CHAPTER X.
THE GAOL FEVER.

Why chapter so styled—The gaol fever the visible exponent of foul state of gaols—Their evils briefly described—Neither sufficient light nor air—Often underground—Scantiest supply of water—No bed, no exercise—Meagre rations—Water soup—Allowance to criminals denied to debtors who had to beg alms—Prison buildings wretched—Often private property of local magnates, who farmed them out, and pocketed the gains—How the Bishop of Ely kept his prisoners—All prisoners loaded with irons—Legal opinions on the practice—Description of irons used—Women also fettered—John Wilkes when sheriff protests against ironing the untried—Avarice primary cause of ill-treatment of prisoners—Drunkenness encouraged—Gaol fees—Overcrowding the parent of gaol fever—Rarity of gaol deliveries—The gaol fever explained—Its causes—Its ravages—Extends from prisons to court-houses—To villages—Into the army and the fleet—Earliest mention of gaol distemper—The Black Assize—The sickness of the House at the King’s Bench prison—The gaol fever in the 17th century—Its outbreaks in the 18th—The Taunton Assize—Originated in Newgate in 1750—Extends to Old Bailey with deadly results—The Corporation alarmed—Seek to provide a remedy—Enquiry into the sanitary condition of Newgate—A new ventilator recommended by the Rev. Dr. Hales and Dr. Pringle, F.R.S.—The ventilator described—Hopes expressed that it will check the disease, but the air of Newgate continues pestiferous—Fatal effects of working at the ventilator—Men employed show all symptoms of gaol fever—The fever constantly present in Newgate—Mr. Akerman’s evidence—Statistics of deaths—The fever taken into the country gaols by prisoners removed from Newgate—Also to Southwark—Renewed dread in the Courts, which are protected by the fumes of vinegar—All this time no regular doctor at Newgate—Howard condemns construction of new Newgate as likely to produce gaol fever—Lord George Gordon dies of it in 1793—Dr. Smith reports and condemns the new prison at Newgate—Too crowded and faulty site—Mr. Akerman defends it as superior to the old, but admits that prisoners die in it, broken-hearted—Mr. Akerman a humane man—A friend of Boswell’s, who panegyrizes him—Mr. Akerman’s brave and judicious conduct at a fire in prison—Calms the prisoners, and remains in the midst of danger—Life at Newgate—The sexes intermixed—Debauchery—Gaming—Drunkenness—Moral contamination—Criminals willingly took military service to escape confinement in Newgate.

I HAVE given this title to the present chapter because the gaol fever while it raged was the visible exponent of the foul condition of all gaols, including Newgate, or, as Dr. Guy puts it, “the physical expression of manifold prison neglect and mismanagement.” The loathsome corruption that festered unchecked or unalleviated within the prison houses was never revealed until John Howard began his self-sacrificing visitations, and it is to the pages of his ‘State of Prisons’ that we must refer for full details. Some would be incredible were they not vouched for on the unimpeachable testimony of the great philanthropist. All through the eighteenth century the case of all prisoners was desperate, their sufferings heart-rending, their treatment a disgrace to that or any age. They were either entirely deprived of, or at best but scantily provided with, the commonest and most indispensable necessaries of life. They were often denied both light and air, which are assuredly the free heritage of all God’s creatures. Rapacity and extortion, of which more directly, were too prevalent in prison administration to allow of many windows when all such openings were heavily taxed. What windows there were looked generally down dark entries or noisome passages, and gave no light. In Newgate until the building of the new (and last) gaol, the felons’ side and the common debtors’ side were so dark that it was necessary to use links and burners all day long; indeed, artificial light was generally necessary all over the prison, except in the press-yard.

