THE PRISONS ASHORE
5. LIVERPOOL
Liverpool became a considerable dépôt for prisoners of war, from the
force of circumstances rather than from any suitability of its own. From
its proximity to Ireland, the shelter and starting and refitting point
of so many French, and, later, American privateers, Liverpool shared
with Bristol, and perhaps with London, the position of being the busiest
privateering centre in Britain.
Hence, from very early days in its history, prisoners were continually
pouring in and out; in, as the Liverpool privateers, well equipped and
armed by wealthy individuals or syndicates, skilfully commanded and
splendidly fought, swept the narrow seas and beyond, and brought in
their prizes; out, as both sides were ready enough to exchange men in a
contest of which booty was the main object, and because the guarding of
hundreds of desperate seafaring men was a matter of great difficulty and
expense in an open port with no other than the usual accommodation for
malefactors.
Before 1756 the prisoners of war brought into Liverpool were stowed away
in the common Borough Gaol and in an old powder magazine which stood on
the north side of Brownlow Street, where Russell Street now is.
Prisoners taken in the Seven Years’ War and the American War of
Independence were lodged in the Tower Prison at the lower end of Water
Street, on the north side, where now Tower Buildings stand, between
Tower Garden and Stringers Alley, which remained the chief jail of
Liverpool until July 1811. It was a castellated building of red
sandstone, consisting of a large square embattled tower, with
subordinate towers and buildings, forming three sides of a quadrangle of
which the fourth side was occupied by a walled garden, the whole
covering an area of about 3,700 square yards.
[Illustration:
THE OLD TOWER PRISON, LIVERPOOL.
(_From an old print._)
]
In 1756 the Admiralty had bought the dancing-room and the buildings
adjoining at the bottom of Water Street, and ‘fitted them up for the
French prisoners in a most commodious manner, there being a handsome
kitchen with furnaces, &c., for cooking their provisions, and good
lodging rooms both above and below stairs. Their lordships have ordered
a hammock and bedding (same as used on board our men of war), for each
prisoner, which it is to be hoped will be a means of procuring our
countrymen who have fallen into their hands better usage than hitherto,
many of them having been treated with great inhumanity.’
One of the most famous of the early French ‘corsaires’, Thurot—who
during the Seven Years’ War made Ireland his base, and, acting with the
most admirable skill and audacity, caused almost as much loss and
consternation on this coast as did Paul Jones later—was at last brought
a prisoner into Liverpool on February 28, 1760.
The romance of Felix Durand, a Seven Years’ War prisoner at the Tower,
is almost as interesting as that of Louis Vanhille, to which I devote a
separate chapter.
The wife of one P., an ivory carver and turner in Dale Street, and part
owner of the _Mary Ellen_ privateer, had a curiously made foreign box
which had been broken, and which no local workman could mend. The French
prisoners were famous as clever and ingenious artisans, and to one of
them, Felix Durand, it was handed. He accepted the job, and wanted ample
time to do it in. Just as it should have been finished, fifteen
prisoners, Durand among them, escaped from the Tower, but, having
neither food nor money, and, being ignorant of English and of the
localities round Liverpool, all, after wandering about for some time
half-starved, either returned or were captured.
Says Durand, describing his own part in the affair:
‘I am a Frenchman, fond of liberty and change, and I determined to make
my escape. I was acquainted with Mr. P. in Dale Street; I did work for
him in the Tower, and he has a niece who is _tout à fait charmante_. She
has been a constant ambassadress between us, and has taken charge of my
money to deposit with her uncle on my account. She is very engaging, and
when I have had conversation with her, I obtained from her the
information that on the east side of our prison there were two houses
which opened into a short narrow street [perhaps about Johnson Lane or
Oriel Chambers]. Mademoiselle is very kind and complacent, and examined
the houses and found an easy entrance into one.’
So, choosing a stormy night, the prisoners commenced by loosening the
stone work in the east wall, and packing the mortar under their beds.
