Glimpses of an Irish Felon's Prison Life by Thomas James Clarke

Author:Thomas James Clarke
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Political prisoners -- Great Britain Biography
ISBN: 9781296603748
Publisher: BiblioLife
Published: 2015-08-08T23:00:00+00:00

LEARNING A TRADE

IT is popularly supposed that prisoners are taught trades in English Convict Prisons. Such was not the case during my time in Penal Servitude. At most they may get opportunities to pick up one or more trades. That is, a prisoner might be put into one of the trade shops and be given some tools and some material and get a piece of work to do which in reality would be extremely simple to the ordinary tradesman in the shop. It would not be explained to him how he must set about doing the job, yet they have a class of officers known as " trades warders," who are supposed to understand tradesman's work, but these officers do not teach trades to the prisoners—as a matter of fact, they only visit the shops occasionally and then but to give orders concerning what jobs are to be done, never to teach a prisoner how to learn a trade. The green hand in a shop may by observation pick up how to do his first piece of work—that is, by keeping an eye upon how the old hands do things. After a time, the new hand, should he master the simple work, gets other work a bit more difficult; that finished, he gets something still more advanced, and so on step by step.

If the prisoner lacks observation or has no aptitude for the work, he may, as happens with a great many prisoners, remain in the shop for years, and at the end know very little more about the trade than the first day he was put to it. What I state in reference to learning trades is accurate as far as it applies to the ordinary convict. But in the case of Irish Political Prisoners this business of learning a trade was a frightful experience, because of the countless opportunities it afforded to the officers in the trade shop to wreak vengeance upon us—opportunities that were fully availed of. In this connection it must be remembered that at the time of our conviction all England was panic-stricken. The English imagination got rattled and started to work overtime at high pressure speed. There was blood on the moon and a skirmisher or Irish Fenian to be seen at every turn.

The panic was at its height when we were arrested in London. Immediately the howl went up for vengeance. A special Bill dealing with the situation was introduced in Parliament by the Government of the day and passed into law in record time. If I remember rightly, that Bill was introduced, read the necessary number of times in the Commons and House of Lords, and received the Royal signature, all in about twenty-four hours. However, to come back to our conviction, once inside the walls of the Convict Prison we were soon made to realise that the prison gates closed out from us a great many things that we had been familiar with in the outside world. But the prison gates did not close out from us the spirit of vengeance that was holding sway throughout England.

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