Prisons & Prisoners: Some Personal Experiences

by Lady Constance Lytton

I had not been long in the other cell before the doctor and four or five wardresses appeared. He was apparently angry because I had broken the jet glass; he seized one of the tin vessels and began waving it about. “I suppose you want to smash me with one of these?” he exclaimed. I said to him, so that all the wardresses with him could hear, “Unless you consider it part of your duty, would you please not strike me when you have finished your odious job” (or I may have said “slap me,” I do not remember). He did not answer, but, after a little pause, he signed to me to lie down on the bed. Again the choice of the wooden or steel implement, again the force, which after a time I could not withstand, in the same place as yesterday where the gum was sore and aching. Then the feeling of the suffocating tube thrust down and the gate of life seemed shut. The tube was pressed down much too far, it seemed to me, causing me at times great pain in my side. The sickness was worse than the time before. As the tube was removed I was unavoidably sick over the doctor. He flew away from me and out of the cell, exclaiming angrily, “If you do that again next time I shall feed you twice.” I had removed my serge jacket and taken several precautions for my bed, but I am afraid one or two of the officers and the floor and wall were drenched. I shut my eyes and lay back quite helpless for a while. They presently brought in fresh clothes, and a woman, another prisoner, came and washed the floor. It seemed terrible that another prisoner should do this, it was altogether a revolting business. Two wardresses came and overlooked her work, one of them said, in a voice of displeased authority: “Look at her! Just look at her! The way she’s doing it!” The woman washed on and took no notice; her face was intensely sad. I roused myself and said, “Well, at any rate, she’s doing what I should be doing myself and I am very grateful to her.” The wardresses looked surprised at me, but they said nothing.

The Governor came in for a moment to see me. To my surprise his anger had cooled a little. He had before spoken to me in a rage and, if I asked questions which implied a complaint, had told me they were not proper questions for me to ask, or that I must not argue or raise discussions. After failing to get a definite answer as to under whose authority the forcible feeding was done, I said it surely could not be right for him to allow such a thing in the prison over which he had jurisdiction, unless he had seen it and at least fully realised what it entailed. With apparently some reluctance, he admitted that he had witnessed it. I asked, “And after that you sanction and approve of such a thing being done to prisoners who have committed only nominal crimes with no criminal object and in defence of a claim which they have no recognised constitutional means to enforce?” The last italicised part of this remark remained unheard, for the Governor interrupted me with “That is not a fitting question for you to ask.” Later, I was had up before him in his room and was severely reprimanded for breaking the glass of the gas-box and “inspection” glass, and for defacing the walls of my cell, but I was dismissed with a caution for glass breaking, and my punishment was reserved for the Visiting Magistrates.

When it was evening the light was lit and the doctor and wardresses came again to feed me. I asked if I could not sit up in a chair and the doctor said “Yes.” I told him that I was a small eater, that the capacity of my body was very limited and if only he would give less quantities the result might be better. I also begged that he would not press the tube so far down into my body. He treated the request with contempt, saying that anyhow my stomach must be longer than his, since I was taller than he was. This third time, though I was continually sick, the doctor pressed the tube down firmly into my body and continued to pour food in. At last this produced a sort of shivering fit and my teeth chattered when the gag was removed; I suppose that every vestige of colour must have left my face, for the doctor seemed surprised and alarmed. He removed the tube and told the wardresses to lay me on the floor-bed and lower my head. He then came and lay over my chest and seemed very sorry for what he had done. I told him I should not faint, that I was not liable to this or any form of collapse; I did not mention the slight chronic debility of heart from which I suffered. He called in the junior medical officer, who happened to be passing at the time, to test my heart. The junior doctor, who was in a jovial mood, stooped down and listened to my heart through the stethoscope for barely the space of a second—he could not have heard two beats—and exclaimed, “Oh, ripping, splendid heart! You can go on with her”; with that he left the cell. But the senior doctor seemed not to be reassured and he was kind to me for the first time. He tried to feed me with a spoon, but I was still able to clench my teeth and no food got down. He then pleaded with me, saying in a beseeching voice, “I do beg of you—I appeal to you, not as a prison doctor but as a man—to give over. You are a delicate woman, you are not fit for this sort of thing.” I answered, “Is anybody fit for it? And I beg of you—I appeal to you, not as a prisoner but as a woman—to give over and refuse to continue this inhuman treatment.” After I had lain quiet for some time I managed to clean the cell myself. I took out two pails to the sink, but had only strength to carry them a few yards. As I was journeying like this, getting on very slowly, a wardress told me to take only one at a time; her sympathy was moved to this extent, but no further. I took one pail back to my cell, went on with the other, and then came back for the first. When I had finished this business of washing up—which I was glad to do myself, even if it took half the day, that it might not be given to another prisoner, and also for the better cleaning of the hideous mess—I fell on my bed and lay there till evening; they now left me both bed and bedding, which was a tremendous blessing.