The place of durance was sometimes underground, a dungeon, or subterranean cellar, into which the prisoners were lowered, to fight with rats for the meagre pittance of food thrown to them through a trap-door. These terrible oubliettes were too often damp and noisome, half a foot deep in water, or with an open sewer running through the centre of the floor. They had no chimneys, no fireplace, no barrack beds; the wretched inmates huddled together for warmth upon heaps of filthy rags or bundles of rotten straw reeking with foul exhalations, and fetid with all manner of indescribable nastiness. There was not the slightest attempt at ventilation, as we understand the word. The windows, when they existed, were seldom if ever opened, nor the doors, for the spaces within the prison walls were generally too limited to allow of daily exercise, and the prisoners were thus kept continuously under lock and key. Water, another necessary of life, was doled out in the scantiest quantities, too small for proper ablutions or cleansing purposes, and hardly sufficient to assuage thirst. Howard tells us of one prison where the daily allowance of water was only three pints per head, and even this was dependent upon the good will of the keepers, who brought it or not, as they felt disposed. At another, water could only be had on payment, the price being a halfpenny for three gallons.

The rations of food were equally meagre. In some prisons indeed nothing was given; in others, the prisoners subsisted on water-soup—“bread boiled in mere water.” The poor debtors were the worst off. For the felon, thief, murderer, or highwayman there was a grant either in money or in kind—a pennyworth of bread per diem, or a shilling’s worth per week, or a certain weight of bread. But the debtors, who formed three-fourths of the permanent prison population, and whose liabilities on an average did not exceed ten or fifteen pounds a piece, were almost starved to death. The bequests of charitable people, especially intended for their support, were devoted to other uses; creditors seldom if ever paid the “groat,” or fourpence per diem for subsistence required by the Act. Any alms collected within the prison by direct mendicancy were commonly intercepted by the ruffians who ruled the roost. When gaolers applied to the magistrates for food for the debtors the answer was, “Let them work or starve”; yet the former was forbidden, lest the tools they used might fall into the hands of criminal prisoners, and furnish means of escape. At Exeter the prisoners were marched about the city soliciting charity in the streets. One Christmas-tide, so Howard says, the person who conducted them broke open the box and absconded with the contents. The debtors’ ward in this gaol was called the “shew,” because the debtors begged by letting down a shoe from the window.

Prison buildings were mostly inconvenient, ill-planned, and but little adapted for the purposes of incarceration. Many of them were ancient strongholds—the gate of some fortified city, the keep or castle or embattled residence of a great personage. Some lords, spiritual and temporal, with peculiar powers in their own districts, once had their prisons, so to speak, under their own roof. The prisons lingered long after the power lapsed, and in Howard’s time many of the worst prisons were the private property of individuals,[175] who protected the keepers, their lessees, and pocketed the gains wrung from the wretched lodgers. The Duke of Portland was the proprietor of Chesterfield gaol, which consisted of one room with a cellar under it. For this accommodation, and the privilege it conferred upon him of demanding gaol fees, the keeper paid the Duke an annual rent of eighteen guineas. “The cellar,” Howard says, “had not been cleaned for months, nor the prison door opened for several weeks.” Another disgraceful prison was that owned by the Bishop of Ely. One bishop had been compelled to rebuild it in part fourteen years before Howard’s visit, but it was still bad. It had been so insecure that the keeper resorted to a most cruel contrivance in order to ensure safe custody. Prisoners were “chained down upon their backs upon a floor, across which were several iron bars, with an iron collar with spikes about their necks, and a heavy iron bar over their legs.” This barbarous treatment formed the subject of a special petition to the king, supported by a drawing, “with which His Majesty was much affected, and gave immediate orders for a proper inquiry and redress.”

Loading prisoners with irons was very generally practised, although its legality was questioned even then. Lord Coke gave his opinion against the oppression. Bracton affirmed that a sentence condemning a man to be confined in irons was illegal, and in ‘Blackstone Commentaries’[176] is this passage: “The law will not justify jailers in fettering a prisoner unless when he is unruly, or has attempted an escape. In 1728 the judges reprimanded the warders of the Fleet prison, and declared that a jailer could not answer the ironing of a man before he was found guilty of a crime.” When a keeper pleaded necessity for safe custody to Lord Chief Justice King, the judge bade him “build higher his prison walls.” As Buxton observes, the neglect of this legal precaution was no excuse for the infliction of an illegal punishment. Prisoners should not suffer because authorities neglect their duty. “Very rarely is a man ironed for his own misdeeds, but frequently for those of others; additional irons on his person are cheaper than additional elevation to the walls. Thus we cover our own negligence by increased severity to our captives.”[177]

