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

The markets and the trading must have afforded one of the chief interests in the prison life, and they have therefore been described as fully as is possible from scanty records.  The daily inspection by the doctors has been alluded to; sickness and death came within the precincts of the Depot as to every other community of men.  These will be dealt with in a later chapter.  There was no prison chapel.  It is possible there were attempts at something like prison worship; it is certain that at one time priests were allowed to reside in the prison, and in the last years of its existence there was a ministering Roman Catholic priest, the Bishop of Moulins, who was banished from France in 1791, and whose brief history, written by himself, will be found in Appendix G.  An examination of the records shows that a large number of the prisoners were from Protestant districts of France, but the majority were, of course, if they professed any religion, Roman Catholics.

This review of the chief factors in the prisoners’ life will enable the reader to form in his own mind a picture of what that life was, the main feature behind the stockade fences, which were enclosed by the outer prison wall, being that the community lived year after year with no female element—no solace from mother, wife, sweetheart, child, or female friend or adviser of any kind—and yet we have the evidence of Mr. Comm. Serle that they “show their satisfaction in the habits of cheerfulness peculiar to themselves”; 44 and the American prisoner who, under the nom de plume “Greenhorn,” published his experiences of Dartmoor in 1813, is reported by Mr. Basil Thomson 45 to have been most struck on entering the prison by “the high spirits of the multitude.”  He had expected “to find hunger, misery and crime, but everything indicated contentment, order and good fellowship.”

Let us hope that, notwithstanding the fact that at Norman Cross many of the prisoners had been confined for ten years, while of those whom “Greenhorn” gazed upon, none had been behind the granite walls of Dartmoor more than four years, the dominant spirit was one of “contentment, order and good-fellowship”; but, unfortunately, it is beyond doubt that there was in the prison a submerged stratum of hungry, miserable, criminal individuals, who had been unable to resist the evil influence of their surroundings on natural or acquired tendencies.

The preceding pages should enable the reader, throwing his imagination back a hundred years to Norman Cross, to conjure up, in place of the photographic picture of forty acres of still and silent pasture, without one human inhabitant, which the camera would produce to-day, a cinematograph series exhibiting a moving panorama, set in the great group of wooden buildings, barracks and prisons, in which lodged nearly 10,000 men, with all the busy life of such a crowd.  On the roads enclosing two sides of the site (one of which—the great North Road—was then always alive with the ever-flowing streams of traffic going and returning between London and the North) are soldiers passing to and fro, and civilians of all kinds having business at the Depot.  Entering the gate on the Peterborough Road, are seen the prison market on the left and the Eastern Barracks on the right, and in the space between are soldiers off duty, local merchants carrying their goods to the market, the prisoners, officers, and civilians allowed on parole, visitors with orders, friends of the British officers, etc.; while at the western gate on the North Road not only is the busy life of the main entrance to the western barracks thrown on the screen, but also the carts and porters bringing in the daily supplies for feeding the thousands within the walls, passing through the gates, and filling with envy the half-starved British workmen who, from the road, gaze on the piled-up loads of meat, bread, and vegetables; beyond the gates the busy barrack life—companies of soldiers changing guard, sentries on their beat pass by; and then appears the outer wall of the prison, stockade fence or brick wall, according to the year in which the imaginary camera is at work; at the eastern of the four gates appears the busy market, with the vendors of the goods, vegetables, eggs, and farm produce, clothes, hardware, and other necessaries for sale at their stalls, and the prisoners from within making their purchases, and offering for sale products of their skill in handicraft; a cannon with its muzzle directed inwards to the prison commands the gate in the market fence, that of the prison itself, and the roadway to the Central Block House.  Between the wall and the stockade enclosing the separate quadrangles, and on the cross roads which separate the four blocks, sixty sentries, posted day and night, are pacing their beats; while fenced in by the inner stockade are seen in each quadrangle crowds of prisoners, the majority young, a few old veterans—well fed and half-starved, well clothed and ragged, some in the yellow suit supplied by the British Government, industrious and idle—all forced to live together under the same conditions of isolation from the outer world.

