Strong as were the foregoing remarks, the inspectors wound up their report in still more trenchant language, framing a terrible indictment against those responsible for the condition of Newgate. Their words deserve to be quoted in full.
“We cannot close these remarks,” say the inspectors, “without an expression of the painful feelings with which we submit to your Lordship[87] this picture of the existing state of Newgate. That in this vast metropolis, the centre of wealth, civilization, and information; distinguished as the seat of religion, worth, and philanthropy, where is to be found in operation every expedient by which Ignorance may be superseded by Knowledge, Idleness by Industry, and Suffering by Benevolence; that in the metropolis of this highly-favoured country, to which the eyes of other lands turn for example, a system of prison discipline such as that enforced in Newgate should be for a number of years in undisturbed operation, not only in contempt of religion and humanity, but in opposition to the recorded denunciations of authority, and in defiance of the express enactments of the law, is indeed a subject which cannot but impress every considerate mind with humiliation and sorrow. We trust, however, that the day is at hand when this stain will be removed from the character of the city of London, and when the first municipal authority of our land will be no longer subjected to the reproach of fostering an institution which outrages the rights and feelings of humanity, defeats the ends of justice, and disgraces the profession of a Christian country.”
The publication of this report raised a storm in the city, and the corporation was roused to make an immediate protest. A committee of aldermen was forthwith appointed to report upon the inspectors’ report, and the result was another lengthy blue book, printed in the parliamentary papers, 1836, traversing where it was possible the statements of the inspectors, and offering explanation and palliation of such evils as could not be denied. The inspectors retorted without loss of time, reiterating their charges, and pointing out that the committee of aldermen by its own admission justified the original allegations. It was impossible to deny the indiscriminate association; the gambling, drinking, smoking, quarrelling in the gaol; the undue authority given to prisoners, the levying of garnish under another name, the neglect of the condemned convicts, the filthy condition of the wards, the insufficiency of bedding and clothing, the misemployment of officers and prisoners by the governor. The corporation evidently had the worst of it, and began to feel the necessity for undertaking the great work of reform. Next year we find the inspectors expressing their satisfaction that “the full and faithful exposure which we felt it our duty to make of Newgate has been productive of at least some advantage, inasmuch as it has aroused the attention of those upon whom parliamentary reports and grand jury presentments had hitherto failed to make the slightest impression.”
The measures of improvement introduced were mainly as follows: the fixing of “inspection holes” in the doors and walls, so as to insure more supervision; of windows opening into the well-holes, to give better light and ventilation; the construction of bed-places, three tiers high alongside the walls for males, two tiers for females; the provision of dining-rooms and dining-tables. The infirmary was enlarged, the admission of visitors limited, and the passing of articles prevented by a wire screen. The windows were to be glazed and painted to prevent prisoners from looking out; baths, fumigating places for clothing, wash-house, and the removal of dust-bins, completed the new arrangements in the main prison. In the press-yard, the press-room and ward above it were parcelled out into nine separate sleeping cells; each was provided with an iron bedstead, and a small desk at which the condemned man might read or write. But the one great and most crying evil remained unremedied. “The mischief of gaol associations,” say the inspectors, “which has been demonstrably proved to be the fruitful source of all the abuses and irregularities which have so long disgraced Newgate, is not only permitted still to exist in the prison, but is rendered more powerful than before.”... In endeavouring to arrest contamination, prisoners were more closely confined, and associated in smaller numbers; but this had the effect of throwing them into closer contact, and of making them more intimately acquainted with, more directly influential upon, one another.
In the inspectors’ fourth report, dated 1839, they return to the charge, and again call the corporation to task for their mismanagement of Newgate. Abuses and irregularities, which had been partially remedied by the reform introduced in 1837, were once more in the ascendant. “In our late visits,” they say, “we have seen manifest indications of a retrograde movement in this respect, and a tendency to return to much of that laxity and remissness which formerly marked the management of this prison.” Again the following year the inspectors repeat their charge. “The prominent evils of this prison (Newgate)—evils which the alterations made within the last four years have failed to remove—are the association of prisoners, and the unusual contamination to which such association gives rise. For nearly twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four the prisoners are locked up, during which time no officer is stationed in the ward with them.” They go on to say—“Newgate is only less extensively injurious than formerly because it is less crowded. The effects of the imprisonment are to vitiate its inmates, to extend their acquaintanceship with each other, to corrupt the prisoner charged with an offence of which he may be innocent, and to confirm in guilt the young and inexperienced offender.”
