PRISON LIFE
The worst prisons are not of stone, they are of throbbing hearts,
outraged by an infamous life.—H. W. BEECHER.
IT is on coming to the consideration of the life of the captives in their
prison that the want is felt of any contemporary account written by one
of themselves; such accounts are extant for the historian of the Dartmoor
Prison, but for Norman Cross the only sources from which a description of
the prison life can be given, are the meagre information gleaned from the
very few persons who had seen the prison and the prisoners, and who were
still alive when the writer commenced his inquiries; private letters
written during the period of the Depot’s existence; scanty paragraphs in
local and other newspapers; official reports and correspondence; and,
finally, the evidence of their pursuits, afforded by the extant examples
of the work executed by the prisoners during their captivity.
The prisoners were almost all, either soldiers or sailors, belonging to
the enemy’s army and navy, or the crews and officers of privateers.
Regulations as to parole varied greatly during the course of the war, but
the majority of the officers and the civilians of good social standing,
mostly passengers on board ships which had been captured, were out on
parole. In each of three of the quadrangles there must have been an
average of about 1,750 prisoners, and in the fourth, the north-eastern,
in which two of the caserns were, from the opening of the Depot, divided
off for the hospital, to which a third was added later for the officers’
hospital, there were probably about 500. This estimate is based upon
returns which show that on one occasion only was the number of prisoners
returned as low as 3,038. This was in 1799—when the total number of
prisoners in Britain was only 25,646. {90} The number had at that time
been reduced by a considerable exchange, and on other occasions the
numbers were much higher. Thus on the 10th April 1810, out of 44,583
prisoners in Britain, 6,272 were at Norman Cross. On the 11th June 1811,
out of 49,132 in all Britain, 5,951 were at Norman Cross. From these
figures it is a fair deduction that the prison population with which we
have to deal averaged, in the eighteen years during which the prison was
occupied, about 6,000, distributed in four sections. Each of the three
larger groups occupied a separate quadrangle about 2½ acres in extent,
their sleeping-places being four blocks of buildings, in each of which
slept 500 men, when they were absolutely packed, 300 in the lower
chambers, which were 12 feet high, and 200 in the upper chambers, the
height of which was 8 feet 6 inches; they occupied hammocks, arranged in
the lower and more lofty rooms, in three tiers, one above the other, and
suspended between posts 8 feet apart; in the upper room, the roof of
which was below the regulation height for three tiers, in two tiers only.
The size of each block, determined by actual measurement of the rubble
foundation, or footing, still lying below the turf, was 100 feet long by
22 feet wide. The hooks for the clews of one end of the hammocks would
be fixed into rails on the wooden sides of the building, while for the
clews at the foot of the hammocks, posts running along the whole length
of the building were erected at the regulation distance (8 feet from the
wall of the building), and into these hammock-posts the stanchions were
driven. Eight feet on the opposite side of the building was occupied in
the same way by the hammocks, and a clear space of 100 feet by 6 would be
left in the middle of the chamber through which, on the upper floor, the
single stair landed.
In the Royal Navy at the present day the average width of the hammock
with a man in it is 18 inches, and they are packed only one or two inches
apart (the midshipmen and other junior officers are allowed a foot
between each hammock).
Assuming that the prisoners were allowed a little more space than our
bluejackets, say, 2 feet for each hammock, there would be fifty hammocks
along each side, and as the hammocks were hung in tiers, three in the
lower chamber and two in the upper chamber, there would be 150 on each
side of the building in the lower chamber, and 100 in the upper chamber,
that is, 500 in each of the four caserns in the three quadrangles
occupied by the healthy prisoners. This calculation, which the author
had worked out before he had seen M. Foulley’s description of his model,
corresponds with the figures he gives.
To the sailors the gymnastic performance necessary to get into the upper
hammock of a tier of three might be easy, but the soldier would probably
have many failures before he became expert. When the head turnkey blew
his horn at sunrise, the first duty of the prisoners was to fold up the
palliasse, rug, and bolster allowed them, and then to take the clew off
the hook on the post, and to hang it with the other clew on the hook in
the wall, thus leaving the space which had been filled by the stretched
hammocks clear. The general body of the prisoners would then turn out,
the fatigue party, one out of every twelve, that is about thirty-six men
for each casern, proceeding with their domestic duties. These probably
in and out of doors gave them little spare time, when once in twelve days
their turn for duty came round for either amusement or other occupation.