Here appear, in a somewhat crowded quadrangle, the thickly packed 1,600 or 1,700 men, groups of whom appear on the screen, some availing themselves of a clear space are dancing, others racing, or fencing with single sticks; then is seen a group carrying on, with violent gesticulation, a hot argument, so heated has it become between two of the disputants that it may end in blows, and possibly in a duel, for duels with extemporised weapons were not infrequent and were occasionally fatal; another group are discussing earnestly, but quietly and in subdued tones, the possibility of the general rising of all the prisoners in England, news having been smuggled in to them that a plan for such a rising is under consideration by the French Government.  Then follow pictures of men at work; they are mostly seated on boxes or rough prison-made stools on the flagged pavement which surrounds the airing-court—they are very numerous.  Here a man in the corner, which he has appropriated for months, is cutting, scraping, polishing, and fitting together the pieces of bone which he is building into the beautiful model of the guillotine which now, a hundred years later, has found its way to the Peterborough Museum; he has bought in the market a good assortment of tools, which lie beside him.  Then comes a group of men, who have selected a spot sheltered from the wind, and who are skilled in straw marquetry, employed in coating well-made work boxes, desks, etc., also all prison work, with marquetry pictures of varied and beautiful designs, so beautiful and so delicate, that we who, a hundred years after the workers and their prison vanished from Norman Cross, see the objects, can only marvel at the skill and the patient perseverance which could accomplish such work in such conditions.

A Dutch sailor appears giving the finishing touch to a marvellous model of a ship made from the bones received from the cooking-house, he is just fastening the Dutch flag to the ship; grouped around him are many of his admiring countrymen.  Then appears on the screen a group who reveal a different side of the life in the quadrangles: a crowd surrounds a party of gamblers, and crushing through them are several anxious, ragged, emaciated men who, having just sold in advance their rations for several days, in order to obtain money for the indulgence of their passion, are eager to join in the game.  Here and there pass by wretched half-naked members of the submerged tenth, which has developed within a year of the opening of the prison, seeking for scraps of food to appease the hunger pangs which have arisen from their selling their rations to the wretch, the usurer, who now appears searching among the losers, in the dispersing crowd for a fresh victim; this man is looked upon by the authorities as a bigger sinner than the starving gamblers themselves. 46

Another group of young fellows is seen taking lessons in English from a polyglot; and so picture succeeds picture, until we see in another quadrangle more men at work, but the crowd generally engaged in and greatly excited over an election.  The commissary whose duty it is to inspect, in the interest of his fellow prisoners, the supplies of food as they are delivered at the prison, has proved unsatisfactory, and permission has been given for the choice of another prisoner to replace him.  There are several parties in the prison each anxious that one of their own group should be selected, hence the contest and the excited crowd of speakers and listeners.  Some of the prisoners are “mugwumps” and take no interest in politics, even such as would touch their personalinterests, and of these a crowd interested in theology fills the screen; they are listening to a hot argument between a Protestant and a Romanist—an argument frequently interrupted by a little party of those who worship only the goddess of reason.  Then follow on the screen the squad told off for fatigue duties for the day; they have just finished their tasks, and are settling down to their usual occupations, some throwing themselves down to rest, others joining a party whose sides are shaking with laughter, as they listen to two or three young men, excellent actors, who are improvising a scene, caricaturing the English, and introducing the peculiarities of the agent, turnkey, and other officials of the prison. 47

The pictures of the next quadrangle are much the same.  A man is seen in violent grief with the letter in his hand which has just announced to him the death of wife, father, mother, or child, leaving him more desolate than ever.  At the turnkey’s gate a group of men are being led off with a guard of soldiers to the Black Hole for a brutal assault on one of their fellow prisoners.  But what has happened to alter the characters of the pictures when the fourth quadrangle appears on the screen?  Work has stopped, arguments have ceased, the excellent meal, with numerous luxuries which a party of prisoners well supplied with money have prepared as the great event of their day, lies on the table before them disregarded, the food untasted.  Where men are speaking at all, it is with the intensity of bitter disappointment, here and there with violent expressions of anger against the authors of their misery.

