Crumlin Road Gaol, Belfast

Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast, Northern Ireland is the only remaining Victorian Prison in the country. It has been out of service since 1996 but first opened it’s doors for prisoners in 1846. The Crumlin Road Courthouse stands opposite the Gaol and a tunnel runs underground from the two buildings, which made it easier to transport prisoners from their cells to their trials.

Crumlin Road Courthouse (opposite Crumlin Road Goal)

 

The design of the prison was based on HM Prison Pentonville, and it was known to be one of the most advanced prisons of its day. Built within a five-sided wall, the four wings are up to four storeys in height and fan off from the central area which was known as The Circle. The prison was originally built to hold between 500 and 550 prisoners in cells that measured 12 x 7 feet. It was the first prison in Ireland to be built according to “The Separate System”, intended to separate prisoners from each other with no communication between them. Later, especially in the early 1970s, as many as three prisoners were placed in each cell.

Interior of Crumlin Road Gaol

 

The first 106 inmates were forced to walk from Carrickfergus Gaol, around 11 miles, arrived in 1846. These inmates, who were men, women and children, completed the changeover of the two prisons. Children from impoverished working-class families were often imprisoned at the gaol in the early years for offences such as stealing food or clothing. Thirteen-year-old Patrick Magee, who had been sentenced to three months in prison hanged himself in his cell in 1858. Women inmates were kept in the prison block house until the early 1900s. Ulster suffragists, among them Dorothy Evans and Madge Muir, were imprisoned in the gaol during 1914.

When originally designed by Lanyon, the prison did not contain a gallows and the executions were carried out in public view until 1901, when an execution chamber was constructed within the prison walls and used until the last of the hangings in 1961. Seventeen prisoners were executed in the prison, the last being was hanged in 1961 for the murder of Pearl Gamble^. The condemned would live in a large cell (large enough for two guards to live in as well). The bodies of the executed were buried inside the prison in unconsecrated ground and the graves were marked only with their initials and year of execution on the prison wall.

Outside of Crumlin Road Goal

 

Crumlin Road Gaol is now a popular touristic attraction in Belfast and in 2012 I took a tour of the Goal. Seeing the unmarked graves of the executed and being in the cell of the boy Patrick Magee, who hanged himself, made me realise just how awful and horrific prison life was during the Victorian era. Nowadays the gaol is known to have paranormal tours as it is claimed that it is haunted by the souls of those who died there.

Bibliography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_Prison_Crumlin_Road

http://www.crumlinroadgaol.com/

Image of interior in Crumlin Road Gaol: http://belfastmediagroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Crumlin-Road-Gaol-23911mj12-1024×682.jpg

Image of Crumlin Road Court House: http://www.rickneal.ca/travelblog/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Crumlin-Road-Court.jpg

Image of outside Crumlin Road Gaol: https://www.meetingsbooker.com/images/venues/Crumlin-Road-Gaol-9.jpg

‘Affinity’ and Millbank Prison

Affinity is a 1999 historical fiction novel by Sarah Waters. It tells the story of Margaret Prior unmarried woman from an upper-class family, visits the Millbank Prison in 1870s Victorian-era England. Millbank Prison was a London prison which was built beside the Thames, so that it was easier to transport prisoners when they were banished to Australia and America. The prisons sordid conditions and poor treatment of the prisoners enabled diseases such as typhoid, scurvy, and cholera, to run rampant within its walls. Cholera broke out on numerous cases in the early and mid 19^th century and the death rate in Millbank was extremely high.

Piranesi’s ‘Imaginary Prisons’ (1750).

