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

Similar vices and similar conditions of life produce similar results, but the impression left after reading Thomson’s graphic and terrible picture of the “Romans” of Dartmoor is only more intense, in consequence of its details, than that left after reading the laconic statements contained in the letters and reports of Captain Woodriff, Commissioner Serle, and others as to the same class at Norman Cross.

The authorities at both prisons were equally powerless to put down the gambling and the usury with all its attendant miseries.  It is somewhat singular that the “Romans” appear to have withstood disease, while in the epidemic at Norman Cross, which was probably enteric fever, a disease at that date not differentiated from other conditions, such as debility, diarrhoea, simple fever, etc., “Les Misérables,” as evidenced by the surgeon’s notes, succumbed. 52

There were well-defined grades of society among the prisoners.  The first, called “Les Lords,” consisted of men of good family who were drawing on their bankers or receiving regular remittances from home; “Les Labourers” were those who added to their rations by the manufacture of articles for sale in the market; “Les Indifférents” did nothing but lounge about the yards, and had to content themselves with the Government rations; “Les Missables” were the gamblers and hatchers of mischief.  The fifth grade is so remarkable that it deserves a chapter to itself.  It was also composed of habitual gamblers, nick-named ironically “Les Kaiserlies” by the other prisoners, but generally known by the title chosen by themselves, “Les Romains,” because the cockloft, to which they were banished in each prison, was called “Le Capitole.”  The cock-lofts had been intended by the architect for promenade in wet weather, but they had soon to be put to this baser use.

To the sociologist there can be nothing more significant than the fact that a body of civilised men, some of them well educated, will under certain circumstances adopt a savage and bestial mode of life, not as a relapse, but as an organised proceeding for the gratification of their appetites and as a revolt against the trammels of social law.  The evolution of the “Romans” was natural enough.  The gambling fever seized upon the entire prison, and the losers, having nothing but their clothes and bedding to stake, turned these into money and lost them.  Unable to obtain other garments, and feeling themselves shunned by their former companions, they betook themselves to the society of men as unfortunate as themselves, and went to live in the cockloft, because no one who lived in the more desirable floors cared to have them as neighbours.  As they grew in numbers they began to feel a pride in their isolation, and to persuade themselves that they had come to it by their own choice.  In imitation of the floors below, where a “Commissaire” was chosen by public election, and implicitly obeyed, they elected some genial, devil-may-care rascal to be their “General,” who only held office because he never attempted to enforce his authority in the interests of decency and order.  At the end of the first six months the number of admitted “Romans” was 250, and in the later years it exceeded 500, though the number was always fluctuating.  In order to qualify for the Order, it was necessary to consent to the sale of every remaining garment and article of bedding to purchase tobacco for the use of the community.  The communism was complete.  Among the whole 500 there was no kind of private property, except a few filthy rags, donned as a concession to social prejudice.  A few old blankets held in common, with a hole in the middle for the head like a poncho, were used by those whose business took them into the yards.

In the Capitole itself every one lived in a state of nudity, and slept naked on the concrete floor, for the only hammock allowed was that of the “General,” who slept in the middle and allocated the lairs of his constituents.  To this end a rough sort of discipline was maintained, for whereas 500 men could sleep without much discomfort on a single floor in three tiers of hammocks, the actual floor space was insufficient for more than a third of that number of human bodies lying side by side.  At night, therefore, the Capitole must have been an extraordinary spectacle.  The floor was carpeted with nude bodies, all lying on the same side, so closely packed that it was impossible to get a foot between them.  At nightfall the “General” shouted “Fall in,” and the men ranged themselves in two lines facing one another.  At a second word of command, alternate files took two paces to the front and rear and closed inward, and at the word “Bas” they all lay down on their right sides.  At intervals during the night the “General” would cry “Pare à viser” (Attention!), “A Dieu, Va!” and they would all turn over.