I lay facing the window, which was high up, and very little light seemed to come from it. As the sun went down I saw the shadow of the wooden mouldings fall across the glass,—three crosses, and they were the shape of the three familiar crosses at the scene of Calvary, one in the centre and one on either side. It looked different from any of the pictures I had seen. The cross of Christ, the cross of the repentant thief, and the cross of the sinner who had not repented—that cross looked blacker than the others, and behind it was an immense crowd. The light from the other two crosses seemed to shine on this one, and the Christ was crucified that He might undo all the harm that was done. I saw amongst the crowd the poor little doctor and the Governor, and all that helped to torture these women in prison, but they were nothing compared to the men in the Cabinet who wielded their force over them. There were the upholders of vice and the men who support the thousand injustices to women, some knowingly and some unconscious of the harm and cruelty entailed. Then the room grew dark and I fell asleep. When the doctor came again with his apparatus he had bovril and brandy, and the tube was left for only one second in my body. The next morning, Thursday, January 20, I told him that the brandy, which at first had the effect of warming me, left me freezing cold after about two hours, and I thought it was no use. As for the bovril, I had the strongest objection to it of a vegetarian kind, and I begged him not to give it to me again; he said he would not. It was only when I was sick that I knew what were the ingredients put down my body. That morning it was again milk and plasmon that was given me, and I was horribly sick. The doctor said to me, “You are absolutely not fit for this kind of thing. How could your Union send a woman like you to do a thing of this kind? It is like sending a wisp of wind to fight against a——” I did not hear the end of the sentence, but I think he said “a rock.” I was not able to answer, but the next time he came I said to him, “Our Union does not send anyone; service of this kind is absolutely voluntary. In my case not one of the leaders even knew of my action. I did it entirely off my own bat and only told the local organisers.”

From the third feeding, when the junior doctor had felt my heart on Wednesday evening, the senior doctor had been much kinder to me; in fact I noticed a change in the way I was treated generally, so much so that I concluded my identity had been discovered or was at least suspected. I left off wearing my hair in a parting, as it was almost impossible to keep it away when I was sick. I brushed it back and did it up in a towel every time when I was fed. I left off wearing my glasses, which were too uncomfortable to be tolerated now that the necessity for them had worn off and they were forcibly feeding me quite happily. I then decided to take the utmost advantage of any privilege, in order to bring the officials to act reasonably, to check their recklessness as much as possible, and to bring them to strain the regulations so far as might be—not, as heretofore, in the direction of brutality, but in the direction of hygiene, if not of humanity. I pleaded afresh with the doctor to try the experiment of giving me less quantity of food, of putting less of the tube into the body, of using less glycerine, which greatly irritated my throat the moment the tube touched it, or to use oil instead of glycerine. He listened to what I said, and though except as to the glycerine—he wiped the tube almost free of it, and called my attention to the fact—there was not much difference in what he did, yet his manner of doing it was different.

When I was at the sink on Thursday morning, two or three other prisoners were there, and they hastily whispered to me, “It is your friend next to you, No. 21.” The kindness which beamed from all their faces did my heart good, but I could never hear or see Elsie Howey next door, and eventually I imagined that they must have mistaken me for her when I threw back my hair after the third feeding.

That day I thought I would clean my window, through which I had seen such a wonderful vision the evening before. Though the day was generally spent in loneliness, I knew that I might be visited at any hour, so I put off till about 3.30, when the ward was generally quiet for a time. All the furniture in the cell was movable, so I placed the table in front of the window and the chair on the top, then I climbed up. Through the small part of the window that opened I looked down, and in a beautiful red glow of the sinking sun I saw a sight that filled my very soul with joy. In the gloaming light—it was an exercise ground that I looked down upon—I saw walking round, all alone, a woman in her prisoner’s dress, and in her arms she carried another little prisoner, a baby done up in a blanket. I was too high up to hear her, but I could see distinctly that she cooed and laughed to her little companion, and perhaps she sang to it too. I never saw maternal love more naturally displayed. The words of the Chaplain came back to my mind—“The women, they’re all as bad as bad can be, there’s absolutely no good in them.” No good in them! and yet amongst them there was this little woman who, at least, loved her child and played with it as only a mother-heart can!

I got down and put the table and chair in their place; I felt amazed, having seen a sight as beautiful as the most beautiful picture in the world.

The wardress who came most often to my cell was kind to me. I said to her, “Oh! if you only knew what a nightmare it is, the feeding. I have never been any good at bearing pain, and each time it comes I feel as if I simply couldn’t endure it.” “Oh! well,” she answered, “it gets better, you’ll see.” She said this in a comforting voice, but the vistas of experience it gave of other prisoners who had gone through the process made it anything but a comfort to me. Most of them had been let out half dead before the end of their time, and I had but very little faith in the assurance that it would “get better.” I asked her after the other Suffrage prisoners, but she could tell me nothing of them. This wardress came back to my cell rather late one day and said to me hurriedly: “I am going away to the other side of the prison. Will you write to me when you get out?” I told her that I was afraid my letters might get her into trouble, for I felt sure it would not be allowed. She said she was quite sure it would be all right, if I sent it to her name, Miss ——. I said, “Very well, then, I will.”

I was filled with terror in the morning when the gas-jet was put out and in the evening when it was lighted again; within about half an hour of these changes in the light came the doctor and wardresses, the gag and all the fiendish consequences. I walked up and down my cell in a fever of fear, stopping now and then and looking up at the window, from which all good things had seemed to come. I said, “Oh, God, help me! Oh, God, help me!”