Newgate Prison

In fact, I should say they were the only attempt, as far as I could discover, at making a distinction between an untried and consequently innocent, vaunted English law twaddle, person and a convicted prisoner.

My experiences at the House of Detention, and subsequently at Newgate, convinced me that justice demands a great alteration in the rules regarding untried prisoners, who are allowed and disallowed certain newspapers at the caprice of the chaplain, and actually restricted as to the class of eatables their friends may send them.

An instance of this occurred in my case.

A kind friend one day brought me a hamper containing, as I was informed, a roast fowl and a tongue.

If the doubtful privilege is to be continued, it is time the government, in common fairness, controlled the tariff.

At present, a prisoner is at the mercy of the eating house keeper, and liable to any charge he may choose to make.

I must admit that the caterers for the House of Detention were civil and comparatively reasonable, whereas those at Newgate were exactly the opposite.

I shall give a detailed account later on of how I was fleeced at the Old Bailey, and I would earnestly warn all prisoners awaiting trial to stick to the prison fare, and carefully to avoid the refreshments supplied from the cat's meat houses in the neighborhood.

There are places that you're gonna recognize in this story.

Newgate Prison.

Heard of it.

Ever heard of her?

And I think this is important.

You know, we've, we've spoken a lot on this podcast about execution days, and we will be talking about that again in this episode, this idea of the sort of the circus, the hundreds if not thousands of people would turn up to see people get hanged, that there would be, you know, ballad singers singing about the deeds of these people on the scaffold.

At Newgate, the bell, the execution bell was rung the night before.

There'd be people lining the procession route from the prison to the place of execution.

The jury ruled that Thomas Millwood had been willfully murdered, and they named Francis Smith as the man who did it.

Smith was arrested and sent to Newgate, London's notoriously grim, overcrowded prison, to sit and wait for his trial.

And that trial was going to be strange, because on the surface, the facts couldn't have been simpler.

Francis Smith had shot and killed an unarmed, innocent man.

These are the stories we think we know, but dig beneath the legend and the truth gets far stranger.

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Francis Smith sat in Newgate Prison, charged with willful murder, all for shooting a man he'd been certain was a ghost.

And in January 1804, his case came before London's most famous criminal court, the Old Bailey.

The whole thing was completely destroyed and it smouldered for days after.

From there, the rebels made their way to Newgate Prison, releasing prisoners who would join their cause.

For the king and the tower, it was just too dangerous.

It was decided that they couldn't ignore the people anymore.

The

Newgate Execution Bell.

Yes, the Newgate Execution Bell.

St Sepulchre without Newgate.

I love these names.

They just make no sense whatsoever.

So what's really there? It is a handbell associated with condemned prisoners in Newgate Prison.

And that was a really nasty place.

Apparently, in the late 18th century, Britain was, again, mobbed with a lot of very unhappy people suffering under the Industrial Revolution, working in factories, getting paid crap, and being really unhappy about it.

One day, a lot of these people get mad and they go and they basically, like, break all the prisoners out of Newgate Prison in London.

um the mob apparently sweeps up william blake and it is reported that blake is on the front lines like he is absolutely chucking rocks and tearing down buildings and like making trouble for guards um so he has a sort of grassroots revolutionary character he gets swept up into these things it's hard to say if he ever is like involved in the organized versions again notice that every time blake touches an organization He gets real prickly and it gets really difficult for him to, you know, work with other people.

But it doesn't change the fact that his ideology is fundamentally revolutionary.

In 1830, however, a considerable extension was necessary, and a vagrants' ward was added, while two years afterwards another ward was completed on the radiating system, at that time just in fashion.

Very recently another wing has been added, and as I walk through it under the guidance of the officer, I observe that in the construction of the cells and the appointment of the building, with its light iron galleries and staircases, it precisely resembles the latest examples of prison architecture at Pentonville, and in the latest portion of Newgate Jail.

In the great entrance hall, which is supported by heavy pillars, a crowd of prisoners are moving hither and thither, as the working parties are going to duty, and standing aside to let them pass, I observe on the wall a large square board, which looks like some kind of calculating machine, but is in reality the prison register of occupied and unoccupied cells.

The surface of the board being cut into small hollows, each hollow representing a cell, and each occupied cell so represented being filled by a neatly fitting brass plate bearing the number of the prisoner corresponding to it.

Chapter ten.

The Jail of Newgate.

Newgate Jail occupies a considerable portion of one side of the thoroughfare known as the Old Bailey.

Grim and soot blackened, its massy stone walls stare blankly at the establishment of the Sunday School Union opposite at the five or six flaring dirty taverns, and at the one or two dingy coffee shops where seedy men, draggled women, impenetrable policemen and irritable witnesses or prosecutors while away the dreary hours spent in waiting for the calling on of the cases in the criminal courts.