The Prison Cookbook
Page 7
Despite all the setbacks, order was gradually achieved and the colony became established, something which probably owed much to the remarkable personal qualities of Arthur Phillip. Life in Australia took its toll on Phillip, however, and ill health forced him to return home in 1792. Despite his departure, the colony continued to develop and, from 1796, the growth of the community outside the prison was helped by a programme of assisted emigration for free settlers who were given a free passage, a grant of land and eighteen months’ free rations.
EVOLUTION OF AUSTRALIAN TRANSPORTATION
In the early years of Australian transportation, convicts could either serve out their sentence in the penal colony, join a labour gang on a public works project or be assigned to work for a free settler who might be anything from a government officer to a farmer or even a freed former prisoner. Assigned convicts typically worked as shepherds, cowherds, field labourers, domestic servants or mechanics, with their masters required to provide food, clothing and shelter. However, the conditions experienced by convicts under the assignment system could vary enormously. In 1838, the British parliament received a report on how convicts were treated:
An assigned convict is entitled to a fixed amount of food and clothing, consisting, in New South Wales, of 12lbs. of wheat, or of an equivalent in flour and maize meal, 7lbs. of mutton or beef, or 4½lbs. of salt pork, 2oz of salt, and 2oz of soap weekly; two frocks or jackets, three shirts, two pair of trousers, three pair of shoes, and a hat or cap, annually. Each man is likewise supplied with one good blanket, and a palliasse or wool mattress, which are considered the property of the master. Any articles, which the master may supply beyond these, are voluntary indulgences.108
Some contributors to the report likened the convict’s lot to that of a slave, with harsh punishments for any misdemeanour. The law in New South Wales enabled a magistrate to inflict fifty lashes on a convict for ‘drunkenness, disobedience of orders, neglect of work, absconding, abusive language to his master or overseer, or any other disorderly or dishonest conduct’. Alternative punishments for these offences included imprisonment, solitary confinement and labour in irons on the roads.
From 1840, a new stage-based probationary system was introduced where prisoners’ conditions and privileges and progression through the system were determined by their behaviour. In most cases, transportees began their sentence with an eighteen-month period of detention in a British prison. Stage 1 for ‘lifers’ was then hard labour on Norfolk Island. Stage 2 for lifers (Stage 1 for non-lifers) was working in labour gang in an unpopulated area on the mainland. Advancement to Stage 3 allowed paid work for private employer, while Stage 4 provided for release on licence. Finally, Stage 5 bestowed a conditional or absolute pardon.
As well as Port Jackson, a number of other prison colonies were subsequently set up, including ones at Hobart in Van Diemen’s Land (renamed Tasmania in 1856), Moreton Bay in Queensland, Port Phillip in Victoria, Swan River in Western Australia and on tiny Norfolk Island, 1,000 miles to the east of the mainland. In 1824, a former transport ship, the Phoenix, was anchored in Sydney Harbour to hold British convicts in transit to the other land-based penal settlements.
THE END OF TRANSPORTATION
Despite its great size, there were only so many convicts that Australia was prepared to receive. New South Wales closed its doors to the convict ships after 1840, and by 1846 Van Diemen’s Land was so overcrowded that transportation there was suspended for two years, finally being halted in 1852. Western Australia continued to accept convicts up until 1867.
As the number of destinations dwindled, the British courts gradually moved away from the use of transportation. In its place, increasing use was made of sentences combining a period of confinement followed by several years of labour at a public-works prison, such as the one at Portland, which opened in 1848.
Transportation finally ended on 9 January 1868, when the last convict ship, the Hougoumont, embarked 280 prisoners at Freemantle in Western Australia. Over the preceding eighty years, around 160,000 British convicts had been landed on Australian shores. Despite the hardships they often endured while serving out their sentences, many went on to become permanent settlers in the country. 109
THE FATE OF THE BRITISH HULKS
The re-establishment of transportation in 1787 did not result in the elimination of the prison hulks, which continued in operation for almost as long as transportation itself. The hulks were initially retained to provide temporary accommodation for transportees awaiting a place on an Australian sailing. Some prisoners, though, such as those who proved unfit to make the voyage, ended up serving the whole of their sentence on the hulks.
