The Depot for Prisoners of War at Norman Cross, Huntingdonshire. 1796 to 1816

FOREWORDS

In April 1894 an exhibition was held at the Grand Assembly Rooms, Peterborough, under the auspices of the Local Natural History and Antiquarian Society, the major portion of the exhibits being articles of various descriptions made by the French prisoners of war at the barracks built in 1796–97 for their confinement at Norman Cross.  On that occasion, Dr. Walker drew up a short account of the buildings and their inmates, derived principally from recollections of old people and from old newspaper files.  Now that most of the relics then exhibited, and many others collected from various quarters, have found a permanent home in the Society’s Museum, it has been thought that the lecture embodying that history, which exists to-day only as a newspaper report, should be expanded and reproduced in the more accessible and permanent form of a small volume.

The lecture was incomplete, and to produce an exhaustive history it has been necessary to carry out systematic researches in the British Museum Library, in the Public Record Office, and in other repositories of information.

The general reader of a book is not concerned with the method of its construction, the complete structure is the only thing regarded, yet a very amusing digression could be given describing the difficulties attending the search, especially in the Government stores, for the material which is incorporated in this volume.  Many of the documents utilised had never been looked at since they were placed in sacks at the close of the war, when Red Tape was more rampant than to-day, and when the jurisdictions of several departments overlapped, causing obstructive friction and consequent confusion.  The official calendars and indices afford little or no indication as to the nature of the contents of bundles and rolls; in several cases valuable information has been obtained from bundles giving no hint of the contents, and simply marked “Various” or “Miscellaneous.”

Under the cumbersome and complicated system in vogue in the various offices at the close of the eighteenth century, the very limited staff employed could not keep pace with the pressure of the war.  At Woolwich, Sir William Congreve reported that in some branches of his department the accounts were three and four years in arrears, in one branch as many as seven years, and pleaded for an extra clerk, which request, after some correspondence, was granted.  This pressure led to laxity of supervision, culminating in corruption even in high places, and at last in 1804 General De Lancey, the Barrack Master-General, the head of the department responsible for the buildings at Norman Cross and other depots, was dismissed for defalcations, and the report of a Commission appointed to investigate his accounts from 1792 to that date, affirms that he had “made the most extravagant bargains both for land and buildings, and actually entrusted the contract for the fittings of barracks to a single individual, upon the easiest and most insecure of agreements. . . .  The Commissioners of Audit were ignored, and the authority of the Treasury set aside on the most ridiculous pretexts; and when inquiry was at last made in 1804, it was found that over nine million pounds of public money had been issued to the Barrack Master-General’s department, and that no accurate account could be produced either of the public or private expenditure of the same.” ¹  This Report led to an inquiry by an eminent firm of accountants as to the method of keeping the accounts, and the following extract from their long and detailed report may be of interest, as showing the confused nature of the materials through which we have had to search for facts throwing light on our subject:

“The Variety, extent and importance of the Business conducted by the Barrack Department, seems to require perhaps more than any other, that all the Accounts should be entered in the Books in such order, and with such precision as that a true Statement of the whole, or of any particular branch of the business may be produced whenever required without constant recurrence to the Vouchers and papers from which these Books are formed.  This cannot be effected in any way so well as by regular Books kept in a manner that has been in use for many hundred years, is familiar to Men of Business in all Countries, is equally applicable to the finances of a Kingdom as to the Accounts of a private family, and upon which the best Accomptants have not been able to make much improvement: but in the Barrack Office, so far from adopting this method, they have no Waste Book or Day Book, nor have they any Journal which is the most essential of all Books, where there is a number of Entries to make, and without which they cannot record any transfer of property, nor any transaction whatever which does not come through the Cash Book.  Their Ledgers are posted chiefly from Vouchers and accounts, and resemble more what is commonly called a Check Ledger, than one which has a regular reference to a Journal and Cash Book, from which only every Entry in the Ledger should be made.  Their Ledgers can never be regularly balanced, nor can an error that may be made, by placing a sum of money to a wrong account, be easily detected—indeed no Examination of any Account in the Ledger can be made without referring to the Vouchers.  Much time and labour is often uselessly spent in searching for them, and replacing them.”

