By the time Millbank was reopened, plans for a number of other prisons had been approved. In 1842 a large new penitentiary was completed at Pentonville and by 1848 no less than fifty-four other prisons had been built on the same plan, having rows of single cells arranged in tiers and in separate blocks radiating from a central hub like the spokes of a wheel. Apart from Wormwood Scrubs, which was built in 1874, and Dartmoor, begun in 1806 for French prisoners of war but made into a convict prison in 1850, nearly all the large English prisons were built in the 1840s and 1850s, many of them like Reading prison, which was considered ‘the finest building in Berkshire after Windsor Castle’, combining ‘with the castellated, a collegiate appearance’. Holloway, finished in 1852, was also described as a ‘noble building of the castellated Gothic style’.18
Pentonville, a characteristic example, had 520 small cells, thirteen feet by seven, with little windows on their outside walls and doors opening on to the narrow landings in the galleries. They were ‘admirably ventilated’, a visitor wrote, and had ‘even the luxuries of a water-closet’, though water-closets were later replaced by the communal, evil-smelling ‘recesses’ because they were constantly getting blocked and their pipes were used as a means of communication. The occupants of the cells, in obedience to a system of prison discipline developed in America, were forbidden to talk to each other and when permitted to take exercise tramped along in silent rows, wearing masks of brown cloth over their faces. In chapel, which they had to attend every day, they sat in little cubicles, their heads visible to the warder on duty but hidden from each other. Men caught trying to talk to their neighbours were confined in refractory cells completely dark for as long as three weeks on end. Mental disturbances were common. An official report admitted that ‘for every sixty thousand persons confined in Pentonville there were 220 cases of insanity, 210 cases of delusions, and forty suicides’.19
Breakfast consisted of ten ounces of bread and three-quarters of a pint of cocoa; dinner was half a pint of soup (or four ounces of meat), five ounces of bread and one pound of potatoes, supper a pint of gruel and five ounces of bread. Work lasted from six o’clock in the morning until seven o’clock at night.
In other prisons, since the provision of useful work was often considered either impossible or undesirable, the inmates were kept occupied in such pointless tasks as picking old rope to pieces long after the use of iron in the building of ships had made oakum almost unsaleable. The treadwheel and the crank were also advocated not only as punishments but also as means of occupation which would not threaten the livelihood of honest men and which were purposeless, therefore degrading, and exhausting, therefore deterrent. The treadwheel, a big iron frame of steps around a revolving cylinder, could be fitted to a mill or used for pumping water; and the crank, a wheel like the paddle wheel of a steamer fitted into a box of gravel which the prisoner had to turn by means of a handle, could also be used for productive purposes. But it was rarely that either was. Prisoners, male and female, trudging up the steps in their separate compartments on the wheel might work as they did at Cold Bath Fields Prison for six hours a day and achieve nothing but the climbing of 8640 feet.
In some prisons the inmates were not only obliged to lead lives of unutterable dreariness but were also subjected to cruel tyranny. A Royal Commission appointed to inquire into allegations of cruelty in prisons in 1854 found that prisoners in Birmingham prison, including boys, were savagely and continually whipped, and a straitjacket, ‘an engine of positive torture’, was frequently employed. At Leicester prison, no convict was allowed a meal on weekdays until he had completed his required number of revolutions on a special type of crank which made the labour of turning it one of agonizing difficulty. One man, the commission understood, had had only nine of the prison’s inadequate meals in three weeks of working days.20
The revelations of such cruelties led to demands that prisons should be brought under national control. They were so by a Prison Act of 1877; but this Act endorsed the silent system, approved ‘hard bodily labour’ by crank, treadmill, shot-drill and capstan, and authorized the use of chains and irons, confinement in refractory cells on bread and water, and flogging. Indeed, conditions in some prisons remained almost as bad after the passing of the Act as they had been at the beginning of the century.
