The Prison Cookbook

by Peter Higginbotham

  Breakfast: ¾oz of flaked cocoa or cocoa nibs, made with 2oz of milk and 6 drams of molasses, into ¾ pint of liquid cocoa.

  Dinner: 4oz of cooked meat, weighed when cooked, without bone, and ½ pint of soup, and 1lb potatoes, weighed when boiled.

  Supper: 1 pint of gruel, sweetened with 6 drams molasses.

  Bread, 20oz per diem. A liberal allowance of salt.

  Soup made with liquor of meat of the same day, strengthened by three ox-heads to 100 pints. Barley, peppers, and carrots added, and a seasoning of onions. Gruel, 1½oz oatmeal to 1 pint.

  In November 1843, The Times reported that after barely six months at Pentonville, two inmates had been ‘driven mad by the severity and the seclusion of its discipline’, requiring their removal to the Bethlehem Hospital. It condemned the prison’s ‘maniac-making system’ which, it noted, subjected prisoners to solitude for a period six times as long as that which the Millbank authorities had now agreed was the safe maximum for such confinement.133 For the first few years of its life, the level of such problems was insufficient to cause the authorities serious concern. However, in 1848, the Pentonville Commissioners noted ‘the great number of cases of death and of insanity, as compared with that of former years’. 134

  Ironically, it was not only the convicts who appeared to suffer ill effects from the new prison buildings. In 1847, Whitworth Russell committed suicide at Millbank. William Crawford died in the same year after collapsing during a meeting at Pentonville.135

  CHANGES TO LOCAL PRISONS

  A fresh impetus to the reform of local prisons came with the Gaol Fees Abolition Act of 1815, which decreed that ‘all Fees and Gratuities paid or payable by any Prisoner, on the Entrance, Commitment or Discharge, to or from Prison, shall absolutely cease, and the same are hereby abolished and determined’. 136 Responsibility for paying gaolers’ salaries now rested with local JPs with the money being provided from town or county rates.

  In 1834, the Middlesex House of Correction at Coldbath Fields adopted the silent system where prisoners could work in association, but not communicate. Here, in the oakum room, the closely supervised inmates were required to pick apart 3½ pounds of old rope per day – a hook attached to the knee could assist in the task.

  Sir Robert Peel’s Gaol Act of 1823 137 took the view that prisons should be ‘an object of terror’ but that those in prison should not become ‘worse members of society, or more hardened offenders’. The Act consolidated and reiterated a number of previous measures relating to hygiene and diet, the prevention of gambling and sale of alcohol, and the payment of prison staff through salaries rather than prisoners’ fees. The Act required separate accommodation to be provided for different categories of prisoner, such as debtors, felons and those awaiting trial. Males and females were to be housed separately and women were to be supervised only by female warders. Each prisoner was to have a hammock or bed provided, either in a cell of their own or sharing with at least two others. Those on hard labour were to work up to ten hours a day. Prisoners were to be provided with instruction in reading and writing. The Act also clarified the distinction between common gaols and houses of correction, with the latter to be used for all ‘idle and disorderly Persons, Rogues and Vagabonds, incorrigible Rogues and other Vagrants’. Prison keepers were to make quarterly reports to local JPs and, along with the chaplain and surgeon, keep regular journals. The Act’s main deficiency was that it applied only to the larger locally administered prisons, less than half of those in operation, and thus ignored those most in need of reform.138

  The passing of a statute and its demands actually being put into practice were still two rather different matters, however. In 1841, the governor of the St Alban’s county gaol was found still to be charging sick inmates for ‘extras’ prescribed by the prison surgeon – meat and vegetables at 8d per plate, beer at 4d per quart and tea or broth at 3d per basin. The governor professed complete ignorance of the 1823 Act, claiming that he had never been made aware of its contents.139

  In 1842, London’s three debtors’ prisons, the Fleet, the Marshalsea and the Queen’s (formerly King’s) Bench, which were all excluded from the 1823 Act, were ‘consolidated’. The former two were wound down and closed with their prisoners transferring to what became known as the Queen’s prison and which then operated in line with the Act.

