Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London by Editors of David & Charles

swiftly made less attractive following a press campaign. Its swampy site led to many deaths amongst prisoners and for this reason it was closed in 1890 to make way for the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) which incorporates some of Millbank’s materials in its fabric.
    The largest of London’s gaols was at Coldbath Fields with a capacity of 1,200 inmates. It was demolished in 1889 to make way for the Royal Mail’s Mount Pleasant sorting office. Its regime was notoriously harsh and was celebrated in verse by Coleridge:
    As he went through Coldbath Fields he saw A solitary cell, And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint For improving his prisons in Hell.
    Both Millbank and Coldbath Fields adopted the ‘Silent and Solitary’ systems of imprisonment whereby prisoners were denied all contact with other inmates in the belief that they would thereby reflect on the error of their ways. Many went mad.
    MAKE LIKE A HAMSTER, OR ELSE!
    Besides recommending isolation Victorian penal reformers believed in keeping prisoners occupied. Unpicking oakum (dense knots of tarred rope) was bad enough but the punishment most dreaded was the treadwheel which required a prisoner to ascend the equivalent of 12,000 feet on a diet of bread and gruel. To avoid it prisoners would swallow soap to bring on a fever accompanied by foaming at the mouth. The treadwheel was abolished in 1898.

The journey to the scaffold
Newgate’s morbid processions
    T hose who were found guilty at the Old Bailey were often sentenced to death since in the 18th century over 300 offences carried the death penalty, including theft of goods worth more than five shillings and impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner. On the evening before the executions a sermon would be preached in the chapel at Newgate in the presence of the condemned, a coffin being prominently placed in the centre of the chapel to remind the prisoners of the fate which awaited them. Gaolers, ever anxious to supplement their incomes, admitted to the service curious members of the public who were prepared to pay for the privilege. The sermon would be preached by a clergyman appointed by the bishop called the Newgate ‘Ordinary’ who profited from the role by publishing accounts of confessions supposedly obtained from prisoners. At midnight the sexton of St Sepulchre’s Church opposite the Old Bailey would ring a bell outside the condemned cell and recite a verse beginning, ‘All you that in the condemned cell do lie, Repent you, for tomorrow you shall die.’

    Newgate procession
    St Sepulchre’s still contains mementoes of its association with Newgate. An ‘Ordinary’ called Villette prepared for sale a confession by a young condemned boy in the 1770s. Upon being told that another suspect had confessed to the crime and that a reprieve for the boy was on the way, Villette feared a loss on his carefully prepared ‘confession’ and urged the executioner to proceed, protesting that it was no time to be worrying about ‘details of this kind’! The boy was spared by more compassionate authorities.
    On the morning of executions the ‘Newgate procession’ would set out for Tyburn, on the present site of Marble Arch, where the former scaffold is commemorated by a brass plaque. The prisoners would travel in carts along the present route of High Holborn, New Oxford Street and Oxford Street. They were led by the highwaymen who were the acknowledged aristocrats of the criminal fraternity, followed by murderers, rapists and thieves, with traitors drawn on hurdles bringing up the rear. The streets would be lined with spectators, often drunk, shouting encouragement or abuse to the occupants of the carts, throwing missiles and offering to buy drinks for them. The procession would indeed stop at numerous taverns on the route so that, with luck, the prisoners would themselves often be drunk before they reached Tyburn. This was fortunate since, until the introduction of the ‘Newgate Drop’ in 1760 which brought