Prisons & Prisoners: Some Personal Experiences

by Lady Constance Lytton

Finally, it was another type altogether who was let in. A woman who looked any age, her face of utmost melancholy had yet the appearance of having drunk heavily; she had all the hang of an “habitual,” her clothes were the dregs of clothes and tumbling off her. When the door was opened for her to be put in, she murmured a few broken words to the effect that her salvation didn’t lie in prison.

The Irish girls and the little woman with the white boa were young, the others looked old and worn out.

I think I shall never forget the self-reproach that stung through my whole being when I had thought my intervention necessary between one prisoner and another. On passing some unusual light in the street, which momentarily lit up our van, not enough to see our faces but only to distinguish the outlines of forms, I noticed that the prisoner opposite to Elsie Howey, my neighbour, was leaning forward and bent towards her. The momentary flash of light was too short-lived to judge whether this was a rapid movement perhaps, as I thought, of assault or drunken affection, or whether it was that the position of physical weariness could find no rest from leaning back on the walls of the jolting van. I was unable to see Elsie, but I imagined that she too might be scared by the attention of the prisoner opposite. As the darkness closed in upon us, I thrust my hand into hers; it was welcomed, but quite unnecessary. Before the end of our drive two things were clear—the prisoners might be evil-minded towards all the rest of the world, they might be blind drunk or raging with misery at their own plight, but the one thing impossible to them would have been to hurt a fellow-prisoner. Every one of those pathetic human wrecks, deformed by drink, so that one could not tell if they were guilty of crime besides, overtaken at a moment when their self-respect was lowest, and captured by a punitive system which would do its utmost to dissolve what remained of it, as they were thrust into the black cavity of the van, made a vigorous appeal to their own courage and met with instant response from their unknown companions. It might be only some drunken joke, it was almost invariably accompanied by a laugh, but for each one it had a call on their inmost strength, and it made its appeal to those in the van. Issuing from different spheres of existence, each one representing lives the most remote from one another, scarcely any two alike in a single respect as to detail, their one point of similarity being poverty and that they had given way to drink, the instinct of our first contact, doubtless to each one of us, was repulsion, mistrust, fear of one another. But it lasted for less than the flash of a moment, less than the inhaling of one breath. Our differences were there, but for the time unimportant, whereas the all-embracing fact was our similarity of fate. No need for social laws to bind that company, no rules of the club were necessary, the code of instinct, expediency and honour were all one and spontaneous to us. “We are all of one blood,” may be a great tie, but “We are all of one fate” is, while it lasts, a better; the bond of the outcast needs no seal.

We arrived for the fifth time in a courtyard, with a deal of jolting and din; it was the Bridewell Police Station, and we all got out. The little woman in the white dress and fur boa tumbled from the van into the arms of a policeman—she assured us that she loved him on finding herself thus closely against him; he remained stalwart as a piece of wood.

We Suffragettes were put into a cell by ourselves, it was perfectly clean. We had not been there very long before the door was opened with a clang and another woman was thrust in. She was reassuring to look at, smartly dressed with fashionably-shaped brown furs draped round her neck. She had come from Ireland that night and was terribly cold. We gave her the blankets that had been given to us; nothing, however, did much good. She had come over with another woman, who on landing had been taken as “wanted by the police.” This woman had been arrested, too, as “her friend,” but she said she was quite sure of getting off, as she had only known the other woman quite a short time, and had no idea that she was in any way “suspected.” The concern of this woman to get free was natural enough, but she seemed to care not at all for the other one, for whom my heart welled over with sympathy. I thought of her with a more or less deceitful face, but I loved her because she was “wanted by the police,” and this woman who was with us I wanted to get off, of course, but that was all; I could not feel any sympathy towards her.

We waited in this cell until it was dawning light. It was not a place for sleep, and the cold was terrible. As it was getting towards morning, we were taken out of the cell and led off to wash our hands and faces in another part of the prison. It was fearfully dark in one part, with only a light occasionally here and there, so that one could not see where one was going. On a bench, some ten or twelve little boys were sitting.

It was the first time I thought of children as prisoners. At Newcastle, it was true, I had seen one little boy in the police court, but he was enjoying himself over a cup of soup in the central room with the police, and he was much too small to be convicted, whatever his offences; possibly, if his parents were hopeless, he would have been sent to a reformatory school. That, of course, was bad enough; one knew that for half of the money that would have to be expended there was many a woman in the country who would have cared for him with motherly tenderness. But with these boys, who looked about nine years to fifteen or sixteen years old, it was another matter. The place where they sat, though public, for it was a gangway, was terrible, it was just where the passages seemed to go underground; they were extremely dark, on one side they abutted into a regular network of cells, with small communicating alleys in between. There the boys sat and gazed at the grown-up criminals who appeared from time to time; they looked at us with the greatest curiosity. It was horrible to see them in a place so profoundly ill-suited to children.

The Liverpool organiser, Miss Flatman, and Miss Maude Joachim came to us with the daylight of Saturday, January 15. It was a most unexpected joy to see them—not alone, for that was not allowed, but in one of the many passages near a window with a policeman standing by. I was able to write a little scrap of a letter to Mrs. Pethick Lawrence in the name of “Jane Warton.” This made me very happy. I believe we were offered breakfast, or should have been able to get it had we asked for it, but, in any case, those surroundings were so wretched that we almost as soon went without, and I was eager to begin the hunger-strike.