This report led to an immediate reform, and research through the documents bearing dates later than 1806 was far easier than that through those of the previous decade, at the commencement of which the Norman Cross Prison came into existence.

It is needless to say that the documents of the various Government departments now concentrated in the Public Record Office are numbered by millions, and of those relating to Prisoners of War there are over 700 volumes, besides hundreds of rolls, bundles, and packets, pertaining to the Admiralty and War Office departments; these include various branches now completely transformed, such as Transport Board, Commission for Sick and Hurt, etc.  Huge Ledgers are not indexed, nor are the accounts entered consecutively.  Rough minute books and letter books on all conceivable subjects are in the same chaotic condition, so that whole days have been wasted on a fruitless search, while on the other hand important results have been unexpectedly obtained in unlikely and unlooked-for quarters.

It may pardonably be allowed to refer to what little has been done by others in the same direction, both with regard to barracks and to prisons.  A comparison with the following pages will show that earlier researches have been of a very superficial character.  Matters have been left doubtful which a little further search would have made certain, and points, which tradition and writers with some claim to authority had left obscure, would have been cleared up.  It would be invidious to go into further particulars, but it may be stated that Huntingdon, in which county Norman Cross is situated, although it has an important and eventful history, has as yet no exhaustive County History, and that the local guide books are of little value.

The results of these researches through official documents, through old newspaper files, and topographical works, in the British Museum Library, are, in the following pages, incorporated with information obtained locally from persons who in their early youth knew the prison, from topical traditions, from printed narratives founded more or less on fact, from parish registers, and from old private letters and diaries.

To the officials at the British Museum and the Record Office our thanks are due for valuable assistance courteously rendered.

Unfortunately, for the completeness of this narrative, no record of the life at the Depot, written by a Norman Cross prisoner or by any official, is known to exist.  Such sources of information exist in the case of at least one of the other prisons, and to fill a blank, which must have been left in this history, we are, by the kind permission of the author, Mr. Basil Thomson, enabled to include in this volume a reprint of Chapter V. from The Story of Dartmoor Prison, ² and to make other extracts which throw light on the life of Prisoners of War confined in Great Britain between the years 1793–1815.

The Rev. E. H. Brown, Vicar of Yaxley, son of the late Rev. Arthur Brown, author of a tale The French Prisoners of Norman Cross, ³ and Mr. A. C. Taylor have kindly taken photographs for the illustrations; Mr. C. Dack, the Curator, and Mr. J. W. Bodger, the Secretary, of the Peterborough Natural History and Scientific Society, have been assiduous in collecting information.

Our thanks are also due to other friends too numerous to specify, who have given items of valuable information, or have communicated traditions the greater number of which have some foundation on fact.

The critical reader is asked to bear in mind the circumstances—so ill adapted to literary work, especially of an historical character—under which this book has been conceived and matured, to be lenient in his criticisms, and to accept it as a humble contribution to the history of those eventful twenty-two years, 1793–1815, when the pens of those recording the contemporary history of their country were occupied with the deeds of the British Army and Navy beyond her shores to the exclusion of the minor details of her social and domestic life.

T. J. W.

A. R.

[Without the aid of Mr. A. Rhodes, the author, whose time, except during his rare holidays, is wholly devoted to the active work of his profession, could not possibly have carried out the researches by which so much information has been obtained.  Mr. Rhodes has in these “forewords” described some of the difficulties encountered, and the author is desirous to emphasise his appreciation of the work of the colleague whose services he was able to secure, and who now, unhappily, is totally incapacitated from work by severe illness.—T. J. W.]