The reports as the years flow on reiterate the same complaints. Much bitterness of feeling is evidently engendered, and the corporation grows more and more angry with the inspectors. The prison officials appear to be on the side of the inspectors, to the great dissatisfaction of the corporation, who claimed the full allegiance and support of its servants. In a resolution passed by the Court of Aldermen on 18th March, 1842, I find it ordered “that the ordinary of Newgate be restricted from making any communications to the Home Office or the Inspectors of Prisons, and that he be required wholly to confine himself to the performance of his duty as prescribed by Act of Parliament.” The inspectors were not to be deterred, however, by any opposition from the earnest discharge of their functions, and continued to report against Newgate. In their tenth report they state that they are compelled by an imperative sense of duty to advert in terms of decided condemnation to the lamentable condition of the prisons of the city of London,—Newgate, Giltspur St. Compter, and the City Bridewell,—in which the master evil of gaol association and consequent contamination still continues to operate directly to the encouragement of crime. “The plan adopted for ventilating the dining-room on the ‘master’s side’ and that of the middle yard is very inefficient; it consists of several circular perforations, about two inches in diameter, slanting downwards from the top of the walls to the outside adjoining the slaughter-houses of Newgate market; and occasionally, in hot weather, instead of ventilating the apartments, they only serve to convey the offensive effluvia arising from the decaying animal matter into the dining-rooms. Sometimes the stench in hot weather is said to be very bad. Many rats also come through these so-called ventilators, as they open close to the ground at the back of the prison.” At the same time the inspectors animadvert strongly upon the misconduct of prisoners and the frequency of prison punishments, both offences and punishments affording a sufficient index to the practices going forward; and they wind up by declaring that a strict compliance with their duties gave them no choice “but to report matters as we found them, and again and again to protest against Newgate as it at present exists.”
No complete and permanent improvement was indeed possible while Newgate remained unchanged. It was not till the erection of the new prison at Holloway in 1850, and the entire internal reconstruction of Newgate according to new ideas, that the evils so justly complained of and detailed in this chapter were entirely removed. But these are matters which will occupy a later page in my narrative.
CHAPTER VI.
EXECUTIONS (continued).
Executions not always in front of Newgate after discontinuance of Tyburn—Old Bailey by degrees monopolizes the business—Description of the new gallows—Same system had already been used in Dublin—“The fall of the leaf”—Last case of burning before Newgate—Phœbe Harris, in 1788—Crowds as great as ever at the Old Bailey, and as brutal as of old—Pieman, ballad-monger, and “rope”-seller did a roaring trade—Governor Wall—His demeanour and dress—Enormous crowd at Wall’s execution—Also at that of Holloway and Haggerty—Frightful catastrophe and terrible loss of life in the crowd—The same anticipated at execution of Bellingham, but avoided by extreme precautions taken—Crowds to see Fauntleroy and Courvoisier suffer—Description of an execution in 1851—The demeanour, generally, of the condemned—Long protracted uncertainty as to their fate—Awful levity displayed—Reasons for delay—The Recorder’s report—Its arrival—Communicated to convicts by chaplain—Tenderness really shown to those certain to die—Chaplain improves the occasion in preaching the condemned sermon—The chapel service on day it was preached described—Demeanour of the condemned described in detail—Abstract of a condemned sermon—Service and returning thanks by the respited the day after the execution—Callousness of those present—Crowded congregation to hear Courvoisier’s condemned sermon, and dense throng to see him hanged—Amelioration of the criminal code—Executions more rare—Capital punishment gradually restricted to murderers—Dissection of the bodies abolished—Some details of dissection—Public exhibition of bodies also discontinued—The body of Williams, who murdered the Marrs, so shown—Hanging in chains given up—Failures at executions—Culprits fight for life—Case of Charles White, of Luigi Buranelli, of William Bousfield—Calcraft and his method of hanging—Other hangmen—Story of the cost of a hangman.
I PROPOSE to return now to the subject of Newgate executions, which we left at the time of the discontinuance of the long-practised procession to Tyburn. The reasons for this change were fully set forth in a previous chapter.[88] The terrible spectacle was as demoralizing to the public, for whose admonition it was intended, as the exposure was brutal and cruel towards the principal actors. The decision to remove the scene of action to the immediate front of the gaol itself was in the right direction, as making the performance shorter and diminishing the area of display. But the Old Bailey was not exclusively used; at first, and for some few years after 1784, executions took place occasionally at a distance from Newgate. This was partly due to the survival of the old notion that the scene of the crime ought also to witness the retribution; partly perhaps because residents in and about the Old Bailey raised a loud protest against the constant erection of the scaffold in their neighbourhood. As regards the first, I find that in 1786 John Hogan, the murderer of a Mr. Odell, an attorney who resided in Charlotte Street, Rathbone Place, was executed on a gibbet in front of his victim’s house. Lawrence Jones, a burglar, was in 1793 ordered for execution in Hatton Garden, near the house he had robbed; and when he evaded the sentence by suicide, his body was exhibited in the same neighbourhood, “extended upon a plank on the top of an open cart, in his clothes, and fettered.” Again, as late as 1809 and 1812, Execution Dock, on the banks of the Thames, was still retained. Here John Sutherland, commander of the British armed transport ‘The Friends,’ suffered on the 29th June, 1809, for the murder of his cabin-boy, whom he stabbed after much ill-usage on board the ship as it lay in the Tagus. On the 18th December, 1812, two sailors, Charles Palm and Sam Tilling, were hanged at the same place for the murder of their captain, James Keith, of the trading vessel ‘Adventure,’ upon the high seas. They were taken in a cart to the place of execution, amidst a vast concourse of people. “Palm, as soon as he was seated in the cart, put a quid of tobacco into his mouth, and offered another to his companion, who refused it with indignation.... Some indications of pity were offered for the fate of Tilling; Palm, execration alone.”[89]