For some months it has been known to these men that negotiations were going on between the two Governments for a General Exchange of prisoners, and although there have been to the knowledge of the prisoners many hitches, yet for the last few weeks it has been rumoured that these difficulties were all overcome, and the announcement of the day when the exchange should commence has been hourly expected; but, alas! in place of the expected news, one of the turnkeys has just handed in an authoritative statement that the negotiations have fallen through, and that all hope of freedom must again be banished from their thoughts!

To know the agony of despair that must on such a day have seized those 6,000 men, one must have shared their captivity and gone through their experiences.

The news from the outside world, the progress of the war, the successes and defeats on either side, the prospects of peace, must have varied the mood of the prisoners from day to day; we can only hope that the national contentment and cheerfulness was for the majority the usual tone.

This panorama of life in the prison represents only what that life was in good weather.  When the weather was too inclement for the outdoor life commanded by the regulations, and when the prisoners were crowded in the bare and dismal caserns, contentment and high spirits can scarcely have been the dominant tone of the inmates.  In the surveyor’s report, 48 referred to in a former chapter, mention is made of the holes cut by the prisoners in the walls of the caserns; on such a day these would be valued not so much for light and ventilation as for the opportunity which they afforded of a glimpse of the world outside—a view of the traffic on the road and of rustic life which would remind many of similar scenes from which the conscription had torn them to fight the battles of Buonaparte.

What a tale is told by those holes cut by the prisoners in the outer walls!

’Tis pleasant through the loopholes of retreat

         To peep at such a world.

Poor fellows, the peep they got through the holes they cut was their only share for years of the world outside.

It must be borne in mind that the habits and customs of the various depots would be almost identical; the Government regulations under which they lived and which ruled the life of the prisoners were the same for all.  There might be points of etiquette and social intercourse, derived from local circumstances, traditional in each prison; but there were constant interchanges of prisoners, and these men would take with them to the new prison the habits, including unfortunately the worst vices, which they had acquired in the old one.  At Norman Cross there were, before it was completed, men waiting to be received into the prison who had been captives at the Depot of Falmouth, where they had been distributed in the town itself in Roskoff, Kerquillack, and Penryn, whence they were removed, because, in consequence of this multiplication of the places of confinement, the administration was not only inefficient, but extravagant.  Many others were brought from Porchester and other prisons on account of their overcrowded condition.  Mr. Perrot, the first agent (Mr. Delafons, it will be remembered, though the first agent appointed, served only a few days, ordering the first stores from the immediate locality and from Lynn and Wisbech, but acting only until Mr. Perrot arrived) came from Porchester, and thus both the administrators and the prisoners would bring old prison customs with them.  It was not until the influx of Dutch prisoners, after Duncan’s victory off Camperdown on the 11th October following the April in which the prison was opened, that any number of prisoners passed, without intermediate imprisonment, direct from the Transports to Norman Cross.

Whatever the cause may have been, whether it was owing to the phlegmatic disposition of the Dutch or the mercurial temperament of the French, all accounts show that the general conduct of the former was much more commendable than that of the latter.  Beyond a few escapes, which were only natural, no offences are attributed to the Dutch.  For the misdemeanours and felonies, great and small, the French were responsible.  The gamblers who arrived from other prisons would doubtless find among the fresh arrivals men, without other resources, ready to relieve the dreary monotony of prison life by the excitement of dice box or cards.  However it may have originated, it is certain that, within three years from the day when the first prisoner entered Norman Cross, the vice of gambling was a curse in the prison, and its slaves had become the victims of cruel, avaricious usurers, whose guilty practices thwarted the efforts of the authorities to insure the health and comfort of those in their charge.  Early in 1800, Captain Woodriff, the agent, sent a report to the Transport Office which induced the commissioners to send to M. Otto, the French commissary in London, a letter, 49 from which the following is an extract:

“There are in those prisons some men, if they deserve that name, who possess money, with which they purchase at the daily market whatever is allowed to enter, and with those articles they purchase of some unfortunate and unthinking Fellow-prisoner, his Rations of Bread for several days together, and frequently both Bread and Beef for a month, which he, the merchant, seizes upon daily, and sells it out again to some other unfortunate being, on the same usurious terms; allowing the former one halfpennyworth of potatoes daily to keep him alive; not contented with this more than savage barbarity he purchases next his clothes, and bedding, and sees the miserable man lie naked on the planks, unless he will consent to allow him one halfpenny a night to lie in his own hammock, and which he makes him pay by a further Deprivation of his rations when his original debt is paid.”

On the 9th September of the same year, 1800, the approach of winter making the matter very urgent, Captain Woodriff again reported to the commissioners that nothing he could do prevented the prisoners from selling their rations of provisions for days to come, and their bedding, that several of the French prisoners were destitute of clothing and bedding, that one or two had died, and that in his opinion, unless some clothing was issued to the prisoners, many of them would die should the winter be severe.  These poor victims of their vicious passions are called in many documents “Les Misérables.”

There is no reason to doubt that the habits described in these reports were the true explanation of the want of food and clothing, for which the French Government blamed the British; but there is also too much reason to believe that many of these prisoners, the victims of their fellow captives the usurers, and of their own passion for gambling, died of want in our prisons, a fact for which we as a nation can only plead the blinding animosity which filled the hearts and brains of the combatants in the wars from 1793 to 1815.

It is possible that besides these, there were others who, although well supplied with food, were at times clothed in rags owing to the obstinacy with which each Government clung to its own view, as to whose duty it was to clothe the prisoners.

On the 14th March 1800, the First Consul issued an Edict, in which among other articles was one directing that the British Government should clothe their French prisoners.

To this Edict the French Minister for Foreign Affairs referred Captain Cotes (the English commissary in Paris), in order that he might see, among other things, that Buonaparte had determined “that the said prisoners should be clothed by the British Government.” 50  This Edict, cancelling an agreement previously entered into between the two Governments, was not communicated direct to the British Government; and from a letter written by the Secretary of State for War to the Lords of the Admiralty on the 4th December 1800, it is clear that the issuing of this Edict, practically an order from the head of the Government of the country with which we were at war, directing the British Government to adopt a certain course, had only increased the determination of the Government to hold its own.  The Secretary for War, Mr. Dundas, in this letter justifies the action of the British Government, and to strengthen his appeal to the French Authorities to do what he considered their duty, and clothe the prisoners, he quotes the fact “that misery, sickness, and a heavy mortality prevail among the French prisoners in the various depots in this country, while the Dutch, under the same management, and with the same allowances in every respect as the French, but clothed by their own Government, continue to enjoy their usual health.”

Those who read this correspondence, now in this twentieth century, when the bitter animosity between the two countries has died away, must feel that the obstinacy was not confined to the French, and must wish that the British had done sooner, what they ultimately did, clothe the prisoners and debit the French Government with the cost.

In the correspondence I have quoted, the usurer, rather than his victims, is spoken of as the cause of the misery, and no mention is made of gambling.  But in other reports this vice is mentioned as the root of the evil, the result of which was that when an epidemic broke out, the mortality among these naked, starving wretches was terrible.  Among the material relating to Norman Cross, picked out from the miscellaneous thousands of papers at the Record Office, was a bundle of long slips of paper—Certificates—ruled out with columns, eleven in all, corresponding to those in the prison register, and ending with one for the date of death, and another for the fatal disorder or casualty.  Among the large bundle for the year 1800, a year of terrible mortality owing to the presence of an epidemic, is a certificate, dated 14th June, which bears an irregular note in pencil, made apparently by the surgeon when he forwarded the slip to the agent; the pencilled note on this certificate is a terrible revelation of what, in that year, was going on in the prison at Norman Cross.