CHAPTER I
URGENT NEED FOR PRISON ACCOMMODATION, NORMAN CROSS, HUNTS, SELECTED AS THE SITE, AND THE PRISON BUILT

 
I watched where against the blue
   The builders built on the height:
And ever the great wall grew
   As their brown arms shone in the light.
 
 
Trowel and mallet and brick
   Made a wedding of sounds in the air:
And the dead clay took life from the quick
   As their strong arms girdled it there.
 

Laurence Housman: The Housebuilders.

The Depot for Prisoners of War, at Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire, was the first, and during twelve years the only prison specially constructed for the custody of the prisoners taken captive in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars between 1793 and 1815.  The Norman Cross Depot received its first inmates on the 7th April 1797; while of the other great prisons built for the same purpose, Dartmoor (since 1850 the Convict Prison) was not occupied until 24th May 1809, and Perth (converted into the general Prison for Scotland in 1839) received its first batch of 399 prisoners on the 6th August 1812.

Eight years before the building of the Norman Cross Prison the French Revolution had commenced.  The storming of the Bastille had taken place in 1789, and during the following years events had advanced rapidly.  In 1792, Louis XVI, yielding to the demands of the assembly, the Girondists, and the populace of Paris, had declared war against Austria.  In 1793 the Republican Government had been established, Louis had been deposed and executed, and on the 1st February of the same year France had declared war against Britain, thus commencing that struggle which lasted, with two short intermissions, to the final overthrow of Buonaparte at Waterloo on the 18th June 1815.

This war—of which the historian Alison, writing in the first half of the last century, said, “It was the longest, most costly and bloodiest war mentioned in history”—cost England above two thousand millions of money, a colossal sum, which represented a proportionate number of lives sacrificed, and a proportionate amount of misery and want, not only to the combatants on both sides, but to the great mass of the civil population of every nation drawn into the conflict.

In recent years there have been wars of shorter duration, more costly and more deadly, but none in which so fierce a spirit of animosity reigned in the breasts of the combatants, none in which the miseries of war were dragged out to the same calamitous length.

The history of the prison at Norman Cross brings forcibly before us those prolonged miseries incidental to war, which are liable to be overlooked by such students as contemplate only

The neighing steed and the shrill trump,

The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,

The royal banner, and all quality,

Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!

The poet paints the close of a hard-fought day when

Thousands had sunk on the ground overpowered,

The weary to sleep and the wounded to die.

The matter-of-fact chronicler records the exact number of killed, wounded, and missing, and of guns, standards, and prisoners captured on either side; but the after-history of those prisoners is left unwritten, their sufferings are unrevealed!  And yet, between 1793 and 1815, literally hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war were held in captivity by the various nations engaged in the conflict, and this confinement meant for the great bulk of them years of misery, long vistas of monotonous restraint, periods of indifferent treatment, occasionally great physical suffering, and, worse than all, for many, moral deterioration and degradation inseparable from the conditions in which they dragged out their existence.  However humane the captors might be, these consequences to the unfortunate captives were inevitable during the protracted Napoleonic Wars of the close of the eighteenth and commencement of the nineteenth centuries; and there is only too much evidence that when matters on which not only the comforts, but the actual lives of the prisoners depended, were being debated by the two hostile Governments, the political and military interests of the nations concerned were regarded before those of the wretched captives.

The great Napoleon revolutionised the art of warfare, as the great Gustavus revolutionised the military organisations of Europe, and one result of this revolution was that the chivalrous treatment of prisoners of war and non-combatants, which prevailed up to Napoleon’s accession to power, was materially changed.  A great French authority on International Law, writing in 1758, said:

“As soon as your enemy has laid down his arms and surrendered his body, you have no longer any right over his life.  Prisoners may be secured, and for this purpose may be put into confinement, and even fettered, if there be reason to apprehend that they will rise on their captors, or make their escape.  But they are not to be treated harshly, unless personally guilty of some crime against him who has them in his power. . . .