There were all sorts and conditions of men among those who, starting the
day in this way, turned out into the airing-court.
An old Mr. Lewin of Yaxley, born in 1801, two miles from Norman Cross,
was accustomed in his boyhood to visit, and get occasional work at, the
Depot. When interviewed by the writer in 1894, he thus described the
prisoners: “Some of them were very rich” [_Lewin himself had been an
agricultural labourer all his life_], “others very poor. The poor ones
used to hang out bags, and would cry, as the people passed by, ‘Drop a
penny in my bag.’ [_See the Frontispiece_.] They were not dressed in
uniform, but in ordinary clothes, some like gentlemen, others like
ragmen.” “The place,” said Lewin, “was like a town. There must have
been near 50,000 people there.” He was ninety-three when he was
describing the prison, and to multiply the figures by ten was probably
due to the enchantment which distance casts over experiences eighty years
agone.
The morning meal was probably the next incident of the day. The meals
can have occupied but little time for those poor fellows, who had nothing
more than the daily ration to depend upon; but probably, although the
French Government did nothing to supplement this ration, the French
people, as well as the relatives of the various prisoners, would remit
money, of which the poorer as well as the well-to-do would reap the
benefit.
It has already been mentioned that the British agent in Paris had orders
to supplement the ration supplied by the French Government to the British
prisoners, wherever he thought it necessary, and, beyond this,
subscriptions for our captives in France were made in various parts of
the country. Mr. Maberley Phillips, F.S.A., in a paper “On the escape of
the French Prisoners of War from Jedburgh in 1813,” gives the particulars
of an entry in the Vestry Book of St. Hilda’s, South Shields, which gives
the details of a subscription in 1807, by which the sum of £226 7_s._
8_d._ was collected for British prisoners in France, and remitted to the
committee at Lloyds, to be sent with the fund raised by them to the agent
in Paris.
The same spirit which influenced the British nation to send succour to
their countrymen would doubtless influence the French people, although
their Government, in accordance with their system of conducting war,
differed from the British Government as to what was the duty of a nation
at war towards its subjects in detention in the enemy’s country. The
remittances from abroad to the whole of the prisoners amounted, from 1797
to 1800, to several thousands of pounds, and remittances were still
continually arriving (Commissioner Serle’s Report to the Transport Board,
28th July 1800). This money passed through the hands of the agent in the
various prisons, and he was directed not to hand it over except in small
amounts, lest a recipient might have sufficient to offer a too tempting
bribe to a sentry.
As to how the prisoners prepared their ration for their several meals,
how they utilised the vegetables and the various table delicacies which
they purchased in the market, we know nothing. The absence of chimneys
in the caserns shows that no fires were allowed in them. It is possible
that under strict regulations they were allowed to make fires in the
courts, and abundance of peat from the neighbouring fen would be
obtainable at a very low price. The fact that a cauldron for making the
soup, which was removed from one of the cook-houses and is now preserved
at Elton Hall, measures 5 feet 1 in. across and 3 feet 6 in. deep, shows
that the appointed and paid French cook made the bulk of the food.
Doubtless in nothing would there be more distinction between the several
prisoners than in the way they dealt with the ration.
[Picture: Plate IX.—Emblematic Group of Seven Figures arranged in Three
Tiers carved in Bone (Peterborough Museum)]
The prisoners in each casern were divided into messes of twelve, and one
of their number attended at the cook-house and brought the ration for the
whole mess.
The monotonous recurrence of the roll-call and the visit of the doctors
were daily incidents. Next would possibly come the daily ablutions, more
or less extensive, probably performed, with the washing of the clothes,
at the wooden troughs, represented in some of the plans, on either side
of the wells, the ground around being paved with flagstones to obviate
mud and dirt from the slopping. There was ample room in the airing-court
for such amusements and sports as these poor cooped-up young fellows,
many only boys (the separate prison for boys was a late addition to the
Depot, it is only shown in MacGregor’s plan and in Foulley’s model) could
devise, and in these courts was carried on much of the work in which so
many of the prisoners were engaged, and which will be discussed later on.
