Episode notes
In 1752 a windmill spun on the roof of Newgate Prison, built by Stephen Hales to push fresh air into a building so thick with gaol fever that physicians refused to enter. The fever was epidemic typhus, carried by body lice, so the breeze did nothing. This episode covers the full life of Newgate from 1188 to 1902, beginning with Henry II and the Assize of Clarendon in 1166, which created traveling royal judges and with them a need for somewhere to hold the accused. London's answer was a gate in the old Roman wall, later fitted with a dungeon in one of its turrets.
What followed was misery run as a business. The sheriffs sublet the prison to private keepers who charged inmates for entry, bedding, food, a place near the fire, and even the removal of their own shackles. The episode moves through rebuild after rebuild, from Dick Whittington's bequest to Christopher Wren to George Dance the Younger's windowless design, and on to the public hangings staged at the prison door. It ends at the Old Bailey, which now stands on the same footprint, and asks whether modern prisons are more humane or simply better hidden.
- Typhus grew so uncontrollable by 1419 that officials shut the prison temporarily, because guards and administrators were dying alongside the inmates.
- Gaoler Edmund Lorimer charged four times the legal limit to remove irons, and reform rules had to forbid guards from stealing charitable alms and charging for a lamp.
- Parliament spent 50,000 pounds on a design style meant to terrify, with chains carved in stone above the entrances. The Gordon Riots of 1780 gutted it by fire before it was finished.
- Quaker reformer Elizabeth Fry entered a women's ward the governor feared to visit, organized schools for the children, and carried her findings to the House of Commons.
- A crowd of 40,000 at an 1807 execution turned into a fatal crush. Michael Barrett's hanging in 1868 was the last public one in Great Britain, after which the condemned were buried beneath Dead Man's Walk.