That Friday storms continued to rage across Somerset. The two dray horses pulling the Black Maria hung their heads after a twenty-four-mile journey in driving rain, their necks sleek and shimmering, stretched by the last long pull uphill from Wells to the gaol at Shepton Mallet.
Inside the Black Maria, Dyer was locked into a windowless cell; a small ventilation grille in the door offered no more than a glimpse of the passing countryside. A police officer sat within the van but outside of the cells, and the driver was perched up top, a gabardine cloak his only protection against the inclement weather. It had been a long and uncomfortable journey: even going flat out, two drays pulling a heavy load could have covered eight miles an hour at most. But Amelia’s discomfort was nothing compared with what lay ahead.
Her sentence may have been the toughest that the magistrates could afford her, but she had in fact escaped lightly. The Victorian passion for harsh punishment of any crime against property meant that theft carried with it far tougher sentences than those for many other misdemeanours. (Just a few years earlier, for example, a local man, George Tipney, had served twelve months’ penal servitude for the theft of a piece of bacon valued at just ninepence.) But as she climbed down from the van on that last Friday in August, and was led up the four stone steps and through the vast studded and arched wooden doors of the main gate of the Shepton Mallet House of Correction, February, and the end of her sentence, must have seemed an eternity away.
Beyond the walls of the House of Correction, locals spoke in hushed tones of the brutal regimen within:
… its very walls look forbidding, and within its courts and corridors reigns a dismal silence, broken only by the forbidding chink of keys, the creaking of a lock, the grumbling of a heavy bolt, the measured footsteps of a warder, or more rarely, by the penitential moan of some poor conscience stricken sinner.
Alas that there is need of such a place on Christian soil.
John E. Farbrother, Headmaster of the
Shepton Mallet Grammar School, 1860
The same “dismal silence” assaulted Dyer’s ears as she stepped inside. The gaol had a rigorously maintained “Silent Order”, imposed upon all prisoners throughout the day. The order extended beyond mere verbal communication: any gesture exchanged by prisoners was severely punished.
Amelia was stripped, inspected by the prison medical officer and given a dress and petticoat, a pair of stockings, a loose cotton shift, neckerchief, pocket handkerchief, cap and a pair of shoes. Her clothing was not the standard pale grey issue, but yellow, to denote hard labour. A badge was pinned to her chest bearing a number which corresponded to that above her cell door. She would have to grow accustomed to responding to this number: it was to be used instead of her name for the remainder of her sentence.
She was led into D-wing, where the female prisoners were housed, through endless corridors and locked wooden doors. It was already late in the day when she arrived at her cell. Very little natural light could seep in through the tiny barred windows set high into the cell walls. Beyond the barred window she could hear the constant distant rumble of the treadwheel, and above that an irregular repetition: the clean echo of iron against stone.
These were the sounds of the male prisoners sentenced to penal servitude. A rectangular building, three storeys high, nestled alongside the boundary wall of the gaol. At ground level were six heavy, arched wooden doors. This was the treadwheel shed: four great wheels, each with twenty-four treads. Male prisoners served out an agonizing eight hours, every day of their sentence, behind these doors. Lined ten abreast at each wheel, they climbed an interminable staircase (amounting to something just short of a Himalayan peak every three days). Men ruptured chest and stomach muscles working the treadwheel. Builders and domestic servants fared better: they were used to the action of climbing ladders or mounting staircases for much of their working day. Skilled artisans, or any others accustomed to a more sedentary life, found it almost intolerable. For the remaining two hours of the prisoners’ working day, men and boys were led into a series of enclosed yards and set to stone breaking, using heavy, handheld mallets.
Amelia would not share the same occupation as her male counterparts, but in common with them she endured the deprivation of basic comforts. Other prisoners were afforded the luxury of a thin mattress, two sheets, a pillow and a coverlet. Amelia, and those like her, slept on a hard wooden bench.
That first morning, after a comfortless night, she was to discover that the days began early. Housed in a little tower built into the apex of the chapel roof was a large bronze bell which tolled every morning at a quarter to six. This was the signal for the prisoners to stir; to wash, dress and then clean their cell. (The washing of hands and face was permitted once a day. Once a week, they were to clean their feet also. Once a month they were indulged with a tepid bath.)
