Prison labour and the star class, 1880-1909 ‘The slaughterhouse’

Built immediately to the south of Saint Mary’s Island, which lies at the mouth of the River Medway’s estuary, Chatham convict prison was home in 1880 to some 1,300 men.1 _{It faced}

the naval dockyard upon which convicts had toiled since 1856, when the prison first opened, and comprised six large cell-blocks, each capable of holding up to 300 prisoners.2 By 1882, two of these blocks had been allocated to star men.3

The segregation of star men from other prisoners at Chatham appears to have been rigorous. In 1890, two years before the prison finally closed, Chatham’s Visitors,4 _{at the}

request of the Home Office, investigated the treatment of Irish (and Irish-American) prisoners convicted under the 1848 Treason Felony Act for offences committed during the Fenian dynamite campaign of the 1880s, hearing evidence from staff and prisoners.5 The prisoners in question, though held in punishment cells rather than the prison’s main cell-blocks (this was one of their grievances), were all classified as star-class convicts, working alongside fellow star men in segregated work parties. Evidence given to the committee confirms that star men paraded and worked separately and, if punished, were consigned to a different set of punishment cells.6 In the prison’s infirmary, Chatham’s MO reported in 1882, star men were ‘kept carefully separated from the ordinary prisoners, wards having been specially set apart for their use.’7 _{The extent of star-class segregation within the prison is indicated by variation}

in the spread of influenza during an outbreak there in August 1891: by the time the illness reached the star-class population at the end of the month, over forty ordinary convicts had already succumbed to it. Indeed, to support his conjecture that the infection had spread via direct contact, Chatham’s MO pointed to the absolute physical separation of star men from ordinary convicts, arguing that had it been airborne, it would have been felt simultaneously by both. There could, he argued, ‘be no more conclusive proof of the infectious nature of the

1 _{RDCP 1880-81, p. xxiii.}

2 _{RDCP 1870, p.281; Chatham Visitors, p. v.} 3 _{RDCP 1881-82, p.110.}

4 _{Visitors had been appointed in 1880 in response to a recommendation by the Kimberley Commission for}

independent inspection of convict prisons; the Chatham investigation was unusual in giving them a prominent role. Radzinowicz & Hood, Penal Policy, pp.570-1.

5 _{McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, pp.342-56, pp.365-77; Chatham Visitors, pp. iii-iv.} 6 _{Chatham Visitors, q.4685, p.131, qq.3571-3, p.104, q.1706, p.53.}

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disease than this’, shared chapel facilities or an infected warder being the only possible way for it to have passed from one group of prisoners to the other.8

The regime at Chatham was considered harsh even by convict prison standards.

According to its chaplain, who had also served at Portland, discipline was ‘most certainly’ more severe than at other establishments: ‘I know myself personally’, he told the Visitors, ‘that I writhe under the discipline of this prison, it is so very strict.’9 _{Major Edward Clayton,}

one of the prison’s two deputy governors, confirmed that discipline at Chatham was ‘stricter than it is in other prisons’, including Portsmouth, his former post.10 _{Tom Clarke recalled in a}

memoir that a journey from his cell to Captain Harris’s office involved ‘marching and counter-marching, marking time and all the rest of it, with as much fuss and noise of military command as I were a whole regiment of soldiers.’11 _{Harris was described by former charges}

as a martinet.12 The same might well have been said of Clayton, who, though he denied being ‘personally committed to special precision in matters of drill’, conceded that he ordered the prisoners to march before him ‘in military trim’. Another of his orders stipulated that, upon returning from work, convicts should remain standing to attention until let back into their cells; as he explained to the Visitors, he objected to them ‘standing about in all sorts of fancy attitudes, which I thought looked very disorderly’.13

No less notorious for its severity was the work performed by Chatham’s convicts, who, according to one prison memoirist, nick-named the prison “the slaughterhouse”.14 _{The Irish}

nationalist MP Arthur O’Connor recalled a senior prison administrator telling him privately that prisoners there ‘were made to live a life of hell upon earth.’15 _{Between 1856 and the}

mid-1880s, convicts not only excavated the dockyard’s three colossal basins, situated along the creek separating St Mary’s Island from what until then had been the mainland, but surrounded the rest of the island with a two-mile-long sea wall and embankment.16 The former task, according to the Howard Association, ‘constitute[d] as hard toil as any man can accomplish’, while the latter, Harris’s predecessor reported, was ‘very laborious, and during

8 _{RDCP, PP 1892 [C.6737] XLII, 467 (hereinafter RDCP 1891-92), p.22.} 9 _{Chatham Visitors, qq.4935-8, p.140.}

10 _{Ibid., q.5083, p.144.} 11 _{Clarke, Glimpses, p.92.}

12 _{Anon., Broad Arrow, p.14; Weekly Times, 18 January 1880, p.2.} 13 _{Chatham Visitors, qq.5014-5, 5019-21, p.143.}

14 _{Anon., Broad Arrow, p.14, p.16.} 15 _{HC Deb 24 March 1898 vol. 55 c.871.}

16 _{Edmund Du Cane, An Account of the manner in which Sentences of Penal Servitude are carried out in} England (London: Printed at Her Majesty’s Convict Prison, Millbank, 1882), p.66.