“We extol the English and French, we feel our bosoms glow with love for them, when we hear accounts of the treatment which prisoners of war, on both sides, have experienced from those generous nations.  And what is more, by a custom which equally displays the honour and humanity of the Europeans, an officer, taken prisoner-of-war, is released on his parole, and enjoys the comfort of passing the time of his captivity in his own country, in the midst of his family; and the party who have thus released him rest as perfectly sure of him as if they had him confined in irons.”

Abundant testimony can be adduced to the truth of what Vattel asserts from contemporary records as to both nations. ⁴  But between 1758 and 1773, the dates of the first and second editions of the French work just quoted, there was born, in Ajaccio in Corsica, a man who was to change all this—Napoleon Buonaparte, who, contemporaneously with the building of Norman Cross Prison, was erecting the pedestal on which he afterwards stood as Emperor, who for twenty years hung over Europe as a great shadow, keeping our ancestors in this country in very pressing terror of invasion, whom the British feared and hated, and whose dominant passion, as time went on, was hatred of England as the insuperable obstacle in his path of conquest.  This little history will reveal to some extent the results of his methods as they affected the unfortunate soldiers and sailors who became prisoners of war.  This is no place for discussing the right and wrong of the devastating Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars; the treatment of the prisoners of war, as shown in their prison life, alone finds its place in a History of the Depot at Norman Cross.

At the commencement of the war the prisoners on either side were comparatively few, but early in its progress embarrassment arose on the British side from the large numbers of French and Dutch taken in the great naval victories of Howe, Jervis, Collingwood, and Nelson.  To maintain these prisoners on a foreign shore or in the face of the enemy was impossible, and as their number increased it became evident that the existing prisons, and the few fortresses remaining in Britain, such as Porchester Castle near Portsmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth, and Fort George in Scotland, which had been hurriedly fitted up and converted into war prisons, were insufficient for the ever-increasing number of captives.  To supplement these it became necessary to fit up special ships and maintain them as hulks, in the harbours of Portsmouth, Plymouth, and the Medway.  These hulks were later used as places of confinement for malefactors among the prisoners, and also to relieve the prisons from overcrowding whenever an extraordinary accumulation took place in the country.

In an article published in Chambers’ Journal in 1854, the writer points out “the ships were large battleships, they were cleared of all obstructions in each deck, and would hold 900 men prisoners and the guard, without much overcrowding; the mortality was very low.” ⁵

The French in the hulks and the English prisoners in France had undoubtedly to endure great hardships, but these hardships did not justify the exaggerated charges brought by each nation against the other—Englishmen pointing to Verdun as the embodiment of French cruelty and oppression, while Frenchmen enlarged with bitter invectives on the condition of their countrymen in the hulks and prison-ships in English harbours.  This exaggeration and these bitter recriminations went on to the end of the war.  Buonaparte himself was never tired of seeking to arouse in the hearts of his soldiers a spirit of hatred towards England by allusions to this subject, and before Waterloo he included these words in his address to the Army: “Soldiers, let those among you who have been prisoners of the English describe to you the hulks, and detail the frightful miseries which they have endured.” ⁶

The number of prisoners of war was so great that their care had been handed over to a new department of the Admiralty thus described:

“The Transport Office is a newly created Board, and was instituted in July 1794 at first for the superintendence of the Transport Service only; but to that employment has since been added the management of the Prisoners of War, in health, at home and abroad.” ⁷

 

To this department all communications in reference to the prisoners of war had to be addressed, and through them all information reached the Admiralty.  There was another special department of the Admiralty, that for the care of the sick and hurt, into whose charge the prisoners of war passed when they ceased to be “in health.”

The following extract gives further details of the Transport Department, on which for twenty years the lot of the prisoners of war so greatly depended.  The paragraph was written in 1803, when the war was supposed to be at an end.

