Days
Beer
Bread
Beef
Butter
Cheese
Peas*
Salt
Quarts
Pounds
Pounds
Ounces
Ounces
Pints
Ounces
Sunday
1
1½
¾
—
—
½
⅓
Monday
1
1½
¾
—
—
—
⅓
Tuesday
1
1½
¾
—
—
½
⅓
Wednesday
1
1½
¾
—
—
—
⅓
Thursday
1
1½
¾
—
—
½
⅓
Friday
1
1½
¾
—
—
—
⅓
Saturday
1
1½
¾
4 or
6
½
⅓
Total
7
10½
4½
4
6
2
2⅓
*Or a pound of good cabbage.
Scheme of diet for the Prisoners in the Hospital.
Low
Diet
Water Gruel, Panada, Rice Gruel, Milk Pottage or Broth, 8oz of Bread (and if Butter is ordered, 2oz.) —For Drink, Toast and Water, Ptisan, or White Decoction.
Half
Diet
For Breakfast, Milk Pottage. For Dinner, 8oz of Mutton, some light Bread Pudding, or in lieu of it some Greens, a Pint of Broth, a Pound of Bread, and Three Pints of Small Beer.
Full
Diet
Breakfast as above.—For Dinner, One Pound of Meat, One Pint of Broth, One Pound of Bread, and Two Quarts of Small Beer. Supper in the Two last-mentioned Diets to be of the Broth left at Dinner, or, if thought necessary, to be of Milk Pottage.
Rice Milk, Orange Whey, Orange and Lemon Water, Tamarind Whey,Vinegar Whey, Balm and Sage Tea, to be discretionally used by the Surgeon. Besides the Cordial Medicines of the Dispensary, Wine is always allowed for such sick Prisoners as the Surgeon judges it to be proper for.
Panada, included in the hospital’s low diet, was made from bread boiled to a pulp in water and sometimes flavoured with sugar, nutmeg, currants or other ingredients. The following recipe for panada ‘for a sick or weak stomach’ was provided by Richard Bradley in the 1762 edition of The Country Housewife:
Panada for a sick or weak stomach.
Put the Crumb of a Penny white Loaf grated into a Quart of cold Water; set both on the Fire together with a Blade of Mace: When it is boiled smooth, take it off the Fire, and put in a Bit of Lemon-peel, the Juice of a Lemon, a Glass of Sack, and Sugar to your Taste. This is very nourishing, and never offends the Stomach. Some season with Butter and Sugar, adding Currants, which on some Occasions are proper; but the first way is the most grateful and innocent.119
Ptisan (many alternative spellings include tisane, thisan, petisane etc.) was a medicinal drink of which barley water was the most common form. Here is Hannah Glasse’s recipe from 1758:
To make Barley Water.
Put a Quarter of a Pound of Pearl Barley into two Quarts of Water, let it boil, skim it very clean, boil half away, and drain it off. Sweeten to your Palate, but not too sweet, and put in two Spoonfuls of white Wine. Drink it Luke-warm.120
DARTMOOR
Overcrowding at the Stapleton and Norman Cross prisons and aboard the hulks at Plymouth resulted in the building of a large new prison at Princetown on Dartmoor. The site chosen was near to granite quarries which supplied stone for construction of the prison. Within a few months of its opening in May 1809, it housed 5,000 French prisoners. A subsequent extension was used to hold captives from the Anglo-American war of 1812–5.
The prison’s distinctive layout, reflecting the popular radial designs of the day, comprised five large rectangular blocks arranged around a semi-circle, like the spokes of a wheel. Each block, two storeys high, could house 1,500 men, sleeping in two tiers of hammocks. At the central hub, an open space was used as a daily market place where local people could sell vegetables and other wares. Other buildings included a large hospital and an officers’ block. The site was surrounded by two walls with a road in between where guards patrolled.