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the winter months very trying to the men, as many of them are almost constantly working in deep and tenacious mud.’17 _{The work could also be dangerous: in separate incidents in 1885,}

for instance, two prisoners died from head injuries received on Chatham’s public works, one having fallen from a plank onto a concrete floor, the other while demolishing an old dockyard shed.18 In 1889, the Howard Association, which had already condemned the ‘numerous injuries sustained by convicts, especially at Chatham’, called for ‘further care to diminish serious accidents’ resulting from prisoners working on ‘certain very dangerous operations’. Earlier that year, a convict had again been killed at Chatham, and another at Portland.19 So severe was Chatham’s labour regime that it was not uncommon for prisoners to injure themselves intentionally in the hope of obtaining transfer to another prison. David Fannan, a burglar sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude in 1876, recalled that ‘[a]t Chatham one Scotch convict coolly allowed his leg to be run over by a loaded wagon, and another

deliberately inserted his arm within the spokes of a wheel’, both acts resulting in

amputation.20 Having peaked in 1871, however, coinciding with the worst of the excavation work - which, as Home Secretary Henry Bruce acknowledged at the time, was ‘very severe [and] therefore very distasteful to the convicts’ - incidents of self-injury had fallen by the end of the decade.21 Precautions taken by prison authorities no doubt helped: Edwin Bernays, Chatham’s supervising civil engineer, who had seen convicts maim themselves ‘over and over again’, told the Kimberley Commission that ‘whenever [a locomotive] engine passes the whole of the men are faced right about, and are made to stop their work and to remain in that position until the engine has passed, so that they shall not be able to throw themselves so easily under [it].’22 _{Despite such measures, desperate acts of ‘wilful injury’ remained fairly}

widespread: in 1877, as Tallack reminded the Commission, they had resulted in three Chatham convicts losing forearms, and another losing a leg. Harris’s predecessor had informed Tallack that men chose loaded wagons ‘because the unloaded waggons would merely give them a pinch, whereas the loaded waggons would crush or sever the limb.’23

17 _{Howard Association Report (1881), p.10; RDCP 1867, p.191.} 18 _{RDCP 1885-86, p.24.}

19 _{Howard Association Report (1889), p.7.}

20 _{David Fannan, A Burglar’s Life Story: Glasgow, Edinburgh, London, Crimea &c. (Glasgow: David Bryce &}

Son, 1897), p.116.

21 _{RDCP 1874, p. vii; RDCP 1871, pp.268-9; Kimberley, qq.3293-4, p.279; HC Deb 14 February 1873 vol. 214}

cc.438-9.

22 _{Kimberley, qq.7187-90, p.589.}

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By the time the first star men arrived there, work on Chatham’s dockyard was drawing to an end. Moreover, brickmaking, the prison’s principal industry during the summer months, and no less arduous than labour on the dockyard basins, had ceased after 1878.24

Nevertheless, much of the public-works labour at Chatham remained severe. In 1879, a majority of the prisoners were employed as labourers and ‘excavators’, engaged in such tasks as digging foundations for a 600-foot-long sea-wall on the island’s north shore.25 It is

therefore tempting to conclude that Du Cane, in selecting Chatham for their accommodation, intended to subject star men to the harshest forms of prison labour. Initially, however, he had earmarked Parkhurst as a suitable location for the ‘experiment’, which would, as we shall see, have represented a somewhat different proposition.26 Sensitivity to charges of favouritism might have prompted his change of mind, or it may simply have been due to logistical factors. Either way, star men arriving at Chatham in the early 1880s were confronted with prison labour at its most demanding. But was this the kind of work they actually did? At an individual level, men assigned to the new division were, if anything, often treated more harshly than their peers.27 As Frederick Martyn would later note, prison warders at Wormwood Scrubs ‘look[ed] very sharply indeed after the “Star” men.’28 This was perhaps intended to put paid to the notion that they might enjoy relaxations in prison discipline: as Harris observed, the star class ‘depend[ed] for its success on a strict and rigid enforcement of rules’.29 _{Such rigour notwithstanding, however, in a world where food, clothing and}

accommodation were subject to stringent regulation, there remained one aspect of daily prison life in which the individual treatment of convicts might vary significantly. This was work: inevitably, some prison jobs were far better than others. This chapter therefore looks

24 _{Kimberley, q.7196, p.587; see also Anon., Seventeen Prisons, p.71; Austin Bidwell, From Wall Street to} Newgate (London: True Crime Library, 1996 [1895]), pp.180-81. Until 1878 (when five million bricks were

made), Chatham’s governor reported an annual brick production figure, but none thereafter, nor any

brickmaking parties. According to Bernays, Farquharson, as Chatham’s governor, ‘like[d] brickmaking better than any other work, because … the men must follow the machine; they must work the machine continuously, and require very little supervision.’ Indeed, so keen was he on this form of prison labour that he used the profits made from it to purchase more clay from outside the prison – some two-fifths of the total used - allowing him to employ even more convicts at the backbreaking work. Brickmaking may have ceased as a result of Bernays’ testimony and/or of reduced requirement due to dockyard construction nearing an end. Appeals from local brickmakers might also have been a factor: in 1877 representatives of working men from Rochester and Chatham had appealed to Cross to limit the government’s use of convict labour; some year later, a local brickmaker apparently forced the closure of Parkhurst’s (far smaller) brickmaking industry.RDCP 1878, p.67; Kimberley, qq.7241-2, pp.596-7; Radzinowicz & Hood, Penal Policy, f.n.55, p.540; Law Times, May 20 1905,

p.65.

25 _{RDCP 1879-80, p. 104, p.99.}

26 _{TNA HO 45/9557/70327C: Du Cane to Liddell, 29 November 1879.}

27 _{E.g. Balfour, Prison Life, p.45; Hobhouse & Brockway, English Prisons, p.225.} 28 _{Martyn, Holiday, p.160.}

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closely at the work performed by star men, in order to determine whether, and to what extent, their treatment was privileged. But before addressing this question, we should first remind ourselves of the broader issues surrounding convict prison labour in the early 1880s.