 

The protagonist becomes a “Lady Visitor” of the prison, hoping to escape her troubles and be a guiding figure in the lives of the female prisoners. It’s interesting that she pins a panopticon design of Millbank on the wall by her desk;

 

‘The prison, drawn in outline, has a curious kind of charm to it, the pentagons appear as petals on a geometric flower. . . Seen close, of course, Millbank is not charming. Its scale is vast, and its lines and angles, when realised in walls and towers of yellow brick and shuttered windows, seem only wrong or perverse. It as if the prison has been designed by a man in the grip of a nightmare or madness – or had been made expressly to drive its inmates mad.’ (Waters, p. 8)

Panoptic Image of Millbank Prison

 

The panoptic prison is meant to be place of light and rationality – but for Margaret Millbank it is a gothic prison of darkness, mystery, pain and suffering. The image that she places on her wall may be a reminder of how she feels, a prisoner of her own life.She is an overall unhappy person, recovering from her father’s death and her subsequent failed suicide attempt, and struggling with her lack of power living at home with her over-involved mother despite being almost 30.Her mother controls her life, just as the matrons control the prisoners and Margaret retreats to self-confinement in her bedroom.

Of all the prisoners, she is most fascinated by a woman, whom she learns

Front cover of Affinity novel (2000)

to be Selina Dawes, a medium of spirits. Their relationship blossoms, and the novel sometimes hints at sexual and homosexual undertones. Selina recognises that Margaret is vulnerable and abuses her relationship and trust by manipulating her. She says to Margaret: ‘You are like me, then. Indeed, you are like all of us at Millbank.’ (Waters, p. 208) Selina begins to give Margaret gifts, and although initially Margaret is soon drawn into a twilight world of ghosts and shadows, unruly spirits and unseemly passions, until she is at last driven to concoct a desperate plot to secure Selina’s freedom, and her own.

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

Waters, S. (2000) Affinity. Riverhead Books

Image of Millbank Prison : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millbank_Prison

Image of Affinity book cover: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25337939-affinity

Image of Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons (1750) : http://www.italianways.com/piranesis-imaginary-prisons/

The Notrious Newgate Goal

Since I began my Prison Voices module, Newgate Prison has been mentioned numerous times regarding numerous texts. From Oliver Twist to Moll Flanders, Newgate stood as a poignant part of Victorian crime and punishment. I wanted to explore the history behind this goal and answer some of the questions as to why it was so notorious.

Fagin in Newgate Goal

Newgate Gaol was first opened around 1769 although there are records dating from much earlier around 1250 that state it was used for the holding of prisoners. As a result of the Prisons Act of 1877, Newgate ceased to be an ordinary prison in 1882 and was used only for those awaiting trial and prisoners sentenced to death awaiting execution. Newgate had the great advantage, from the authorities’ point of view at least, of being next door to the Central Criminal Court (Old Bailey) which was the trial venue for all of London’s most serious criminals. It saved the cost and security risk of transporting prisoners by horse drawn van from other prisons for their trial.

 

Conditions in Newgate in the early part of the 19th century were appalling and led to great efforts by early prison reformers such as John Howard and Elizabeth Fry to improve things. Elizabeth Fry was deeply shocked by the conditions that women were detained under, in the Female Quarter as the women’s area was known, when she visited the prison in 1816. See my Blog Post on Elizabeth Fry for more information on this. Many of the prisoners were psychopathic and mentally ill and there was no segregation, so men, women and children were all imprisoned together. Charles Dickens also visited Newgate, in 1836 and documented this in A Visit to Newgate. He describes the horrors of the overcrowded gaol and the different prisoners which he encounters.

Inside Newgate Goal 1735

 

Daniel Defoe describes in his novel Moll Flanders describes the horrific condtions of Newgate:

I looked around upon all the horrors of that dismal place. I looked on myself as lost, and that I had nothing to think of but of going out of the world, and that with the utmost infamy: the hellish noise, the roaring, swearing, and clamour, the stench and nastiness, and all the dreadful crowd of afflicting things that I saw there, joined together to make the place seem an emblem of hell itself, and a kind of an entrance into it.

Moll is trapped in what sounds like a nightmare. Newgate is a place where there is, quite literally, no escape. Moll describes it as an entrance to hell, thus the fear of actually being condemned to Hell for eternity scares Moll into repenting for her sins.

Bibliogprahy

http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/newgate.html

http://charlesdickenspage.com/visit_newgate.html

Defoe, D. and Mitchell, J. (1978) The fortunes and misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders. United Kingdom: Penguin Books