From morning till night groups of Romans were to be seen raking the garbage heaps for scraps of offal, potato peelings, rotten turnips, and fish-heads, for though they drew their ration of soup at mid-day, they were always famishing, partly because the ration itself was insufficient, partly because they exchanged their rations with the infamous provision-buyers for tobacco, with which they gambled.  Pride was certainly not a failing of which they could be accused.  In the alleys between the tiers of hammocks on the floors below you might always see some of them lurking.  If a man were peeling a potato, a dozen of these wretches would be round him in a moment to beg for the peel; they would form a ring round every mess bucket, like hungry dogs, watching the eaters in the hope that one would throw away a morsel of gristle, and fighting over every bone.  Sometimes the continual state of starvation and cold did its work, and the poor wretch was carried to the hospital to die; but generally the bodies of the Romans acquired a toughened fibre, which seemed immune from epidemic disease.

Very soon after the occupation of the prison the Romans had received their nickname, and had been expelled from the society of decent men, for we find that, on August 15th, 1809, five hundred Romans received permission to pay a sort of state visit to No. 6 prison.  At the head of the procession marched their “General,” clad in a flash uniform made of blankets, embroidered with straw, which looked like gold lace at a distance.  Behind him capered the band—twenty grotesque vagabonds blowing flageolets and trumpets, and beating iron kettles and platters.  The ragged battalion marched in column of fours along the grass between the grille and the boundary wall without a rag on any of them but a breech clout, and they would have kept their absurd gravity till the end, had not a rat chanced to run out of the cookhouse.  This was too much for them; breaking rank, they chased it back into the kitchen, and the most nimble caught it and, after scuffling for it with a neighbour, tore it to pieces with his teeth and ate it raw.  The rest, with whetted appetites, fell upon the loaves and looted them.

The guard was called out, and the soldiers marched into the mêlée with fixed bayonets; but were immediately surrounded by the naked mob, disarmed with shouts of laughter, and marched off as prisoners towards the main gate amid cries of “Vive l’Empereur!”  Here they were met by Captain Cotgrave hurrying to the rescue at the head of a strong detachment.  The “General” of the Romans halted his men and made a mock heroic speech to the agent.  “Sir,” he said, striking a theatrical attitude, “we were directing our steps to your house to hand over to your care our prisoners and their arms.  This is only a little incidental joke as far as your heroic soldiers are concerned, who are now as docile as sheep.  We now beg you to order double rations to be issued as a reward for our gallantry, and also to make good the breach which we have just made in the provisions of our honourable hosts.”  Captain Cotgrave struggled with his gravity during this harangue, but the “General” had nevertheless to spend eight days in the cachot for his escapade, while his naked followers were driven back to their quarters with blows from the flat of the muskets.  For a long time after this the life of the soldiers was made miserable with banter, and they would bring their bayonets down to the charge whenever a prisoner feigned to approach them.

Strange as it may seem, there were among the Romans a number of young men of good family who were receiving a regular remittance from their friends in France.  When the quarterly remittance arrived, the young man would borrow a suit of clothes in which to fetch the money from the Agent’s office, and, having handed over £1 to the “General” to be spent in tobacco or potatoes for the community, would take his leave, buy clothes, and settle down in one of the other floors as a civilised being.  But a fortnight later the twenty-five louis would have melted away at the gaming-tables, clothes and bedding followed, and the prodigal would slink back to his old associates, who received him with a boisterous welcome.  During the brief intervals when he was clothed and in his right mind, many efforts were made by the decent prisoners to restrain him from ruin; but either the gambling fever or a natural distaste for restraint always proved too strong, and no instance of permanent reclamation in the prison is recorded.  It was otherwise when the Romans were restored to liberty.  One would think that such creatures—half-ape and half-hog—had finally cut themselves off from civilised society, and that they ended their lives in the slums and stews of Paris.  That this was not the case is the strangest part of this social phenomenon.  In the year 1829 an officer who had been in Dartmoor on forfeiture of parole attended mass in a village in Picardy, through which he happened to be passing.  The curé preached an eloquent and spiritual sermon, a little above the heads of his rural congregation.  One of his auditors was strangely moved, not by the matter of the sermon, but by vague reminiscences, gradually growing clearer, evoked by the features and gestures of the preacher.  So certain did he feel that he had last seen this suave and reverend priest raking an offal heap in the garb of Adam that he knocked at the sacristy door after the service.  The curé received him formally with the “to-what-do-I-owe-the-honour” manner.  “Were you not once a prisoner at the Depot of Dartmoor?”  The priest flushed to his tonsure and stammered, but at last faltered an affirmative, adding sadly that imprisonment was very harmful both to body and soul.

