The Depot for Prisoners of War at Norman Cross, Huntingdonshire. 1796 to 1816. Thomas James Walker
Hay wrote that no butcher within fifty miles of Norman Cross would supply cow, heifer, or ox beef for less than 44s. per cwt., but he offered to supply it at 43s., and this was agreed to. 26
No tables or benches were to be provided. Hammocks were supplied, but no clews nor lanyards (the cords to suspend them by); these the prisoners had to make for themselves, jute being supplied to them for that purpose, one ton to every 400 men.
The new agent, Mr. Perrot, who came from the prison at Porchester Castle, appears to have applied for other comforts, as we infer from the following communication addressed to him from the Transport Office:
“We cannot allow any razors or strops for the use of the prisoners at Norman Cross. We see no reason for your appointing barbers, to shave the prisoners, the razors sent to Porchester having been intended more for shaving the Negro prisoners from the West Indies.”
Does the fact that the names of the two first agents appointed, Delafons and Perrot, were French, and that they were not naval officers as at other prisons, justify the supposition that our Government in their anxiety to study the interests of the prisoners and to satisfy the French, were trying the experiment of appointing a British subject of French birth or of French origin as agent to this Depot? Such a supposition might account for the fact of Mr. Delafons’ resignation a few days after his appointment. A man in sympathy with the French might well find, on entering into the particulars of his duties, that he could not conform to the regulations regarded by the Government as necessary for the discipline of prisons—regulations, for breaking which, many prisoners lost their lives. Does not this letter to Mr. Perrot also read as though he were making a frivolous application to the Government?
Whatever the worth of this supposition may be, we find that on the 2nd January 1799, less than two years after his appointment, Mr. Perrot’s name disappears from the books, and that Captain Woodriff, R.N., the transport officer who had been acting for the transport office in the district, was asked to take over the duties of the agent, receiving a small addition to his previous salary.
The duties of the Depot agent and the district agent must have previously overlapped, for it was Captain Woodriff, the Transport officer, who two years before was making all the arrangements for the reception and maintenance of the prisoners, and who shortly after their arrival, having employed some of them to spread the gravel in the exercise yards, paying them 3d. a day for doing it, was called upon by the Government to furnish the information as to the wages and the prices of provisions in the neighbourhood, given in the extract from his report printed in the footnote on p. 16.
Captain Woodriff held the post of agent at Norman Cross from his appointment in 1799 to the Peace of Amiens in 1802, having previously from 2nd September 1796, when he was appointed agent of the Transport Office at Southampton, been engaged in duties associated with the care of prisoners of war. In July 1808 he was appointed agent for prisoners of war at Forton, holding office until 1813. He thus spent, in all, eleven years of his long services as a naval officer, assisting the Transport Board in their important work as the custodian of the prisoners. In the Appendix will he found a short biography of Captain Woodriff, collated by Mr. Rhodes. It gives an insight into the adventurous and uncertain career which, during the epoch with which this history has to do, might be that of a naval officer of distinction, and shows that the custodian of the prisoners at Norman Cross and Forton was himself at one time an English prisoner at Verdun. 27
On the 24th March the troops who were to form the garrison had marched into their quarters, this event being noted in his diary by John Lamb, a farmer and miller living at Whittlesey, about seven miles from Norman Cross—“24th March 1797 the soldiers came to guard the Barracks. The Volunteers did not much like it; they liked drinking better.” All arrangements being sufficiently advanced, the prisoners sent from Falmouth, who for several days had been waiting, cooped up in the Transports at Lynn, were disembarked and put into lighters, to be brought by water to Yaxley and Peterborough, and the first prisoners passed through the prison gates on 7th April 1797, just four months from the commencement of the building.
CHAPTER III
ARRIVAL AND REGISTRATION OF THE PRISONERS
A prison is a house of care, A place where none can thrive; A touchstone true to try a friend, A grave for one alive; Sometimes a place of right, Sometimes a place of wrong, Sometimes a place of rogues and thieves, And honest men among.
We have now arrived at that stage in the story of the Norman Cross Depot when, although the whole of the buildings were not yet erected, sufficient progress had been made for the occupation of a part of them. Two quadrangles were ready, each of them containing caserns and the necessary accessory buildings for the care and safe custody of 2,000 men. The other two quadrangles were rapidly approaching completion, one for 2,000 prisoners, the other, the north-eastern block, for a smaller number, as it was in part devoted to the accommodation of the sick, who slept in bedsteads instead of in hammocks, and therefore occupied a far greater space than the healthy men.
In this north-eastern square each casern was artificially warmed by fires, and in every extant plan these blocks are shown to have chimneys, while all the others have merely ventilators. The buildings were cut up by partition walls into wards, and surgeons’ and attendants’ rooms, which further interfered with their capacity; but, notwithstanding the limited number of the occupants of this quadrangle, it is probable that in the most crowded period of its occupation the prison held, including the sick, and the occupants of the boys’ prison outside the boundary wall, at least 7,000 prisoners.
On the 10th April 1810 a return made of all the prisoners of war in England on that day shows 6,272 at Norman Cross. These returns are few and far between, and may well have missed a period of overcrowding; the lowest of any of them, one rendered in 1799, gives the number as 3,278.
To appreciate the details of the life of the prisoners, the reader must grasp the magnitude of the experiment which was being initiated at this Depot, where a number of men, equal to the adult male population of a town of 30,000 inhabitants, were to be confined within four walls, with no society but that of their fellow prisoners, no female element, no intercourse with the outside world, except that in the prison market, in which they were served by foreigners, whose language they did not understand. In this community order and discipline had to be maintained, while at the same time ordinary humanity demanded that these unfortunate men, who had committed no crime, who were in a foreign prison for doing their duty and fighting their country’s enemies, must be treated with all possible leniency.
The exigencies of the war, and the circumstances under which many of the men arrived at the prison, were not conducive to peace and order, and the posts of agent of the Depot and of transport officer carried great responsibility. This we can realise from an occurrence, a vivid example of the horrors of war, concerning which Captain Woodriff had to hold an inquiry as one of his first duties in connection with the Depot. Among the thousand prisoners who, when the prison was opened, were already on their way to Norman Cross from Portsmouth, Falmouth, Kinsale, and Chatham, were men who had been conveyed on board the Marquis of Carmarthen transport, on which ship there had been a mutiny of the prisoners. In the fray seven men were killed and thirty-seven dangerously wounded, but the mutiny was quelled and all the prisoners accounted for, except one, who was the murderer of one of the crew. Next day he was discovered and placed in irons, with a sentry over him. He asked to be shot, and in the absence of the captain of the vessel, who protested against his wish being acceded to, the officer commanding the troops, one Lieutenant Peter Ennis of the Caithness Militia, shot the unfortunate man, and had the body thrown overboard. This happened three days after the mutiny. The matter was investigated and reported upon by Captain Woodriff at Norman Cross. The prisoners gave evidence that they had mutinied on account of the
Evidence that two years later meat could be obtained at a much lower rate has come under my notice, from an unexpected source. On the fly-leaf of a copy of Batty’s Bible, in the possession of a descendant of Mr. W. Fowler, is written below the name W. Fowler (in the same writing, but in paler ink), “Came down to Norman Cross March 10th, 1799, to serve the prisoners of War at Yaxley.” In a different handwriting has been inserted after “Came down,” “from London,” and after Yaxley, “with Beef at 28
Appendix B, Biographical Sketch of Captain Woodriff.