The domestic politics of the various prisons and the various blocks must
have run high; the prisoners were of course under a despotism, but the
choice of delegates for the market, for inspection of the food, etc., was
in their own hands. The topic of conversation which must have most
interested them must have been the prospect of their liberation, and the
course of the war, as far as they could gather it, from the gossip of the
turnkeys and from what little they could hear in the market. Each party
of fresh arrivals would bring news. They would have accounts of the
escape of prisoners from other prisons, and would have secret confidences
and various schemes for their own escape; they would hear of the
incessant plots for a general rising of all the prisoners in Britain, of
the progress and failure of the negotiations for exchange, and they would
discuss these matters with the intensity of men, over all of whom at all
times hung the cloud of captivity, who all felt in a greater or less
degree the longing for freedom.
There was also the appointment by themselves of the delegates who were to
attend with the stewards of the prison and inspect the bread, meat, and
vegetables as they were delivered at the western gate, in order to make
sure that the goods were of proper quality. One of the Prison
Regulations speaks of “the turnkey or any other officer” as the head of
the prison police. As from various returns we know that there was no
part of the British staff of the Depot, except the turnkeys, who could be
acting in the quadrangle as police, it is probable that there was some
scheme imposing on individual prisoners the duties of assisting the
turnkeys in enforcing the regulations. The brigade-major could
apparently march a patrol where he thought it was needed. In case of any
violence or resistance, the turnkey called in the assistance of the
sentries or a squad from the barracks.
Even in the earlier years of the war there were doubtless many of the
prisoners who would adopt teaching as their work, and who would, among
the 1,500 who shared their quadrangle, find pupils willing to pay for
lessons, which would relieve the monotony of their existence. There
would be fencing masters, who would fence with sticks, for any who had
clandestinely obtained or manufactured weapons dared not let them be
seen; there were many traders who made money legitimately, acting as
middlemen between the market at the gate and the prisoners in the
enclosure; and there were, the curse of the prison, those illicit traders
and usurers who bought the rations and clothes of their fellow prisoners
and reduced them to starvation, the unfortunate victims being, as a rule,
the slaves to the vice of gambling. The moral degradation of the gambler
was, from the first, a source of trouble to the authorities, and it was
the wretched condition of this vicious class which was the foundation for
many of the complaints made by the French agents. Both the usurious
traders and their victims were liable to punishment, as were also the
manufacturers of, and dealers in, contraband articles. These last were
assisted by persons outside, who are best described as smugglers, their
part in the proceedings being to convey from this foreign community to
the British subjects outside, goods which, either from their intrinsic
character or from their liability to duty, could not be sold
legitimately.
In the reports of the Commissioners of the Transport Board, given in full
in Nos. 29 and 30 of the correspondence published in the Appendix to the
Parliamentary Report already referred to, it is stated that “the
prisoners in all the depots in the country are at full liberty to
exercise their industry within the prisons, in manufacturing and selling
any articles they may think proper excepting those which would affect the
Revenue in opposition to the Laws, obscene toys and drawings, or articles
made either from their clothing or the prison stores, and by means of
this privilege some of them have been known to carry off upon their
release more than 100 guineas each.”
At some of the depots, special restrictions had to be made, on account of
objections raised in the neighbourhood on the ground that the prisoners,
supported out of the revenue provided by the taxes which people had to
pay, were allowed to undersell the inhabitants in their own local
industries. Thus at Penryn the Frenchmen were stopped from making pastry
and confectionery, and the prohibition of the manufacture of straw plait
at Norman Cross was supposed to be based on the same grounds, combined
with the fact that it was thrown on the market duty-free. This point
will be dealt with later.
For the sale of these goods, and for the purchase of goods from without,
there was in each prison square a sort of market, where business was
carried on, the sellers putting up stalls. Among other things, they sold
provisions and vegetables, doubtless making a profit on what they had
paid in the more important market which was held under strict
regulations, at the eastern gate of the prison (at one period of the war
twice a week only, at another period daily). In this market delegates
from the prisoners met the dealers from without for traffic in the
produce of the neighbourhood and in such goods as the prisoners
required—clothes, feeding utensils, tools, and materials for carrying on
their work, etc.; here probably were handed out to the village turner
portions of bone carefully prepared for the lathe by the prisoner who
made the articles portions of which were turned. Such examples are still
extant. Here also opportunities were found for disposing of the illicit
articles, which were a source of some profit to the prisoner, but of far
larger profit to the middleman outside.
