lapsuskalamari
The Entrance to Holloway Prison
Location: Parkhurst Road, Holloway, London N7, England
Date of Photograph: pm 17 September 2007
OS Grid Reference: TQ301855
Co-ordinates: 51:33:13N: 0:07:27W
Elevation: 40 meters
Until the end of the middle of the Nineteenth-Century the usual British punishment for serious offenders was transportation, a process that for much of history was considered more condign than death. Transportation involved shipping the miscreant to a remote colony, where they would be enslaved for between seven years and life. In wilderness destinations prisoners were usually simply abandoned to try conclusions with savages, wild animals or the weather: Some became millionaires, the vast majority promptly died.
By the 1870’s, the Australian Colonies had already been largely successful in stopping British forced migrations. Furthermore, British suffragists, mostly female, started a campaign of arson and public disorder in their quest for votes for women. Thirdly, in 1903, the ancient gaol of The City of London, Newgate, was demolished to make way for The Central Criminal Court, the almost equally notorious “Old Bailey”.
A need was established for a new gaol for the City, and by 1849 work had commenced on a mixed City of London House of Correction at Holloway, a mock-medieval castellated structure to the design of James Bunstone Bunning. This edifice inevitably became known as “Camden Castle”.
This first phase, completed in 1852, had three male wings and one for females and juveniles. It provided 436 cells at a cost of £91,547:10s:8d. During the 1880’s 340 new cells were added including a hospital wing.
Oscar Wilde was a celebrated Victorian inmate, but by 1903 Holloway was a female-only prison, the only secure penal institution for females in the UK. The British custom is to accommodate criminal women and girls in mental hospitals, but for the few hundred who pose a violent escape risk, or whose personal safety from outsiders is problematic, Holloway is the preferred receptacle.
Local suffragettes often found themselves in Holloway, rubbing shoulders with prostitutes who could often walk back to their beats within minutes of release.
But Holloway, which hanged five of the fifteen British women executed in the Twentieth-Century, soon developed a lurid reputation for some truly dangerous females, many of them minor European aristocrats.
It accommodated World War One IRA women Constance Markeivicz and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington; Pro-German spies Eva de Bournonville and Dorothy O’Grady ( both narrowly avoided the gallows ); prominent fascists Diana Mitford and her husband Sir Oswald Mosley, personal friends of Adolf Hitler; and the Nazi synagogue arsonist Francoise Dior, niece of couturier Christian Dior and sometime wife of British Nazi leader Colin Jordan. ( Even after the passage of forty-five years I remember clearly how this Dior woman scandalised London by attending her wedding naked except for a diaphanous gauze shift and indulging in a barbaric blood-mingling ritual with the groom ).
Until her death in 2002, Holloway was home to Manchester child-torturer and murderess Myra Hindley.
Forty-seven women waited in Holloway’s condemned cell. Forty, including 27 infanticides, were reprieved, one freed on appeal, and one sent to Broadmoor, a secure hospital for the criminally insane. The five others were hanged.
Curiously, the last two to hang, within two years of each other, committed their murders in Hampstead, a wealthy suburb an easy hour’s stroll from the prison.
The last British woman to hang was 28-year-old nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis who died on the gallows at Holloway on Wednesday 13 July 1955. She shot her boyfriend dead outside The Magdala tavern in nearly Gospel Oak. He had refused to keep her company over the Bank Holiday. Albert Pierrepoint, the last hangman, officiated. Sometime in 1967 the long drop apparatus was dismantled and its housing converted into a sewing room.
When the prison was rebuilt in 1970 the five bodies were exhumed and sent to unmarked graves at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, except for Ellis who was re-interred at St Mary’s, Amersham. It each case surviving relatives refused the remains.
The Entrance to Holloway Prison
Location: Parkhurst Road, Holloway, London N7, England
Date of Photograph: pm 17 September 2007
OS Grid Reference: TQ301855
Co-ordinates: 51:33:13N: 0:07:27W
Elevation: 40 meters
Until the end of the middle of the Nineteenth-Century the usual British punishment for serious offenders was transportation, a process that for much of history was considered more condign than death. Transportation involved shipping the miscreant to a remote colony, where they would be enslaved for between seven years and life. In wilderness destinations prisoners were usually simply abandoned to try conclusions with savages, wild animals or the weather: Some became millionaires, the vast majority promptly died.
By the 1870’s, the Australian Colonies had already been largely successful in stopping British forced migrations. Furthermore, British suffragists, mostly female, started a campaign of arson and public disorder in their quest for votes for women. Thirdly, in 1903, the ancient gaol of The City of London, Newgate, was demolished to make way for The Central Criminal Court, the almost equally notorious “Old Bailey”.
A need was established for a new gaol for the City, and by 1849 work had commenced on a mixed City of London House of Correction at Holloway, a mock-medieval castellated structure to the design of James Bunstone Bunning. This edifice inevitably became known as “Camden Castle”.
This first phase, completed in 1852, had three male wings and one for females and juveniles. It provided 436 cells at a cost of £91,547:10s:8d. During the 1880’s 340 new cells were added including a hospital wing.
Oscar Wilde was a celebrated Victorian inmate, but by 1903 Holloway was a female-only prison, the only secure penal institution for females in the UK. The British custom is to accommodate criminal women and girls in mental hospitals, but for the few hundred who pose a violent escape risk, or whose personal safety from outsiders is problematic, Holloway is the preferred receptacle.
Local suffragettes often found themselves in Holloway, rubbing shoulders with prostitutes who could often walk back to their beats within minutes of release.
But Holloway, which hanged five of the fifteen British women executed in the Twentieth-Century, soon developed a lurid reputation for some truly dangerous females, many of them minor European aristocrats.
It accommodated World War One IRA women Constance Markeivicz and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington; Pro-German spies Eva de Bournonville and Dorothy O’Grady ( both narrowly avoided the gallows ); prominent fascists Diana Mitford and her husband Sir Oswald Mosley, personal friends of Adolf Hitler; and the Nazi synagogue arsonist Francoise Dior, niece of couturier Christian Dior and sometime wife of British Nazi leader Colin Jordan. ( Even after the passage of forty-five years I remember clearly how this Dior woman scandalised London by attending her wedding naked except for a diaphanous gauze shift and indulging in a barbaric blood-mingling ritual with the groom ).
Until her death in 2002, Holloway was home to Manchester child-torturer and murderess Myra Hindley.
Forty-seven women waited in Holloway’s condemned cell. Forty, including 27 infanticides, were reprieved, one freed on appeal, and one sent to Broadmoor, a secure hospital for the criminally insane. The five others were hanged.
Curiously, the last two to hang, within two years of each other, committed their murders in Hampstead, a wealthy suburb an easy hour’s stroll from the prison.
The last British woman to hang was 28-year-old nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis who died on the gallows at Holloway on Wednesday 13 July 1955. She shot her boyfriend dead outside The Magdala tavern in nearly Gospel Oak. He had refused to keep her company over the Bank Holiday. Albert Pierrepoint, the last hangman, officiated. Sometime in 1967 the long drop apparatus was dismantled and its housing converted into a sewing room.
When the prison was rebuilt in 1970 the five bodies were exhumed and sent to unmarked graves at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, except for Ellis who was re-interred at St Mary’s, Amersham. It each case surviving relatives refused the remains.