At Chatham, according to another Royal Commission which made its report in 1879,
Prisoners severely mutilated themselves and threw themselves beneath the wheels of the railway wagons in the dock basins in their efforts to escape from the fearful place. If they did not die they were flogged. ‘There was no reason,’ the Governor said, ‘why they should not be flogged, because they had only mutilated an arm or a leg.’
Because they were so badly fed, the convicts at Chatham were driven to eating live worms and frogs and rubbish and at Portland, Dartmoor and other prisons they melted candles in their gruel to make it more satisfying.21
Concern was expressed about ‘the moral condition’ in which men left such prisons as these and about ‘the serious number of recommittals’. There was, in fact, ‘ample cause for a searching enquiry into the main features of prison life’. A Departmental Committee of Inquiry into Prisons was consequently set up under the chairmanship of Herbert Gladstone; and in 1898 a new Act was passed incorporating most of the committee’s recommendations, including the limitation of corporal punishment and the introduction of remission of sentences conditional upon good behaviour. Yet the difficulties of translating legislation into practice remained; and visitors to prisons were still deeply shocked by the conditions which they found. A visitor to Dartmoor in 1906 wrote:
As I walked along the endless landings and corridors in the great cellular blocks I saw something of the 1,500 men who were then immured in Dartmoor. Their drab uniforms were plastered with broad arrows, their heads were closely shaven … Not even a safety razor was allowed, so that in addition to the stubble on their heads, their faces were covered with a sort of dirty moss, representing the growth of hair that a pair of clippers could not remove … As they saw us coming each man turned to the nearest wall and put his face closely against it, remaining in this servile position until we had passed him. This was a strictly ordered procedure, to avoid assault or familiarity, the two great offences in prison conduct.22
The Gladstone Committee had warned of the effect on a man’s subsequent behaviour of confinement in cells but the effect of contamination in a prison like this might be equally disastrous. ‘The average man was inextricably dragged down by the conduct and example of the men around him, whose company he could not escape. Within a year, he was almost unrecognizable in speech and habit and point of view.’23
At least something was being done for young offenders, although the early Reformatory Schools Acts insisted on initial periods of imprisonment, and regulations about how the reformatories should be run were rare, while punishments in them were often extremely harsh. The Rev. Sydney Turner, in charge of the Redhill Reformatory, for example, advocated severely punishing boys by isolating them for a few days in unheated cells on a diet of bread and water and by whipping them ‘with as much solemnity and form as possible’.24 But after the return of Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, chairman of the Prison Commissioners, from America where he had studied the growing system of state reformatories, a building in the village of Borstal in Kent was taken over as an institution where boys, who might otherwise be sent to prison, could be trained ‘mentally, morally and physically’ by an experienced staff. Within four years the experiment seemed so promising that the prison commissioners asked the Home Secretary for legislation to establish the Borstal system as an official one, and to permit the courts to sentence boys and girls between sixteen and twenty-one to reformatories for up to three years. The request was granted by the Prevention of Crimes Act of 1908; and with the help and encouragement of Sir Alexander Paterson, the most understanding and far-sighted of the prison commissioners, the Borstal system grew and prospered. In 1930 a Borstal without walls
or wire was opened near Nottingham; and four years later the first ‘open prison’ in England was started near Wakefield. At last, after so many years, steps were being taken to prevent crime by the reformation and rehabilitation of the criminal rather than by his degradation and humiliating punishments. The problems of contamination, however, remained. ‘I learnt more about thieving from the chaps there than anywhere else,’ one former Borstal boy told a magistrate;25 and another complained that he was bullied by the other boys: ‘there was a lot of sexual stuff went on in that place … If you refused you got beaten up.’26
Hard as Sir Alexander Paterson tried to turn Borstals into real reformatories and prisons into more than squalid places of confinement, the fundamental problems remained unsolved at his death and have not been solved today.