In 1802, management of the hulks passed from private contractors to the first Inspector of the Hulks, Aaron Graham. Graham issued new orders for improvements in the domestic routine and hygiene aboard the vessels and in the record-keeping. Officers were no longer to keep pigs or poultry on board for selling meat or eggs to the prisoners. The convicts’ daily food allowance was increased, with ‘coarse, wholesome meat’ now replacing the much-hated ‘ox-cheek’. The table below shows the new rations for each mess of six:
BREAKFAST
DINNER
SUPPER
Barley
Oatmeal
Bread
Beef
Cheese
Beer
Barley
Oatmeal
lbs oz
lbs oz
lbs oz
lbs oz
lbs oz
½ Pints
lbs oz
lbs oz
Sunday
1 4
0 4
7 14
5 14½
- -
18
1 1½
0 6½
Monday
1 4
0 4
7 14
- -
2 10
18
- -
1 8
Tuesday
1 4
0 4
7 14
5 14½
- -
18
1 1½
0 6½
Wednesday
1 4
0 4
7 14
- -
2 10
18
- -
1 8
Thursday
1 4
0 4
7 14
5 14½
- -
18
1 1½
0 6½
Friday
1 4
0 4
7 14
- -
2 10
18
- -
1 8
Saturday
1 4
0 4
7 14
5 14½
- -
18
1 1½
0 6½
Each Mess per Week
8 12
1 12
55 2
23 10
7 14
126
4 6
6 2
4 6
6 2
The Bread to be of the Quality served to His Majesty’s Troops of the Line.
13 2
7 14
Each Man per Week
2 3
1 5
9 3
3 15
1 5
21
Each Man per Day
0 5
0 3
1 5
0 9
0 3
3
A Select Committee in 1810–11 noted that the cost of feeding each convict amounted to 13¼d a day, compared to the 9d a day expended at gaols such as Southwell and Gloucester. It was proposed that savings should be made by renegotiating the contracts for supplying the hulks’ food. The committee also looked at the widely varying daily allowances that the convicts received from their employers while working ashor
e. At the Woolwich Ordnance department, the men received beer and biscuit ranging in value from 2d to 4½d; at Portsmouth Dockyard, the daily allowance was small beer and biscuit to the value of 2¼d, with smokers receiving ½d worth of tobacco on top; at the Portsmouth Ordnance Department, the allowance amounted to 1d per day, while at the Sheerness Dockyard, no allowances were given at all. The committee proposed that some parity be established.
The committee’s report portrayed the prisoners’ quarters as dens of ‘gambling, swearing, and every kind of vicious conversation’. The counterfeiting of coins also went on. It appeared that night-time visual supervision of the men below decks was non-existent. In fact, it seemed ‘doubtful whether, in some of the Hulks at least, an officer could go down among the prisoners at night without the risk of personal injury’.110 After consultation with the Navy Board, a new plan was devised for subdividing the convicts’ quarters into a number of separate cells off a central corridor, although it took until 1817 for all the vessels to be fitted out in this way.
