SNIPPETS OF THE PAST

FACT AND FICTION


I've suggested in the course of this series of SNIPPETS OF THE PAST how such material can be used in the creation of scenes and character in historical novels.I'm taking the liberty here of showing how I've tried to build up a scene in my e-novel WINTER HUNT set in the early years of the 19th century and  written uder my pen-name Allen Makepeace.

As well as being a banker, Mr Prout is a magistrate, a sometimes irksome responsibilty. Here he is called upon to visit the prison to interview a criminal. I've tried to indicate the role of the magistrate, the dreadful conditions in the prison and what may called a typically unsympathetic prisoner as well as the magistarte's immediate sense that the man is 'hanging material'. Everything in this extract is suggested in a variety of original documents.

Text begins:

And then Mr Barrowby arrives quite unexpectedly with the request that he go at once to the prison.

‘It’s magisterial business, sir,’ Mr Prout is told. ‘Robbery with violence apparently. Somebody was shot as I hear.’

‘Magisterial.’ The word echoes in his head. ‘Magisterial.’ One day, he will give it up, being a magistrate. He has suggested it before. He had been a magistrate for twenty-seven years and it is all so time-consuming. It takes up time from his own bank work. But they insisted that he stay on last time he put it to them, the possibility of his resignation, just as they had done on the two previous occasions.. ‘No, no, Mr Prout,’ they had said to him. ‘Can’t think of it. Too valuable. Your experience.’ And so it will go on in the future. His Lordship will not hear of it; Hartley Wills, the second biggest landowner in this part of the county, will slap him on the back and smile and shake his head when Mr Prout even hints that he wishes to give up; and the three or four substantial farmers and the retired tea-merchant and the fierce Colonel Priddy and the rest of them, who really enjoy a day out at the court, will insist that Mr Prout remain a magistrate.

And so on this miserable morning, at no later than eight-fifteen, Mr Prout finds himself knocking at the huge gate of Mainton prison.

‘Mr Prout, sir,’ says the man who opens the door to him. ‘Good to see you, sir.’

Such a greeting does nothing to assuage the banker’s irritation. Mr Prout has never cared for Turnkey Royle with his leery eye and his unshaven chin.

‘Up here?’ he asks pointing at the stone stairway on the outside of the main building.

‘Up there, sir,’ he is told. ‘In the old pantry. As usual, Mr Prout, eh?’

Oh yes, the old pantry. As usual. Mr Prout knows that room well enough. He has interviewed hundreds of men and women in there in one or other of his capacities, either as magistrate or as banker. It has not been a pantry in all of Mr Prout’s time coming to the prison. It has probably not served that function for the past hundred years but the name has stuck.

Royle leads him up the slope to the main door. As soon as it is opened Mr Prout is assailed by the stench to which after all these years of regular visiting he has never quite become accustomed. A sour, pungent, all-searching stink of people, of drains, of the ‘offices,’ which seem to him to somehow soak into his flesh, his hair, his very bones. And for hours after leaving, the reek of the place will linger on him and his clothes. He will never become used to it.

Nor will he ever accustom himself to the shouts, the curses, the screams in that great echoing place. At whatever time, the earliest hour of the day or the latest of the night, he has been called to the prison he has to steel himself against the unceasing clamour.

‘Here we are then, sir,’ the turnkey says, ushering him into the old pantry with its sweating walls, stained and encrusted with years of grime. And here behind an ancient table sits a man, his wrists manacled, his ankles shackled. His arm has been bandaged. ‘He had a graze last night but the doctor says it’s nothing,’ Royle explains.

‘And he is…?’ Mr Prout asks of another turnkey, Hull, standing in the shadowy corner on the other side of the room.

Hull produces a sheet of paper, stares at it, clears his throat and begins.

‘This is Dennis Aylott, age forty-two, taken in charge earlier this morning with breaking and entering a house in this town while furnished with a pistol.’ He clears his throat again. ‘As Mr Royle says, he was grazed by a shot in the arm last night but it ain’t nothing serious.’

Mr Prout studies Aylott briefly. Long, greasy hair; threadbare, greasy jacket cuffs; fingers dirty, greasy. Hanging material, he tells himself. Guilty as charged. This will not take long, he tells himself.

