The prisoner mentioned above was continually persecuted by trials of this kind. The most trifling acts were magnified into offences. He was charged with moving something which should not be touched, with leaving a door open, or coughing maliciously to the disturbance of his companions. The evidence was invariably sufficient to convict, and the judge never hesitated to inflict the heaviest penalties. The unfortunate man was compelled at length to adopt the habits of his associates; “by insensible degrees he began to lose his repugnance to their society, caught their flash terms and sung their songs, was admitted to their revels, and acquired, in place of habits of perfect sobriety, a taste for spirits.” His wife visited him in Newgate, and wrote a pitiable account of the state in which she found her husband. He was an inmate of the same ward with others of the most dreadful sort, “whose language and manners, whose female associates of the most abandoned description, and the scenes consequent with such lost wretches, prevented me from going inside but seldom, and I used to communicate with him through the bars from the passage.” One day he was too ill to come down and meet her. She went up to the ward and found him lying down, “pale as death, very ill, and in a dreadfully dirty state, the wretches making game of him, and enjoying my distress; and I learned he had been up with the others the whole night. Though they could not force him to gamble, he was compelled to drink, and I was obliged afterwards to let him have five shillings to pay his share, otherwise he would have been stripped of his clothes.”
Felons who could pay the price were permitted, irrespective of their character or offences, to purchase the greater ease and comfort of the master’s side. The entrance fee was at least 13s. 6d. a head, with half-a-crown a week more for bed and bedding, the wards being furnished with barrack bedsteads, upon which each prisoner had the regulation allowance of sleeping room, or about a foot and a half laterally. These fees were in reality a substantial contribution towards the expenses of the gaol; without them the keeper declared that he could not pay the salaries of turnkeys and servants, nor keep the prison going at all. Besides the gaol fees, there was garnish of half-a-guinea, collected by the steward, and spent in providing coals, candles, plates, knives, and forks; while all the occupants of this part of the prison supported themselves; they had the ration of prison bread only, but they had no share in the prison meat or other charities, and they or their friends found them in food. All who could scrape together the cash seem to have gladly availed themselves of the privilege of entering the master’s side. It was the only way to escape the horrors, the distress, penury, and rags of the common yards. Idleness was not so universally the rule in this part of the gaol. Artizans and others were at liberty to work at their trades, provided they were not dangerous. Tailoring and shoemaking was permitted, but it was deemed unsafe to allow a carpenter or blacksmith to have his tools. All the money earned by prisoners was at their own disposal, and was spent almost habitually in drink, chambering, and wantonness.
The best accommodation the gaol could offer was reserved for the prisoners on the state side, from whom still higher fees were exacted, with the same discreditable idea of swelling the revenues of the prison. To constitute this the aristocratic quarter, unwarrantable demands were made upon the space properly allotted to the female felons,[42] and no lodger was rejected, whatever his status, who offered himself and could bring grist to the mill. The luxury of the state side was for a long time open to all who could pay—the convicted felon, the transport awaiting removal, the lunatic whose case was still undecided,[43] the misdemeanant tried or untried, the debtor who wished to avoid the discomfort of the crowded debtors’ side, the outspoken newspaper editor, or the daring reporter of parliamentary debates. The better class of inmate complained bitterly of this enforced companionship with the vile, association at one time forbidden by custom, but which greed and rapacity long made the rule. The fee for admission to the state side, as fixed by the table of fees, was three guineas, but Mr. Newman declared that he never took more than two. Ten and sixpence a week more was charged as rent for a single bed; where two or more slept in a bed the rent was seven shillings a week each. Prisoners who could afford it sometimes paid for four beds, at the rate of twenty-eight shillings, and so secured the luxury of a private room. A Mr. Lundy, charged with forgery, was thus accommodated on the state side for upwards of five years. But the keeper protested that no single prisoner could thus monopolize space if the state side was crowded. The keeper went still further in his efforts to make money. He continued the ancient practice of letting out a portion of his own house, and by a poetical fiction treated it as an annexe of the state side. Mr. Davison, sent to Newgate for embezzlement, and whose case is given in the preceding chapter, was accommodated with a room in Mr. Newman’s house at the extravagant rental of thirty guineas per week; Mr. Cobbett was also a lodger of Mr. Newman’s; and so were any members of the aristocracy, if they happened to be in funds—among whom was the Marquis of Sligo in 1811.