For the first hour and a half, the female prisoners were occupied carrying out domestic duties around the gaol: cooking, laundry, cleaning, all carried out in absolute silence. At eight fifteen, the silence was again shattered by the bell, summoning all prisoners to chapel. Line by line, the female prisoners were paraded, two steps from those in front, from the first floor of D-wing across a high covered wooden walkway into the chapel. The prisoners sat in stony silence; each seat was enclosed on three sides by high wooden screens, which precluded any communication between prisoners and offered only a view of the chaplain, as he threatened the unrepentant with eternal hellfire from the pulpit.
After chapel, Amelia’s days were to be occupied with hard labour: hour upon hour of “oakum picking”.
Inside the oakum sheds the air was clouded with dust; it caught in the throat and settled on shoulders and laps like ash from a bonfire. The women sat in serried ranks in absolute silence, bent over the work in their laps. Mounds of old rope, sodden and tar-soaked, were to be unravelled, each piece pulled apart little by little, until the hemp was teased out like cotton wool, and every last one of its fibres picked out. The fibres were used in the ship-building industry, mixed with tar to waterproof ships’ hulls.
Oakum picking was a painful occupation. The ropes were tough and the sinews cut deep gashes in the women’s hands. In many workhouses a sharp tool was provided in order to tear the threads apart. But in prisons tools were prohibited and the task thus made all the more unendurable. After just one morning, Amelia’s hands would have been blistered and blood-soaked, nails torn from the skin of the fingers. After six months, her hands were scarred and calloused, their skin as thick as a pig’s. Like the treadmill, this was a task designed to be hard work without any of the satisfaction gained from an end product: although the treadwheel at Shepton was used to power a working mill, the prisoners were never permitted the satisfaction of seeing the flour they milled. Toil was regarded as an end in itself.
There were precious few moments of relief in the day. Two half-hour breaks were permitted, and brief evening reading sessions – of the Bible or the Prayer Book – by dim gaslight. Night-time communication between prisoners went unregulated. Prisoners could send and receive one letter in every quarter, and in exchange for sustained good behaviour they could also earn a twenty-minute visit every quarter.
Mealtimes were no cause for excitement: the menu was always the same and never entirely sustaining. It consisted of a pint and a half of gruel, a pound of bread and a pound of potatoes, with a meagre 6oz of beef, boiled on the bone, so that much of its weight was made up by the bone itself. No tobacco, no beer, and certainly no opiates.
But unstinting hard work didn’t go entirely unremunerated: a reward system, known as “stages”, was in place at the gaol. A full day’s toil was worth one point. Carelessness or insufficient industry: zero. Indolence or insubordination took a point off a prisoner’s total. Earn fifty-six points and Amelia would be rewarded with a slate and chalk and secular reading matter, along with one day’s remission for every seven days left of her sentence. She could strive to move up through the stages, converting more of her punishment into rehabilitation, and reducing her sentence in the process, a day at a time.
If she chose to kick against the regime, however, her experience of gaol would have been insufferable. Solitary confinement was routinely imposed and for extended periods. The room reserved for the purpose instilled dread into all who had experienced it. Known as the “Dark and Silent Cell” it was a damp basement room, its walls bricked up solid with just one small ventilation hole in the ceiling. The thick wooden door blocked out any additional light and sound: but there was little in any case. The corridors outside were poorly lit and the cell was deliberately positioned far away from the other prisoners: once incarcerated, a prisoner could neither see nor hear any sign of life. Whippings were commonplace, the prisoner strapped at the ankles and wrists to an x-shaped frame, and lashed with a cat-o’-nine tails. Restraint, too (leather cuffs for women, irons and straitjackets for men), was standard practice. Lie in late, fail to sweep out your cell satisfactorily, or be caught talking, and an inmate would be whipped.
Whether Amelia Dyer passed her sentence in silent servitude, or else raged against the regime at every opportunity, the Shepton Mallet House of Correction left her scarred. When she was finally released in February 1880, she resolved that nothing would lead her back. From now on, she determined to stay one step ahead of the law.