Caliban Shrieks by Jack Hilton

Author:Jack Hilton [Hilton, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Published: 2024-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Prison

But neither milk-white rose nor red

May blossom in prison air;

The shard, the pebble and the flint

Are what they give us there.

For flowers have been known to heal

A common man’s despair.

BALLAD OF READING GAOL

IMPRISONMENT HAS BEEN A METHOD of curing society’s misfits nearly since the days of Adam. We will not go so far back, however, as Daniel in the lions’ den; we will rush through our own misfortunes since the days of Elizabeth with their castles and dungeons, no cleanliness – light and air things unknown and methods of isolation, chains, and tortures. In fifteen seventy-seven ‘Gaol Fever’ was rampant. History records that at ‘the Black Assizes’ held at Oxford, all the people at that court died inside two days, somewhere about three hundred of them, including the Lord Chief Baron. Speaking of seventeen hundred and fifty, Arthur Griffith says, ‘it was common for released prisoners to take back contagion to their homes; and later the Lord Mayor of London, two judges, an alderman, and many of inferior rank, fell victims to the fever … Sanitary precautions and rules of action, which are today considered indispensable, were then a dead letter.’ James I transported a hundred ‘dissolute’ persons to Virginia; Cromwell showed his love of fair play to the ‘Politicals’ by sending them to America. Parliament with its human urge ratified transportation as the law of the land by seventeen-seventeen. Our colonies must be developed. Some gaols were even privately owned, hulks were strewn up and down the Thames. And slowly improvements took place. A luxury building costing half a million was thrown up on a swamp. England’s penitentiary, to wit Millbank (1816–1843). This was the prelude to Pentonville. Some luxury! Prisoners died hand over fist in 1823 – it was an epidemic, scurvy and flux. The cause was considered unknown then (even a hundred years before it was common among the Italian peasantry). Enquiries showed they had had their rations cut in two. Despite the efforts at cure, the dying kept going on. Eventually they transferred the prisoners to the hulks. Unfortunately this unfathomable epidemic meant the death of most of them. In those days they knew how to keep order. Under act 7 & 8 G. IV it had become lawful to inflict corporal punishment in serious cases, Griffith describing it thus: ‘The whole of the prisoners of the D. ward, to which Sheppard belonged, were therefore assembled in the yard, and the culprit tied up to iron railings in the circle.’ ‘Having addressed the prisoner,’ says the Governor, ‘on this disgraceful circumstance, I had one hundred lashes applied by warden Aulph, an old farrier of the cavalry, and therefore well accustomed to inflict corporal punishment, who volunteered his services. The surgeon attended and he being of opinion that Sheppard had received enough, I remitted the remainder of his sentence, on the understanding to that effect with Mr Gregory (the sitting magistrate). The lashes were not very severely inflicted, but were sufficient for example. Sheppard, when taken down,

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