  Further moves towards more standardised operation came in the wake of the 1835 Prisons Act which set up the Inspectors of Prisons. In 1843, under the direction of Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, the inspectors examined the whole system of prison ‘discipline’, including such matters as the employment, diet and health of prisoners, arrangements for their religious instruction and moral improvement, the use of punishments such as the tread-wheel, and the temperature of the cells. As a result of their investigations, a set of regulations was devised to try and bring some consistency to the operation of the 220 or so prisons then operating in England and Wales.

  Despite the problems experienced at Pentonville, it marked the start of a boom in prison construction. In the six years following its building, fifty-four new prisons were erected, providing 11,000 separate cells. 140 Pentonville’s open gallery radial design became a model for many new local prison buildings and between 1842 and 1877 around twenty gaols or houses of correction were erected on similar lines. 141 These included new county prisons at Reading, Clerkenwell, Wakefield, Aylesbury, Winchester, Exeter, Wandsworth, Lewes, Warwick, Coldbath Fields (Middlesex), Salford and Lincoln, together with borough prisons at Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Hull and Portsmouth. Most were located on green-field sites at the edge of town, although some, such as Reading and Clerkenwell, reconstructed existing buildings. The new City of London House of Correction, opened in 1852, was located to the north of London at Holloway since no suitable site could be found within the city itself.

  Even at prisons where wholesale rebuilding was not possible, such as those occupying castles or confined town sites, there was a move to adopt Pentonville’s principles by converting buildings to provide separate cells, or by constructing new separate-cell blocks, as happened at prisons such as Stafford, Gloucester, Oxford, Bodmin, Maidstone and Newgate.

  Despite the adoption of the separate system at Pentonville, some local prisons such as Wakefield, Derby and Coldbath Fields opted to use the silent system. Journalist Henry Mayhew, visiting Coldbath Fields in the late 1850s, reported that the system required a higher proportion of officers to supervise the prisoners than at Pentonville, and that the relative number of punishments inflicted was also higher. Mayhew was particularly critical of the ‘stark waste of intellect’ resulting from the silent system, where the prisoners could not even be read aloud to during the enforced ‘utter mental idleness’. Despite the strict regime, the Coldbath Fields governor admitted that some prisoners did manage to communicate using ‘significant signs’. 142 Touching one’s nose to indicate a wish for tobacco may be the origin of ‘snout’ – a slang word for the substance, particularly associated with prisons.

  PUBLIC WORKS PRISONS

  By the 1840s, the decline in the number of available destinations for transporting convicts led to the development of alternative forms of sentence at home. In 1848, a ‘public works’ prison housing 840 prisoners was opened at Portland in Dorset where the inmates were employed in the local quarries and naval dockyard. A similar but much larger establishment was constructed at Portsmouth in 1852. On Dartmoor, part of the old prisoner-of-war prison – largely empty since 1815 – was put to use as a public-works project, with over 1,000 prisoners working on the land, renovating the building and adapting it to house invalid prisoners.

  From 1848, convicts sentenced to between seven and ten years transportation could instead receive twelve months of separate confinement at Pentonville (or Millbank for women), followed by up to three years hard labour at Portland, Dartmoor or on the hulks, with good conduct earning a shorter stay. They would then be transported to Van Diemen’s Land or Western Australia,
there receiving a pardon so long as they did not return to Britain.

  Van Diemen’s Land closed its doors to convicts in 1852, leaving just Western Australia available for transportation, and then only of men. The following year, the Penal Servitude Act replaced transportation sentences of less than fourteen years by a shorter sentence of imprisonment in England. This again comprised an initial period of separate confinement, now reduced to nine months, at Pentonville, Millbank or the new women’s convict prison at Brixton opened in 1853. This was followed by a period of labour on public works, then release on licence – the beginnings of the parole system. This was a development which aroused some concern amongst the public.

  The general use of transportation ceased in 1857, replaced in all cases by sentences of penal servitude. The same year also saw the demise of the last remaining hulks. To cope with the increasing numbers now needing prison accommodation, a further public-works prison was opened on St Mary’s Island at Chatham.

