David Leslie - Banged Up!. Doing Time in Britains Toughest Jails

I am most grateful to my friend John Boyce for the countless stories and invaluable help he so kindly gave while I was researching Banged Up. I am also grateful to staff at the National Archives for giving permission to quote from the previously confidential file on Snow.

And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

Matthew 16:19

FOR THE ONE HUNDREDTH time that morning, Thomas Pitman wished he was back in the black hole that had been Dartmoor Prison. Its cold, damp walls had been hell, but now he felt he had been consigned to eternal damnation in the foulest pit of the underworld. Pitman had been forced to exchange his freezing, stone-walled cell in the terrible edifice that dominated the bleak moors around Princetown, in Devon, for a low-ceilinged, iron-barred, stinking, rat-infested corner below decks in the wooden barque William Hammond.

Thomas Pitman was on a voyage into the unknown, having been ordered to be transported to Western Australia and to stay there for the next fifteen years because he had stolen a lamb. The judge at the Quarter Sessions in Wells, Somerset, had told Pitman that if he behaved himself, and worked hard over the next decade and a half, he could ask permission to return to England. But the hapless convict knew he had been handed the equivalent of a life sentence. If he wanted to see his home again he would have to raise the price of his own ticket and with a pittance for wages, that was a hopeless prospect.

It was January 1856. Thomas Pitman, already suffering from depression, would never again see the fields and farms of the West Country, or even the grim moors and quarries around Dartmoor. Nor did tens of thousands of others.

Transportation was first used as a form of government punishment in about 1610. Because there were so many crimes for which men, women and even children could be locked up or executed, British prisons became overcrowded. There were more than 200 offences for which the penalty was death, some so petty that it is hard to imagine an offender ending up on the scaffold. The list of these was known as the Bloody Code and capital crimes included stealing a pocket handkerchief, stealing a horse, threatening violence to civilians when on the duty of the King, impersonating a Chelsea pensioner, shoplifting items worth more than five shillings, stealing from a rabbit warren, cutting down a young tree, stealing from a shipwreck or a naval dockyard, forging a will, setting fire to a church or church property, any robbery that left a victim in fear, damaging Londons Westminster Bridge, stealing a letter, damaging a public building, extortion, maiming cattle or even spending a month with gypsies. A thief might get away with a few years in prison if he was arrested, but if he had blackened his face to try to avoid being seen in the dark, he was liable to be hanged in public.

Maybe it was no surprise that many judges felt they could not justify condemning somebody to death for these relative misdemeanours. Not all, though. In 1785 ten men found guilty of crimes that included stealing linen from an outhouse all paid the ultimate penalty when they were hanged together, while a few years later a boy aged thirteen was executed for stealing a spoon.

In showing mercy and not sentencing offenders to death, judges unwittingly condemned those before them to a punishment that many felt was even worse than taking a few steps to a scaffold and having a noose placed around their necks before the floor gave way beneath their feet, thus ending a miserable existence of hunger, cold and poverty. Sending prisoners to jail rather than having them hanged meant prison populations rapidly got out of control. Overcrowding became rife. There were fears that swelling numbers might cause jails to burst at the seams, allowing inmates to avoid old and often dishonest guards and simply run off. The answer, it was decided, was to introduce a new punishment transportation.