The market was, as I have said, held under strict regulations; every
article made in the prison had attached to it its price, and the name of
the prisoner who made it. But, alas for the fame of the deft
individuals, who spent long years in the prison, in the manufacture of
these beautiful articles, the name was only attached in temporary
fashion, and the names of six only of the artists of the 500 specimens in
the Peterborough Museum are preserved: that of Jean de la Porte, the
producer of several beautiful pictures in straw marquetry, Peterborough
Cathedral being a favourite subject with him and with other accomplished
artists in the prison; that of a M. Grieg, whose name appears on a silk
holder decorated with figures, birds, and square and compass; Ribout, on
a small box; Jacques Gourny, on a similar specimen; Godfrov, on a highly
decorated work cabinet; and Corn on a silk holder.
The price of all the goods brought in from the neighbourhood was also
regulated by the agent, who saw that the prisoners were not charged
higher than the ordinary market price. It is evident that there must
have been some regulation as to who, from among the prisoners, should be
admitted from each quadrangle. It is certain that the gates of the
quadrangle were not thrown open for the whole of the 5,000 or 6,000 to go
to the market, and it is probable that certain trusted individuals,
delegates from each prison, were marched under guard across the turnkeys’
court, out on to the road between the squares, to the east gate, through
which they passed into the prison market held in the space formed by the
embrasure of the great outer wall. Purchases for themselves and for
those of their comrades who had given them commissions were made by these
privileged men. On their return to their own prison square, these men
probably traded with their fellow prisoners in the small market which was
held in each quadrangle. There appear to have been at one time stalls to
which the public were admitted on Sundays to purchase the articles made
by the prisoners—that is, if the following paragraph is well founded:
“Barracks were erected on a very liberal and excellent plan for the
security of French prisoners who were confined here during the late
war, and employed themselves in making bone toys, and straw boxes,
and many other small articles, to which people of all descriptions
were admitted on Sundays, when more than £200 a day has been
frequently laid out in purchasing their labours of the preceding
week. It is capable of containing 7 or 8,000 men, and has barracks
for two regiments of infantry.” (_Crosby’s Complete Pocket Gazette_,
2nd Edition, 1818, Yaxley.)
The paragraph is somewhat puzzling, but it is certain that it states that
people of all descriptions were admitted somewhere on Sundays, and it can
hardly have been into the bone toys, straw boxes, and other small
articles. The extract was sent to me by the Rev. Father A. H. Davis (a
connection through his mother of one of the French prisoners). He
remarks that this Sunday trading was “very unusual for the date of the
Norman Cross prison”; he suggests that the traffic may have been
regarded, on the part of the purchasers, as a pure act of charity, and
the sellers were of course accustomed to the Continental Sunday. {99}
The markets and the trading must have afforded one of the chief interests
in the prison life, and they have therefore been described as fully as is
possible from scanty records. The daily inspection by the doctors has
been alluded to; sickness and death came within the precincts of the
Depot as to every other community of men. These will be dealt with in a
later chapter. There was no prison chapel. It is possible there were
attempts at something like prison worship; it is certain that at one time
priests were allowed to reside in the prison, and in the last years of
its existence there was a ministering Roman Catholic priest, the Bishop
of Moulins, who was banished from France in 1791, and whose brief
history, written by himself, will be found in Appendix G. An examination
of the records shows that a large number of the prisoners were from
Protestant districts of France, but the majority were, of course, if they
professed any religion, Roman Catholics.
This review of the chief factors in the prisoners’ life will enable the
reader to form in his own mind a picture of what that life was, the main
feature behind the stockade fences, which were enclosed by the outer
prison wall, being that the community lived year after year with no
female element—no solace from mother, wife, sweetheart, child, or female
friend or adviser of any kind—and yet we have the evidence of Mr. Comm.
Serle that they “show their satisfaction in the habits of cheerfulness
peculiar to themselves”; {100a} and the American prisoner who, under the
_nom de plume_ “Greenhorn,” published his experiences of Dartmoor in
1813, is reported by Mr. Basil Thomson {100b} to have been most struck on
entering the prison by “the high spirits of the multitude.” He had
expected “to find hunger, misery and crime, but everything indicated
contentment, order and good fellowship.”