So long as the country had no professional police force, soldiers and militiamen were liable to be called to the scenes of disturbances and to arrest troublemakers. Their policing duties had not endeared them to the public and they had generally been regarded as oppressors rather than protectors. ‘Military service does not bring distinction in England as it does in many parts of Europe,’ it was observed in the time of the Duke of Wellington, ‘and, as the profession of arms is not held here in the first estimation, the better class of peasantry do not leave the plough or the shuttle for the sword. Consequently the recruits of infantry regiments are … often drawn from the refuse of manufacturing towns, for instance from destitute workmen who enroll themselves in the army through necessity.’27 William Cobbett, who enlisted in the West Norfolk Regiment in 1785 and was rapidly promoted to sergeant-major, while complaining of the impossibility of living on the miserable pay, spoke warmly of soldiers, their fundamental decency and lack of hypocrisy. But few of his contemporaries shared his opinions. General Wolfe had described his men as ‘dirty, drunken, insolent rascals … terrible dogs to look at’. ‘I knew their discipline to be bad and their valour precarious,’ he had added. ‘No nation ever paid so many bad soldiers at so high a rate.’ Wellington, whose contempt was mixed with admiration, later described his soldiers as scum who enlisted only for drink.
In the Middle Ages men had been pressed into service whether they were willing to take arms or not. Some of the more adventurous eagerly accepted the pay which was appreciably more than they could have expected for hired labour in their villages. But, although they were rarely kept on active service for more than three months at a stretch, most peasants were reluctant to accept the summons of the King’s Commissioners of Array even when pay was offered in advance. Desertions were common. Of 16,000 men ordered to be at Carlisle in June 1300, only 3000 were still under the king’s command in August. Some had died; others had served their allotted time; but most had crept home.28 As the fourteenth century progressed, and the wars of Edward III demanded more and more recruits, enrolment became an ever-present danger, and the categories of those liable for muster were widened on occasions to include all able-bodied men between sixteen and sixty.
Since then increasing reliance had been placed upon voluntary service; and, as the rewards of a soldier’s life were so meagre and conditions often intolerable, few except vagrants and vagabonds were persuaded to enlist. There was a time after the Civil War when the New Model Army had imposed the strictest discipline upon its troops, when soldiers, if not popular, were generally respected. But the moral fervour associated with the New Model Army had soon evaporated, and soldiers, billeted in private houses where they were frequently drunk and violent, became more disliked than ever. After the Restoration, despite the strong prejudice against it, a standing army was achieved and by the Militia Act of 1661 the management of national defence was placed in the hands of the king. But recruits remained of a very low standard. As Defoe observed, ‘the poor starve, thieve or turn to soldier’; and when insufficient numbers joined through necessity, the ranks were made up with imprisoned debtors, drafted into the service and with unemployed or ‘notoriously idle’ men sent to the colours by magistrates with statutory powers of enlistment. In the American War crisis of 1779 orders were issued to press all London’s rogues and vagabonds into the army.29 Samuel Johnson considered that felons and life guardsmen were equally undesirable in respectable society.