At its height, the prison held over 8,000 inmates whose diet was rather better than that received by many of the prisoners in England’s civilian gaols. The daily ration for Dartmoor’s healthy prisoners is shown below:121
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Thursday
Saturday
One pound and a half of bread. Half a pound of fresh beef. Half a pound of cabbage or turnips fit for the copper. One ounce of Scotch barley. One-third of an ounce of salt. One-quarter of an ounce of onions.
Wednesday
One pound and a half of bread. One pound of good sound herrings (red herrings and white pickled herrings to be issued alternately). One pound of good sound potatoes.
Friday
One pound and a half of bread. One pound of good sound dry cod fish. One pound of good sound potatoes.
The food was provided by private contractors and its quality was specified in some detail:
Bread—To be made of whole meal, the produce of good marketable British or foreign wheat, and well dressed through a thirteen shilling seam-cloth. The said bread to be well baked into loaves of four pounds and a half, or three pounds Avoirdupois; to be weighed at the end of six hours after the same shall have been baked; to be made with salt and not with sea-water, and to be equal in quality in all respects to the bread supplied by the Victualling Board to the Ordinary of His Majesty’s Navy.
Beef—To be good and wholesome fresh beef, not bull beef, and delivered in clean quarters, a fore and hind quarter alternately, when the number of prisoners is sufficient for the expenditure of that quantity; but if it be not so, then in parts of such quarters, a fore and hind quarter alternately.
Cod fish—To be the produce of the British fisheries, or the fishery at Newfoundland. To be delivered in whole fish. Cabbages or turnips to be issued as the agent of the said Commissioners shall from time to time direct.
Three different levels of diet were provided for prisoners of war who were sick, with plenty of greens – and beer – for the less seriously ill:
Patients on Low Diet
A pint of tea in the morning for breakfast, and a like quantity in the evening, 8oz bread, 2oz butter, or in lieu of butter, 1 pint milk, ½ pint broth, or such an additional quantity thereof as the surgeon shall judge proper. For drink, barley-water, toast and water, water-gruel, lemon-water, vinegar-whey, balm or sage-tea. In febrile cases the barley-water may be acidulated with lemon juice.
Patients on Half Diet
Tea morning and evening as above, 16oz bread, 8oz beef or mutton, 8oz greens, or good sound potatoes, 1 pint broth, and 3 pints small beer. For common drink, barley-water.
Patients on Full Diet
Tea morning and evening as above, 16oz bread, 16oz beef or mutton, 1 pint broth, 16oz greens or good sound potatoes, and 2 quarts small beer. For common drink, barley-water.
In ‘particular cases of debility, or where the appetite may be capricious’:
The surgeon may substitute fish, fowl, veal, lamb, or eggs, provided the expense incurred for the same do not exceed the price of the beef or mutton allowed. One dra
m and a half of good souchong tea, seven drams of good muscovado sugar, and one sixth part of a pint of genuine milk, to be allowed to every pint of tea. The broth to be made by boiling together the meat allowed in the half and full diet, with the addition of twelve drains of good sound barley, twelve drains of good onions, or one ounce of leeks, and three drains of parsley for every pound of meat.
Again, the quality of the items was carefully stipulated:
Beer—Every seven barrels to be brewed from eight bushels of strong amber malt, and six or seven pounds of good hops, such as are used by the common brewers.
Bread—To be the best wheaten bread.
Butter—To be good salt butter.
Mutton—To be good wether mutton.
Beef—To be good ox beef.
Greens—To be stripped of the outside leaves, and fit for the copper.
Potatoes—To be good sound potatoes.