  A view of the West Riding County Gaol at Wakefield, erected in 1843–7, and one of the many prison designs of the period influenced by Pentonville’s radial layout.

  The galleried interior of one of Wakefield’s cell wings.

  From 1848, up to a thousand convicts extracted and dressed stone at the public-works quarries at Portland. Between 1849 and 1872, 6 million tons of the stone were used to create a breakwater for Portland harbour.

  YOUNG OFFENDERS

  Prior to the 1850s, children who broke the law were subject to exactly the same penalties as adults, including execution, transportation and flogging. Some typical examples of Old Bailey sentencing were proffered by a schoolmaster who had spent eight months in Newgate. One boy, aged no more than 13 and not a known offender, was to be transported for life for stealing his companion’s hat while at a puppet show. The unfortunate child said that he had knocked the hat off in fun, and that someone else must have picked it up. Other boys of a similar age were sentenced to death for petty offences:

  I have had five in one session in this awful situation; one for stealing a comb almost valueless, two for a child’s sixpenny story-book, another for a man’s stock, and the fifth for pawning his mother’s shawl. 143

  An early attempt to deal with young offenders came in 1838 when a former military hospital at Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight was converted for use as a juvenile penitentiary. It aimed to provide under-18s who had been sentenced to transportation with a preparatory period of discipline, education and training in a useful trade. Each boy’s progress at Parkhurst would determine whether he would be transported as a free emigrant, with a conditional pardon or to be detained on arrival. The Parkhurst regime was extremely strict and included a prison uniform, leg irons, silence on all occasions of instruction and duty, constant surveillance by officers and ‘a diet reduced to its minimum’.144 The original dietary, with breakfasts and suppers largely consisting of oatmeal, led to numerous health problems such as skin eruptions. A revised dietary, issued in 1843, included bread and cocoa for breakfast, bread and gruel for supper, and dinners of bread and potatoes accompanied by either mutton or beef and vegetable soup.145 The conduct of Parkhurst boys after arrival in Australia did not live up to expectations and in 1863 Parkhurst was turned over for use as a women’s convict prison.

  A completely new approach to the treatment of young offenders came in the Reformatory School Act of 1854, which enabled courts to place under-16s for a period of two to five years in reformatory schools that had been certified by the Inspectors of Prisons.

  The 1857 Industrial Schools Act provided for children aged 7 to 15 and convicted of vagrancy to be placed in a broadly similar type of establishment known as an industrial school. From 1861, unruly children from workhouses or pauper schools could also be sent to industrial schools, so long as they had not been previously convicted of a felony.

  Most reformatories and industrial schools were privately run, often by religious groups, although a few, such as the Feltham Industrial School, were operated by public authorities. Boys at Feltham were taught trades such as carpentry, bricklaying, tailoring and shoemaking – all the boys’ clothes and boots were made at the school.146 They also worked on the school’s own farm which was cultivated entirely by manual labour. The school was run very much along military lines and had a rigged ship fitted out for performing drill and naval exercises.

  Tothill Fields prison, the Middlesex House of Correction for women and juveniles in the late 1850s. Henry Mayhew, observing the boys exercising, could ‘tell by their shuffling noise and limping gate, how little used many of them had been to such a luxury as shoe leather’. The majority of the boys were imprisoned for pickpocketing or other petty thieving.

  The schools were not always successful and some closed within a few years. A reformatory opened in 1856 by the monks of St Bernard’s Abbey at Whitwick in Leicestershire took up to 250 delinquent Roman Catholic boys and was run with the help of lay assistants. However, the staff were unable to control their charges. There were several riots, and in 1878 sixty boys escaped after attacking the master in charge with knives stolen from the dining room. The establishment closed in 1881 after its certification was withdrawn.

  A general view of Parkhurst juvenile prison in 1847 with some of the longer established inmates engaged in ‘spade husbandry’. For their first few months, new arrivals spent nineteen hours a day alone in cells measuring 11ft by 7ft, leaving only for exercise, cleaning, chapel and school. Misbehaviour could result in a spell inside a ‘dark cell’.

