CURIOS MADE BY PRISONERS OF WAR
Objects recently made in Holland--The Napoleonic prisoners at Norman
Cross, Perth, Dartmoor, Stapleton, Liverpool, and Greenland
Valleyfield
Ever since the days when enemy soldiers and sailors were first interned
for protracted periods of time, it has been a practice for the
incarcerated men to while away the tedium by making little odds and
ends of things as souvenirs. Their wares are often of extreme interest,
as they help us to gain some idea of the class of people who have
been interned on particular occasions and the ability and skill they
possessed.
At the present moment, objects of no little interest are gradually
finding their way into England, which have been made by the men
interned in Holland who evacuated Antwerp after its fall, and, no
doubt, many will be the treasures which our brave soldiers will bring
back with them when they are freed from the concentration camps in
Germany. Needless to say, all such curios will be valued by the
collector more and more as time rolls on.
In the present chapter, we shall confine our remarks to the handiwork
of the French and Spanish prisoners captured during the Napoleonic
wars, because sufficient of it has been preserved to engage the
attention of the treasure-hunter. One word of caution is necessary,
at the outset: such objects are easily counterfeited, and, on this
account, must only be bought from reputable people unless documentary
proof of genuineness is forthcoming.
The Napoleonic prisoners were quartered in various districts of
England, and for many years on end, thus our statements can only be
made generally.
The chief settlement was at Norman Cross, near Peterborough, and,
though the huge and dingy buildings which served as prisons no longer
stand, the place is marked by a cross which was unveiled on July 28,
1914. The craft of the Peterborough prisoners ranked high, as visitors
to the local museums will readily acknowledge. Their wares were chiefly
made out of the beef-bones left over from their rations. The writer
treasures a most exquisitely made set of dominoes carved from bone and
ornamented by brush, quill, and knife which came from this settlement.
A photograph of the set is given among the illustrations of the present
work, but the delicate tracery and the coloured panels of the box
have lost much of their charm in the process of reproduction. There
is nothing unfinished about the dominoes; each is perfectly squared
and the dots are scooped out and coloured with black enamel. When one
remembers that the tools at the disposal of the workers were few
and primitive, their productions must be accepted as truly marvellous.
Another example of the work of these men which is worth mentioning is
to be seen in the Peterborough Museum; it consists of a miniature bone
or perhaps ivory guillotine, perfect in every detail.
[Illustration: OBSIDIONAL HALF-FRANC NOTE OF EPERNAY.]
[Illustration: OBSIDIONAL FRANC NOTE OF EPERNAY.]
Perhaps it will be well to mention that the inhabitants of Peterborough
displayed much interest in the Frenchmen's art, and a regular market
was held daily within the prison walls from ten to midday, whilst
history records that as much as two hundred pounds was given in a week
for these curios.
At Perth, another of the concentration centres, the products of the
prisoners consisted of carved boxes, wooden and bone puzzles, toys
and strawplait goods. Indeed, the skill which the men displayed in
this latter class of production was so high that it outclassed all
local work of a similar nature. From straw which was dipped in various
coloured dyes these clever workmen made tableaux of a most gorgeous
nature and framed them with carefully shaped pieces of wood. They
also dug up the clay in the courtyards and modelled it into little
statuettes of sailors, soldiers, and people of notoriety, whilst they
cut pieces from their clothes and worked them into ornamental slippers.
Their ingenuity did not stop here, for they forged bank-notes to while
away their tedious hours, and foisted them on to those who came to the
prison market. In this matter the following quotation from the _Perth
Courier_ of September 19, 1813, is interesting:[30]--
"We are sorry to learn that the forgery of notes of various banks is
carried on by prisoners at the Depôt, and that they find means to
throw them into circulation by the assistance of profligate people who
frequent the market. The eagerness of the prisoners to obtain cash is
very great, and as they retain all they procure they have drained the
place almost entirely of silver, so that it has become a matter of
difficulty to get change of a note.
"Last week a woman coming from the Market at the Depôt was searched
by an order of Captain Moriarty, when there was found about her
person pieces of base money in imitation of Bank tokens (of which the
prisoners are suspected to have been the fabricators), to the amount of
£5 17s. After undergoing examination, the woman was committed to gaol."
[30] Here quoted from Abell, "Prisoners of War in Britain."
The Perth prisoners earned for themselves a very bad name, for not only
did they counterfeit bank-notes, copies of which are still to be found
by collectors, but they fell to all sorts of dishonest practices. A
favourite ruse of theirs was to bargain with a customer and then offer
to wrap up the goods which were about to change hands. The wrapping-up
process was completed out of the unwary purchaser's view, but instead
of enclosing the curio they included a lump of clay or piece of wood
of similar shape. If the customer came back to complain, the seller
was seldom found, and even when he was discovered it took a deal of
threatening and verbal eloquence to obtain redress from the defaulter,
whose one security was the iron railings which separated him from the
outside world.
The prisoners at Dartmoor also made knick-knacks, but the Governor
here forbade the sale of woollen mittens, gloves, straw hats or
bonnets, plaited straw, shoes, and articles made out of prison stores.
At Stapleton, outside Bristol, the bootmakers of the neighbourhood
complained of the sale of shoes in the prison market The prison-made
article, however, was usually more a thing of ornamentation than of
use, and so the bootmakers' complaint seems somewhat unwarranted.
At Liverpool, the Frenchmen made trinkets, crucifixes, card-boxes,
toys, snuff-boxes, horsehair rings, and hair watch-chains, using their
own hair in the manufacture of the two latter articles.
At the Greenland Valleyfield prison, the making of straw into
strawplait was for a while a profitable pastime, as the following
passage shows:[31]--
"The employer gave out the straw and paid for the worked article, three
sous per 'brasse,' a little under six feet. Some men could make twelve
'brasses' a day. Beaudoin (a sergeant-major of the 31st Line Regiment)
set to work at it, and in the course of a couple of months became an
adept. After four years came the remonstrance of the country people
that this underpaid labour by untaxed men was doing infinite injury to
them; the Government prohibited the manufacture and much misery among
the prisoners resulted. From this prohibition resulted the outside
practice of smuggling straw into the prison and selling it later as the
manufactured article; and a very profitable industry it must have been,
for we find that, during the trial of Matthew Wingrave in 1813, for
engaging in the strawplait trade with the prisoners at Valleyfield, it
came out that Wingrave, who was an extensive dealer in the article, had
actually moved up there from Bedfordshire on purpose to carry on the
trade and had bought cornfields for the purpose."
[31] Abell, "Prisoners of War in Britain," p. 203.
Thus it is clear that the curios made by prisoners of war embrace a
wide range of interesting objects, and that there is much fascination
to be had in collecting them. The reader who would know more of the
lives, the romances, and the sufferings of these unfortunate men should
read Francis Abell's capital book bearing the title "Prisoners of War
in Britain."
[Illustration: A NEWSPAPER POSTER WHICH TOLD OF WELCOME NEWS.]
[Illustration: A SET OF BONE DOMINOES CARVED BY PRISONERS TAKEN IN THE
NAPOLEONIC WARS AND INTERNED IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF PETERBOROUGH.]