Derby County Jail: Grim jail designed to instil fear

Prison reformer John Howard

HORTICULTURIST, model landlord and country gentleman, John Howard was born in 1726. His would have been just another name to pass into obscurity but for his work on behalf of the wretches inhabiting the jails of his day.

When he became High Sheriff of Bedfordshire, he took on responsibility for the county jail; and so appalled was he by what he found there in terms of human misery and degradation, he devoted much of the rest of his life to the reformation of the prison system throughout the country, and gave his name to today’s Howard League for Penal Reform.

On a tour of the country to visit other prisons, he was confident he would discover examples of more humane conditions but was horrified to find that the malpractices of Bedford were all too common all over England and Wales.

In those brutal times, during the mid-1750s, jails held common thieves and felons.

But many of the incarcerated were also religious dissenters and debtors. Many of these debtors were hard-working local tradesmen who had to rot in prison until money could be raised to pay off their creditors.

The chief jailers were left to manage their prisons in any fashion they chose and, having to make their own living as best they could, this made for a system rife with corruption and bribery.

Prisoners were charged for their food, and when it came to such necessities as bedding, another charge of around 2/6d a week could be levied.

It is difficult to imagine how the poorest managed in those unheated cells. A jailer could keep a prisoner in chains and some were forced to wear an iron collar with spikes about their necks.

There were occasions when prisoners would not be allowed to leave the jails, even if they had been found innocent, unless they or their families paid for their release.

Howard’s work began to have influence as far afield as Germany and America. He even travelled as far as the Ukraine and it was there in January 1790 he died, ironically, of “jail fever”, a form of typhus.

Partly through Howard’s efforts, 27 years after his death, an architect’s report in December 1817 condemned the jail at Derby as “insufficient and insecure” and the corporation of Derby had no choice but to draw up plans for a new County Jail.

Designed by Francis Goodwin, the new Derby County Jail at Vernon Street opened in 1827 and was claimed as being “one of the most complete prisons in England”.

Its enormous cost for those days of £66,227 might well have evoked the response from hard-pressed and disapproving taxpayers: “And so it should be.”

The exterior of the new jail was grim, foreboding and designed to instil fear and respect for authority.

Flanked by two Martello towers with loopholes for muskets, its huge entrance gates would have been well defended against any disorder from the outside or rioting inside its walls.

Its Grecian Doric frontage remains today as one of the city’s better known landmarks.

Its boundary wall, part of which still exists along Uttoxeter Old Road, had on top of its 25 feet height, 15 courses of loose bricks, and enclosed an area of three acres.

The interior of the prison comprised a central building which was the governor’s house and chapel, from this radiated seven wings of two storeys each and connected by iron bridges.

A far cry from the cramped haphazardness of the previous jail in Friar Gate.

A detached circular building was the punishment block for those committed to solitary confinement. The cells were dark, the lower ones being damp, and altogether as uncomfortable as could be devised.

The whole was under the charge of 14 male turnkeys, at a wage of 20s per week, and two females, who earned 14s. A street adjacent to the site of the prison carries today the name of the most renowned of its governors, Mr J H Sims.

As a disciplinarian, he was much approved of by the Inspectorate of Prisons and his draconian measures were “much to the satisfaction of the magistracy of the county”.

The Prison Act of 1898 had abolished the treadwheel as a form of hard labour, although it remained a while longer in some jails, notably at Derby, where the mill ground wheat for other prisons. Clearly, the Howard League had many mountains yet to climb.

Those inmates doing hard labour, but exempted from treading the mill by the medical officer because of physical inability, had to spend the first 14 days of the month picking oakum “without mechanical appliances”. This meant that the “fiddle”, a tool used to untwist and comb old tarred rope, was forbidden.

Without this help, after constant picking, fingertips would begin to bleed. These prisoners, during the second half of the month, were then put to sewing coal sacks or performing other “heavy, disagreeable labour”.

Douglas Fox, as prison surgeon, collected £100 a year and an allowance of £20 for medicines. Apart from attending prisoners with “mild inflammatory diseases”, another of his duties was to be present at the infliction of corporal punishment.

A duty in those harsh times likely to have taken up a good proportion of his time.

He was also the dietician responsible for the prisoners’ well-being and considered a quart of gruel made from two ounces of oatmeal sufficient for breakfast; dinner was 1lb of potatoes and a portion of bread, while supper comprised a quart of gruel and another portion of bread.

Those prisoners incarcerated for longer than three months also got two ounces of onions or a red herring each day.

The Rev George Pickering was a busy prison chaplain at Derby County Jail and well earned his £150 a year.

Prisoners, whether they liked it or not, got daily prayers, homilies in chapel and as much as three sermons a week.

More of their labour-free time was taken up by lecturers interminably going on about such subjects as “purity”, “the cardinal virtues”, “industry”, “formation of character” and “our worldwide empire”.

We are told the Rev Pickering noted “with great satisfaction” that his congregations remained “quiet and devoutly attentive”, which was not to be wondered at since “discipline warders on raised seats, backs to the altar, cast a cold eye on their charges throughout the proceedings”.

His other, more gruesome, duty was to conduct condemned prisoners to the scaffold which was set up for public viewing in front of the prison on what is now a car park and where members of the public would crowd the area to witness these grim spectacles.

In 1833, John Leedham was the first person to be executed at Derby’s new County Jail. He was also the last person to hang in Derbyshire for a crime other than murder.

Convicted of bestiality, he was hanged on April 12 in front of a crowd of more than 6,000.

His was not the last execution at Derby by any means; that doubtful honour came to a prisoner named Edwin Slack who, in 1909, was hanged for the murder of his wife.

Except for that of murder, the 1898 Prison Act had done away with most categories of capital offences and was to lead to the eventual abolition of hard labour.

It established the idea that prison labour should be productive and a means whereby prisoners should be able to earn their livelihoods on release.

Although by the end of the 18th century, transportation, that much-used method of getting rid of convicts, had been curtailed, I would have thought that, despite the efforts of the reformers, conditions at the new Derby County Jail would have made the sentence of transportation just that little easier to bear.

It lasted as a county jail for just over 100 years. After the First World War it slowly fell out of use as a prison and, in 1929, it was demolished, leaving only its imposing frontage and the boundary walls intact.

In 1933, the Preston Greyhound Association reopened it as a dog-racing track and under this guise it lasted another 55 years.

In 1988, the track was sold to developers for more than £1m, and today, behind its listed facade, lies an office complex.

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