“Transport Office, Dorset Square, Westminster, established in August 1794, for the purpose of conducting the transport business which had hitherto been transacted by the Navy Office; it has also the care of the prisoners of war.  It was at first managed by three commissioners, but the business having much increased two more were added in the year 1795.  The salary of each commissioner is a thousand a year.  They have under them, several resident agents at the different sea-ports both at home and abroad, to superintend the particular service of embarking, re-embarking of troops, etc., and seeing that the contracts made in this particular service are strictly adhered to.  These agents are captains and lieutenants of the Royal Navy.  There are also several agents afloat.  The captains have one guinea a day; the lieutenants fifteen shillings, and nineteen shillings more per month for a servant.  At the conclusion of the war in 1802, the Board was reduced to three commissioners; Capt. Schank retired on a pension of £500 per annum, and Joseph Hunt, Esq., was removed to the ordnance as clerk of the deliveries.

^[7] Schomberg, Naval Chronology, chap. v., p. 213.

In order properly to understand the establishment of the Depot at Norman Cross, it is necessary to briefly review the events which led up to it.  It arose at a very momentous era in our history.  It was not officially called a barracks, or a prison, but a Depot.  At that time there were few barracks in England, practically none, and what we term garrison towns were very scarce.  Our regular army was abroad fighting, and the internal defence was in the hands of the Militia and Yeomanry.  Service in the former was compulsory, but substitutes could be purchased, so that it is easy to judge who would actually serve, especially at a time when scarcity and high prices were the rule, while the Militia were well fed.  In the Yeomanry were enrolled the gentry and well-to-do persons of each locality; this was a very large force.  There was a special troop of Norman Cross Yeomanry, in which the farmers and others from the neighbouring villages gave their services, and there were one or more troops in Peterborough and the neighbouring towns.  The duty mainly consisted in putting down the various small riots that arose in different parts of the country.  In their travels they were “billeted” on the publicans and the public at a tariff fixed by the Government, and which, not being very extravagant, gave rise to much dissatisfaction, oppression, and fraud.

As the foreign wars continued, the number of prisoners sent to Britain multiplied and the military duty increased.  In 1793 the Supplementary Militia Act was passed, and it was determined to spend about £2,000,000 in erecting barracks, and out of this sum Norman Cross was built.  It was always hoped that peace was at hand, and the prisoners of war had hitherto been confined not in places built for, or exactly suitable for, their retention, but in fortresses or castles or ships, and when these became overcrowded, in empty warehouses or similar buildings specially hired.  It was not considered safe to keep prisoners of war in sea-ports, or even near the coast.  Ireland was in a state of rebellion, and had to be kept down with a strong military force, hence the great Depot at Kinsale was formed.

We must bear in mind that at this period the Parliamentary Reports were very closely watched by our enemies, and information which might be of service to them was suppressed and consequently is sought for in vain to-day.  The country was in a state of turmoil, the Government departments were overladen to a terrible degree, and red tape, far more than now, reigned supreme.  These conditions led to careless supervision and defalcations even in high positions; the Barrack Master-General, General Oliver de Lancey, was dismissed from the Army after a Commission had investigated his accounts.  He was responsible for Norman Cross, and it is in accordance with the finding of the commission referred to in this preface that no official account of the original cost can be found.  The ground was purchased from Lord Carysfort. ⁸  It is from measurements of foundations remaining on the site, from plans, and from scattered and brief references to reports, of which the originals cannot up to the present be found, that a history and description of the original buildings can be given.  They were begun in haste, hurriedly built, and in a continual state of repair and alteration during the whole of their existence.

