The Business of Newgate Prison: At least it wasn't in Portsmouth.

Newgate Prison cicra 1700

There have been millions of words written by smarter people than I on the history of Newgate Prison. So, I thought I’d focus this blog on the business side of the jail.

Are you sitting comfortably? Yes? Good; let's begin.

Newgate had four main stated purposes: the holding of suspected criminals until trial, a debtors prison, a post-trial holding jail for those found guilty and awaiting punishment, and forth, a place for the guilty to serve out their sentence. Under these four purposes the prison was effectively two places in one.

Side A - 'Masters', for those inmates who could afford to live relatively well within its seventeen-hundred-year-old-walls and Side B - 'Common' for those who could not.

Newgate was, like every jail of the time, a business; to our modern eyes, a very strange business.

If you are an American, imagine if you can; a floor of suites plucked from New York's The Plaza hotel and inserted inside Sing Sing Prison, dead opposite Cell Block A.

If you are British, imagine staying at Claridge's or The Dorchester but waking up, in stupefied horror, to find your hotel room has been moved permanently to Portsmouth!

Welcome to Newgate 1696 CE.

On the wealthier, side of Newgate were the private or semi-private rooms. Political prisoners with benefactors or debtors who could afford to live comfortably, but couldn’t or wouldn’t pay their debts-off, lived over and around The Press Yard, this side of Newgate was called ‘Masters’.

The poor and those poorly socially connected lived in the squalid part of the prison known as ‘Common’.

In a section of ‘A Filigree of Gold’, which I have since edited out of the final novel, I describe how one of our main characters, Jonathan Wild, lives well in an apartment overlooking The Press Yard. He has a private room, can come and go as he wishes, nice furniture, a fireplace, good food and drink. That passage has since become a short story for future publication as, ‘The Pink Pearl’.

The warders and managers of Newgate made most of their income from the ‘Masters’ side of the jail. Most everything was available for a price. Inmates could buy-in quality food, clothing, bedding, books, and if you were fed up of reading newspapers and cards, and had six-pounds going spare, the best courtesans London could offer.

The 'Master' side of Newgate was the 'Star' of Boston Group Business Matrix. 

(Google the matrix if you are not familiar with the concept.)

The Common side of the prison, however, is where the legend of Newgate really lives. This section of the jail consisted of four ‘Wards’ each with about two hundred, very dirty, souls apiece.

In ‘The She of We’ Edgeworth Bess gives us a glimpse of what life was like in the Women’s Ward.

The Common was the side of the jail that didn't make the warders a lot of money, those imprisoned here could not afford to pay for the luxuries available to masters of The Press Yard. Yet, even in a ward, most things were for sale, at double the outside costs. Newgate had its own in-jail inn.

Ale was tuppence a pint, bread three pence for a poor quality loaf.

The Common wards provided a steady income to Newgate's staff.

Our friends in Boston Consulting would call this Newgate's 'Cash Cow'. Newgate's warders milked this side of the business til every teat was empty. The warders didn't really mind as there was another fresh herd always coming in from the field of the Old Bailey.

The Common wards, the Portsmouth of our imagination, stank with dirt and squalor, prostitution was endemic, violence commonplace and disease a way of life.

(Not that dissimilar in fact to the real Portsmouth.)

The warders added to their Common ward income by charging the prisoner’s family for visits, general price gauging, and selling the inmates at five-pounds each into indentured service in the plantations of the West Indies. Every Spring a cargo of Newgate prisoners were loaded into ships sailing west; not many ever returned.

The prisoner's themselves could earn money for a daily meal by working at a laborious task, such as picking oakum. Warders took a percentage of prisoner’s wages as part of their fees. The modern equivalent of the soul-destroying drudgery and relentlessly painful misery of picking oakum, is of course, the night-shift at a Middlesbrough McDonald's.

The least profitable part of Newgate, from the management point of view, was the holding cells for the poor who had been condemned to death. Not that all those, or even many of those prisoners who were condemned to die by hanging, would actually be hanged. But we will cover that in a separate blog.

Those prisoners who were due to be executed at Tyburn spent their last days and nights in the deepest dankest dungeons below the Common wards. The most notorious of these Hellholes was known as Tangiers. Prisoners in these cells almost certainly had little money to pay for their keep and were likely dependent on the parish funds for their last day’s food and drink. Mostly the parish charity on offer was less than subsistence. From the warder’s point of view there was no or little money to be made from those prisoners in Tangiers. This is the ‘Dog’ business in the Boston matrix.

The warders and management of all seventeenth century prisons ran the place as a business. Newgate was no exception, it was run for profit. So much so that people bought their position as a warder or governor. The wages for the job were the fees extracted form the inmates, rich or poor, those found guilty and those awaiting trial. Warders and managers made a good living from those who were just trying to survive.

Newgate had four main reasons for existing; holding people until trial, a debtors prison, holding those found guilty before final punishment and a punishment itself. If there was a fifth reason, it was money.

The economics of Newgate Prison were simple:

Prisoners paid at least twice as much for the basics of life compared to those in the outside world.

And,

The wealthier you were in prison, the better were your conditions.

***

Ending on a happier note, if you ever check into a suite at:

The Plaza in New York, or a room at Claridge's in London, you are unlikely to wake up in Sing Sing prison, or God forbid, Portsmouth.

A new blog each Sunday; Everything Else, is Just Straw and Water.

P.B. Phillips. Author of the series of novels, Seeking Solus: Life and Love as the First True Thief Taker.

Check out: Newgate | The History of London