Alex Halliday, ditto, and as superintendent carpenter, £20, with 2s. 10½d. abatement for Civil List.
John Hayward, labourer, 12s. a week.
Wm. Powell, labourer, 12s. a week.
Captain Pressland was informed that no clothing of any kind was to be served out to any prisoner, though most were captured with none beyond what they stood upright in. No soup was to be served out, except to the prisoners who acted as barbers. He asked for some modification of this, but was refused. He was allowed £25 per annum for coals and candles, and 10s. 6d. each time he went to Peterborough on the Board’s Order or to make affidavits as to his accounts, etc. A few days afterwards this was increased to 12s. 6d. The military guard consisted of 400 of the North Lincoln Militia.
[248] Chambers’ Journal of Literature, etc., loc. cit.
[250] At this time Norman Cross and the other existing prisons were greatly overcrowded, but Wellington found it impossible to guard and maintain his prisoners on the Continent. Not only were the troops actually captured overwhelmingly numerous, but to their number were added deserters. In one of his dispatches, he writes: “Two battalions of the Regiment of Nassau, and one of Frankfort having quitted the enemies’ Army and passed over to that under my command. . . . I now send these troops to England.” The long-delayed completion of the prisons at Dartmoor and Perth would relieve the overcrowding of Norman Cross; but the resources of the staff must, in the meantime, have been strained to an extreme point to prevent the evils which might result from the state of matters. The breakdown of the various negotiations for exchange prevented the relief which was afforded during the first period of the war by the steady drain of prisoners sent back to their own country.
[252] It is said that a memorandum exists in a private diary that the price paid for a picture of straw marquetry of Peterborough Cathedral was only £2; the picture must have taken weeks to construct.
[253a] The prison register confirms this paragraph. The last death certificate is that of Petronio Lambertini, a soldier of the Italian Regiment of the French Army. He died of consumption, and was presumably the last prisoner buried in the cemetery adjoining the North Road.
[253b] Loc. cit., p. 120.
[254] The copy of the catalogue used by the auctioneer, with his note of the purchaser of and the price paid for each lot, is for the time in the writer’s hands, and has afforded much information, especially as to the construction of the buildings and the use to which each was appropriated.