades such as upholstering, gun making, haberdashery, goldsmithing, carpentry, gardening, linen drapery, carving and gilding, baking, coopering, grocering, soap-making, sail-making, trunk-making, brass plate working, stationers, stockbrokers, builders, and surveyors. Apprenticeships were meant to be a regulated market. There was a fixed term of seven years, during which the apprentice would normally live with the master. Apprenticeships were the same length for all trades, and an apprentice could usually expect better conditions in the second half of his time, with perhaps half pay and some accommodation paid for. This had been the system since Tudor times.