Forming the star class, 1879-

The previous chapter drew a distinction between contamination of the world beyond the prison and the contamination within it of prisoners by one another. Walls, defences and remote locations, as well as the post-release supervision of prisoners, were intended to limit the former, while attempts to prevent the latter led to both silent regimes and cellular

separation, and to refinements in prisoner classification. Following its introduction in English convict prisons in 1879, the star class followed a similar dual principle: physical segregation protected star men from contamination by ordinary convicts, while a vetting process checked its spread within the division. Measures aimed at the external threat are detailed in the following chapter, while this chapter explores those whose objective was internal.

Following publication in July 1879 of the Kimberley Commission’s report, Sir Edmund Du Cane, sceptical that a lack of previous convictions indicated the absence in an individual of a criminal disposition, initiated a system of supplementary background checks on convicts whose status as first offenders made them eligible for its proposed division. This system is mentioned by Radzinowicz and Hood, who, as we shall see, regard it as absurdly restrictive, an assessment that has tended to obscure its importance. Rather than see the star class operating in spite of them - albeit rather feebly, as do Radzinowicz and Hood – the checks should be understood as intrinsic to this form of classification. Indeed, when in 1897 the Convict Service finally issued a Standing Order mandating the star class in both convict and local prisons, six of the order’s nine provisions related to background investigation.1

Writing in 1885, Du Cane reiterated the system’s prophylactic rationale: it was, he declared, ‘of the greatest consequence to prevent corrupt and cunning criminals who have evaded convictions, though they have deserved it, from gaining admission into this class and leading the well-disposed among them astray.’2 In this, he adhered to the logic of

contamination: the presence among first offenders of just one ‘corrupt’ individual – a

previously unconvicted receiver, say – could render useless measures taken to segregate them from the general convict population. Hence ‘[g]reat pains’, as Major Arthur Griffiths

1 _{TNA PCOM 7/279: Standing Order (New Series), No.10. A Standing Order was only deemed necessary in the}

first place because prisoners, rather than arriving via a local prison (where the majority by now served penal servitude’s first stage), were occasionally sent directly to convict establishments, whose governors were therefore required to carry out the checks themselves. Ibid., Clayton to Ruggles-Brise, 8 July 1897.

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observed, were ‘taken to eliminate the black sheep.’3 _{The 1897 Standing Order stipulated}

that ‘full inquiries’ were to be made into ‘the character and antecedents of prisoners sentenced to penal servitude on first conviction’, as well as any convict with a previous conviction for a trivial offence or a serious offence committed some time ago. Enquiry forms were to be sent in the first instance to the senior police officer for the district in which a convict had been committed for trial and/or convicted, or, if unknown there, in which he had previously lived. Further information, if required, was to be obtained from individuals referred by the initial respondent and/or ‘respectable persons’ nominated by the convict himself. Completed forms would then be forwarded, along with a convict’s penal record, to the Convict Directors, with whom rested final responsibility for classification.4

By the time the order was issued, convict administrators and officials had been following this procedure for almost twenty years. Writing in 1884, Griffiths described the ‘special investigation’ to which prisoners ‘supposed to be convicted for the first time’ were subject: ‘The police, the clergyman of the parish, all persons who would be likely to know him are written to, and if the result is satisfactory, the prisoner is admitted into the “star class.”’5

‘Sometimes we write to half-a-dozen people’, the governor of Woking female convict prison told the Gladstone Committee in 1894, ‘[t]hen we send the result up to the director, and he decides whether the convict is to be put in the Star class on not.’6 _{A quarter of a century}

later, this procedure remained unchanged, the Inspector of English Prisons confirming in 1919 that a convict’s eventual classification depended on ‘printed forms of enquiry’ sent ‘to the police and to any respectable friends’.7

An endeavour of this kind might strike us as somewhat quixotic. Rather than classify prisoners on the basis of their age, the type of offence they had committed, or (as after 1967) their risk of escape and potential danger to the public, we see here an attempt to determine the

character of a convict prior to his offence. As well as his occupation and ‘Means of

livelihood’, an opinion was sought as to his ‘Character with regards honesty’, ‘Character with regards industry’ and ‘Character with regards sobriety’, his ‘Class of life’, his ‘Mode and habits of life’, and the character of his friends and associates. Thus, although star men

3 _{Griffiths, Memorials, p.466.}

4 _{TNA PCOM 7/279: Standing Order (New Series), No.10., pp.2-3.} 5 _{Griffiths, Memorials, p.466.}

6 _{Gladstone, qq.4817-8, p.63.}

7 _{N.G. Mitchell-Innes, memo prepared for 1919-20 Indian Jails Committee, quoted in Hobhouse & Brockway,} English Prisons, f.n.5, p.318.

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continued to be described (as, for the sake of concision, they are in this study) as ‘first offenders’, the designation was something of a misnomer: as we shall see, many more men convicted for the first time were rejected from the star class than were ever assigned to it. Instead, we might think of star men simply as those prisoners who successfully passed the Convict Service’s background checks. Some forty years after the Kimberley Commission’s recommendation, we find one of Du Cane’s successors defining a star man not as a prisoner ‘against whom no previous conviction of any kind is recorded’, but simply one ‘whose previous character has been good’.8 Thus, despite the Commission’s best intentions,

classification came to be based on grounds less hard-and-fast than arbitrary, the new system essentially functioning as a form of post-trial character assessment.