They were safe during the day, but once when a keeper did come round,
they put one of their party in bed, curtained the window grating with a
blanket, and said that their compatriot was ill and could not bear the
light. So the officer passed on. At last the hole was big enough, and
one of them crept through. He reported an open yard, that it was raining
heavily, and that the night was _affreuse_. They crept out one by one
and got into the yard, whence they entered a cellar by the window,
traversed a passage or two, and entered the kitchen, where they made a
good supper, of bread and beef. While cutting this, one of them let fall
a knife, but nobody heard it, and, says Durand, ‘Truly you Englishmen
sleep well!’
Finally, as a neighbouring clock struck two, they managed to get past
the outer wall, and one man, sent to reconnoitre, reported: ‘not a soul
to be seen anywhere, the wind rushing up the main street from the sea.’
They then separated. Durand went straight ahead, ‘passed the Exchange,
down a narrow lane [Dale Street] facing it, in which I knew Mademoiselle
dwelt, but did not know the house; therefore I pushed on till I came to
the foot of a hill. I thought I would turn to the left at first, but
went on to take my chance of four cross roads—’ (Old Haymarket, Townsend
Lane, now Byron Street, Dale Street, and Shaw’s Brow, now William Brown
Street).
He went on until he came to the outskirts of Liverpool by Townsend Mill
(at the top of London Road), and so on the road to Prescot, ankle-deep
in mud. He ascended Edge Hill, keeping always the right-hand road, lined
on both sides with high trees, and at length arrived at a little village
(Wavertree) as a clock struck three. Then he ate some bread and drank
from a pond. Then onwards, always bearing to the right, on to ‘the
quaint little village of Hale,’ his final objective being Dublin, where
he had a friend, a French priest.
At Hale an old woman came out of a cottage and began to take down the
shutters. Durand, who, not knowing English, had resolved to play the
part of a deaf and dumb man, quietly took the shutters from her, and
placed them in their proper position. Then he took a broom and swept
away the water from the front of the door; got the kettle and filled it
from the pump, the old woman being too astonished to be able to say
anything, a feeling which was increased when her silent visitor raked
the cinders out of the grate, and laid the fire. Then she said something
in broad Lancashire, but he signified that he was deaf and dumb, and he
understood her so far as to know that she expressed pity. At this point
he sank on to a settle and fell fast asleep from sheer exhaustion from
walking and exposure. When he awakened he found breakfast awaiting him,
and made a good meal. Then he did a foolish thing. At the sound of
horses’ hoofs he sprang up in alarm and fled from the house—an act
doubly ill-advised, inasmuch as it betrayed his affliction to be
assumed, and, had his entertainer been a man instead of an old woman,
would assuredly have stirred the hue and cry after him.
He now took a wrong turning, and found himself going towards Liverpool,
but corrected his road, and at midday reached a barn where two men were
threshing wheat. He asked leave by signs to rest, which was granted. We
shall now see how the native ingenuity of the Frenchman stood him in
good stead in circumstances where the average Englishman would have been
a useless tramp and nothing more. Seeing some fresh straw in a corner,
Durand began to weave it into a dainty basket. The threshers stayed
their work to watch him, and, when the article was finished, offered to
buy it. Just then the farmer entered, and from pity and admiration took
him home to dinner, and Durand’s first act was to present the basket to
the daughter of the house. Dinner finished, the guest looked about for
work to do, and in the course of the afternoon he repaired a stopped
clock with an old skewer and a pair of pincers, mended a chair, repaired
a china image, cleaned an old picture, repaired a lock, altered a key,
and fed the pigs!
The farmer was delighted, and offered him a barn to sleep in, but the
farmer’s daughter injudiciously expressed her admiration of him,
whereupon her sweetheart, who came in to spend the evening, signed to
him the necessity of his immediate departure.
For weeks this extraordinary man, always simulating a deaf-mute,
wandered about, living by the sale of baskets, and was everywhere
received with the greatest kindness.
