Thomas Walker - The Depot for Prisoners of War at Norman Cross, Huntingdonshire. 1796 to 1816

Unfortunately, for the completeness of this narrative, no record of the life at the Depot, written by a Norman Cross prisoner or by any official, is known to exist. Such sources of information exist in the case of at least one of the other prisons, and to fill a blank, which must have been left in this history, we are, by the kind permission of the author, Mr. Basil Thomson, enabled to include in this volume a reprint of Chapter V. from The Story of Dartmoor Prison , 2 2 The Story of Dartmoor Prison , by Basil Thomson. (London: William Heinemann. 1907.) and to make other extracts which throw light on the life of Prisoners of War confined in Great Britain between the years 1793–1815.

The Rev. E. H. Brown, Vicar of Yaxley, son of the late Rev. Arthur Brown, author of a tale The French Prisoners of Norman Cross , 3 3 The French Prisoners of Norman Cross . A Tale by the Rev. Arthur Brown, Rector of Catfield, Norfolk. (London: Hodder Brothers, 18, New Bridge Street, E.C.) and Mr. A. C. Taylor have kindly taken photographs for the illustrations; Mr. C. Dack, the Curator, and Mr. J. W. Bodger, the Secretary, of the Peterborough Natural History and Scientific Society, have been assiduous in collecting information.

Our thanks are also due to other friends too numerous to specify, who have given items of valuable information, or have communicated traditions the greater number of which have some foundation on fact.

The critical reader is asked to bear in mind the circumstances—so ill adapted to literary work, especially of an historical character—under which this book has been conceived and matured, to be lenient in his criticisms, and to accept it as a humble contribution to the history of those eventful twenty-two years, 1793–1815, when the pens of those recording the contemporary history of their country were occupied with the deeds of the British Army and Navy beyond her shores to the exclusion of the minor details of her social and domestic life.

[Without the aid of Mr. A. Rhodes, the author, whose time, except during his rare holidays, is wholly devoted to the active work of his profession, could not possibly have carried out the researches by which so much information has been obtained. Mr. Rhodes has in these “forewords” described some of the difficulties encountered, and the author is desirous to emphasise his appreciation of the work of the colleague whose services he was able to secure, and who now, unhappily, is totally incapacitated from work by severe illness.—T. J. W.]

The Depot for Prisoners of War, at Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire, was the first, and during twelve years the only prison specially constructed for the custody of the prisoners taken captive in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars between 1793 and 1815. The Norman Cross Depot received its first inmates on the 7th April 1797; while of the other great prisons built for the same purpose, Dartmoor (since 1850 the Convict Prison) was not occupied until 24th May 1809, and Perth (converted into the general Prison for Scotland in 1839) received its first batch of 399 prisoners on the 6th August 1812.

Eight years before the building of the Norman Cross Prison the French Revolution had commenced. The storming of the Bastille had taken place in 1789, and during the following years events had advanced rapidly. In 1792, Louis XVI, yielding to the demands of the assembly, the Girondists, and the populace of Paris, had declared war against Austria. In 1793 the Republican Government had been established, Louis had been deposed and executed, and on the 1st February of the same year France had declared war against Britain, thus commencing that struggle which lasted, with two short intermissions, to the final overthrow of Buonaparte at Waterloo on the 18th June 1815.

This war—of which the historian Alison, writing in the first half of the last century, said, “It was the longest, most costly and bloodiest war mentioned in history”—cost England above two thousand millions of money, a colossal sum, which represented a proportionate number of lives sacrificed, and a proportionate amount of misery and want, not only to the combatants on both sides, but to the great mass of the civil population of every nation drawn into the conflict.

In recent years there have been wars of shorter duration, more costly and more deadly, but none in which so fierce a spirit of animosity reigned in the breasts of the combatants, none in which the miseries of war were dragged out to the same calamitous length.

The history of the prison at Norman Cross brings forcibly before us those prolonged miseries incidental to war, which are liable to be overlooked by such students as contemplate only

The neighing steed and the shrill trump,

The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,

The royal banner, and all quality,

Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!

The poet paints the close of a hard-fought day when

Thousands had sunk on the ground overpowered,

The weary to sleep and the wounded to die.

The matter-of-fact chronicler records the exact number of killed, wounded, and missing, and of guns, standards, and prisoners captured on either side; but the after-history of those prisoners is left unwritten, their sufferings are unrevealed! And yet, between 1793 and 1815, literally hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war were held in captivity by the various nations engaged in the conflict, and this confinement meant for the great bulk of them years of misery, long vistas of monotonous restraint, periods of indifferent treatment, occasionally great physical suffering, and, worse than all, for many, moral deterioration and degradation inseparable from the conditions in which they dragged out their existence. However humane the captors might be, these consequences to the unfortunate captives were inevitable during the protracted Napoleonic Wars of the close of the eighteenth and commencement of the nineteenth centuries; and there is only too much evidence that when matters on which not only the comforts, but the actual lives of the prisoners depended, were being debated by the two hostile Governments, the political and military interests of the nations concerned were regarded before those of the wretched captives.

The great Napoleon revolutionised the art of warfare, as the great Gustavus revolutionised the military organisations of Europe, and one result of this revolution was that the chivalrous treatment of prisoners of war and non-combatants, which prevailed up to Napoleon’s accession to power, was materially changed. A great French authority on International Law, writing in 1758, said:

“As soon as your enemy has laid down his arms and surrendered his body, you have no longer any right over his life. Prisoners may be secured, and for this purpose may be put into confinement, and even fettered, if there be reason to apprehend that they will rise on their captors, or make their escape. But they are not to be treated harshly, unless personally guilty of some crime against him who has them in his power. . . .

“We extol the English and French, we feel our bosoms glow with love for them, when we hear accounts of the treatment which prisoners of war, on both sides, have experienced from those generous nations. And what is more, by a custom which equally displays the honour and humanity of the Europeans, an officer, taken prisoner-of-war, is released on his parole, and enjoys the comfort of passing the time of his captivity in his own country, in the midst of his family; and the party who have thus released him rest as perfectly sure of him as if they had him confined in irons.”