The family historian will find a genuine challenge in the task of tracing prison officers. Their lives and their working routines only really show up when something goes wrong or when there is a government enquiry and staff are interviewed or profiled.

The first prison officers, from the first ‘turnkeys’ to the ‘wardens’ of later times, have always been regaled with nicknames. These names give insights into the profession, of course. The prison officer came to be called a ‘screw’ after the introduction of the crank, which was a device fixed to the outside wall of a cell, fitted through to the inside, where the luckless inmate had to turn so many revolutions of the handle; the officer’s role was to tighten the screw and make turning the handle more demanding and exhausting. Today, screw is the dominant term.

The word screw has led to rhyming slang terms, such as flue and four by two but there were alternatives back in the 19th century, such as dub-cull or dub-cove. Then came jigger and twister, the first relating to a dark cellar and the second to the keys carried.

Whatever the word stuck onto the prison officer, the fact is that the job is and has always been, extremely demanding, in all kinds of ways: the officer has to cope with discipline problems, develop working relationships (purely professional) with individuals; deal with a range of prison orders; liaise with the white-collar management (in a separate building to the prison usually) and also handle shift-work and such tiring, selfless tasks as ‘bed-watch’ when the officer has to give a constant, round-the-clock observation of a prisoner at suicide risk.

In the local jails before the 1877 Act which began the national regulation of prisons, the staff were a mix of family members, local part-timers, amateur medics and ex-military types. By the 1920s, at last there were more moves to change and improve the turnkey’s lot. The first training initiatives were established, and over the last 50 years, in particular after a stormy period of prison violence in the 1960s, there has been more recognition of the necessity of giving more support and respect to the people who work in this tough job.

The governor from the Light Brigade
In the first two centuries of prison staff, in many cases it was a family affair. A classic example is found at a very old prison, recently closed: Northallerton in North Yorkshire.

In the 1881 census listing prisoners, staff and other residents at Northallerton prison, 11 non-prisoners are listed; eight of these people are women. The list follows a familiar pattern, with the governor’s family being involved: George Gardner was the governor – a man who had been one of the 600 at the Charge of the Light Brigade – and his daughters Gertrude and Caroline were listed also, along with George junior, who was a solicitor’s clerk. Only six officers are named: Lucy Norton was the prison matron; John Slingsby was the gate porter, and his wife and daughter are not listed as staff. Finally, we have Annie Moore and Mary Wright as ‘officers’ and Eliza Topham is ‘cook/domestic servant.’

Before George, and the arrival of the Victorian prison, there were the houses of correction, as the bridewells came to be known. At Northallerton, through the Regency years, the Shepherd family ran the jail, with several family members being brought in to do specific tasks. The census records from the mid-19th century gradually give more and more information about prison workers.

There is no doubt that British prisons had a definite female presence in the centuries between the bridewells of the 1550s and the new local jails of the last decades of the 19th century when Holloway arrived on the scene. This is because bridewells were ‘houses of correction’ and their prisoners were a mix of every kind of offender imaginable, along with mendicants and the mentally ill, the debtors and the drunkards. Consequently, a major element in the staff’s work was caring. On the walls of the female prison at York Castle there is an old phrase carved in the stone: ‘This prison is a house of care/a grave for man alive/a touch stone to thee friend/no place for man to thrive.’

These local prisons were in part factories, producing a range of produce, from textiles to food; the treadmill, coming into use in the 1820s, gave the prison boards a devilish machine that would be productive as well as punishing, and the invention gives us some idea of the ethos behind the early prisons: hard work and discipline. With this came a repressive regime, with religious worship built in. At the heart of this regime was the matron. In an 1850 inspection of Northallerton, the report noted that ‘There was much sickness during the early part of the year; this was followed by smallpox… one prisoner died of phthisis.’

The overall pattern of employment, between the mid-Tudor bridewells and the mid-19th century was one of houses of correction and local jails mainly being run as businesses, essentially factories, with a family at the heart of the staff provision, and guided by the local group of magistrates, who paid visits of inspection.

What the researcher in this area has to hope for is either that their ancestor was involved in the experience of a celebrity prisoner, or perhaps was employed at the time of a national report or enquiry.

In 1777 there had been the first large-scale series of reports written on all the local jails across the land, by the great reformer John Howard. He saw the defects in the situation: the prevalence of disease; overcrowding; no separation of male and female prisoners; and the particular plight of debtors and young people, who were mixed with hardened villains and so were subject to ‘contamination’ as it was then termed. Howard’s book, The State of the Prisons (1777) has remarks on the staff, and he sums up the kind of person required for the work with these words: ‘He must encourage and promote cleanliness. For this reason an old or infirm man should not be a gaoler… He should be compassionate to the sick. If he distributes the allowance, he must do so justly…’ The gaoler in Howard’s mind is male. But in common experience, the keeper’s family were a real influence on the prison regime (the keeper being the name used for the manager before ‘governor’ was adopted).

Reading between the lines, it can be seen that the keeper’s wife (as at Northallerton) played a part in the running of the gaol. Wives were unofficial staff, and daughters were often employed.

