URGENT NEED FOR PRISON ACCOMMODATION, NORMAN CROSS, HUNTS, SELECTED AS THE SITE, AND THE PRISON BUILT
I watched where against the blue
The builders built on the height:
And ever the great wall grew
As their brown arms shone in the light.Trowel and mallet and brick
Made a wedding of sounds in the air:
And the dead clay took life from the quick
As their strong arms girdled it there.Laurence Housman: The Housebuilders.
The Depot for Prisoners of War, at Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire, was the first, and during twelve years the only prison specially constructed for the custody of the prisoners taken captive in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars between 1793 and 1815. The Norman Cross Depot received its first inmates on the 7th April 1797; while of the other great prisons built for the same purpose, Dartmoor (since 1850 the Convict Prison) was not occupied until 24th May 1809, and Perth (converted into the general Prison for Scotland in 1839) received its first batch of 399 prisoners on the 6th August 1812.
Eight years before the building of the Norman Cross Prison the French Revolution had commenced. The storming of the Bastille had taken place in 1789, and during the following years events had advanced rapidly. In 1792, Louis XVI, yielding to the demands of the assembly, the Girondists, and the populace of Paris, had declared war against Austria. In 1793 the Republican Government had been established, Louis had been deposed and executed, and on the 1st February of the same year France had declared war against Britain, thus commencing that struggle which lasted, with two short intermissions, to the final overthrow of Buonaparte at Waterloo on the 18th June 1815.
This war—of which the historian Alison, writing in the first half of the last century, said, “It was the longest, most costly and bloodiest war mentioned in history”—cost England above two thousand millions of money, a colossal sum, which represented a proportionate number of lives sacrificed, and a proportionate amount of misery and want, not only to the combatants on both sides, but to the great mass of the civil population of every nation drawn into the conflict.
In recent years there have been wars of shorter duration, more costly and more deadly, but none in which so fierce a spirit of animosity reigned in the breasts of the combatants, none in which the miseries of war were dragged out to the same calamitous length.
The history of the prison at Norman Cross brings forcibly before us those prolonged miseries incidental to war, which are liable to be overlooked by such students as contemplate only
The neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
The poet paints the close of a hard-fought day when
Thousands had sunk on the ground overpowered,
The weary to sleep and the wounded to die.