Conducted over decades and with respect to many thousands of prisoners, this amounted to a vast undertaking. By March 1881, 3,600 checks had already been carried out, resulting in 380 star-class admissions.9 Inevitably, the task was magnified greatly after 1897,

following the extension by Du Cane’s successor, Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, of first-offender classification to local prisons (as discussed in Chapter 4). A year later, over 60,000 newly sentenced prisoners had been investigated, resulting in around 12,000 admissions, ‘a work of considerable magnitude’ in which police forces provided their ‘cordial and valuable

assistance’.10 _{As ‘the necessary information [was] often not easy to arrive at’, multiple}

references were frequently sought. The fruits of such ‘exhaustive enquiries’, as the Inspector of Prisons acknowledged, could be ‘confused and misleading unless carefully sifted’,

requiring ‘considerable clerical work’.11 _{Convict administrators (and, after 1897, prison}

administrators in general) appear, then, to have fully embraced the logic of contamination, carrying out background checks diligently and conscientiously.

Prison memoirs afford occasional glimpses of the procedure from the convict’s point of view. Tom Clarke, for instance, later the hero and martyr of the 1916 Easter Rising, had received a life sentence at the Old Bailey in 1883, following arrest in London in possession of explosives. He recalled that ‘[a] day or two after having been sentenced’, Millbank’s

governor (who would at the time have been Captain Harvey) and its Chief Warder ‘came to my cell [and] explained the separation of convicts into two classes.’ The ‘Habitual Criminal

8 _{RCPDCP, PP 1923 [Cmd.2000] XII Pt.2, 379 (hereinafter RCPDCP 1922-23), p.27.} 9 _{RDCP 1880-81, p.290.}

10 _{RCPDCP, PP 1898 [C.8998] XLVII, 23 (hereinafter RCPDCP 1897-98), p.18.}

11 _{RCPDCP, PP 1900 [Cd.380] XLI, 1, p.31; RCPDCP, PP 1904 [Cd.1800] XXXV, 1 (hereinafter RCPDCP} 1902-03), p.34.

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Class’, Harvey informed Clarke, were ‘a bad lot – bad in almost every respect – and not at all the class of individuals that I would wish to associate with for the remainder of my life’ (an assessment that he reckoned ‘was not far out’).12 _{But before Clarke, convicted under an}

assumed name, could be assigned to the star class, Harvey required ‘a guarantee from two reputable citizens’ as to his first-offender status. Suspecting a ruse to extract information, he refused to provide names, yet upon transfer to Chatham found himself nevertheless placed among the prison’s first offenders, ‘although no friend or acquaintance of mine had vouched for me’. This was probably to assist the day-to-day management of the Chatham’s treason- felony convicts (discussed in the following chapter), the remainder of whom Clarke now discovered ‘wearing … the Red Star’.13 _{A similar request was refused by the prison}

memoirist Frederick Martyn, a university-educated gentleman of independent means,

sentenced in 1908 to eighteen months’ imprisonment for obtaining money by false pretences. Misidentified by the police as ‘an old criminal’, Martyn sought admission to the star class and was asked by a clerk at Wormwood Scrubs for “the names of your last two employers, and any other references as to respectability you may be inclined to offer”. To this he replied, “I can’t refer you to employers because I’ve never been in the position of having an employer … and as to furnishing you with references, the idea is too absurd for me to entertain it for a moment.”14 _{As a result, he remained with ‘the most hardened offenders that the prison}

contained’, whom he judged ‘more lively companions’ than its star men.15

The clearest picture of the star-class selection process is, however, provided by surviving convict licences, which include completed and returned enquiry forms. It is upon these that this chapter is largely based. The most recent surviving licences are for convicts released in 1887 – sentenced, that is, no later than 1884 to penal servitude’s five-year minimum term and serving at least three years – and thus provide evidence of the extent, not only of individual investigations, but of the process carried out with regard to all putative first offenders during the star class’s early years. Beyond 1884, as published sources already cited in this chapter indicate, similar rigour appears to have been maintained.

As well as the selection process itself, this chapter examines the various criteria and caveats to which classification was subject, and the way in which these shaped the star-class population as a whole. It then looks at the ‘demotion’ and ‘promotion’ of individual

12 _{Thomas J. Clarke, Glimpses of an Irish Felon’s Prison Life (Dublin: Maunsel & Roberts, 1922), pp.96-7.} 13 _{Ibid., p.97-9.}

14 _{Martyn, Holiday, p.160, p.158.} 15 _{Ibid., p.156, p.160.}

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convicts, post-classification, and the question of whether the star class should be seen as merely a preventative or, rather, a genuinely reformatory form of penal practice. The chapter concludes by asking whether background checks succeeded in their explicit aim of excluding from the division expert criminals. Before that, however, the following section details the official response to the Kimberley Commission’s recommendation in the immediate aftermath of its report, and the manner in which a system of classification based, as it had proposed, on a rigid first-offender qualification evolved swiftly into something rather different.