Let us hope that, notwithstanding the fact that at Norman Cross many of
the prisoners had been confined for ten years, while of those whom
“Greenhorn” gazed upon, none had been behind the granite walls of
Dartmoor more than four years, the dominant spirit was one of
“contentment, order and good-fellowship”; but, unfortunately, it is
beyond doubt that there was in the prison a submerged stratum of hungry,
miserable, criminal individuals, who had been unable to resist the evil
influence of their surroundings on natural or acquired tendencies.
The preceding pages should enable the reader, throwing his imagination
back a hundred years to Norman Cross, to conjure up, in place of the
photographic picture of forty acres of still and silent pasture, without
one human inhabitant, which the camera would produce to-day, a
cinematograph series exhibiting a moving panorama, set in the great group
of wooden buildings, barracks and prisons, in which lodged nearly 10,000
men, with all the busy life of such a crowd. On the roads enclosing two
sides of the site (one of which—the great North Road—was then always
alive with the ever-flowing streams of traffic going and returning
between London and the North) are soldiers passing to and fro, and
civilians of all kinds having business at the Depot. Entering the gate
on the Peterborough Road, are seen the prison market on the left and the
Eastern Barracks on the right, and in the space between are soldiers off
duty, local merchants carrying their goods to the market, the prisoners,
officers, and civilians allowed on parole, visitors with orders, friends
of the British officers, etc.; while at the western gate on the North
Road not only is the busy life of the main entrance to the western
barracks thrown on the screen, but also the carts and porters bringing in
the daily supplies for feeding the thousands within the walls, passing
through the gates, and filling with envy the half-starved British workmen
who, from the road, gaze on the piled-up loads of meat, bread, and
vegetables; beyond the gates the busy barrack life—companies of soldiers
changing guard, sentries on their beat pass by; and then appears the
outer wall of the prison, stockade fence or brick wall, according to the
year in which the imaginary camera is at work; at the eastern of the four
gates appears the busy market, with the vendors of the goods, vegetables,
eggs, and farm produce, clothes, hardware, and other necessaries for sale
at their stalls, and the prisoners from within making their purchases,
and offering for sale products of their skill in handicraft; a cannon
with its muzzle directed inwards to the prison commands the gate in the
market fence, that of the prison itself, and the roadway to the Central
Block House. Between the wall and the stockade enclosing the separate
quadrangles, and on the cross roads which separate the four blocks, sixty
sentries, posted day and night, are pacing their beats; while fenced in
by the inner stockade are seen in each quadrangle crowds of prisoners,
the majority young, a few old veterans—well fed and half-starved, well
clothed and ragged, some in the yellow suit supplied by the British
Government, industrious and idle—all forced to live together under the
same conditions of isolation from the outer world.
[Picture: Plate X.—Model of Guillotine: Bone Work (Peterborough Museum)]
Here appear, in a somewhat crowded quadrangle, the thickly packed 1,600
or 1,700 men, groups of whom appear on the screen, some availing
themselves of a clear space are dancing, others racing, or fencing with
single sticks; then is seen a group carrying on, with violent
gesticulation, a hot argument, so heated has it become between two of the
disputants that it may end in blows, and possibly in a duel, for duels
with extemporised weapons were not infrequent and were occasionally
fatal; another group are discussing earnestly, but quietly and in subdued
tones, the possibility of the general rising of all the prisoners in
England, news having been smuggled in to them that a plan for such a
rising is under consideration by the French Government. Then follow
pictures of men at work; they are mostly seated on boxes or rough
prison-made stools on the flagged pavement which surrounds the
airing-court—they are very numerous. Here a man in the corner, which he
has appropriated for months, is cutting, scraping, polishing, and fitting
together the pieces of bone which he is building into the beautiful model
of the guillotine which now, a hundred years later, has found its way to
the Peterborough Museum; he has bought in the market a good assortment of
tools, which lie beside him. Then comes a group of men, who have
selected a spot sheltered from the wind, and who are skilled in straw
marquetry, employed in coating well-made work boxes, desks, etc., also
all prison work, with marquetry pictures of varied and beautiful designs,
so beautiful and so delicate, that we who, a hundred years after the
workers and their prison vanished from Norman Cross, see the objects, can
only marvel at the skill and the patient perseverance which could
accomplish such work in such conditions.