“You see, my dear Sir, since our selection of the invalids, and the benefit of warm weather, we have had but one death this ten days.  If another batch of those vagabonds, who by their bad conduct defy all the benefits the Benevolence of this country bestows upon them, were to be sent away in September next, we might expect great benefit from it in the winter, for to a certainty all these blackguards will die in the winter.  Compare sixty a week with one in ten days.”

From this scrap we learn how terrible was the mortality, and how bad was the character of these wretched men; we learn also that when all the steps taken to reform them had failed, some system of segregation and removal to the hulks or elsewhere was finally recommended.  There is evidence in a letter of M. Otto’s that a large number of invalids and men of the class spoken of as “Les Misérables,” or less sympathetically by the surgeon as “these blackguards,” was sent back to France.  Two years after this pencilled note was written, all the prisons, both in Britain and France, were emptied, and the prisoners restored to their native countries; but when they refilled after the renewal of the war in 1803 under the same conditions, the same depravity and suffering developed.

At Dartmoor, 1809 to 1816, there are records, especially those of the Americans, which furnish full particulars of the internal life of that prison, particulars which in the case of Norman Cross can only be gathered from scraps such as the pencilled note just referred to.  Mr. Basil Thomson has permitted the reprint in this history of his chapter on these reprobates in Dartmoor.  It is terrible reading, but I avail myself of Mr. Thomson’s permission, because there is little doubt that much of the description of these self-styled “Romans” at Dartmoor would apply equally to “Les Misérables” at Norman Cross, and that the Norman Cross “Blackguards” were, like the “Romans,” ostracised by their fellow prisoners, and were in a similar, if in a less systematic fashion than their Dartmoor brethren, segregated by natural selection from their comrades, and herded together in special parts of the prisons.

From a careful perusal of the death certificates for the year 1801, when the terrible epidemic, commencing in November 1800, carried off a thousand victims, it would appear that Block 13, that behind the hospital caserns in the north-east quadrangle, was the habitat of “Les Misérables.”  There are constantly recurring notes at the end of the certificate to the effect: “This prisoner had sold his clothes and rations; he was from No. 13.”  The cause of death given was debility.  There are other entries, with the simple note, “Debility, from 13.” 51

CHAPTER VI

“LES MISÉRABLES” AND THE “ROMANS” OF DARTMOOR

         What are theseSo wither’d and so wild in their attire,That look not like th’ inhabitants o’ th’ earth,And yet are on’t?Shakespeare, Macbeth.

The prototypes of the self-styled “Romans” of Dartmoor were the prisoners of Norman Cross, known and mentioned, ten years before Dartmoor was built, in various official documents as “Les Misérables.”

It has already been stated that the absence of any description of the internal life of the Norman Cross Prison, written by an inmate, renders it impossible to give details which in the case of Dartmoor can be gathered from accounts published by French and American prisoners who were there incarcerated.

The author has, therefore, gladly availed himself of the permission given by Mr. Basil Thomson, to reproduce here the chapter of his book in which he describes “Les Misérables” of Dartmoor.  The incidents in their life presented by Thomson are not, of course, identical with those of the same class at Norman Cross.  The Norman Cross prisoners were not banished to a cockloft, and, although they may have been confined to one floor in one block, probably No. 13, they still retained the hammocks, in which many (during the awful epidemic of 1801) died before they could be removed to the hospital, succumbing at once to the malady owing to the debility resulting from their nakedness and starvation.  The description of the sleeping arrangements of the “Romans” does not therefore apply to “Les Misérables” of Norman Cross.