“I assure you, sir,” he told Mr. Nihil, “that this officer on one occasion remarked to me that St. Paul took up several chapters in telling women what sort of ribbons they wore in their bonnets.” And on this evidence Mr. Mann lost his situation; for, says the Governor, “I considered his answers evasive throughout; while the prisoner being an exceedingly well-conducted man, I have no doubt, from the tenour of the whole proceedings, that he spoke the truth.” Hard measure this, and scarcely calculated to maintain the discipline of the establishment.
Still harder, perhaps, was the dismissal of another officer, who was found using what was characterized as a species of low slang in speaking of prisoners. “It came out very artlessly,” says Mr. Nihil, “as he was telling me of some boyish irregularity of a prisoner, whom he styled a ‘rascal.’ This, coupled with other appearances, determined me that the man may have meant no great harm, but that he was quite unfit for the moral charge here entrusted to him; and I thought it necessary, not only in regard to this offence, but that others might take a lesson from it, to mark my sense of the unfitness of one in the habit of familiarly using such language for the situation of warder.” When a fate so severe overtook these two for the offences recorded, a third was not likely to escape who was proved to have occasionally sworn, and who admitted that he considered it was all humbug taking the prisoners to chapel. Although this culprit held the grade of taskmaster, and had completed a service of many years, he too was forthwith sent about his business. But then it was brought home to him that he had once been heard to say, “The governor thinks himself a sharp fellow—I think him the—— fool I ever knew.” It also appeared that this officer’s familiar language among other officers was very profane. He sometimes ridiculed religion; and at one time scoffed at the miracle of the sun standing still. On one occasion he spoke of the chaplain’s lectures as humbug. “My own impressions of T.,” says the governor-chaplain, “were that though he was an efficient officer, he was a conceited self-sufficient man, and of his moral principles I had no good opinion. Everything led to the conviction that he was a very dangerous character in an institution of this kind; his general bearing giving him influence over the inferior officers, and his principles and habits being such as to turn that influence to pernicious account.” He was accordingly dismissed by the committee “with the strongest reprobation of his abominable hypocrisy.”
Although thus studiously bent upon raising the moral tone of his officers, in many other respects, hardly of inferior importance, the utmost laxity prevailed. The rules by which the Penitentiary was governed, and by which all undue familiarity between officers and prisoners was strictly prohibited; which forbade certain luxuries, such as tobacco, ardent spirits, and the morning papers; and which insisted upon certain principles to insure the safe custody of those confined—all these were often contravened or neglected. Upon no one point are gaolers bound to be more vigilant and circumspect than in the security of their keys. In all well-ordered prisons now the most stringent rules prevail on this head. To lose a key entails exemplary punishment, heavy fines, or immediate dismissal. Yet in these old Millbank days we find an officer coolly lending his keys to a prisoner to let himself in and out of his ward; and another who wakes up in the morning without them, asserts at once that they have been stolen from him in the night. In this latter case instant search was made, and after a long delay one key was found in the ventilator of a prisoner’s cell, and below his window, outside, the remaining three. This man was of course accused of the theft; and a circumstantial story at once invented, of his escaping after school, repairing to the tower, and possessing himself of the keys. He would infallibly have suffered for the offence, had it not been accidentally discovered that the officer who had lost them was drunk and incapable on the night in question, and had himself dropped them from his pocket. There was more than one escape, which though ingeniously conceived and carried out could never have succeeded but for a want of watchfulness and supervision on the part of the officer. Of the improper intimacy there could be little doubt, when it was proved that officers and old prisoners were seen in company at public houses—the latter standing treat, and supplying bribes freely, to compass the conveyance to their friends, still inside, of the luxuries prohibited by the rules. All this came out one fine day, when it was discovered that, through the connivance of certain dishonest warders, several prisoners had been regularly supplied with magazines and morning newspapers. Wine, spirits, and eatables more toothsome than the prison fare, and the much-loved weed, found their way into the prison by the same reprehensible means. It is but fair to add here, that in this and in every other case, as soon as the irregularities referred to were brought to light, they were invariably visited with the condemnation they deserved.
Even a man of shrewd intelligence like Mr. Nihil could not fail to be occasionally taken in. On one or two points he was especially vulnerable. Signs of repentance, real or feigned, won from him at once an earnest sympathy which not seldom proved to be cruelly misplaced. There was also a certain simplicity about him, and want of experience, that sometimes made him the dupe of his subordinates when they tried to curry favour by exaggerating the sufferings of the prisoners. One day when he was en route to the dark cells, intending to pardon a culprit therein confined, the taskmaster who accompanied him voluntarily observed, “You are quite right to release him, sir. His legs would get affected, I am afraid, if he were left there any time, like all the rest.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked the governor at once. “Explain.”
“I mean, sir, that whenever a prisoner is kept any length of time in the dark, his loins are always affected. It may be seen in their walk. Take the case of Welsh. Welsh is quite crippled from being so much in the dark.”
“Do they never recover it?”
“Never.”
Mr. Nihil was naturally much struck with this observation, and gave it credence, thinking the officer’s opinion worth attention, as he was particularly shrewd and intelligent. But on consulting the medical man of the establishment, he found the statement quite without foundation. Nothing of the kind ever happened; there was nothing the matter with Welsh, and never had been. It was all pure nonsense.
Then there was the case of Stokes, a boy continually in mischief, an arrant young villain, who coolly tells the governor that it is no use sending him to the dark—the dark only makes him worse. The governor reminded him that he had often tried kind and gentle methods in vain, and asked what would make him better. Stokes replied that the only thing to cure him would be a good sound flogging—knowing full well that this it was not possible to inflict except for certain offences, all of which he studiously avoided. Three days later when liberated from the dark, to which he had been sent in default of corporal punishment, he tried a fresh tack with Mr. Nihil, who observes, “This boy sent for me, and spoke as from the very abyss of conscious depravity. He complains of the hardness and wickedness of his heart. He thinks there is something wrong about him. He cried much. I urged him to pray, but he said his heart was too full—too full of wickedness to pray. I have promised to visit him in his cell, when I shall endeavour to soften and raise the tone of his mind, and pray with him.” Of course his new attitude is all hypocritical deceit. Almost the next day he breaks out in conduct more disorderly than ever, and after smashing his window, spends his time in shouting to the prisoners below. The governor, now alive to his real character, declares “that the injury done to the discipline of the prison by the perpetual insubordination of this boy has become so serious, that I think he must be sent up to the committee as incorrigible.” Again he wavers, and again he changes his mind. “John Stokes applied to me yesterday evening, and spoke so sensibly, with such an appearance of a sincere desire for reformation, that I must beg to suspend my recommendation for his removal to the hulks. The result of such removal would probably be to consign him to the destroying influences of the worst companions.” Stokes did not remain long in this way of thinking, and continued still to be a thorn in the governor’s side for many a month to come.