Despite the relatively good fare provided to the Dartmoor inmates, food was still the cause of problems, particularly amongst a group of French prisoners known as the ‘Romans’. These were men who, largely because of the gambling that was rife in the prison, had literally lost their shirts – together with their bedding and any other possessions. Such men formed a commune in the large lofts beneath the prison roofs which had been intended to provide exercise space during bad weather. The Romans rarely tasted the prison’s official dietary:
From morning till night groups of Romans were to be seen raking the garbage heaps for scraps of offal, potato peelings, rotten turnips, and fish heads, for though they drew their ration of soup at mid-day, they were always famishing, partly because the ration itself was insufficient, partly because they exchanged their rations with the infamous provision-buyers for tobacco with which they gambled. In the alleys between the tiers of hammocks on the floors below you might always see some of them lurking, if a man were peeling a potato a dozen of these wretches would be round him in a moment to beg for the peel; they would form a ring round every mess bucket, like hungry dogs, watching the eaters in the hope that one would throw away a morsel of gristle, and fighting over every bone.122
After the prison’s own bakehouse was burned down in October 1812, the prisoners refused to accept the bread sent in from Plymouth by the contractor, claiming that it was damp and sour. After satisfying himself that the bread was of good quality, the prison’s chief officer Captain Cotgrave announced that any man who refused the bread would forfeit the ration for that day. According to one account, the starving Romans:
Fell upon the offal heaps as usual, and when the two-horse waggon came in to remove the filth they resented the removal of their larder. In the course of the dispute, partly to revenge themselves upon the driver, partly to appease their famishing bloodthirst, these wretches fell upon the horses with knives, stabbed them to death, and fastened their teeth in the bleeding carcases. This horror was too much for the stomachs of the other prisoners, who helped to drive them off.123
A rather more salubrious part of the premises, known as the Petty Officers’ prison, housed French naval and merchant service officers. Many were fairly well-to-do men who were able to buy provisions from the daily market and also hire prisoners from other sections to perform menial tasks such as cleaning for them. Even here, though, life was not uneventful:
One day at dinner a man pulled out of the soup bucket of his mess a dead rat which he held up by the tail, whereupon heads and tails and feet were dredged up from every bucket in such numbers that they would have furnished limbs for fully a hundred animals. We may judge whether the regulation diet of the prisoners was sufficient, from the fact that out of all these Frenchmen of the middle classes only a handful of the most squeamish went without their soup that day. For a time the life of the cooks hung by a thread, and it was only upon the intervention of the Commissaire that the head cook was allowed to speak in his own defence. The coppers, as it seemed, had been filled with water overnight as usual, but through forgetfulness the covers had not been closed, and the coppers had thus been converted into rat traps. It had not occurred to the cooks to dredge them for dead bodies, and the meat and vegetables had been thrown in atop and the fires lighted. 124
Naturally enough, some foreign prisoners attempted to recreate their home cuisine. Some of the more enterprising French inmates ‘opened booths for the sale of strange and wonderful dishes compounded of the Government rations with ingredients purchased in the market. The favourite was a ragout, called “ratatouille,” made of Government beef, potatoes and peas.’125 When American prisoners came to Dartmoor, some shaved a thin layer from the crust of their bread which was then scorched over coals to make a form of coffee.
An aerial view of Dartmoor prison. After 1815, Dartmoor was unoccupied until 1850 when it was re-opened as a public works prison. Within a few years it was mainly being used as an invalid prison and by 1858 housed up to 1,200 convicts capable of performing light labour.