The irons were so heavy that “walking, even lying down to sleep, was difficult and painful.” In some county gaols women did not escape this severity, Howard tells us, but London was more humane. But in the London prisons the custom of ironing even the untried males was long and firmly established. An interesting letter is extant from John Wilkes, dated 1771, the year of his shrievalty to the keeper of Newgate, Mr. Akerman. This letter expresses satisfaction with his general conduct, and admits his humanity to the unhappy persons under his care. But Wilkes takes strong exceptions to the practise of keeping the prisoners in irons at the time of arraignment and trial, which he conceives to he alike repugnant to the laws of England and humanity.

“Every person at so critical a moment ought to be without any bodily pain or restraint, that the mind may be perfectly free to deliberate on its most interesting and awful concerns, in so alarming a situation. It is cruelty to aggravate the feelings of the unhappy in such a state of distraction, and injustice to deprive them of any means for the defence of supposed innocence by calling off the attention by bodily torture at the great moment when the full exertion of every faculty is most wanting. No man in England ought to be obliged to plead while in chains; we therefore are determined to abolish the present illegal and inhuman practice, and we direct you to take off the irons before any prisoner is sent to the bar, either for arraignment or trial.”[178]

Avarice was no doubt a primary cause of the ill-treatment of prisoners, and, as I have described elsewhere,[179] heavy fees were exacted to obtain “easement” or “choice” of irons. This idea of turning gaols to profit underlaid the whole system of prison management. The gaolers bought or rented their places, and they had to recoup themselves as best they could. A pernicious vested interest was thus established, which even the legislature acknowledged. The sale of strong drink within the prison, and the existence of a prison tap or bar, were recognized and regulated by law. Drunkenness in consequence prevailed in all prisons, fostered by the evil practice of claiming garnish, which did not disappear, as I shall presently show, till well on into the present century. Another universal method of grinding money out of all who came within the grip of the law was the extortion of gaol fees. It was the enormity of demanding such payment from innocent men, acquitted after a fair trial, who in default were hauled back to prison, that first moved Howard to inquire into the custom at various prisons. As early as 1732 the Corporation of London had promulgated an order that all prisoners acquitted at the Old Bailey should be released without fees. But when Howard visited Newgate forty years later, Mr. Akerman the keeper showed him a table of fees “which was given him for his direction when he commenced keeper.” The sums demanded varied from 8s. 10d. for a debtor’s discharge, to 18s. 10d. for a felon’s, and £3 6s. 8d. for a bailable warrant. The exactions for fees, whether for innocent or guilty, tried or untried, was pretty general throughout the kingdom, although Howard found a few prisons where there were none. Even he in his suggestions for the improvement of gaols, although recommending the abolition of fees and the substitution of a regular salary to the gaoler, was evidently doubtful of securing so great a reform, for he expresses a hope that if fees were not altogether abolished they may at least be reduced. However, the philanthropist found a welcome support from Mr. Popham, M.P. for Taunton, who in 1773 brought in a bill “abolishing gaolers’ fees, and substituting for them fixed salaries payable out of the county rates,” which bill passed into law the following year in an amended form. This Act provided that acquitted prisoners “shall be immediately set at large in open court.” Yet the law was openly evaded by the clerks of assize and clerks of the place, who declared that their fees were not cancelled by the Act, and who endeavoured to indemnify themselves by demanding a fee from the gaoler for a certificate of acquittal. In one case at Durham, Judge Gould at the assizes in 1775 fined the keeper £50 for detaining acquitted prisoners under this demand of the clerk of assize, but the fine was remitted on explanation. Still another pretence often put forward for detaining acquitted prisoners until after the judge had left the town was, that other indictments might be laid against them; or yet again, prisoners were taken back to prison to have their irons knocked off, irons with which, as free, unconvicted men, they were manacled illegally and unjustly.