“Do you remember me?” the officer asked.

“Of course I do.  It was you who so often preached good morals to me.  It is a long time ago, and, as you see, God has worked a miracle in my soul.  Evil example and a kind of fatal attraction towards vice dragged me down; I was young then.  But do not let us talk of that horrible time, which I look upon as an incurable wound in my life.”  An invitation to dinner followed the interview, and the visitor noticed that his host was no anchorite in the matter of food and drink.  As he warmed with wine he became more confidential, and even a little scandalous, though he took occasion more than once to remind his guest that if in his youth his life had been shameful, at least he had the consolation of remembering that it was never criminal.  Nevertheless, in the later stages of the repast, there seemed to be a faint afterglow of the volcanic eruption of his youth when he lived in the “Capitole.”  This man had been one of those who had received regular remittances from his friends in France, and who, after a brief orgy at the gaming-tables, had rooted his way back to the swine-pen in the cockloft.  His parishioners affirmed him to be a man of great piety and open-handed charity.  They knew nothing of his past, and his guest was careful to respect his secret.

In August 1846 one of the highest administrative posts under Louis Philippe was filled by a man of great ability, one of those officials who are selected by the Press for flattering eulogium.  Yet he, too, had been a Roman, and there must have been many in France who knew that the breast then plastered with decorations had once been bare to the icy winds of Dartmoor.

In 1844 there was in Paris a merchant who had amassed a large fortune in trade.  His little circle of vulgar plutocrats was wearied with the stories of his war service and the leading part he had taken in the internal affairs of the war prison at Dartmoor.  He seemed quite to have forgotten that the “leading part” was an unerring nose for fish offal in the garbage heap, wherein he excelled all the other naked inmates of the “Capitole.”

As they grew in numbers, from being objects of commiseration the Romans became to be a terror to the community.  Theft, pillage, stabbings, and the darkest form of vice were practised among them almost openly.  Unwashed and swarming with vermin, they stalked from prison to prison begging, scavenging, quarrelling, pilfering from the provision carts, throwing stones at any that interfered with them.

It was this formidable body whose condition so shocked the Americans on their first arrival.  They were the analogues of the “Rough Alleys” in the American prison, but they were more bestial and less aggressive.

As it is not mentioned in the official records, let us hope that one horrible story, told by a French prisoner, is untrue.  He says that when the bakehouse was burned down on October 8th, 1812, and the prisoners refused to accept the bread sent in by the contractor, the whole prison went without food for twenty-four hours.  The starving Romans fell upon the offal heaps as usual, and when the two-horse waggon came in to remove the filth, they resented the removal of their larder.  In the course of the dispute, partly to revenge themselves upon the driver, partly to appease their famishing blood thirst, these wretches fell upon the horses with knives, stabbed them to death, and fastened their teeth in the bleeding carcases.  This horror was too much for the stomachs of the other prisoners, who helped to drive them off.

Occasionally the administration made an attempt to clothe them.  In April 1813, fourteen who were entitled to a fresh issue were caught, scrubbed from head to foot in the bath-house, deprived of their filthy rags, and properly clothed, but on the very next day they had sold every garment, and were again seen in the yards with nothing to cover their nakedness but the threadbare blanket common to the tenants of the “Capitole.”  In 1812 they were banished to No. 4 prison, and in order to keep them from annoying their fellow prisoners the walls were built which separated No. 4 and its yard from the rest of the prison, for it was hoped that where all were destitute, those who would sell their clothing, bedding and provisions would be unable to find a purchaser.  But though new hammocks and clothing were given to them by charitable French prisoners as well as by the Government, they disposed of them all through the bars of the gate and went naked as before.

Unquestionably, the greatest evil which Captain Cotgrave was called upon to face was the sale of rations.  Serious crime could safely be left to the prisoners themselves to punish, but this inhuman traffic was the business of nobody but the persons who indulged in it.