The female felons’ wards I shall describe at length in the next chapter, which will deal with Mrs. Fry’s philanthropic exertions at this period in this particular part of the prison. These wards were always full to overflowing; sometimes double the number the rooms could accommodate were crowded into them. There was a master’s side for females who could pay the usual fees, but they associated with the rest in the one narrow yard common to all. The tried and the untried, young and old, were herded together; sometimes girls of thirteen, twelve, even ten or nine years of age, were exposed to “all the contagion and profligacy which prevailed in this part of the prison.” There was no separation even for the women under sentence of death, who lived in a common and perpetually crowded ward. Only when the order of execution came down were those about to suffer placed apart in one of the rooms in the arcade of the middle ward.
I have kept till the last that part of the prison which was usually the last resting-place of so many. The old press yard has been fully described in a previous chapter.[44] The name still survived in the new press yard, which was the receptacle of the male condemned prisoners. It was generally crowded, like the rest of the prison. Except in murder cases, where the execution was generally very promptly performed, strange and inconceivable delay occurred in carrying out the extreme sentence. Hence there was a terrible accumulation of prisoners in the condemned cells. Once, during the long illness of George III., as many as one hundred were there waiting the “Report,” as it was called. At another time there were fifty, one of whom had been under sentence a couple of years. Mr. Bennet speaks of thirty-eight capital convicts he found in the press yard in February 1817, five of whom had been condemned the previous July, four in September, and twenty-nine in October. This procrastination bred certain callousness. Few realizing that the dreadful fate would overtake them, dismissed the prospect of death, and until the day was actually fixed, spent the time in roystering, swearing, gambling, or playing at ball. Visitors were permitted access to them without stint; unlimited drink was not denied them provided it was obtained in regulated quantities at one time. These capital convicts, says Mr. Bennet, “lessened the ennui and despair of their situation by unbecoming merriment, or sought relief in the constant application of intoxicating stimulants. I saw Cashman[45] a few hours before his execution, smoking and drinking with the utmost unconcern and indifference.” Those who were thus reckless reacted upon the penitent who knew their days were numbered, and their gibes and jollity counteracted the ordinary’s counsels or the independent preacher’s earnest prayers. For while Roman Catholics and Dissenters were encouraged to see ministers of their own persuasion, a number of amateurs were ever ready to give their gratuitous ministrations to the condemned.
The prisoners in the press yard had free access during the day to the yard and large day room; at night they were placed in the fifteen cells, two, three, or more together, according to the total number to be accommodated. They were never left quite alone for fear of suicide, and for the same reason they were searched for weapons or poisons. But they nevertheless frequently managed to secrete the means of making away with themselves, and accomplished their purpose. Convicted murderers were kept continuously in the cells on bread and water, in couples, from the time of sentence to that of execution, which was about three or four days generally, from Friday to Monday, so as to include one Sunday, on which day there was a special service for the condemned in the prison chapel. This latter was an ordeal which all dreaded, and many avoided by denying their faith. The condemned occupied an open pew in the centre of the chapel, hung with black; in front of them, upon a table, was a black coffin in full view. The chapel was filled with a curious but callous congregation, who came to stare at the miserable people thus publicly exposed. Well might Mr. Bennet write that the condition of the condemned side was the most prominent of the manifold evils in the present system of Newgate, “so discreditable to the metropolis.”
Yet it must have been abundantly plain to the reader that the other evils existing were great and glaring. A brief summary of them will best prove this. The gaol was neither suitable nor sufficiently large. It was not even kept weather-tight. The roof of the female prison, says the grand jury in their presentment in 1813, let in the rain. Supplies of common necessaries, such as have now been part of the furniture of every British gaol for many years, were meagre or altogether absent. The rations of food were notoriously inadequate, and so carelessly distributed, that many were left to starve. So unjust and unequal was the system, that the allowance to convicted criminals was better than that of the innocent debtor, and the general insufficiency was such that it multiplied beyond all reason the number of visitors, many of whom came merely as the purveyors of food to their friends.