But misfortune overtook him at length, although only temporarily. He was
standing by a very large tree, a local lion, when a party of visitors
came up to admire it, and a young lady expressed herself in very purely
pronounced French. Unable to restrain himself, Durand stepped forward,
and echoed her sentiments.
‘Why!’ exclaimed the lady. ‘This is the dumb man who was at the Hall
yesterday repairing the broken vases!’
The result was that he was arrested as an escaped prisoner of war, sent
first to Ormskirk, and then back to his old prison at the Liverpool
Tower.
However, in a short time, through the influence of Sir Edward Cunliffe,
one of the members for Liverpool, he was released, and went to reside
with the P.’s in Dale Street. In the following September Mr. Durand and
Miss P. became man and wife, and he remained in Liverpool many years, as
partner in her uncle’s business.
In 1779 Howard the philanthropist, in his tour through the prisons of
Britain, visited the Liverpool Tower. He reported that there were
therein 509 prisoners, of whom fifty-six were Spaniards, who were kept
apart from the French prisoners, on account of racial animosities. All
were crowded in five rooms, which were packed with hammocks three tiers
high. The airing ground was spacious. There were thirty-six invalids in
a small dirty room of a house at some distance from the prison. There
were no sheets on the beds, but the surgeons were attentive, and there
were no complaints.
At the prison, he remarked, the bedding required regulation. There was
no table hung up of regulations or of the victualling rate, so that the
prisoners had no means of checking their allowances. The meat and beer
were good, but the bread was heavy. The late Agent, he was informed, had
been very neglectful of his duties, but his successor bore a good
character, and much was expected of him.
It has been said that most of the prisoners of war in Liverpool were
privateersmen. In 1779 Paul Jones was the terror of the local waters,
and as his continual successes unsettled the prisoners and incited them
to continual acts of mutiny and rebellion, and escapes or attempts to
escape were of daily occurrence, a general shifting of prisoners took
place, many of the confined men being sent to Chester, Carlisle, and
other inland towns, and the paroled men to Ormskirk and Wigan.
In 1779 Sir George Saville and the Yorkshire Militia subscribed £50 to
the fund for the relief of the French and Spanish prisoners in
Liverpool. The appeal for subscriptions wound up with the following
complacent remark:
‘And as the Town of Liverpool is already the Terror of our Foes, they
will by this means (at the time they acknowledge our Spirit and Bravery)
be obliged to reverence our Virtue and Humanity.’
In 1781 the Rev. Gilbert Wakefield wrote:
‘The American and French Wars had now been raging for some months, and
several hundred prisoners of the latter nation had been brought into
Liverpool by privateers. I frequently visited them in their confinement,
and was much mortified and ashamed of their uniform complaints of hard
usage and a scanty allowance of unwholesome provision. What I
occasionally observed in my visits gave me but too much reason to
believe the representations of this pleasing people, who maintained
their national sprightliness and good humour undamped even in captivity.
I was happy to learn later from the prisoners themselves the good
effects of my interference, and the Commissary, the author of their
wrongs, was presently superseded.... When I met him in the street later
there was fire in his eye, and fury in his face.’
In 1793, the New Borough Gaol in Great Howard Street, (formerly Milk
House Lane), which had been built in 1786, but never used, was made
ready for prisoners of war.
The following letter to the _Liverpool Courier_ of January 12, 1798, was
characterized by _The Times_ as ‘emanating from some sanguinary Jacobin
in some back garret of London’:
‘The French prisoners in the dungeons of Liverpool are actually
starving. Some time ago their usual allowance was lessened under
pretence of their having bribed the sentinels with the superfluity of
their provisions. Each prisoner is allowed ½ lb. of beef, 1 lb. bread,
&c., and as much water as he can drink. _The meat is the offal of the
Victualling Office_—the necks and shanks of the butchered; the bread is
so bad and so black as to incite disgust; and the water so brackish as
not to be drunken, and they are provided with straw. The officers,
contrary to the rule of Nations, are imprisoned with the privates, and
are destined with them to experience the dampness and filth of these
dismal and unhealthy dungeons. The privileges of Felons are not allowed
them. Philanthropos.’