Each prisoner was served with rations every day, but if he chose to sell them instead of eating them, it was very difficult to interfere.  Certain prisoners set up shops where they bought the rations of the improvident and sold them again at a profit.  Gambling, of course, was at the bottom of the evil.  To get a penny or two to stake at the tables, men who had sold all their clothes would hypothecate their rations for several days, and, having lost, and knowing that to beg would be useless, they would sit down to starve, until, in the last stage of weakness, they were carried to the infirmary to die.  Sometimes these miserable creatures would forestall the end by hanging themselves to a hammock stanchion, rather than be forced out of their beds by the guards.

In February 1813, very much to their surprise, Captain Cotgrave clapped a few of the most notorious food buyers into the Cachot, and kept them there for ten days, on two-thirds allowance.  To their remonstrances he replied as follows:

“To the Prisoners in the Cachot for Purchasing Provisions

“The orders to put you on short allowance from the Commissioners of His Majesty’s Transport Board is for purchasing the provisions of your fellow prisoners, by which means numbers have died from want of food, and the hospital is filled with sick not likely to recover.  The number of deaths occasioned by this inhuman practice occasions considerable expense to the Government, not only in coffins, but the hospital filled with those poor unhappy wretches so far reduced from want of food that they linger a considerable time in the hospital at the Government’s expense, and then fall a victim to the cruelty of those who have purchased their provisions to the disgrace of Christians and whatever nation they belong to.

“The testimony of your countrymen and the surgeons prove the fact.”

But it was all to no purpose, and in the following month we find him appealing to the whole body of prisoners.

“Notice to the Prisoners in General.”

“The infamous and horrible practice of a certain number of prisoners who buy the provisions of some evil-conducted and unfortunate of their fellow-countrymen, thereby tearing away from them the only means of existence they possess forces me to forewarn the whole of the prisoners that on the first appearance of a recurrence of this odious and abominable practice I shall, without any exception prevent any person from keeping shops in the prison, and I will stop the market.

“As it would be entirely against my wishes and inclination to have recourse to these violent measures, I strongly request of the well-conducted of the prisoners to use all their exertions to put a stop thereto.”

The threat was an empty one; the well-conducted prisoners discountenanced the practice, but the Romans bought and sold among themselves.

After their attack upon the American prisoners in July 1813, they were further isolated, by being confined to the small yard on the south side of No. 4 (now the separate cells yard).  For more than four years they had skulked about the yards by day, almost naked, exposed to the damp fogs of summer and the icy blasts of winter; had huddled by night upon a wet and filthy stone floor, had subsisted half-starved upon garbage until the wind seemed to blow through their skeleton ribs; had neglected every elementary law of sanitation, and yet, strange to relate, every succeeding epidemic had passed them by, and it was notorious throughout the prison that sickness was almost unknown among the Romans.  When General Stephenson and Mr. Hawker held their inquiry in 1813, the scandal of their mode of life was so great that the principal recommendation of the Commission was that “the prisoners calling themselves Romans” should be removed and compelled to live like human beings in some place where they could be kept under strict surveillance.  And so, on October 16th, 1813, the scarecrow battalion of 436 “Romans” was mustered at the gate, decently clothed, and marched under a strong escort to a prison hulk in Plymouth, and kept under strict discipline until the peace.  Fit products of the Terror these Romans, who as children may have hooted after the tumbrils in Paris, and shrieked with unholy glee as the boats went down in the Noyades under the quai at Nantes.

CHAPTER VII

EMPLOYMENTS OF THE CAPTIVES—STRAW PLAIT CONTROVERSY—CONDUCT—ESCAPES

Ye, to your hot and constant task      Heroically true,Soldiers of Industry! we ask,      “Is there no Peace for you?”Lord Houghton, Occasional Poems.

It is a relief to turn over the last page of the chapter which illustrates the darkest side of the prison’s history, and to pass on to the consideration of what probably was the greatest solace which those in confinement experienced.  This was work.  Not the work done daily by the fatigue parties, but work by which the prisoners could earn something.  By far the largest amount of the earnings was money brought into the prison from without, of which a portion circulated in the prison, finding remunerative work for other inmates.  Much was spent in the market, and again left the prison, but a considerable amount accumulated in the hands of the thrifty, and sent the prisoners back to their own country all the richer for having been in Norman Cross.

