In the convict prisons, the separate system required that food be distributed from a central kitchen to each individual cell, a task carried out by prisoners under the direction of a warder. Mayhew observed the operation in progress at Brixton:
At a few minutes before one o’clock the ‘breads’ are counted out into large wicker baskets, while the tin cans being filled with soup and meat on one side, and potatoes on the other, are ranged in large potboy-like trays, which are inscribed with the letters of the several wards to which they appertain.
At one o’clock a bell is heard to ring, and then the matrons of the old prison enter in rotation, each accompanied with four prisoners, one of whom seizes one tray, while two more of the gang go off with another that is heavier laden, and the last hurries off with the basket of bread, with an officer at her heels.
After this, large trucks are brought in, and when stowed with the trays and breadbaskets for the ‘wings,’ they are wheeled off by the attendant prisoners, one woman dragging in front, and the others pushing behind.
We followed the two trucks that went to the east wing of the prison, and here we found a small crowd of women waiting, with the matrons at the door, ready to receive the trays as the vehicles were unladen. ‘That’s ours!’ cried one of the female officer in attendance; and immediately the prisoners beside her seized the tray with the basket of bread, and went off with it, as if they were so many pot-girls carrying round the beer.
Then a large bell clattered through the building, and one of the warders screamed at the top of her voice, ‘O Lord, bless this our food to our use, and us to thy service, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen!’
No sooner was the grace ended, than the officers of the several wards went along the galleries, opening each cell-door by the way, with three or four prisoners in their wake, carrying the trays. The cell being opened, the matron handed in the bread from the basket which one of the prisoners carried, and then a can of soup from the tray, the door being closed again immediately afterwards, so that the arcade rang with the unlocking and slamming of the doors in the several galleries. When the dinners were all served, the cell-doors were double locked, and then another bell rang for silence.
A curious part of the process consisted in the distribution of the knives before dinner, and collection of them afterwards. For the latter purpose, one of the best-conducted prisoners goes round with a box, a matron following in her steps, and then the knives, ready cleaned, are put out under the door. These are all counted, and locked up in store for the next day. But if one of the number be short, the prisoners are not let out of their cells till the missing knife be found, each convict and cell being separately searched, with a view to its discovery.
At Millbank, the prison’s labyrinthine layout made the distribution process more complex. Three separate kitchens were located around the central hexagon, each serving two of the outer pentagons:
‘They are now preparing for breakfast,’ said our guide. ‘There, you see, are the cans for the cocoa,’ pointing to a goodly muster of bright tin vessels, in size and shape like watering-pots, and each marked with the letters of the wards from A to H. On the table were rows of breads, like penny loaves, arranged in rank and file, as it were.
At Holloway, as at a number of other London prisons, the kitchen was located in the basement. At mealtimes, trays of cooked food were lifted to the upper floors by means of a hand-cranked hoist.
‘This is the female compartment. Here, you see,’ said the officer, pointing to the farther side of a wooden partition that stood at the end of the kitchen, ‘is the place where the women enter from pentagon 3, whilst this side is for the men coming from pentagon 4.’ Presently the door was opened and files of male prisoners were seen, with warders, without.
‘Now, they’re coming down to have breakfast served,’ said the cook. ‘F ward!’ cries an officer, and immediately two prisoners enter and run away with a tin can each, while another holds a conical basket and counts bread into it — saying, 6, 12, 18, and so on.
When the males had been all served, and the kitchen was quiet again, the cook said to us, ‘Now you’ll see the females, sir. Are all the cooks out?’ he cried in a loud voice; and when he was assured that the prisoners serving in the kitchen had retired, the principal matron came in at the door on the other side of the partition. Presently she cried out, ‘Now, Miss Gardiner, if you please!’ Whereupon the matron so named entered, costumed in a gray straw-bonnet and fawn-coloured merino dress, with a jacket of the same material over it, and attended by some two or three female prisoners habited in their loose, dark-brown gowns, check aprons, and close white cap.
The matron then proceeded to serve and count the bread into a basket, and afterwards handed the basket to one of the females near her. ‘I wish you people would move quick out of the way there,’ says the principal female officer to some of the women who betray a disposition to stare.
Convicts delivering food cans and bread to the cells at an unnamed London prison in around 1900.