Since the billeting of troops in private houses had been declared illegal in the reign of William III, however, the public at large had had less cause for complaint about the behaviour of troops; and as more barracks were built, and rooms in taverns and inns were less often commandeered, soldiers and civilians tended to regard each other with less resentment. Indeed, for a time during the Napoleonic wars soldiers were accorded the wary respect that had formerly been reserved for sailors. Even so, the conditions in which most of them were required to live when stationed at home were often deplorable. Married men – limited to six in a company – were allocated a corner of the barrack room where blankets or screens of canvas were hung up between the beds. For almost 100 years since the end of the seventeenth century pay had been fixed at 2s 6d a day for cavalry troopers, is 6d for dragoons and 8d for private soldiers in the infantry. Out of this the men had to feed themselves, and, in the case of mounted troops, their horses. Moreover, various deductions were exacted from time to time, one shilling in the pound for Chelsea Hospital, for example, payments for medicines and subscriptions to regimental auditors for purposes not always well defined. Pay had been increased in 1797 so that all troops thereafter were entitled to at least a shilling a day; there were also enlistment bounties of four or five guineas and a bread allowance of 1½d a day. But the bounties were soon spent, and for most soldiers their pay proved quite inadequate. Furthermore, uniforms were extremely uncomfortable and tight-fitting, while the powdered and clubbed pigtails, which were officially abolished in 1804 but which did not finally disappear until 1814, not only caused discomfort but endless trouble. Flogging was a constant threat. In 1809 Cobbett was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for taking up in his Political Register the case of a soldier who had received 500 lashes for alleged mutiny; and such punishments were far from uncommon. Sentences of 2000 lashes were not unknown. In 1836 the Articles of War limited a sentence by a general court martial to 200 lashes and a sentence by a regimental court martial to 100. But the maximum number of lashes were frequently imposed, and the whole regiment was paraded to watch them being applied. In the 1860s a young officer described a flogging witnessed by 600 troops at Aldershot. Many of them were young soldiers and over 100 fainted. Officers, too, fell out and ‘tried to recover their composure while sitting on the shafts of empty carts’.30
There was still an unbridgeable gulf between officers and their men. Reforms carried out by the Duke of York as Commander-in-Chief had improved the quality of officers. A Royal Military College had been established, and, while infantry and cavalry officers continued to purchase their commissions – until the reforms carried out by Edward Cardwell, Secretary for War between 1868 and 1874 – artillery and engineer officers were not required to buy rank or promotion, though promotion did for them, as often as not, depend upon seniority rather than merit. Yet after the Crimean War, in which the failings of the army had been painfully revealed, the chasm between officers and men remained as wide as ever, the officers being almost exclusively upper class or upper middle class from the older public schools or such more recent schools as Wellington – which, founded in 1856, supplied more cadets to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst than any other – the other ranks still being recruited from the lowest ranks of society and from the half starved poor in the towns and villages of Ireland: in 1878, 39,121, soldiers out of 178,064 in the army were Irish. A sergeant in the 13th Regiment calculated that out of every 120 recruits, eighty were ‘labourers and mechanics out of employment’ who turned to the army for support, sixteen were idle men who thought that a soldier’s life might prove an easy one, nine were either criminals or bad characters falling back on the army as a last resort, and eight were discontented and restless men in search of a more v
aried existence. Only two out of every 120, in this sergeant’s opinion, were respectable men who had joined the army because misfortune had driven them to it, and only one was motivated by ambition.31 A generation later, towards the end of the century, this was still largely true. In a study of late Victorian poverty it was estimated that 90 per cent of all recruits were working class, 7 per cent former shop assistants or clerks and only one per cent from the ‘servant-keeping class’.32 It was now accepted that Tommy Atkins was quite likely to be a decent enough fellow at heart, as he often appeared in the poems and stories of Rudyard Kipling, but he was still more likely to be regarded as a creature to be pitied rather than admired and, as Kipling himself admitted, ‘single men in barracks don’t grow into plaster saints’. Notices could still be seen in the windows of public houses warning: ‘Men in uniform not admitted.’33
Reforms in the army were, however, slowly being made, though pensions remained low and pay meagre. Medical services, for instance, were gradually improving to deal with soldiers whose health was far poorer than that of the civilian population and whose rate of death from tuberculosis alone was five times that of the people as a whole. In 1859 flogging was restricted to a limited number of offenders; nine years later it was decreed that it could be inflicted only on active service; and the last flogging took place in 1881. Education in the army also improved; by 1871 school attendance had been made compulsory for recruits and every major garrison had a library and several had writing- and reading-rooms. Between 1858 and 1899 the literacy rate among recruits rose rapidly; while the number of officers attending the Staff College, established in 1858, also increased. Drunkenness was less widespread, while regimental temperance societies and the Army Temperance Association became more influential. And sports which were shared by all ranks, as were amateur theatricals, helped to bridge the divide that separated officers from men.
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