The Depot for Prisoners of War at Norman Cross, Huntingdonshire. 1796 to 1816. Thomas James Walker

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1

  Fortescue: History of the British Army, iv. 904–6.  Clode: Military Forces of the Crown, i. 240.

2

  The Story of Dartmoor Prison, by Basil Thomson.  (London: William Heinemann. 1907.)

3

  The French Prisoners of Norman Cross.  A Tale by the Rev. Arthur Brown, Rector of Catfield, Norfolk.  (London: Hodder Brothers, 18, New Bridge Street, E.C.)

4

  Vattel, Les Droits des Gens, book iii, chap, iii, sec. 49, p. 150.

5

  “Prisoners of War,” Chambers’ Journal, No. 21, 1854, p. 330.

6

  It will be seen in a later chapter what class of men the prisoners were to whom these words would come home.

7

  July 1797—Reports House of Commons, “18th Report of Committee of Finance.”

8

  In 1803 the Earl of Carysfort of the Irish Peerage took the title of Lord Carysfort of Norman Cross, as a Peer of the United Kingdom.

9

  The price of timber had risen in December 1806 to £8 8s. a load; at one date the contractor complained that even by paying £12 a load he could not obtain fifty loads in Plymouth.  The Story of Dartmoor Prison, Basil Thomson.  (London: William Heinemann, 1907.)

10

  The sum of £14,800 was paid to Adams between the 1st January 1797 and 29th November 1797 in the following instalments:

The total amount paid to 19th November 1797 for the Norman Cross Prison was £34,518 11s. 3d., for Hull £22,600, for Lewes £12,400, and for Colchester £15,620.

11

  As illustrating the hardship which, already in its fourth year, this war had imposed upon the nation, the following extract from the report furnished to the Transport Office, by Captain Woodriff, R.N., agent to the Commissioners, of the average price of provisions and the rate of wages in the district in which the Depot had been established, during the time that the prison and barracks were erecting, may be of interest.  Mutton was 10½d. per lb., beef 1s. per lb., bread 1s. per quartern loaf.  Carpenters’ wages were 12s. per week, shoemakers’ 10s., bakers’ 9s., blacksmiths’ 8s., and husbandmen 7s.  Starvation wages were then a literal truth.  Four years later from a Parliamentary Report we find the Government granting a bounty on all imported wheat, in order to keep the price down to £5 a quarter, other grain being treated in the same way.  We can well understand that, as the price of provisions went up, and the taxation increased with the prolongation of the war (a war which, however it originated, was prolonged for years by the ambitious projects of Buonaparte for the aggrandisement of himself and of France), the animosity not only of the actual combatants, but also of the suffering men, women, and children, steadily grew against the man and the nation whom they regarded as the authors of all their misery.

12

  Appendix A.

13

  Auctioneer’s Catalogue, (Jacobs’ Peterborough, 1816).

14

M. Foulley’s description of his model on Key Plan, Pl. xx., p. 251.

15

  The following entry in the Register of Marriages in St. John’s Church, Peterborough, probably explains the reason for the housing of the surgeon in a comfortable brick house within those prison walls, instead of in the very indifferent quarters in the hospital casern:—

Mr. George H. Walker was the surgeon to the Prison, which was in the Parish of Yaxley, and Captain Pressland, R.N., had been for some years, after the renewal of the war in 1803, Superintendent of the Prison, so among all these dry details crops up the picture of our human life.  We see the young medical officer passing through the door in the Prison wall which communicated with the Superintendent’s house (the door over which the wall is seen rising with a ramp in the photographs of the only fragments of the wall now remaining) to spend happy hours with Captain Pressland’s family.  We see friendship ripening into love, the story told by the entry in the Register of St. John’s Church, Peterborough, and then in the Register of St. Peter’s, Yaxley, we are brought face to face with a tragedy, for the last entry of a burial from the Depot is “Captain Thomas Pressland, Norman Cross.  March 21st, 1814.  59 years.  Signed, J. Hinde, Curate,” and there can be little doubt that from the house to which, mainly through his future father-in-law’s influence, Surgeon Walker was able in the third year of its existence to bring Elizabeth Colinette Pressland as his bride, while the bells of Yaxley Church rang out a merry marriage peal, six years later passed the body of Captain Pressland himself to be laid in Yaxley Churchyard, while the death bell tolled its solemn note.  For six years this house was the house of the couple for whom it was built.  It was in the auctioneer’s catalogue, when it was sold on the 2nd October 1810, nothing more than “An excellent brick dwelling-house, containing a cellar 12 ft. 6 in. by 11 ft. 2 in., parlour 13 ft. 3 in. by 13 ft. 8 in., etc., etc.”  To us, 100 years later, it is a part of the great tragedy of Norman Cross, and by the light of the registers we see it in those short eight years from its building to its destruction the scone of the brightest joys and the deepest griefs of men and women whose names we know, whose persons we can imagine, and who help to clothe those cold, dry records with the warmth of human life.

16

  On a range of the stabling purchased in 1816 to be re-erected as farm buildings in a neighbouring village, over one of the doors there stands out in bold relief, owing to the protective influence of the paint, the letters B. A. T., and in the auctioneer’s catalogue the Range is described as Bathorse Stable Range.  From Stœqueler’s Military Encyclopædia, we learn that “Bat” signified a pack saddle; “Bathorse,” one which carried a pack; “Batman,” the man in charge of the Bathorse.  The latter term came to be used for an officer’s servant, while the Bathorse Stable was applied to a military stable for draught and other horses.

17

  In his interesting romance, The French Prisoners of Norman Cross, the Rev. Arthur Brown speaks of Mr. Vise as Chief Surgeon at the Prison; this, of course, is an error, the prisoners were not attended by the neighbouring practitioners.  The statement that the surgeons were all English is also erroneous.

18

  Major Kelly was highly esteemed and at the time of his death (when the Indian Mutiny was not yet quelled) the following lines were published in a local newspaper:—