‘So, Aylott,’ says Mr Prout settling himself on a creaky chair opposite the prisoner. ‘Now, you understand, don’t you, that this is your chance to make a clean breast of things so that the court may consider any mitigating circumstances?’ As if there are likely to be such mitigating circumstances in this case. Some hope. The banker looks sternly over his spectacles. ‘So have you anything to say? Perhaps you can tell me what exactly happened last night?’

SNIPPETS OF THE PAST

Sorry that this piece is so long but I'm having trouble getting a signal here in the Philippine backwoods. I'm trying to blog twice a week but it's not always easy.

PRISON WORKS

What is the purpose of prison? This question continues to agitate the minds our politicians? Punishment? Retribution? Reformation? Or is it simply to move anti-social characters from our streets either temporarily or permanently for the public benefit? Prison works, some say. But even the harshest regimes have not managed to cut rising crime rates. Look how they've tried.

In 1824 the treadmill at Maidstone prison was completed under the superintendence of William Cubitt, the inventor of this form of prison discipline. Newspaper reports suggest that the machine at Maidstone was ‘the most perfect building of its kind in the country.’ Perhaps similar approval was given to gas chambers.

The machine cost £3,000, equivalent to £200,000 today. There were eight distinct shafts, all connected to the great central wheel. Standing side by side men had 18 inches of elbow room as they ceaselessly climbed, step by step. This mill was capable of holding about 100 persons at the same time. It was built to dress corn and ground 12 bushels an hour.

What a bestial invention. Men fell off the endless ladder or became entangled in the revolving machinery. And there is no evidence that even these nightmare contraptions acted as a deterrent even though those employed, the frail and unfit as well as the robust and sturdy, are estimated to have walked up the equivalent of 12,000 feet each day in winter. In summer, with longer hours for this work, they climbed as much as 18,000 feet. The treadmills were eventually abandoned but whether for humanitarian reasons or for the fact that they produced no positive benefits is uncertain.

In 1867, as part of a national survey, the Court of General Session heard reports from the governors and surgeons of Maidstone and Canterbury gaols on the effects of the Government dietary which had been in force for nine months.

Mr Joy, the Maidstone surgeon, said that the new diet was insufficient to keep prisoners healthy enough to be able to work the scheduled nine hours on the treadmill. There had been, he reported, an unusual amount of sickness and diarrhoea and in consequence he had had to increase the diet of many prisoners. The governor, Major Bannister, claimed that weakness and hunger were visible on the faces of the convicts within a week of their arrival. He had difficulty in preventing them from picking up raw potatoes and potato peelings.

While the Canterbury surgeon, Mr Reed, had observed no serious deterioration in the health of prisoners, he, like Mr Joy, felt that the diet was not compatible with continuous hard labour at the treadmill. He was also of the opinion that released prisoners could not go out into the world and straightaway earn a living after three months on the machine. The treadmill was producing physically broken men.

There were alternative sanctions. In 1867 punishment at Maidstone gaol was inflicted 2,406 times on males and 83 times on females.

Males Females

Whipping 11 -

Irons or handcuffs 1 -

Solitary or dark cells 820 83

Stoppage of diet 1,574 -

In several gaols male prisoners were given shot drill as a punishment. In this form of hard labour, groups of up to 32 men responded to warders’ orders. They had to stoop down and without bending the knees, pick up a cannon ball. The ball was raised up to the chest and when the order was given, the men took three steps sideways and then replaced the ball on the ground. They were then ordered to take three steps backwards and the procedure commenced all over again.

Stone breaking, beating rope, picking oakum and pumping water were other mind-numbing and body-breaking tasks to be performed. Work continued throughout daylight hours in winter and in summer from 6.30am until 6pm.

Oakum picking was carriedout by women as well as men. The purpose of this hateful job was to separate strands of old, tarred rope into thin thread. Constant working at this task, day after day, made the fingers painful, raw and bloody. The reconstituted threads were sold on to make string or mattress stuffing – ‘money for old rope.’

The Report on the Prisons of Great Britain indicates that on the day of the Inspectors’ visit to Canterbury in 1867 the male prisoners were employed as follows:

Treadmill 50

Beating rope and oakum 2

Oakum picking (3lb daily) 17

Shoemaking 1

Cleaning 2

In punishment 1

These days we learn that prisoners can elect not to work during their sentences – a complete turn-about. How do we sort this out? The purpose of prison in a democratic society remains unanswered.

Don't forget these Snippets of the Past are intended not simply for mild historical interest. I do hope that writers of historical fiction may gain some useful background.