  The Middlesex Industrial School was established in 1854 by a private Act of Parliament and was the first institution of its type. Its new premises, erected on a 100-acre site at Feltham in Middlesex, could hold up to 700 boys aged seven to thirteen.

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  Changes in Prison Food 1800 – 1860s

  By the start of the nineteenth century, the majority of prisoners were being provided with at least some food by their prison. However, up to the formation of the national prison system in 1877, the food that a particular prisoner might receive often depended on an elaborate and often almost impenetrable combination of factors. These included the nature of the institution and its management, the prisoner’s offence, the stage of his progress through the legal process, his state of health, whether he was performing certain types of labour within the prison, and the governor’s interpretation of phrases such as ‘coarse but wholesome food’ which appeared in national prison legislation. Even in the same prison, inmates in apparently similar situations could receive very different rations – something that often led to great discontent.

  COMPLEXITIES AT COLDBATH FIELDS

  A good example of these dietary intricacies was provided in 1800 by a Royal Commission investigating the recently rebuilt Coldbath Fields prison at Clerkenwell. The prison’s dietary then comprised:

  on One Day about Eight Ounces of meat, which, by boiling, is reduced to about Six Ounces; and the Day following, the Prisoners have the Broth produced by that Meat; and so alternately from Day to Day, One Pound of Bread Daily. Besides this Allowance, there are about Fifty Prisoners who have Water Gruel, by Order of the Doctor.147

  However, the majority of Coldbath prisoners did not actually receive this supposedly standard allowance. More than half the inmates were being held under the 1779 Transportation Act which demanded that they be ‘fed and sustained with Bread, and any coarse Meat, or other inferior Food, and Water, or small Beer’, at public expense and were not to have ‘any other Food [or] Drink’. Those at the prison in its role as a house of correction, and given hard labour, were required ‘to be sustained with Bread, and any coarse, but wholesome Food and Water’; those not doing hard labour were to be maintained by the county with up to half of any of their earnings taken as a contribution towards their food. Inmates awaiting trial and those held as ‘idle apprentices’ received only the basic bread ration of 1lb per day, although one apprentice who had been further convicted on a charge of aggravated assault was then
eligible to the full meat allowance. Two convicted women in the ‘disorderly’ section received the full allowance while a third, yet to be tried, was given just bread. Women working in the prison laundry received a double allowance of bread and a pint of porter (dark beer) each day.

  The best-fed inmates at Coldbath Fields turned out to be a group of sailors imprisoned after joining a mutiny at the Nore (an anchorage on the Thames estuary) in 1797. The mutineers had a daily ration of 1½lb of bread, 6oz of meat, rice soup on alternate days, a ‘warm breakfast’ and a pint of porter with permission to buy a further pint if they had money. This generous treatment was at the direction of the prison surgeon who saw it as a protection against the scurvy to which seamen were well known to be disposed.

  Not surprisingly, many Coldbath Fields prisoners complained about their food. A common grievance was of portions being underweight. Enquiries by the commissioners revealed that loaves were sometimes underweight, but also often overweight. The inconsistency appeared to be due to loaves sticking together during baking and then being unevenly separated. An unpleasant taste in the bread was also reported by some prisoners. The baker said this arose from the present necessity of using a proportion of imported wheat which sometimes acquired a disagreeable flavour when it became too warm during its sea voyage. Another prisoner stated that he had occasionally been served with tainted meat during hot weather. The prison’s butcher explained that this was probably because he was obliged to slaughter meat on Friday but not send it to the prison until the following Monday. The timing of the prison meals caused objection from some prisoners. Being served their bread at 8 a.m. and their meat or soup at noon, they were effectively forced to fast for up to eighteen hours. The commissioners suggested that ‘as the lower classes accustom themselves to eat frequently’, a later hour for serving the dinner meal would benefit the health of those serving long sentences. One ‘very healthy looking’ young inmate protested about a lack of food. This, it transpired, was because he had opted to have his food supplied by his mother who brought him provisions twice a week. However, he always ended up eating his three days’ supply on the day that it was delivered and then had to rely on the daily 1lb ration of the ‘prison loaf ’ until his mother’s next appearance.