Saturday night, when both the inclination and opportunity for drunkenness are at their height, is the worst time of the week in a metropolitan jail. The violent, judgement-impaired and purely unfortunate are admitted in a sullen stream that overloads the regular muster of inmates, and the atmosphere is sour with recrimination and despair.
Some time after nine on the night of Saturday 8 April 1842, Auckland’s newly built jail (or ‘gaol’, as it was generally spelt at that time) became so intolerable that head gaoler George McElwain took the extreme step of summoning his superior, James Coates, from his home. The cells were overflowing, McElwain insisted, and two of his prisoners were ‘very violent and appeared to him to be deranged’.
The gentlemanly Coates held the ancient title of High Sheriff, yet he had no prior experience of the penal system. In 1842 Auckland was barely a year old, the makeshift and largely hypothetical capital of a brand-new colony, and its government posts were shared around among the mainly young and under-qualified men available to take them. Coates was just 27 when his gaoler sent the frantic request for his presence. Sensibly, he asked the older and more experienced Colonial Surgeon John Johnson, whose responsibilities included the health of gaol inmates, to accompany him. The two officials picked their way awkwardly by lamplight through mud and dung to the soggy lower end of Queen Street, where the town’s wooden gaol stood. McElwain showed them to the larger of its two cells, where they found a scene from a nightmare.
The No. 1 cell, the size of a modest modern-day bathroom, held 14 prisoners. There was not enough room for them all to lie down, and a hammock had been strung beneath the low ceiling, further reducing the minimal ventilation. The second cell, even smaller, contained 12 men, and while the two observers were present another was admitted, so violently drunk that his handcuffed wrists had to be tied to the bars over the window. Another man became contorted on the floor of the cell with fits so intense that it took the efforts of most of the other prisoners to hold him down. Someone had evidently just vomited, and Sheriff Coates found that ‘the stench was insufferable’.
Next day Coates reported these appalling conditions to the Colonial Secretary, the capital’s highest-placed official apart from its governor, William Hobson. The sheriff did his best to absolve himself and his staff of blame for the scene he had witnessed. Coates explained that the cells ‘are cleaned out every day that the weather will permit of so doing and every precaution is used to ventilate them during the day, but the number of prisoners confined in so small a space renders it inoperative … On Wednesday next I anticipate the introduction of 20–25 debtors, where I am to place them I cannot possibly imagine.’1 This was the incontinent state of Auckland’s only penal facility 18 months after the colony’s capital was relocated from Kororāreka in the Bay of Islands to a thinly populated stretch of scrub and fern beside the Waitematā Harbour.
Kororāreka (later known as Russell) was a notoriously lawless former whaling settlement, and during 1840 a large proportion of its seafarers, ex-convicts, defaulting soldiers, needy women and gamblers followed the governor and his officials south to the promising territory of the new capital. Auckland therefore had immediate need to contain its most unruly and dishonest elements. In the first year this facility was a raupō lockup, a flimsy structure divided into a room for the turnkey and a single 3 x 3.5 metre cell capable of holding eight prisoners at most. A total of 82 inmates were held there in the town’s first year, most of them charged with misdemeanours but 17 classed as felons, or serious offenders, and therefore likely to be serving lengthy terms.2
In early 1841 construction began on a larger and more secure gaol. The site selected was at the lower end of a gully opening into a sheltered section of the harbour recently named Commercial Bay, since it was where most of Auckland’s supplies were landed. The tree-lined and tidal Waihorotiu Creek ran down the western side of the gully, and alongside this lay the town’s main thoroughfare, the grandly and optimistically named Queen Street. At that time it was no more than a muddy track ending in a morass of mudflats and swamp through which new arrivals had to stumble ashore. About 200 metres up from the original shoreline, Queen Street was intersected by Victoria Street. This marshy junction, lying well below the properties beginning to appear on the surrounding higher ground, was the unfavoured piece of real estate chosen for Auckland’s first gaol — a single-storey, wooden, shed-like building on the left-hand side of Queen Street as it ran down to the shoreline. The Waihorotiu Creek, then a clean and attractive little stream, ran directly behind the gaol, supplying a source of fresh water and a means of disposing of its waste. It was inevitable, however, that in Auckland’s moist and fickle climate the stream would periodically overflow its banks and flood the gaol — a recurrent problem throughout the life of the institution.3
The gaol was not yet finished, and still lacked a roof, when in July 1841 its first prisoners were transferred from the temporary lockup.4 They fell into the category of felons, since they included Thomas Brown, convicted of assault, and Donald McNaughton and Patrick Sharkey, who had attempted to free a companion from police custody using a sword and gun. Police Magistrate Gilbert Dawson was among those who had been attacked with these weapons, but in a letter to Lieutenant-Governor Hobson he attributed all three men’s offences primarily to intoxication, and appeared concerned mainly for their health while they were held in the unroofed building: ‘Considering the state of the gaol these unfortunate men may be subject to severe illness in their confinement and I would therefore recommend that the humane intentions of your Excellency should be extended to the whole of them.’5 This generous appeal apparently succeeded, and three months later McNaughton and Sharkey were fined a shilling each and released.6