While this is going on, another convict enters and goes off with the tin can full of cocoa. Then comes another matron with other prisoners, and so on, till all are served, when the cook says, ‘Good morning, Miss Cromwell,’ and away the principal matron trips, leaving the kitchen all quiet again — so quiet, indeed, that we hear the sand crunching under the feet.
Almost without exception, the food sampled by Mayhew in London’s prison kitchens received his approbation. At Horsemonger Lane, the soup was of ‘excellent quality’, while that at Holloway was ‘very wholesome and palatable’. At Wandsworth, the meat and potatoes were ‘of good quality and carefully prepared; superior to what is generally sold in many respectable eating houses in the metropolis’. At Pentonville, the cocoa – ‘made with three-quarters of an ounce of the solid flake, and flavoured with two ounces of pure milk and six drachms of molasses’ – reached positively gourmet standards. The cocoa beans were freshly ground on the premises by a steam-engine and then brewed with water not from ‘the slushy Thames’, but which had been raised from the prison’s own artesian well several hundred feet below the surface. Whatever the reasons for Mayhew’s particularly rosy view of prison cuisine, his reports provide a unique inside view of London’s Victorian prisons and their kitchens.
eleven
Towards a National Prison System 1863 – 1878
For many convicts during the 1850s, the hardships of penal servitude became less severe. The initial period of confinement at Pentonville came down to nine months and the wearing of masks by prisoners outside their cells was dropped. The compartmentalised chapel seats became open benches, and segregated exercise yards were replaced by circular tracks. Such relaxations did not, however, meet with universal approval. Much of the criticism was aimed at Joshua Jebb who, in 1850, had become chairman of the Directors of Convict Prisons. An opportunity for Jebb’s critics came early in 1863 after London had been subjected to an outbreak of ‘garrotting’ or violent mugging, which many people blamed on convicts let out of prison under licence. In February 1863, a House of Lords Select Committee was set up under Lord Carnarvon to examine ‘the present state of discipline in gaols and houses of correction’.
HARD LABOUR, HARD FARE AND A HARD BED
The Carnarvon Committee’s report noted the ‘many and wide differences, as regards construction, labour, diet and general discipline’ in the country’s prisons, which resulted in an ‘inequality, uncertainty and inefficiency of punishment’.167 To rectify this situation, the committee recommended that all prisons should adopt the separate system of confinement. The primary aims of the prison, it believed, were punishment and deterrence, achieved through a regime characterised by ‘hard labour, hard fare, and a hard bed’. The interpretation of ‘hard labour’, it was observed, varied widely and the report proposed that it should be precisely defined using measurable tasks. As well as the tread-wheel, these included shot drill (where a heavy metal ball was raised and lowered in various sequences)
and crank turning (where a handle whose stiffness could be adjusted was turned a specified number of times). Prison diets were viewed by the committee as forming part of an inmate’s punishment and should be set accordingly. There should be no incentive for workhouse inmates, for example, to commit crimes in order to enjoy a better standard of food in prison. As regards a ‘hard bed’, the Carnarvon Report recommended that prisoners should spend at least part of their sentence sleeping on planks, with no more than eight hours spent in bed per night. Despite the more severe conditions favoured by the report, it also proposed a system of ‘marks’ where a prisoner’s good conduct and hard work could be rewarded by promotion to a grade demanding less labour and better food.
The Carnarvon Committee’s recommendations resulted in the 1865 Prisons Act,168 which made adoption of the separate system compulsory in all local prisons. It defined two classes of hard labour. The first required male convicts during the first three months of their sentence to work for up to ten hours a day at the tread-wheel, shot drill, crank, capstan or stone-breaking. The second, less onerous, class of labour was left for local Justices to approve. Exercise, diet and the use of plank beds were also left to local discretion, but all dietaries had to be submitted for central approval. To create consistency of operation, the 1865 Act included a list of 104 regulations for the running of prisons. Finally, the long-standing legal distinction between local gaols and houses of correction was abolished. It was decreed that any prison that was unwilling or unable to adopt the requirements of the Act would have to close or amalgamate with a neighbouring institution. This was a course taken by a number of prisons, especially smaller establishments or those with old buildings where the cost of meeting the new regulations proved prohibitive. Of the 187 prisons operating in 1850, only 126 remained open in 1867.169
In parallel with the Carnarvon Committee, a Royal Commission, chaired by Earl Grey, reviewed sentencing policies. The resulting 1864 Penal Servitude Act specified that five years should be the minimum length of a sentence of penal servitude, or seven years for re-offenders. Responding to concerns over the garrotting outbreak, it also introduced stricter supervision of convicts released under licence. The changes necessitated a gradual increase in the provision of public-works prisons, with new ones opening at Borstal in 1874 and Chattenden in 1877.