So the Mayor and Magistrates of Liverpool made minute inspection of the
prison (which had been arranged in accordance with Howard’s
recommendations), and published a report which absolutely contradicted
the assertions of ‘Philanthropos’. There were, it said, six large
detached buildings, each of three stories, 106 feet long, twenty-three
feet high, and forty-seven feet wide; there were two kitchens, each
forty-eight feet long, twenty feet broad, and thirteen feet high. In the
two upper stories the prisoners slept in cells or separate compartments,
nine feet long, seven feet broad, and eleven feet high, each with a
glazed window, and in each were generally three or four, never more than
five, prisoners. The Hospital occupied two rooms, each thirty-three feet
long, thirty feet broad, and eleven feet high. The officer-prisoners,
seventy in number, occupied a separate building, and the other
prisoners, 1,250 in number, were in the five buildings. The mortality
here, from May 15 to December 31, 1798, among 1,332 prisoners was
twenty-six.
Richard Brooke, in _Liverpool from 1775 to 1800_, says:
‘Amongst the amusements some of the French prisoners during their
confinement here performed plays in a small theatre contrived for that
purpose within the walls, and in some instances they raised in a single
night £50 for admission money. Many of my readers will recollect that
with the usual ingenuity of the French the prisoners manufactured a
variety of snuff-boxes, rings, trinkets, crucifixes, card-boxes, and
toys which were exhibited in a stand at the entrance of the Gaol and
sold for their benefit.’
One famous prisoner here was a Pole, named Charles Domery, whose
voracity was extraordinary. He ate anything. After the surrender of the
frigate on which he was captured he was so hungry that he was caught
tearing the mangled limb of one of his fallen comrades. In one year he
ate 174 cats, some of them alive, besides dogs, rats, candles, and
especially raw meat. Although he was daily allowed the rations of ten
men, he was never satisfied. One day the prison doctor tested his
capacity, and at a sitting he ate fourteen pounds of raw meat and two
pounds of candles, and washed it all down with five bottles of porter.
Some of the French prisoners used to upbraid him with his Polish
nationality, and accuse him of disloyalty to the Republic. Once, in a
fit of anger at this, he seized a knife, cut two wide gashes on his bare
arm, and with the blood wrote on the wall ‘Vive la République!’
He stood six feet two inches, was well made, and rather thin, and,
despite the brutality of his taste in food, was a very amiable and
inoffensive man.
The following touching little letter was evidently written by a very
poor prisoner whose wife shared his confinement.
‘De Livrepool: Ce 21 Septanbre 1757.
‘Mon cher frere je vous dis ses deux mot pour vous dire que ma tres cher
femme à quitte ce monde pour aller à lotre monde; je vous prit de priyer
pour elle et de la recommender a tous nos bons paran.
‘Je suis en pleuran votre
‘Serviteur et frere
‘JOSEPH LE BLAN.’
From Brooke’s _Liverpool_ I also take the following:
‘A considerable number of prisoners were confined in the Borough Gaol, a
most ill-judged place of confinement when its contiguity to Coast and
Shipping, and the facilities afforded for escape of prisoners in case of
the appearance of an Enemy off the Coast are considered. In general the
prisoners were ill clad and appeared dispirited and miserable, and the
mortality among them was very considerable; the hearse was constantly in
requisition to convey from the Gaol the corpse of some poor Frenchman to
the public cemetery at St. John’s Church (where they were buried
unmarked in a special corner set apart for felons and paupers). Soon
after the Peace of Amiens, 1802, eleven hundred were liberated, some of
whom had been there for years.’
One of these men had accumulated three hundred guineas by his
manufactures.
As no book alludes to Liverpool as possessing a war-prison after 1802,
it may be concluded that it ceased to have one after that date. This, I
think, is probable, as it was eminently unsuitable owing to its position
and its proximity to disturbed Ireland.[7]