Once completed, the primitive gaol consisted of a single cellblock that included the two shared cells and three smaller single cells grouped around a central kitchen and dayroom in a yard surrounded by a two-metre-high wooden fence. Its staff comprised McElwain the gaoler, two turnkeys, and an overseer for the male prisoners sentenced to hard labour. Those inmates worked outside the prison on public works — collecting firewood for government offices, road-making, stone-breaking, and carting sand or lime. It was not possible to house different categories of prisoners separately, so hardened criminals, drunkards and those awaiting trial were held together with female and very young offenders. Some were already veterans of tougher prisons in other British colonies, and were especially hard to manage in the crude conditions they found in Auckland.7
Women inmates were acutely vulnerable to abuse from both fellow prisoners and the all-male prison staff. In June 1842, Arin Waite accused assistant gaoler William Kean of ‘assault with intent to take improper liberties with her’, and of using obscene language. Her complaint was dismissed for want of evidence. Kean was, however, found to have supplied her with liquor, and magistrate Felton Mathew considered his conduct ‘highly reprehensible’. Remarkably, Kean was not immediately forced to leave his post, and two years later he accepted a bribe of £40 to enable another prisoner to escape.8
On this map of Auckland from January 1842, the town’s first gaol and the adjacent courthouse are shown at the southwest corner of Victoria and Queen Streets, alongside the Waihorotiu Creek. TA-MAKI PAENGA HIRA AUCKLAND WAR
The institutions of law enforcement in Auckland, c.1845. This early drawing shows the pillared courthouse (left) and gaol, surrounded by its flimsy fence. Outside this, to the right, on Victoria Street West, are the town’s scaffold and its stocks, where miscreants were held for the amusement of passersby. AUCKLAND LIBRARIES HERITAGE COLLECTIONS, NZG-19101207-32B-1 MEMORIAL MUSEUM, G9084.A8
In the town’s earliest years, perhaps one in four of its business premises was a grog shop, and their patrons became regular inmates of the gaol.9 One Queen Street resident expressed the outrage felt by ‘the respectable portion of the community’ at the sight of drunks hauled off to gaol by Māori who, being less prone to drunkenness than the European population, were hired for this purpose to assist the local constabulary. The writer’s sympathies lay entirely with the ‘poor unfortunates’ treated in this manner by ‘a set of savages’.10
Those unfortunates may have included women, who were typically charged with either drunkenness or ‘vagrancy’ (a euphemism for soliciting and prostitution). If unable to pay a fine, they were held for up to 48 hours in a lean-to in a corner of the main cellblock, which was not fully secured from the other cells. Police Magistrate Felton Mathew noted the ‘very great inconvenience being continually felt from the want of any place within the Gaol which can be appropriated to the confinement of females’.11 After Arin Waite complained of her treatment by assistant gaoler Kean, a police magistrate recommended that a matron be added to the staff to manage female prisoners. Governor Hobson thought the expense unnecessary.12
Soon after the gaol opened, construction began on the larger and more ostentatious courthouse alongside it. This building would eventually be used for sittings of the Supreme Court and other lofty legal purposes, but meantime it stood in ‘a perfect sea of mud, quite impassable unless a person walked carefully along a single line of boards placed end to end over the semi fluid’.13 The local newspaper asked rhetorically how ‘the Chief Justice, the Law Officers, and all connected with the Court, will contrive to get to it in wet weather — to pass and repass from the Court House to other parts of the town, with decent facility, will be out of the question.’14
Like the gaol, the courthouse was still unfinished when a landmark case compelled its immediate use. The defendant was a tall, 17-year-old Māori from a chiefly Northland family. Maketu Wharetotara was charged with murdering five settlers at Motuarohia Island in the Bay of Islands in a fit of rage after being repeatedly abused by one of them, a farmer named Thomas Bull. His lethal retaliation may well have been regarded with sympathy by his own people, and in former times been dealt with under traditional tribal processes of justice. The Treaty of Waitangi had been signed shortly before the Motuarohia murders, however, and notwithstanding the Crown’s obligation to share governance with Māori, all New Zealand’s people had become subject to a penal system introduced from Britain. After certain inducements were offered to them, Ngāpuhi chiefs agreed to deliver the young man over to this system, and he was held in a condemned cell in Auckland’s gaol for several months until his trial. During that time he covered the walls with images of canoes, men and horses, perhaps to remind him of his home.15
The trial in the new courthouse was brief and decisive. Maketu was found guilty and sentenced to hang, and Sheriff Coates was required to organise the colony’s first official execution. This was to be a public spectacle, and a gallows was erected directly outside the gaol gates. The hanging was scheduled for noon on 7 March 1842, the same time as an important sale of Crown lands. This auction was therefore postponed for an hour ‘to enable intending land purchasers to witness the event’.16
Maketu, described as ‘a fine young man, whose stature was upwards of six feet’, was brought from his cell at the appointed time, wearing ‘a blue blanket, of native manufacture’.17 With the gaol bell tolling, he was led to the scaffold under the gaze of a thousand spectators who were kept at a suitable distance behind a strong guard of armed troops. A reporter noticed that very few Māori were among the crowd. Although capital punishment was well established in Māori tradition, it was generally delivered summarily, immediately after sentencing. Maketu’s fate under the new judicial system was apparently accepted by his people, but they were distressed at the long and, they felt, unnecessarily cruel delay between his arrest and his execution. Whether for this or some other reason, Māori remained much less inclined than the European population to attend future public hangings.