When it comes to enquiries, the government reports are well worth a study. If a particular prison was the subject of an enquiry or report, then a large proportion of the prison staff would be called to give testimony or details of work. Their names and positions are all printed in the official publications. For looking into prison officers’ lives, these have to be the most interesting documents, as the questions asked give profound insights into the tasks and responsibilities of the staff, and more than this, the modern reader actually hears them speak, in the sense that the words in the texts are exact statement of what was actually spoken.

Documentaries and newspaper reports
In the mid-Victorian years our most remarkable insights into prison staff come from documentary narratives, such as the massive survey of London prisons undertaken by Henry Mayhew and John Binny in the 1850s, and from a strange work called Female Life in Prison, purporting to be written by ‘a prison matron’ but which was the work of FW Robinson. He summarised the women workers in this way: ‘In charge of the female compartment are assistant matrons on probation, assistant matrons, latterly a chief matron – on whom the practical running of the prison really devolves, but to whom credit is rarely given – a lady superintendent, a deputy governor and a governor.’ Basically there was this hierarchy of staff all above the standard status of ‘wardress’ and we know only a limited about of details about their daily work. Much may be inferred, though, and we may be sure that it was hard, demanding work.

Mayhew and Binny do give some enlightening statistics however. In their account of Brixton female prison, they supply a full list of staff as it was in 1856. The hierarchy was:

• Principal officers and clerks
• Officers in the manufacturing and labour department
• Subordinate officers and servants.

In the first group, of 14 positions, seven were women, being the four members of the school staff, a scripture reader and two superintendents. In the second group, numbering just six staff, two were women, being the workmistress and the cutter. Finally, in the third group of subordinates, there was a total of 47 staff, and of these, only seven were male, being the carpenter, plumber, labourer, messenger, watchman, gatekeeper and baker. Predominantly, the female staff consisted of 19 assistant matrons, 13 matrons and three principal matrons. We may see from this that, in most cases, references to a ‘wardress’ were in fact, technically, matrons. Interestingly, the male equivalent terminology was ‘warder’ or even ‘turnkey’.

Mayhew and Binny provide engraving illustrations of some of the female staff at that time. The principal matron wore a full-length, full dress: a collared cape, a blouse and a bonnet. As with most prison supervision, the work was tedious in the extreme for the matrons. One typical illustration in Criminal Prisons of London shows lines of women convicts at work on the landings, and three levels, sewing or picking oakum, while five matrons look on, standing throughout the shift.

Details of the wardresses’ lives may be hard to come by, but fortunately, the rise of family history research has opened up new material. Thanks to such work by Ruth Saunders, for instance, into the life of her grandmother, Mary Ann Bullock, who was born in 1869 at Wall Heath, her father being a labourer in an ironworks; they moved to Giggetty Womborne and then to Dudley by 1881, and then there was another move to Tamworth. In 1891, Mary Ann was working as a nurse in Moab House, a private asylum run by John F Moody, who was registered as an MRCS, and he was a former governor of Winson Green prison.

Mary found a job as a wardress at Winson Green, where she was working by the census of 1901, and where she lived in. In 1902 Mary Ann married, and then she died in 1917, aged just 48. Her husband, William, married another wardress at the jail. There is a photo of her in uniform, with her daughter Marjorie, taken around 1912: the full-length skirt and belt are entirely typical, and the collar, tie and male-looking shirt show that at least some advances had been made in this working attire since Mayhew and Binny’s documentary study of the 1850s.

The governors and head matrons carried the main responsibility; sometimes we have a name, as in Robinson’s reference: ‘At Millbank the sole superintendence is now vested in Mrs Gibson, a thoughtful and energetic lady.’ There is a glimpse of Mrs Gibson in a report in The Daily News of 1874, when a visitor saw the infamous Constance Kent of the Road House murder, knitting stockings.

Twentieth century: times of crisis
For more recent times, such databases as The Times Digital Archive are ideal for this research. There was very detailed reporting throughout the 30 years after World War Two on all kinds of prison issues. A name search is highly likely to bring up a prison officer in this period, as the papers faced so many hot topics. There was overcrowding; violence and riots were common; there were regular escapes; enquiries into abuse and corruption were common, and of course, at management level, the nature of prison administration changed radically. By our own time, the shift was made in prison government from restrictions in top management to governors with prison backgrounds, to the employment of administrators from other trades and businesses as prison managers.

The challenge of tracing an ancestor who worked in our prisons is tough; records have been lost or discarded; some online sources have disappeared over the last ten years; the most interesting materials are buried in County Record Offices within related subjects. The answer is, as always in family history, to persevere. This is illustrated in my own research for my book, The Justice Women, for which I needed a case study of a wardress from time long gone. My appeal brought a wonderful example, when Ruth Saunders got in touch, and sent me details (and a photo) of her grandmother, Mary Anne Bullock, who had been a wardress in Birmingham.

Bibliography:
Hawkings, David T, Criminal Ancestors (Sutton, 1992)
Mayhew, Henry and Binny, John, The Criminal Prisons of London ( Griffin, Bone and Co., 1862
Thomas, JE, The English Prison Officer Since 1885: A Study in Conflict (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972)