I have dealt in the last few pages with the misconduct of the boys as it showed itself in a comparatively short period of time.
The contumacy of these lads continued for more than a year: again and again they broke out, insulted, bearded, browbeat their officers till the latter stood almost in awe of their charges; night after night the pentagon was made hideous with their outcries and uproar. The governor was pressed to abolish the ward altogether; but the project was a pet one, and he hesitated to abandon it. He never quite got the better of the boys; but in the end firmness and a resolute exhibition of authority had its effect, and the ward, if not entirely quelled, was at least brought to something like subordination and order.
It is of course clear to the reader that the convicts who were now and hereafter contained within the Millbank walls comprised the worst of the criminal class. There is this difference between the calendars at Newgate and at Millbank, that at the former place the worst criminals passed without delay to the gallows, while at the large depot prison they remained to continually vex their keepers.
The life of Millbank was prolonged until the end of the nineteenth century, by which time the new and palatial buildings at Wormwood Scrubs, on the western outskirts of London, had been completed. A word is appropriate here as to this imposing edifice which was begun in a very small way by the writer, in the winter of 1874. The plan pursued was identical with that of Elam Lynds when he built Sing Sing on the banks of the Hudson. Lynds must have been a fine self-reliant character, of such unwavering courage that it gave him personal ascendency over the dangerous elements in his charge. When they told him that a certain convict openly threatened to murder him, he sent for the man, who was a barber, and made him shave him. “I knew you had said you would kill me,” he remarked quietly after the shaving was over. “I despised you too much to believe you would do it. Here alone, unarmed, I am stronger than you, and the whole of your companions.”
The work at Wormwood Scrubs as at Sing Sing was almost entirely done by the convicts themselves under the supervision of the warders and directing staff.
An indispensable preliminary was the provision of a boundary fence enclosing an area of three acres of common land. This fence was of simple planking ten feet in height. Inside this space the shell of a slight temporary prison had also been erected, a two-storied building, of wood on an iron framework filled in with brick “nogging” (a single brick thick), the cells lined and separated with sheet iron. Nine of these cells were completed with locked doors and barred windows when they were at once occupied by nine “special class” prisoners, men who were in the last year of a lengthy sentence and little likely to run away and forfeit privileges already earned. From this germ or nucleus the whole establishment grew. The first comers laboured on the still unfinished cells and as they were gotten ready fresh arrivals were imported to fill them. In a short time the whole block of a hundred cells was completed, and with the numbers which could now be lodged there was strength sufficient for very extended operations: the erection of a second block for another hundred convicts; and the preparation of clay for brickmaking, and the digging for the foundations of the main prison. Such rapid progress was made that within six months I had established the brick mills and had turned out a large number of “London stock,”—the sound, hard, light yellow bricks, the chief building material of our modern metropolis. The place was largely self-contained and self-supporting; we did everything as far as possible for ourselves; we had our own carpenters and smiths; we dressed stone for the window sills and cast the iron bars and framework for staircases. Ere long the prison population reached a daily average of from five to six hundred, and in less than five years we had built four large blocks containing 350 cells apiece, a spacious chapel, a boundary wall and beyond it numerous residences for the governor and staff. Throughout this period, Millbank was the parent prison, Wormwood Scrubs only an offshoot drawing support, supplies, cash, all necessaries from the older establishment.
Millbank continued to be a centre of great criminal interest to the very end. As has been shown, it became the depot and starting-point for all convicts sentenced to penal exile, and when a peremptory stop was put to transportation, it worked in with the substituted system of Public Works prisons. For fifty years it was a receptacle for male and female convicts undergoing the first period of separate confinement, the preliminary to associated work with greater freedom. Notorieties of all kinds passed through it; and the names of almost all the celebrated prisoners of the time were to be found upon its registers. There were murderers who had scraped through and just escaped the death penalty, such as Dixblanc, the French cook who murdered her mistress in Park Lane. Constance Kent, who confessed to the mysterious crime of killing her infant brother, spent many years at Millbank; the cruel and infamous Stantons, who starved poor Alice—— at Penge, began their retribution there; Madame Rachel, the would-be benefactor to her sex which she desired to make beautiful for ever, tried her blandishments on more than one Millbank matron. It was my fate to welcome the Tichborne claimant to durance vile, to watch him wasting from excessive obesity to a decent and respectable size, lachrymose and repentant, but secretive and defiant to the last. The moving spirits in the De Goncourt affair, Kurr and Benson, made Millbank their medium of communication with the dishonest detective officers who for a time shook public confidence in the London police force.
Millbank served for other prison purposes. In its latest phases, part of its accommodation was leased to military authorities and it was long the home of court-martial prisoners. When the State finally acquired all prisons of every category in the country, it was used for the retention of venial offenders sent by petty sessions and police courts.
The end came in 1891, when Millbank was finally closed and the site surrendered by the prison authorities to the government Office of Works.
Here the London County Council have built dwellings for the poor; a handsome military hospital for the Guards and London District has been erected by the War Office; and the trustees of the Tait bequest have put up a fine gallery to house the valuable pictures with which that munificent patron has endowed London. Thus buildings of a new and very different character have now replaced the old Penitentiary.