Although remunerative is as a rule more attractive than unremunerative work, any work done by the prisoners must have been cheering and elevating to those condemned to the deadly monotony of an idle prison life.  To those gifted with artistic taste, the production of the thousands of specimens of beautiful and ingenious articles of value must have been a positive joy.

The work open to the industrious prisoners included that of an ordinary labourer, of a skilled artisan, and of a man with a trade, and ranged up to that of a teacher, an actor, an author, or an artist!

A complaint of the French Government was that the British did not employ their prisoners on works outside the walls, as the British were employed in France.  The answer to this is that the French male labour market was exhausted by the serious depletion due to conscription of the adult male population, and that the French Government, in the interests of France, gladly availed itself of the services of the British, under military surveillance, for public works, etc.  No such necessity pressed on the British; there was an ample supply of labour, and the introduction of competing gangs of prisoners of war would have led to trouble, and was in fact a domestic impossibility.  There were occasions when the prisoners were employed on large constructive works connected with their own prisons.  Dartmoor Chapel was built by the prisoners in 1810–14; the masons were paid 6d. a day, it being understood that the money should accumulate, and that should any workman escape, the whole of the pay due to the gang would be forfeited.  By this means every prisoner was made a warder over his fellows. 53

They were also regularly employed in their prisons as labourers, and those who knew a trade as tradesmen.  From the accounts of Norman Cross Prison (which are scattered among various bundles, and difficult to find) has been selected the wage sheet for the midsummer quarter of 1789.  The total is £408 1s. 6d.; of this £13 7s. 6d. was paid to the Dutch, and £32 to the French prisoners employed as labourers.  Under the head of tradesmen’s bills for the same quarter are entered, French prisoners £35 3s. 4d.; Dutch prisoners £541 6s. 2d.  These sums represent the employment of a considerable number of men, as, the recipients being lodged and fed at the expense of the State, the wage each man received was very small, much below the normally low wage paid for labour at that date.  The accounts show that the practice of employing and paying the prisoners was in vogue in the first years of the Depot’s existence, and that it went on until its last year is shown in the report of Mr. William Fearnall, the surveyor, 54 who recommends certain repairs, and states that Captain Hanwell, the Agent, can find thirty-six carpenters, two pairs of sawyers, and three masons from among the prisoners.  Further, as already stated, the prisoners held several paid posts, such as cooks, nurses, hospital porters, and the like, within the prison walls.

In the sketch of the prison life, allusion has been made to the retail traders and merchants; there were also craftsmen—men who knew a trade—tailors, shoemakers, cooks, etc.  These carried on a business, their customers being their fellow prisoners.  The regulation made for the protection of the revenue and in the interests of our own workers, to the effect that in making slippers and shoes, they might use list, but no leather, must have applied only to articles made for sale outside.  The employments by which the prisoners earned money from outside and brought it into the prison have, perhaps, the greatest interest to us.  The greater part of this money was either transmitted for safe keeping to France or Holland, banked with the agent, or hoarded until the hoped-for day of release should come.

The industry, neatness of fingers, skill and artistic taste of the prisoners, enabled them to produce a great variety of ornamental and useful articles.  The materials used in these manufactures were usually very simple, but it has puzzled writers on the subject to account for the possession by the prisoners of the dyes with which they stained the straws used in their brightly coloured and delicately tinted marquetry decorative work.  One writer or imaginative person started the theory that the colours were all obtained from the tea served out to the prisoners, and this has been repeated in various literary notices on this subject, in magazines, newspapers, and other documents.  The reader may be spared the effort of trying to account for the loss of the art of extracting such colours from such a source, by recognising the fact that no tea was served out to a prisoner, except to those in the hospital, and that it would be far cheaper for the prisoners to buy the dyes in the outside market than to purchase tea—which was at that time a costly article used only by persons with good incomes—from which to extract these mythical dyes.