THE 1864 DIETARIES REPORT
After hearing lengthy – and sometimes contradictory – scientific evidence from Edward Smith and William Guy on matters such as the relationship between adequacy of diet and resulting changes in body weight, the Carnarvon Committee had felt unable to propose a specific new dietary. Instead, a three-man committee of prison medical officers, chaired by William Guy, was set up to examine Sir James Graham’s 1843 dietaries and devise new ones for use in local prisons.
A prisoner doing a shift of crank-turning at the Surrey House of Correction, Wandsworth, in around 1860.
In their report, published in May 1864, the committee concluded that the existing dietaries were ‘strangely anomalous and eminently unsatisfactory’ – for example, the amounts of bread and potatoes given to female prisoners appeared to bear no consistent relationship to the corresponding allowances received by male inmates.170 The committee also noted the very wide range of tasks that were provided as ‘hard labour’. This had led to significant inequalities in the discrepancies in the dietaries allocated to inmates at different prisons, with some establishments even giving the same dietary to those serving sentences with or without hard labour. The report side-stepped the disagreements between William Guy and Edward Smith on what constituted a sufficient diet by deciding that the available scientific evidence was of ‘ limited and uncertain practical value’. At the end of the day, it was ‘experience’ and ‘prevailing opinions’ that guided the committee’s conclusions. 171
The committee recommended that the diet provided for prisoners should be related to the labour that they actually performed. The basic dietary would therefore provide for those not undertaking hard labour, with various additions allowed where labour was imposed. As before, the report proposed a graded series of dietaries for different lengths of sentence, with prisoners on longer terms eventually being allowed items such as meat and cheese. However, based on advice from various prison authorities, it was now recommended that prisoners sentenced to longer terms of imprisonment should progressively pass through the diets of all the sentences shorter than their own. Women were, as standard, to receive three quarters of the rations provided to male prisoners. The new dietary scheme is summarised in the table below:
1864 Dietaries for County and Borough Gaols for Prisoners without Hard Labour
Meals
Articles of Food
Class 1
Class 2
Class 3
Class 4
Class 5
One week or less.
After 1 week, to 1st month inclusive.
After 1 month, to 3rd month inclusive.
After 3 months, to 6th month inclusive.
After 6 months
M
F
M
F
M
F
M
F
M
F
oz
oz
oz
oz
oz
oz
oz
oz
oz
oz
Breakfast
Bread
6
5
6
5
8
6
8
6
8
6
Gruel
-
-
1pt
1pt
1pt
1pt
*1pt
*1pt
*1pt
*1pt
Supper
Bread
6
5
6
5
6
6
8
6
8
6
Gruel
-
-
-
-
1pt
1pt
1pt
1pt
*1pt
*1pt
Dinner
Sunday
Bread
8
6
8
6
10
8
10
8
12
10
Cheese
-
-
1
1
2
2
3
2
3
2
Mon,
Wed,
Fri.
Bread
6
5
6
5
4
4
4
4
4
4
Potatoes
-
-
-
-
12
8
16
12
16
12
Suet Pudding
-
-
-
-
8
6
12
8
12
8
Indian Meal Pudding
6
4
8
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
Tue,
Thu,
Sat.
Bread
6
5
6
5
8
6
8
6
8
8
Potatoes
8
6
12
8
8
6
8
6
16
12
Soup
-
-
-
-
¾pt
¾pt
1pt
1pt
1pt
1pt
* To contain 1oz of molasses on Sundays.
Additions for prisoners on Hard Labour
Male prisoners at Hard Labour, and women employed in the laundry or other laborious occupations, to have the following additions and substitutions:
In Class 2: 1oz extra of cheese on Sundays, and 1 pint of gruel for supper daily
In Classes 2-5: 1oz extra of cheese on Sundays, and 1 pint of gruel for supper daily
In lieu of the pudding on Mondays and Fridays – Men: 3oz of beef in Class 3; 4oz in Class 3; and 4oz in Class 5. Women 2oz in Class 3; 3oz in Class 3; and 3oz in Class 5.
The soup to contain in each pint, 2oz of split peas, instead of 1oz of barley.
The Prison Cookbook Page 13