A regular concern about the hulks was the occurrence of sodomy and rape, which were said to be commonplace. George Lee, a convict on the Portland in Langstone Harbour in 1803 claimed that ‘the horrible crime of sodomy rages … shamefully throughout’. According to Jeremy Bentham, new inmates on the Woolwich hulks were routinely raped as a matter of course: ‘an initiation of this sort stands in the place of garnish and is exacted with equal rigour.’111 The 1810 Select Committee, in a circumspectly worded appraisal of such claims, were happy, however, to accept that ‘the Captains of the different Hulks all concur in disbelieving the existence among them of the more atrocious vice, which rumour has sometimes imputed to them’. Such activities, they believed, would be viewed as abhorrent by the other convicts and dealt with accordingly.112
Aaron Graham’s successor, John Capper, held the post of what became the Superintendent of the Hulks from 1815 to 1847. Capper’s main contribution in the early years of his tenure was the introduction of a scheme whereby convicts were classified as ‘Very Good’, ‘Good’, ‘Indifferent’, ‘Suspicious’, ‘Bad’ or ‘Very Bad’. Prisoners of each class were housed in separate areas of the ship so that, for example, docile inmates would not be bullied by aggressive ones. The classification was subsequently extended to separate youthful offenders from adults, with a separate hulk, the Bellerophon, allocated for boy convicts in 1824.
Further parliamentary appraisals of the hulks took place in 1828, 1831 and 1835. Despite repeated concerns about the convicts’ work being too lenient and the discipline too lax, little changed. The 1831 review by the Committee on Secondary Punishments heard from a former convict identified as ‘A.B.’ who, from the age of 17, had spent four years on the hulk Retribution at Sheerness. A.B. recounted that the convicts worked, slept and ate in irons weighing up to 4lb. The work they were given – pulling down buildings and unloading ships – often resulted in serious injury. Anyone judged to be shirking had his pay stopped and was placed in double-irons. The captain used only a fraction of the money officially allocated for buying the prisoners’ rations, but always kept a small quantity of top quality bread and meat to hand so that he could demonstrate to any visitors how well the men dined. Unfortunately, A.B. lost any sympathy he had gained when he revealed what went on below decks. New arrivals were routinely robbed of any valuables. Singing, dancing, fighting and gambling regularly took place. Newspapers, ‘improper’ books and quantities of spirits (smuggled inside a bladder) found their way on board. Some inmates operated small businesses selling tea, bread, tobacco and groceries to the other prisoners. A convict could receive visitors during the daytime, on which occasions he was excused from work. All in all, it was – as A.B. happily admitted – ‘a jolly life’. Shocked at such revelations, the committee recommended a clampdown on such indulgences and an increase in the convicts’ daily hours of work. 113
The convict ship Discovery was moored at Woolwich and Deptford between 1824 and 1830. She could house up to 200 convicts.
A lull in parliamentary concern about the hulks ended abruptly on 28 January 1847, when Thomas Dunscombe, MP, addressed the Commons on the appalling conditions that he claimed existed on the Woolwich hulks. Based on information he had been sent by William Brown, a convict nurse on the hulk Warrior, Dunscombe recited a catalogue of cases of inmates who had been mistreated or neglected by the ship’s surgeon Peter Bossey. One, a lunatic named George Monk, suffering from a broken leg, had been ‘allowed to lie in bed in his own water and filth until such time as a large piece fell out, putrid with his urine, from the bottom of his back bone’. At times, Monk had also been handcuffed to his bed or strait-jacketed. Another man, Peter Bailey, near to death, had requested the attendance of a Wesleyan Methodist minister but had been refused by Bossey, who had laughed at him and told him that he would die in the bed where he lay. Bailey died a few days later. A prisoner named Henry Driver, labelled as a ‘schemer’ by Bossey, died a few days after arriving at the Warrior. While the body was still warm, its entrails had been removed and thrown in the river.
An investigation by prison inspector Captain William John Williams found that most of William Brown’s specific claims were untrue or much exaggerated, but that the hulks suffered from lax management. A lack of regular inspection had resulted in two of the vessels, the Justitia and the hospital ship Unité, being filthy and infested with vermin. There had been an excessive use of corporal punishment, particularly on mentally disturbed prisoners, with the birch and cat o’ nine tails. An inadequate diet, much of which was regularly thrown overboard by the prisoners, had led to a high rate of scurvy. Amongst Williams’ recommendations were an improvement to the diet – cocoa should be served instead of gruel at least once a day, white bread instead of brown two or three times a week, and 6oz of pork instead of cheese. Each prisoner should also receive an extra daily allowance of 12oz of potatoes.114
From 1849, overall management of the remaining hulks moved to a new body, the Directors of Convict Prisons. However, the increasing use of land-based prisons saw the hulk fleet continue to shrink until, by 1857, only two vessels remained – the Defence, whose inmates were mostly invalids, and the hospital ship Unité. On 14 July 1857, a fire broke out in the Defence’s coal store. Within a few weeks, both vessels had been abandoned and most of their inmates transferred to an old war prison at Lewes in Sussex. So ended the eighty-year-long ‘temporary’ measure for holding convicts in floating prisons on the Thames.