A Dutch sailor appears giving the finishing touch to a marvellous model
of a ship made from the bones received from the cooking-house, he is just
fastening the Dutch flag to the ship; grouped around him are many of his
admiring countrymen. Then appears on the screen a group who reveal a
different side of the life in the quadrangles: a crowd surrounds a party
of gamblers, and crushing through them are several anxious, ragged,
emaciated men who, having just sold in advance their rations for several
days, in order to obtain money for the indulgence of their passion, are
eager to join in the game. Here and there pass by wretched half-naked
members of the submerged tenth, which has developed within a year of the
opening of the prison, seeking for scraps of food to appease the hunger
pangs which have arisen from their selling their rations to the wretch,
the usurer, who now appears searching among the losers, in the dispersing
crowd for a fresh victim; this man is looked upon by the authorities as a
bigger sinner than the starving gamblers themselves. {103}
Another group of young fellows is seen taking lessons in English from a
polyglot; and so picture succeeds picture, until we see in another
quadrangle more men at work, but the crowd generally engaged in and
greatly excited over an election. The commissary whose duty it is to
inspect, in the interest of his fellow prisoners, the supplies of food as
they are delivered at the prison, has proved unsatisfactory, and
permission has been given for the choice of another prisoner to replace
him. There are several parties in the prison each anxious that one of
their own group should be selected, hence the contest and the excited
crowd of speakers and listeners. Some of the prisoners are “mugwumps”
and take no interest in politics, even such as would touch their
personalinterests, and of these a crowd interested in theology fills the
screen; they are listening to a hot argument between a Protestant and a
Romanist—an argument frequently interrupted by a little party of those
who worship only the goddess of reason. Then follow on the screen the
squad told off for fatigue duties for the day; they have just finished
their tasks, and are settling down to their usual occupations, some
throwing themselves down to rest, others joining a party whose sides are
shaking with laughter, as they listen to two or three young men,
excellent actors, who are improvising a scene, caricaturing the English,
and introducing the peculiarities of the agent, turnkey, and other
officials of the prison. {104}
The pictures of the next quadrangle are much the same. A man is seen in
violent grief with the letter in his hand which has just announced to him
the death of wife, father, mother, or child, leaving him more desolate
than ever. At the turnkey’s gate a group of men are being led off with a
guard of soldiers to the Black Hole for a brutal assault on one of their
fellow prisoners. But what has happened to alter the characters of the
pictures when the fourth quadrangle appears on the screen? Work has
stopped, arguments have ceased, the excellent meal, with numerous
luxuries which a party of prisoners well supplied with money have
prepared as the great event of their day, lies on the table before them
disregarded, the food untasted. Where men are speaking at all, it is
with the intensity of bitter disappointment, here and there with violent
expressions of anger against the authors of their misery.
For some months it has been known to these men that negotiations were
going on between the two Governments for a General Exchange of prisoners,
and although there have been to the knowledge of the prisoners many
hitches, yet for the last few weeks it has been rumoured that these
difficulties were all overcome, and the announcement of the day when the
exchange should commence has been hourly expected; but, alas! in place of
the expected news, one of the turnkeys has just handed in an
authoritative statement that the negotiations have fallen through, and
that all hope of freedom must again be banished from their thoughts!
To know the agony of despair that must on such a day have seized those
6,000 men, one must have shared their captivity and gone through their
experiences.
The news from the outside world, the progress of the war, the successes
and defeats on either side, the prospects of peace, must have varied the
mood of the prisoners from day to day; we can only hope that the national
contentment and cheerfulness was for the majority the usual tone.
This panorama of life in the prison represents only what that life was in
good weather. When the weather was too inclement for the outdoor life
commanded by the regulations, and when the prisoners were crowded in the
bare and dismal caserns, contentment and high spirits can scarcely have
been the dominant tone of the inmates. In the surveyor’s report, {105}
referred to in a former chapter, mention is made of the holes cut by the
prisoners in the walls of the caserns; on such a day these would be
valued not so much for light and ventilation as for the opportunity which
they afforded of a glimpse of the world outside—a view of the traffic on
the road and of rustic life which would remind many of similar scenes
from which the conscription had torn them to fight the battles of
Buonaparte.
What a tale is told by those holes cut by the prisoners in the outer
walls!
’Tis pleasant through the loopholes of retreat
To peep at such a world.
Poor fellows, the peep they got through the holes they cut was their only
share for years of the world outside.