The prison allowances were eked out by the broken victuals generously given by several eating-house keepers in the city, such as Messrs. Birch of Cornhill and Messrs. Leach and Dollimore of Ludgate Hill. These were fetched away in a large tub on a truck by a turnkey. Amongst the heap was often the meat that had made turtle soup, which, when heated and stirred together in a saucepan, was said to be very good eating. The bedding was scanty; fuel and light had to be purchased out of prisoners’ private means; clothing was issued but rarely, even to prisoners almost in nakedness, and as a special charitable gift. Extortion was practised right and left. Garnish continued to be demanded long after it had disappeared in other and better-regulated prisons. The fees on reception and discharge must be deemed exorbitant, when it is remembered the impoverished class who usually crowded the gaol; and they were exacted to relieve a rich corporation from paying for the maintenance of their own prison. This imposition of fees left prisoners destitute on their discharge, without funds to support them in their first struggle to recommence life, with ruined character, bad habits, and often bad health contracted in the gaol. A further and a more iniquitous method of extorting money was still practised, that of loading newly-arrived prisoners until they paid certain fees. Ironing was still the rule, not only for the convicted, but for those charged with felonies; only the misdemeanants escaped. At the commencement of every sessions, such of the untried as had purchased “easement” of irons were called up and re-fettered, preparatory to their appearance in the Old Bailey. Irons were seldom removed from the convicted until discharge; sometimes the wearer was declared medically unfit, or he obtained release by long good conduct, or the faithful discharge of some petty office, such as gatesman or captain of a ward. The irons weighed from three to four pounds, but heavier irons, seven or eight pounds’ weight, were imposed in case of misconduct; and when there had been an attempt at escape, the culprit was chained down to the floor by running a chain through his irons which prevented him from climbing to the window of his cell. Among other excuses offered for thus manacling all almost without exception, was that it was the best and safest method of distinguishing a prisoner from a stranger and temporary visitor. Clothes or prison uniform would not have served the purpose, for a disguise can be rapidly and secretly put on, whereas irons cannot well be exchanged without loss of time and attracting much attention.[46]
The unchecked admission of crowds of visitors to the felons’ as well as the debtors’ side was another unmixed evil. By this means spirits, otherwise unattainable and strictly prohibited, were smuggled into the gaol. Searches[47] were made certainly, but they were too often superficial, or they might be evaded by a trifling bribe. Hence the frequent cases of drunkenness, of which no notice was taken, unless people grew riotous in their cups, and attracted attention by their disorderly behaviour. Another frightful consequence of this indiscriminate admission was the influx of numbers of abandoned women, only a few of whom had the commendable prudery to pass themselves off as the wives of prisoners. Any reputed, and indeed any real, wife might spend the night in Newgate if she would pay the shilling fee, commonly known as the “bad money,” a base payment which might have done something towards increasing the prison receipts, had it not been appropriated by the turnkey who winked at this evasion of the rules. Among the daily visitors were members of the criminal classes still at large, the thieves and burglars who carried on the active business of their profession, from which their confederates were temporarily debarred. One notorious character, while a prisoner awaiting transfer to the hulks, kept open house, so to speak, and entertained daily within the walls a select party of the most noted thieves in London. This delectable society enticed into their set a clerk who had been imprisoned for fraud, and offered him half the booty if he would give full information as to the transactions and correspondence of his late employers. Owing to the facility of intercourse between inside and outside, many crimes were doubtless hatched in Newgate. Some of the worst and most extensive burglaries were planned there. Forged notes had been fabricated, false money coined, and both passed out in quantities to be circulated through the country. “I believe,” says Mr. Bennet in the letter already largely quoted, “that there is no place in the metropolis where more crimes are projected or where stolen property is more secreted than in Newgate.”
These malpractices were fostered by the absence of all supervision and the generally unbroken idleness. Although attempted partially at Bridewell, and more systematically at the new Millbank penitentiary, but just open (1816), the regular employment of prisoners had never yet been accepted as a principle in the metropolitan prisons. Insuperable difficulties were still supposed to stand in the way of any general employment of prisoners at their trades. There was fear as to the unrestricted use of tools, limits of space, the interference of the ill-disposed, who would neither work nor let others do so, and the danger of losing material, raw or manufactured. Many years were to elapse before these objections should be fairly met and universally overcome. It was not strange, therefore, that the inmates of Newgate should turn their unoccupied brains and idle hands to all manner of mischief; that when they were not carousing, plotting, or scheming, they should gamble with dice or cards, and play at bumble puppy or some other disreputable game of chance.