A convict ward set for dinner aboard the hulk Defence in the 1850s.
The death of a convict on the hulk Justitia – attributed to the illustrator George Cruickshank. After severe criticism of conditions aboard the Justitia in 1847, and a cholera outbreak the following year, the vessel was condemned and replaced by the newly refitted Defence.
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Prisoners of War
The endless succession of wars in which England was involved up until the twentieth century regularly resulted in the capture of prisoners – men who then had to be housed somewhere. Because such prisoners only needed to be accommodated until an exchange was arranged or until the conflict ended, the facilities they needed were fairly basic – food, somewhere to sleep and medical care. At times, however, the sheer numbers of war prisoners caused problems. In 1763, following the Seven Years War, around 40,000 Frenchmen were being held in improvised prisons, while half a century later, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, more than 120,000 were held captive. Over a similar period, the number of civilian prisoners rose from a mere 4,000 to around 16,000. 115 Conflicts with America, Spain and Holland during the 1770s and 1780s also swelled the volume of war prisoners being held.
Over the years, the accommodation provided for prisoners of war took several different forms. A floating hulk, the Cornwall, was used for French prisoners of war from 1755, with up to sixty others later established at Portland and Plymouth. On the Brunswick, moored off Chatham, 460 prisoners were crowded at night into a deck measuring 125ft by 40ft
, with a ceiling only 4ft 10in high.116
Existing buildings were also pressed into service such as the castles at Edinburgh and Portchester. In 1756, Sissinghurst Castle was leased to the government for use as a prison. Over the following seven years, 3,000 French prisoners were held there in cold and overcrowded conditions that were terrible for prisoners and guards alike. Much of the house and furniture were destroyed by the inmates and used for firewood. In 1779, a new prison was opened at Stapleton in Bristol to hold naval prisoners of war who were being landed at Bristol – by 1782 it housed almost 800 Spaniards and Dutchmen. In 1783, a former orphans’ home at Shrewsbury was converted to house up to 600 Dutch prisoners.117 A camp for French and Dutch soldiers and sailors was built in 1796 at Norman Cross, near Peterborough. From 1796 to 1816, it held about 10,000 prisoners, of whom at least 1,700 died.
THE KING’S HOUSE, WINCHESTER
Between 1778 and 1780, the King’s House at Winchester was home to over 6,000 French and 1,500 Spanish prisoners. The house, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, was originally intended to be a palatial residence for Charles II, but the scheme had never been completed due to lack of money.
Following the outbreak of a ‘distemper’ amongst French prisoners in April 1779, and another amongst the Spanish in April 1780, a parliamentary committee investigated the conditions at Winchester and its medical facilities. A list of complaints from the Spanish inmates had blamed the outbreak on the prison’s poor quality bread which was described as ‘not even fit for dogs’. The committee, on the other hand, concluded that the disease, ‘a contagious malignant fever of the gaol kind’, had probably been brought ashore by the sailors themselves and its spread owed much to their own ‘indolence and want of cleanliness’.118 Increased space for the prison hospital, improvements in the prison’s ventilation and hygiene, with regular bathing of the inmates, airing of their hammocks and bedding, and a twice-weekly fumigation of the rooms with sulphur, had now dealt with the problem. A change in the sick dietary was also instituted. The standard and sick diets at Winchester are shown below: