The Prison Cookbook

by Peter Higginbotham

  ELIZABETH FRY

  Perhaps the most influential reformer of the nineteenth century was Elizabeth Gurney, daughter of a large Quaker family in Ipswich. Following her marriage to businessman Joseph Fry in 1800, she eventually settled near London, at East Ham, to bring up her own growing family. In 1813, she heard the report of a visit to Newgate prison by a group of American Quakers who had been shocked to find scenes of ‘blaspheming, fighting, dram-drinking, half-naked women’. 87 Her own visits to Newgate, where she witnessed ‘riot, licentiousness, and filth’ led to her campaigning for the reform of prison conditions and of the inmates themselves. Several years later, following discussions with the prison authorities and the prisoners, a number of changes were introduced, including a scheme of classification and segregation, a prison uniform, paid work, educational and religious classes, and a system of constant supervision by a matron and monitors chosen by the prisoners from their own number.88 Although some of the changes, such as the banning of alcohol and playing cards, were not totally popular, there was a marked improvement in the prisoners’ conduct.

  Fry travelled widely, promoting her work, and in 1821 set up a national body – the British Ladies’ Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners – to co-ordinate the work of the numerous local prison-visiting groups that had sprung up. The society spawned offshoots in a number of other countries including Holland, Italy, Russia and the USA where a group of Quaker women began visiting the Arch Street prison in 1823.

  At the heart of Elizabeth Fry’s philosophy was that the treatment of prisoners should be based on the principles of justice and humanity. The aim of prison should be reformation – achieved through kindness – rather than degradation, cruelty and neglect. Her particular concern for female prisoners led to significant improvements in their treatment, for example the 1823 Gaols Act, which required the complete segregation of male and female prisoners, led to females being supervised by female officers. Her efforts also resulted in improved conditions for those being transported to Australia aboard convict ships. She arranged for each woman to receive a ‘bag of useful items’. These included a Bible, two aprons, a black cotton cap, a large hessian sack (for transporting her clothes) and a sewing kit and material to make a patchwork quilt. The quilt could then be sold or used as proof of her sewing skills for a potential future employer.

  Elizabeth Fry on a visit to Newgate. In 1817, Fry and a group of like-minded, mostly Quaker, women formed the Ladies’ Association for the Reformation of the Female Prisoners in Newgate which, amongst other activities, provided daily visits and Bible readings for the inmates.

  six

  Transportation and the Hulks

  TRANSPORTATION TO AMERICA

  The shipping of felons to Britain’s overseas colonies began in 1615, during the reign of James I, and continued, on and off, for the next 250 years. The use of transportation was first introduced as a piece of Poor-Law legislation in the 1597 Vagabonds Act. It provided that ‘rogues, vagabonds, and sturdie beggars’ could be ‘banished out of this realme, and … conveied unto such parts beyond the seas’. 89 The statute also decreed that such undesirables could be put to service manning galley ships – a type of vessel not much used in England.

  Initially, the transportation of convicted lawbreakers was on a voluntary basis, with only a few hundred offenders taking this option up to 1650. The most common destinations were the American settlements of Virginia and Maryland – where the new arrivals were sold as labourers to plantation owners at dockside auctions. Despite attempts in the 1670s by the colonies to halt transportation, the second half of the century saw its use increase with around 5,000 convicts being despatched there.90 For Britain, transportation had the benefits of both removing serious offenders from its shores and providing a much-needed labour force for its New World territories. By 1775 the total transported had grown to more than 30,000, with two-thirds of all felons convicted at the Old Bailey now being sent to the colonies and sold as servants.91 This was a policy which one pamphleteer in 1731 applauded as ‘Draining the Nation of its offensive Rubbish, without taking away their Lives’.92

  Among the beneficiaries of the transportation policy were the merchants contracted to ship the convicts to their new homes. It was profitable business as the outgoings were relatively small and the returns high. Contractors were required to pay each prisoner’s gaol discharge fees (typically £1) and feed them during the voyage (at a weekly rate of 2s 6d during the eight-week crossing). Other overheads included crew, ship, port and administrative costs (around £2 per head), hire of irons (1s per head) and import duty (£1 per convict), giving a total expenditure of around £5 1s per convict.93 On the income side, merchants received a fee of £5 per head for transporting the convicts, plus whatever they could get for them at the quayside auction on arrival at their destination port. Typical prices were £15 to £25 for males with useful trade skills, £10 for common thieves and £8 for female convicts. The old and the infirm, however, had to be given away. On a good trip, a merchant could expect to clear an average profit of £9 to £15 per convict. On top of this, the return voyage to Britain, with a cargo of tobacco or grain on board, could generate a further healthy income.

  The typical weekly food ration for those being transported comprised 1.2lb of beef and pork, 13.3oz of cheese, 4.7lb of bread, 0.5 quart of peas, 1.7 quarts of oatmeal, 1.3oz of molasses, 0.5 gill of gin and 5.3 gallons of water, providing a total of just 1200 calories a day.94

  For the American recipients of this human traffic, the deliveries proved increasingly unwelcome – a feeling summed up in a 1751 letter (attributed to Benjamin Franklin) in the Pennsylvania Gazette, which proposed that the colonies should repay the kindness of mother England by exporting rattlesnakes to the British Isles and releasing them in St James’ Park.95 Attempts by the colonies to curtail transportation – by charging a duty on each convict landed, or a bond to ensure their good behaviour once in service – all proved unsuccessful and the convict ships continued to arrive until the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1775.

  ALTERNATIVES TO TRANSPORTATION

  The war with America brought an abrupt halt to the steady stream of convict ships that had been heading to its shores. What did not abate, however, was the flow of convicts sentenced to transportation by the courts, and a crisis in prison overcrowding soon began to loom.

  The immediate, and supposedly short-term, solution was to turn two of the hulks of old battleships berthed on the Thames at Woolwich into floating prisons for 100 inmates. At the same time, two pieces of parliamentary legislation were prepared which proposed longer-term remedies for the problem. The first, the Criminal Law Act of 1776, aimed to extend the use of shipboard prisons. It recommended that transportation be replaced by a period of hard labour lasting between three and ten years, with offenders held in houses of correction or ‘some proper place of confinement’ and fed on a diet of ‘bread, and any coarse meat, or other inferior food, and water, or small beer’. Although the Act made no explicit mention of shipboard prisons, the particular form of hard labour that it proposed – ‘removing sand, soil, and gravel from, and cleansing the River Thames’ – makes it clear that was where its intent lay. Despite some objections, such as the possible nuisance caused to nearby residents, and concerns about the security of the vessels, the bill was passed in May 1776.96

  The second bill brought before parliament, but which took another three years to receive approval, proposed the erection of a pair of ‘Penitentiary Houses’ (one for 600 men and one for 300 women) on a site near to London. The houses would impose a strict regime with ‘labour of the hardest and most servile kind’.97

  THE HULKS

  In August 1776, the contract for supplying and managing the new prison ships, or hulks as they became known, was awarded to Duncan Campbell – one of the merchants who had previously been engaged in transporting convicts to America. Campbell’s initial contract was to provide a ship to house 120 prisoners for each of which
he was to receive £32 a year. The first vessel he provided, the Justitia, was joined the following year by the Tayloe, the two then accommodating 240 prisoners. The Tayloe was soon replaced by the much larger Censor.

  The ships were moored in the middle of the Thames at Woolwich Warren – a mass of foundries, workshops, warehouses and barracks, and a long-established home of naval ship-building and arms manufacture. During the day, prisoners worked at dredging the river or providing labour for building works. At night they were crammed below decks, originally in beds, and then in pairs on low wooden platforms, 6ft by 4ft. During the day, the platforms were stood on their side and used as tables. An experiment in using hammocks for beds was abandoned after it became apparent how difficult these were to use while wearing chains.98

  John Howard, visiting the Justitia in 1776, discovered that the bread provided for the prisoners was mostly crumbs and ‘mouldy and green on both sides’. However, the captain assured him that ‘they would soon be out of the mouldy batch’.99 The meat used on the ship mostly came from the heads of butchered cattle, obtained at minimal cost from the slaughtering yards at Tower Hill, 3 miles upstream. A barely edible dish of ‘ox cheeks’ was served up five days a week but had often gone off. The convicts dined in groups or ‘messes’ of six and the daily menu for each mess in the early 1780s is shown below.100 There was also a daily ration of 7lb of bread per mess.

  Breakfast

  Every day: a pint of barley or rice made into three quarts of soup.

  Dinner

  Sunday: six pounds of salt pork or seven pounds of beef with five quarts of beer. Monday, Wednesday, Friday: six pounds of bullock’s head.

  Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday: Two pounds of cheese, and five quarts of beer.

  Supper

  Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday: A pint of pease and barley made into three quarts of soup.

  Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday: A pint of oatmeal made into burgou.

  ‘Burgou’ (also spelled burgoe or burgoo) was a thick oatmeal porridge. Two methods for making burgoo were provided by William Ellis in 1750 which he described as ‘best’ and ‘worse’. Presumably, convicts on the hulks would have been given the second version.

  The Cheshire Way of making Burgoo, in the best Manner.—They first boil their Milk, and then thicken it by Degrees with fine Oatmeal, hasty-pudding like, and after boiling it well they eat it with Butter. In Derbyshire they call this thin Pudding.

  The Cheshire Way of making Burgoo in a common worse manner.—Here the Farmers make a worse watry Sort of Burgoo with Water. Or Water and Milk mixed, which when boiled they stir their Oatmeal into it by Degres, and eat it hot with some Spoonfuls of Milk. Some few eat Butter with it.101

  Conditions on the hulks were dire, with ships sometimes housing up to 700 convicts. At night, they were crammed below deck and left in the charge of a single warder. In the first twenty years of their operation, the hulks received around 8,000 prisoners, of which almost a quarter died on board. As well as diseases, such as gaol-fever, tuberculosis, cholera and scurvy, severe depression appears to have been common. During the first two years of the hulks’ operation, one physician commented that some of his patients had died ‘merely of lowness of spirit, without any fever or other disorder upon them’.102

  The lack of progress in building a land-based penitentiary led to a steady growth in the number of hulks required to house the growing convict population. By 1788, the fleet included the Stanislaus at Woolwich, the Dunkirk based at Plymouth, the Lion at Gosport, and the Ceres and La Fortunee at Langstone Harbour. However, the role of the convict hulks as long-term prisons was about to come to an end.

  TRANSPORTATION TO AUSTRALIA

  Britain’s war with America ended in 1783 and resulted in the permanent loss of the American colonies as a destination for Britain’s convict ships. Despite there being no immediate alternative yet available, parliament passed an Act 103 reaffirming its belief in the use of transportation. Although Africa was briefly considered as a destination, the place that soon emerged to take on the role was Australia, claimed for Britain by Captain James Cook in 1770. It was decided to found a British prison colony at Botany Bay, the place where Cook had made his first landfall.

  The first Australian convict convoy, the so-called First Fleet, comprised the flagship HMS Sirius, an armed tender, three store ships and six convict transports. 104 As with the hulks on the Thames, the convicts’ accommodation was provided by private contractors. The fleet set sail from Portsmouth on 13 May 1787 carrying 565 male and 192 female convicts, 13 children of convicts, 206 marines with 46 members of their families, 20 officials, 210 seamen of the Royal Navy, and 233 merchant seamen. Commanding the fleet was Captain Arthur Phillip, RN, who was to become the governor not just of the new penal colony, but also of the whole territory of New South Wales where the prison was to be Britain’s first permanent settlement.

  As well as its human cargo, the First Fleet carried a vast amount of supplies to help the settlers establish the new colony. Two years’ supply of food and drink included 448 barrels of flour, 135 tierces of beef, 165 tierces of pork, 50 puncheons of bread, 110 firkins of butter, 116 casks of dried peas, 5 casks of oatmeal, 5 puncheons of rum, 300 gallons of brandy, 3 hogsheads of vinegar and 15 tons of drinking water. For their shelter and comfort on arrival, the ships carried 800 sets of bedding, 40 tents for female convicts, 26 marquees for married officers and a portable canvas house for Governor Phillip. Lighting was provided by 2½ tons of candles, plus 44 tons of tallow with which to make further stocks. Building tools included 700 felling axes, 175 steel hand-saws, 50 pick-axes, 700 shovels, 700 spades, 40 wheel-barrows, 12 brick moulds, 175 hammers, 747,000 nails and 5,448 squares of glass.