eight
The Evolution of Prisons 1780s – 1860s
PENITENTIARY HOUSES
As an alternative to transportation, the 1779 Transportation Act had sanctioned the building of two large ‘penitentiary houses’, one for men and one for women, near to the capital. The Act went into considerable detail about the operation of the proposed houses. As well as the prisoners’ own quarters, the buildings were to include stores, workshops, an infirmary, a chapel, burying-ground and ‘dark but airy dungeons’. New arrivals would be washed, issued with a distinctive prison uniform and given a medical examination. For up to ten hours a day, Sundays excepted, prisoners would be put to ‘Labour of the hardest and most servile Kind, in which Drudgery is chiefly required … such as treading in a Wheel, or drawing in a Capstern, for turning a Mill or other Machine or Engine, sawing Stone, polishing Marble, beating Hemp, rasping Logwood, chopping Rags, making Cordage’. Work suggested for the less able included picking oakum, weaving sacks, spinning yarn and knitting nets. A small part of any profit from such work could be used by the prisoner or their family. The inmates were to sleep in individual cells, each measuring at least 7ft by 10ft by 9ft high, and heated by flues from the prison fires. Association between the prisoners would be confined to work hours, meal times, exercise periods and during twice-daily chapel services. The prison diet would consist of ‘Bread, and any coarse Meat, or other inferior Food, and Water, or small Beer’. However, each prison was also to have a kitchen garden. Finally, prisoners were to be divided into three categories known as First, Second, or Third Class, through which they would automatically progress during each third of their sentence. First Class prisoners would receive the most severe treatment and Third Class the most lenient.
Implementation of the proposals was placed in the hands of a supervisory committee whose initial membership included John Howard. However, despite their efforts to get the project off the ground, the scheme ground to a halt.
LOCAL PRISONS
The 1780s and 1790s did, however, see a burst of activity in the modernisation of local prisons, with more than sixty rebuilt during this period, many the work of architect William Blackburn, a disciple of John Howard.126 Although a wide variety of designs were constructed, the buildings typically included separate sections for different classes of prisoner, individual sleeping cells, work-rooms, exercise yards, a chapel, laundry and infirmary. Cells opened onto a linking corridor or walkway placed either on the inside or the outside of the building.
The simplest type of plan, used at county gaols such as Exeter and Winchester, was a single block with the keeper’s quarters placed at the centre. Courtyard designs, such as those in new county gaols at Hertford and Moulsham, were based on the layout of monastic cloisters and placed wings around the sides of a quadrangle. What were to prove more significant were Blackburn’s polygonal and radial designs. An example of the first of these was the new gaol erected at Northleach in the late 1780s. The cell block formed five of the sides of an octagon, providing good visibility of all the cells from a central
point. The radial design, where a number of wings emanated from a central hub, was used at the new county gaol in Ipswich. The radial principle was widely adopted in Victorian workhouses and prisons, although Blackburn’s designs lacked the internal open galleries that characterised many later prison buildings.127
BENTHAM’S PANOPTICON
While the national penitentiary scheme was languishing, some alternative proposals were put forward by philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham. One idea was for a set of colour-coded institutions – a white-walled building for debtors and those awaiting trial, a grey one for short-term prisoners and a black one for those serving life sentences. Outside the latter two would stand the figures of ‘a monkey, a fox and a tiger, representing mischief, cunning, and rapacity, the source of all crimes’; inside, two skeletons would flank an iron door.128
A later scheme, the ‘panopticon’ or inspection house, was based on a design for a workshop by Bentham’s brother Samuel. It consisted of a circular or polygonal building with cells on each storey and, at the centre, an inspection ‘lodge’ from where prisoners could be supervised. The establishment would be managed by a contractor who would provide profitable work from which the inmates would receive some income. The contractor would be penalised for any prisoners who died or escaped while in his custody. Bentham’s plans included a glass roof and mirrors to aid observation of the inmates, a complex system of pipes for ventilation and heating and a network of ‘conversation tubes’ allowing staff or visitors to speak to prisoners from the central lodge.
Bentham’s vigorous and persistent lobbying of ministers eventually resulted in some modest backing for a panopticon prison and in 1799 he acquired a site for its construction on the north bank of the Thames at Millbank. However, like the original penitentiary houses project, the scheme never gained sufficient momentum and was effectively abandoned by the government in 1803. Panopticon-style buildings were later erected in other countries, including the Koepelgevangenis at Haarlem in Holland, the Presidio Modelo in Cuba and the Stateville Correctional Center in the USA.
The Prison Cookbook Page 8