It must be borne in mind that the habits and customs of the various
depots would be almost identical; the Government regulations under which
they lived and which ruled the life of the prisoners were the same for
all. There might be points of etiquette and social intercourse, derived
from local circumstances, traditional in each prison; but there were
constant interchanges of prisoners, and these men would take with them to
the new prison the habits, including unfortunately the worst vices, which
they had acquired in the old one. At Norman Cross there were, before it
was completed, men waiting to be received into the prison who had been
captives at the Depot of Falmouth, where they had been distributed in the
town itself in Roskoff, Kerquillack, and Penryn, whence they were
removed, because, in consequence of this multiplication of the places of
confinement, the administration was not only inefficient, but
extravagant. Many others were brought from Porchester and other prisons
on account of their overcrowded condition. Mr. Perrot, the first agent
(Mr. Delafons, it will be remembered, though the first agent appointed,
served only a few days, ordering the first stores from the immediate
locality and from Lynn and Wisbech, but acting only until Mr. Perrot
arrived) came from Porchester, and thus both the administrators and the
prisoners would bring old prison customs with them. It was not until the
influx of Dutch prisoners, after Duncan’s victory off Camperdown on the
11th October following the April in which the prison was opened, that any
number of prisoners passed, without intermediate imprisonment, direct
from the Transports to Norman Cross.
Whatever the cause may have been, whether it was owing to the phlegmatic
disposition of the Dutch or the mercurial temperament of the French, all
accounts show that the general conduct of the former was much more
commendable than that of the latter. Beyond a few escapes, which were
only natural, no offences are attributed to the Dutch. For the
misdemeanours and felonies, great and small, the French were responsible.
The gamblers who arrived from other prisons would doubtless find among
the fresh arrivals men, without other resources, ready to relieve the
dreary monotony of prison life by the excitement of dice box or cards.
However it may have originated, it is certain that, within three years
from the day when the first prisoner entered Norman Cross, the vice of
gambling was a curse in the prison, and its slaves had become the victims
of cruel, avaricious usurers, whose guilty practices thwarted the efforts
of the authorities to insure the health and comfort of those in their
charge. Early in 1800, Captain Woodriff, the agent, sent a report to the
Transport Office which induced the commissioners to send to M. Otto, the
French commissary in London, a letter, {107} from which the following is
an extract:
“There are in those prisons some men, if they deserve that name, who
possess money, with which they purchase at the daily market whatever
is allowed to enter, and with those articles they purchase of some
unfortunate and unthinking Fellow-prisoner, his Rations of Bread for
several days together, and frequently _both Bread and Beef for a
month_, which he, the merchant, seizes upon daily, and sells it out
again to some other unfortunate being, on the same usurious terms;
allowing the former one halfpennyworth of potatoes daily to keep him
alive; not contented with this more than savage barbarity he
purchases next his clothes, and bedding, and sees the miserable man
lie naked on the planks, unless he will consent to allow him one
halfpenny a night to lie in his own hammock, and which he makes him
pay by a further Deprivation of his rations when his original debt is
paid.”
On the 9th September of the same year, 1800, the approach of winter
making the matter very urgent, Captain Woodriff again reported to the
commissioners that nothing he could do prevented the prisoners from
selling their rations of provisions for days to come, and their bedding,
that several of the French prisoners were destitute of clothing and
bedding, that one or two had died, and that in his opinion, unless some
clothing was issued to the prisoners, _many_ of them would die should the
winter be severe. These poor victims of their vicious passions are
called in many documents “Les Misérables.”
There is no reason to doubt that the habits described in these reports
were the true explanation of the want of food and clothing, for which the
French Government blamed the British; but there is also too much reason
to believe that many of these prisoners, the victims of their fellow
captives the usurers, and of their own passion for gambling, died of want
in _our_ prisons, a fact for which we as a nation can only plead the
blinding animosity which filled the hearts and brains of the combatants
in the wars from 1793 to 1815.
It is possible that besides these, there were others who, although well
supplied with food, were at times clothed in rags owing to the obstinacy
with which each Government clung to its own view, as to whose duty it was
to clothe the prisoners.
On the 14th March 1800, the First Consul issued an Edict, in which among
other articles was one _directing_ that the British Government should
clothe their French prisoners.
