Neil Hanson - The Custom of the Sea

He stared at him. ‘I hope your career brings you satisfaction, Mr Collins. I bid you good-day.’ He turned his back until he heard the door clang shut behind him.

Stephens’s head was still bowed, but Tom could see tears falling in the dust around his feet.

They were led out to the waiting Black Maria — a dark, stinking, horse-drawn wagon, with a central corridor dividing cells so cramped there was barely room to stand. They were driven slowly north towards Holloway, the horses straining to pull the ironclad wagon up the steep hill from Islington.

When the great doors of the prison at last closed behind them, Tom and Stephens were taken from the Black Maria and made to stand before the reception counter while a clerk recorded their age, religion, offence and sentence. All their possessions were noted in the ledger, which the two men had to countersign. They were stripped of their clothes, which were taken away to be cleaned and stored against their release. The garments of particularly filthy or verminous prisoners were simply burned.

Naked and shivering with cold, Tom and Stephens were weighed and medically examined, then forced to wash with lye soap and hosed clean. They were issued with prison clothes, given a lecture on the prison regime by the head gaoler and then taken to their cell-block.

As the door clanged shut and Tom was left alone in silence and semi-darkness, the displays of waxworks in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s were already being rearranged to include a crude likeness of ‘The Cannibal Captain, Tom Dudley’.

Holloway was a prison for men, women and boys of eight years and over. As Lord Coleridge had suggested, it was newer and better equipped than the notorious gaols like Newgate or the rotting prison hulks moored on the Thames at Woolwich, but the system it operated was as cruel and degrading as any in the civilized world.

Always brutal and dehumanizing, the prison system in the early nineteenth century had also been irredeemably corrupt. In the 1830s turnkeys were doubling or trebling their wages through the sale of food, liquor and tobacco to inmates with the means to pay for them and bribes to allow male prisoners access to female inmates willing to act as whores. The infirmary was also full of healthy prisoners paying bribes to sleep in a bed.

Captain George Chesterton, the governor of Coldbath Fields prison, introduced a new regime, ‘the silent system’, in 1834. It removed much of the corruption, but it also replaced the random cruelties of earlier eras with a system requiring the isolation and degradation of every single prisoner. The regime was enforced by whippings and floggings which Chesterton described as ‘beneficial, nay indispensable’.

There was no heating or lighting, and no instruction or productive employment of prisoners. Every inmate was totally anonymous, addressed only by the number of his cell incised on the brass badge on his cap. The work of hard labour was mostly carried out in the cells, prisoners ate alone and never communicated with or even saw the other inmates. They were hooded whenever they left their cells for exercise or any other reason.

The punishment for talking was normally confinement in one of the refractory cells in the basement on bread and water. Those cells had only a wooden bench for a bed and a chamber-pot, and when the door was shut, according to Henry Mayhew and John Binny, who wrote a contemporary book on London prisons, ‘They not only exclude a single beam of light but they do not admit the slightest sound.’

One warder said, ‘It is impossible to describe the darkness. It is pitch black, no dungeon was ever so dark.’

In a single year, 1836, there were 5,138 punishments for talking and swearing in that one prison alone. Even for prisoners confined in the normal cells, the psychological damage inflicted by months of sensory deprivation through darkness and silence was so severe that prisoners being released showed no excitement, ‘staring stupidly around them’. They were also often suffering from tuberculosis and other diseases that made them unemployable and, if they survived long enough, were prone to commit further crimes.

Dickens saw similar results during a visit to a US penitentiary, Cherry Hill, which also used the silent system.

Every prisoner who comes into the jail comes at night, is put into a bath and dressed in the prison garb, and then a black hood is drawn over his face and head, and he is led to the cell from which he never stirs again until his whole period of confinement has expired. I looked at some of them with the same awe as I should have looked at men who have been buried alive and dug up again.

Chesterton’s silent system did not become universal until 1863, when a wave of crime in London, particularly robbery with violence, led to the setting up of a Select Committee under Lord Carnarvon.

The committee’s conclusion was that, ‘A separate system must now be accepted as the foundation of prison discipline. Its rigid maintenance is a vital principal to the efficiency of county and borough jails. Other means employed for the reformation of offenders should always be accompanied by due and effective punishment.’

The committee made a statutory definition of hard labour. It was to be an endless, painful cycle of meaningless repetitions of a gruelling task. The aim was exhaustion and humiliation, not rehabilitation.

First-class hard labour was the treadwheel, the crank, the shot-drill, the capstan and stone-breaking. Of these, ‘The treadwheel and the crank performed the principal elements of prison discipline.’

The treadmill at Holloway at least had a function: driving the pumps that supplied the prison’s water. It was fifty-four feet long and twenty-four feet in diameter and had places for twenty-four prisoners — sixteen men and eight boys. They stood in numbered compartments, gripped a horizontal bar for support and pushed the treads down with their feet.

Although relatively safe compared to the ancient treadmills in use at other prisons — three separate incidents of prisoners being crushed to death inside the treadmill were recorded at Aylesbury prison in a single year — careless or exhausted prisoners at Holloway could become caught by the foot or leg and it was impossible to stop the wheel in time to prevent the mutilation or even death of a trapped person.

The crank was, A narrow drum placed on legs with a long handle on one side which, on being turned, causes a series of cups or scoops in the interior to revolve. At the lower part of the interior of the machine is a thick layer of sand which the cups as they come round scoop up and carry to the top of the wheel, where they throw it out and empty themselves after the principal of a dredging machine. A dial plate fixed in front of the iron drum shows how many revolutions the machine has made.

Cranks were set up in each prisoner’s cell and they were forced to work them in silence and isolation. Failure to do the prescribed number of turns led to confinement in a dark cell or a flogging.

The shot-drill drew from Mayhew and Binny the comment that, ‘It is impossible to imagine anything more ingeniously useless than this form of hard labour.’

Prisoners were lined up in a row in the exercise yard next to a pyramid of shot — iron cannon balls. The first prisoner in the row would pick up a cannon ball, place it at his feet, then pick it up again and pass it to the next man. This was repeated all the way down the line to the last man who built the cannon balls into another pyramid. Then they were passed back down the line again.

Second-class hard labour, such as oakum-picking, was less onerous, but prisoners only graduated to that after at least three months of first-class hard labour. It required old ship’s rope to be unpicked by hand, first into its individual strands, and then into their constituent threads. Each day three pounds of it had to be reduced to ‘a fine soft tow by the bare fingers of each man, before he lays down to rest’. If not enough had been produced a punishment would result.