In 1793 a large sum of money was voted by Parliament for barracks both permanent and temporary.  A Barrack Master-General had already been appointed.  The first measure taken by this official was the conversion of existing buildings to meet their new object—viz. the safe custody of the captive soldiers and sailors, and the provision of suitable accommodation for lodging and maintaining them and the troops who guarded them.  Even in the first three years of the war these efforts were barely sufficient to meet the requirements, and in February 1796 the matter of prison accommodation had become most urgent.  The Dutch Fleet was at sea, and a meeting with the English Fleet being probable, it was reported to the Admiralty, in reply to their inquiries as to the means of disposing of the large number of prisoners expected in the event of a successful battle, that Porchester Castle was capable of containing 2,000 men, and the Dutch prisoners could be kept separate from the French.  Forton would be of little use, as not more than 300 extra could be accommodated; it was already full, 6,000 being incarcerated in the hospital there.

On the 20th June of the same year it was reported that the number of prisoners had increased, until every prison was overcrowded.  At Mill Prison, Plymouth, calculated to hold 3,300, there were confined 3,513, and in consequence of the report 200 were transferred from this prison into a ship; this in turn also became crowded, and another ship had to be pressed into the service.  Fresh prisoners still poured into the country.  Sir Ralph Abercrombie reported that he was sending upwards of 4,000 from the West Indies, and the urgency was such that it became absolutely necessary to construct with the utmost rapidity a new prison.

In selecting a site, several requirements had to be considered.  To be suitable for its purpose the prison must be within easy reach of a port, in order that prisoners might be landed, and conveyed rapidly and at small cost to their place of confinement.  At the same time it must not be too near an unfortified port, as such a situation would offer facilities for escape, and there would be danger of support from the sea, in the event of a general rising, and a combined attempt to restore to the fighting ranks of the enemy the thousands of captive soldiers and sailors who were in captivity hors de combat.  The site must be healthy, well supplied with water, and conveniently situated for the provision of the necessaries of life—and further, it must be near trunk roads, for convenience of administration, and in order that in the event of a rising, troops sufficient to quell the mutinous prisoners could be concentrated on the spot.

The site chosen for the Norman Cross Depot possessed all these advantages.  It was situated on the Great North Road, one of the most important in the country, the Ermine Street of the Romans, and it was only seventy-six miles from London.  The situation was altogether suitable from a sanitary point of view, although later, at a period when the bulk were ill clad, the poor half-naked French, accustomed to a warmer climate, complained bitterly of its cold and exposed position.  An abundant supply of excellent water could be obtained by sinking deep wells, the surrounding country was agricultural, the land fertile and well stocked; there were small towns near from which supplies could be obtained, and, finally, the transports could be brought to the ports of Yarmouth, Lynn, or Wisbech, and the prisoners landed there could be cheaply conveyed by water to Yaxley, Stanground, and Peterborough, all of which places were within a few miles’ march from the prison gates.  As an alternative the prisoner could march direct from the ports to the prison.

On the 8th December 1796 the Transport Commissioners applied to the Barrack Office for estimates for a building to contain 10,000 prisoners, but official red tape could not be disregarded, and the Barrack Master-General replied that as the Admiralty had not authorised the construction of any such buildings, he could not give any opinion on the subject.  In the Transport Office, however, were officials who recognised the urgency of the situation, and when at length on the 13th February 1797 the Barrack Master-General wrote to the Transport Board, referring to his letter of the 19th December of the previous year, and asking for an order for the building, he was too late.  The Transport Commissioners were already at work, the prison had been planned, and the work, started in the previous December, was, under the direction of William Adams, Master Carpenter to the Board of Ordnance, already making such rapid progress that portions were nearly complete.

The material selected for the structure was wood; this was economical, and suited to the temporary character of the building.  No one, however pessimistic, thought in 1796 that the prison would be required to house prisoners of war, with only two short intervals, for another nineteen years.  Such wooden buildings, the outer walls constructed of a strong framework, with feather-edged boards overlapping one another covering and casing in the framed work, were much used in domestic architecture at this period, and many houses thus constructed may be seen in the neighbourhood of London.  A good example of a village mansion of this kind may be still seen in Lower Sydenham, where it is at present occupied by Lady Grove, the widow of Sir George Grove.  The wooden buildings were erected on a buried brick or stone foundation.