To this Edict the French Minister for Foreign Affairs referred Captain
Cotes (the English commissary in Paris), in order that he might see,
among other things, that Buonaparte had determined “that the said
prisoners should be clothed by the British Government.” {109} This
Edict, cancelling an agreement previously entered into between the two
Governments, was not communicated direct to the British Government; and
from a letter written by the Secretary of State for War to the Lords of
the Admiralty on the 4th December 1800, it is clear that the issuing of
this Edict, practically an order from the head of the Government of the
country with which we were at war, directing the British Government to
adopt a certain course, had only increased the determination of the
Government to hold its own. The Secretary for War, Mr. Dundas, in this
letter justifies the action of the British Government, and to strengthen
his appeal to the French Authorities to do what he considered their duty,
and clothe the prisoners, he quotes the fact “that misery, sickness, and
a heavy mortality prevail among the French prisoners in the various
depots in this country, while the Dutch, under the same management, and
with the same allowances in every respect as the French, but clothed by
their own Government, continue to enjoy their usual health.”
Those who read this correspondence, now in this twentieth century, when
the bitter animosity between the two countries has died away, must feel
that the obstinacy was not confined to the French, and must wish that the
British had done sooner, what they ultimately did, clothe the prisoners
and debit the French Government with the cost.
In the correspondence I have quoted, the usurer, rather than his victims,
is spoken of as the cause of the misery, and no mention is made of
gambling. But in other reports this vice is mentioned as the root of the
evil, the result of which was that when an epidemic broke out, the
mortality among these naked, starving wretches was terrible. Among the
material relating to Norman Cross, picked out from the miscellaneous
thousands of papers at the Record Office, was a bundle of long slips of
paper—Certificates—ruled out with columns, eleven in all, corresponding
to those in the prison register, and ending with one for the date of
death, and another for the fatal disorder or casualty. Among the large
bundle for the year 1800, a year of terrible mortality owing to the
presence of an epidemic, is a certificate, dated 14th June, which bears
an irregular note in pencil, made apparently by the surgeon when he
forwarded the slip to the agent; the pencilled note on this certificate
is a terrible revelation of what, in that year, was going on in the
prison at Norman Cross.
“You see, my dear Sir, since our selection of the invalids, and the
benefit of warm weather, we have had but one death this ten days. If
another batch of those vagabonds, who by their bad conduct defy all
the benefits the Benevolence of this country bestows upon them, were
to be sent away in September next, we might expect great benefit from
it in the winter, for to a certainty all these blackguards will die
in the winter. Compare sixty a week with one in ten days.”
From this scrap we learn how terrible was the mortality, and how bad was
the character of these wretched men; we learn also that when all the
steps taken to reform them had failed, some system of segregation and
removal to the hulks or elsewhere was finally recommended. There is
evidence in a letter of M. Otto’s that a large number of invalids and men
of the class spoken of as “Les Misérables,” or less sympathetically by
the surgeon as “these blackguards,” was sent back to France. Two years
after this pencilled note was written, all the prisons, both in Britain
and France, were emptied, and the prisoners restored to their native
countries; but when they refilled after the renewal of the war in 1803
under the same conditions, the same depravity and suffering developed.
At Dartmoor, 1809 to 1816, there are records, especially those of the
Americans, which furnish full particulars of the internal life of that
prison, particulars which in the case of Norman Cross can only be
gathered from scraps such as the pencilled note just referred to. Mr.
Basil Thomson has permitted the reprint in this history of his chapter on
these reprobates in Dartmoor. It is terrible reading, but I avail myself
of Mr. Thomson’s permission, because there is little doubt that much of
the description of these self-styled “Romans” at Dartmoor would apply
equally to “Les Misérables” at Norman Cross, and that the Norman Cross
“Blackguards” were, like the “Romans,” ostracised by their fellow
prisoners, and were in a similar, if in a less systematic fashion than
their Dartmoor brethren, segregated by natural selection from their
comrades, and herded together in special parts of the prisons.
From a careful perusal of the death certificates for the year 1801, when
the terrible epidemic, commencing in November 1800, carried off a
thousand victims, it would appear that Block 13, that behind the hospital
caserns in the north-east quadrangle, was the habitat of “Les
Misérables.” There are constantly recurring notes at the end of the
certificate to the effect: “This prisoner had sold his clothes and
rations; he was from No. 13.” The cause of death given was debility.
There are other entries, with the simple note, “Debility, from 13.” {111}