  To establish agricultural production, 100 bushels of wheat, barley and corn seeds were supplemented at Rio and Cape Town by fig trees, bamboo and banana plants, sugar cane, and coffee and cocoa seeds. Cape Town also contributed to the fleet’s livestock with 7 cows, a bull, 3 mares, a stallion, 44 sheep, 19 goats, 32 hogs, 18 turkeys, 29 geese, 200 fowls and chickens, 35 ducks, kittens and puppies, and 5 rabbits. Fishing equipment comprised 14 fishing nets, 8,000 fish hooks, 48 dozen lines, 18 coils of whale line and 6 harpoons. Finally, to nourish the spirit as well as the body, the inventory included a Bible and prayer-book, a box of books and one piano.105

  The passage took eight months – five times the duration of the crossing to America – and the fleet reached Botany Bay at the end of January 1788. Having surveyed the terrain, Governor Phillip decided that the new colony should be established a few miles to the north of Botany Bay at Port Jackson, now part of Sydney Harbour. Despite an outbreak of dysentery while crossing the Indian Ocean, the fleet suffered only forty-eight deaths on the voyage, a low rate which owed much to the efforts of the principal surgeon, John White, who insisted on fresh fruit and vegetables being obtained at each port en route, together with cleanliness in the cramped quarters below decks and regular exercise.

  The colony had a shaky start, having to contend with illnesses such as scurvy, the failure of crops, limited fresh water supplies and trees whose hardness made them impossible to cut down. Discipline, too, was a problem – as well as insubordination from the prisoners, many of those that had been engaged as guards for the voyage refused to help keep order once the crossing had been completed. Finally, the native aborigines proved less than friendly – perhaps having a premonition of the devastation that was to come in 1789, when an outbreak of smallpox killed almost half of their number in the area.106

  At the end of 1789, a second convict fleet carrying much needed supplies had been delayed, and a serious food shortage was facing the colony. By February 1790:

  There remained therein not more than four months’ provisions for all hands, and this at half rations. To prepare for the worst, the allowance issued was diminished from time to time, till in April, that year, it consisted only of 2lbs. of pork, 2lbs. of rice, and 2½lbs. of flour per head, for seven days. More than ever in the
general scarcity were robberies prevalent. Capital punishment became more and more frequent, without exercising any appreciable effect … [One] old convict said that he had often dined off pounded grass, or made soup from a native dog. Another old convict declared he had seen six men executed for stealing twenty-one pounds of flour. ‘For nine months,’ says a third, ‘I was on five ounces of flour a day, which when weighed barely came to four. The men were weak,’ he goes on, ‘dreadfully weak, for want of food. One man, named ‘Gibraltar,’ was hanged for stealing a loaf out of the governor’s kitchen.’ 107

  Conditions were also grim on board the transport ships of the Second Fleet, which finally arrived at Port Jackson in June 1790 after losing one of its stores ships to an iceberg. Of the 1,000 or so convicts that set out, more than a quarter perished at sea. A further 150 died not long after coming ashore. The largest transport ship in the fleet, the Neptune, accommodated its 421 prisoners on a lower deck measuring no more than 75ft long by 35ft wide, an allowance of just over 6ft square each. Most of the prisoners were chained together in irons. The convicts were grouped into messes of six, with their rations calculated as being two thirds of the standard Royal Navy allowance. Accordingly, each mess should have received a weekly provision of: 16lb of bread, 12lb of flour, 14lb of beef, 8lb of pork, 12 pints of pease, 1½lb of butter and 2lb of rice. Whether they received anything like this appears doubtful. As well as the excessive confinement, malnourishment was a major cause of the fatalities. The contractors, Messrs. Calvert, Camden and King of London, were paid £17 7s 6d per convict embarked, and supplying short rations was an easy option for boosting their profit margin.