Once the execution was concluded, Maketu’s relatives asked to take his body back to the Bay of Islands, but they were refused and he was buried without ceremony within the grounds of the gaol. Ten months later, his father Ruhe begged again for his son’s bones and this time the governor acceded to the request. The body was exhumed and carried back to the north for reburial.
It was in the month after this hanging that Sheriff Coates witnessed the dismal state of the cells on an April Saturday night, and urged the Colonial Secretary to make funds available to relieve the crammed and insanitary conditions.18 His appeal stirred the administration to action, and a basic lockup, where offenders could be held overnight before being dealt with in court, was added next to the courthouse. This small cell, the first port of call for most gaol inmates, was later described by gaoler McElwain as ‘not fit for any civilised community’, a ‘mere hole where men and women are thrown in drunk and wet on a floor, without light or anything else, until the morning’.19
Police Magistrate Felton Mathew, who was said to be ‘possessed of stern piety’, was notoriously hard on the town’s many drunks.20 He imposed fines of £1 5s, the equivalent of several hundred dollars today, on offenders, and those who could not pay were placed in the stocks outside the courthouse.21 This medieval form of punishment required offenders to sit on a bench with their legs placed in holes cut through two heavy planks locked one above the other. The bench was somewhat lower than the planks, so the position was not comfortable.22 It was a particularly undignified posture for women offenders, and Auckland’s respectable citizens expressed disgust at witnessing ‘the indecent and disgraceful exhibition of a female sitting in the public streets in a position and under circumstances of the most indelicate nature’.23 These stocks are clearly visible in early illustrations of Queen Street, and remained in use until late in 1845.
Jurors hearing trials in the courthouse were subjected to conditions little better than those faced by offenders in the gaol next door. In June 1842, a jury sat on a defamation case brought by Sheriff Coates against his superior, Colonial Secretary Willoughby Shortland.24 To consider their verdict, the jurors were locked in the gaoler’s small bedroom at the rear of the prison. They could not reach agreement on the case and when they returned to court the following day were placed in one of the cells to continue their discussion. No food was provided, and they were obliged to beckon through the bars and hand a passerby some cash to buy them bread and cheese.25
For its first five years Auckland had no hospital, and certainly no facility for caring for the mentally ill. The gaol therefore fulfilled this latter function, to no one’s satisfaction. In May 1842, Dr Johnson advised Governor Hobson that a man named Joseph Hale was held in the gaol, ‘having been found wandering about in a state of mental derangement … it is highly necessary that he should be removed from the Gaol for at present he occupies one of the two cells allowed for the prisoners, who are thereby crowded most incommodiously into one cell, to the probable detriment of their health’.26 The only option available was to place him in a subterranean cell beneath the courthouse, and to direct one of the hard-labour prisoners to act as his keeper while he received treatment from Dr Johnson. This cell was so damp and rat infested that Coates did not consider it fit for habitation even by a lunatic.27
A unique and intriguing figure among the early gaol inmates was an English-born chancer named William Phelps Pickering. He had arrived in the colony in March 1841 by way of Australia, where he had spent the previous four years as a small-time and not always scrupulous businessman, eventually serving six months for debt in Van Diemen’s Land. He then sailed for the Bay of Islands but soon followed the exodus south to the new capital in Auckland. There he represented himself as agent for an Australian bank and attempted to secure funds under its name. The deception was uncovered, and in October 1841 the 25-year-old Pickering, described as an unmarried merchant, was charged with false pretences. His jury found him guilty but with a recommendation for mercy. The interim Attorney-General, Francis Fisher, was unmoved, and sentenced Pickering to the maximum available penalty — transportation ‘beyond the seas’ for seven years.
To the judges who ordered it, and to most of the offenders thus sentenced (they were then officially termed convicts to distinguish them from felons and petty offenders), transportation was the most severe penalty in law short of a death sentence. William Pickering was the first New Zealand resident to receive such a sentence from a local court, and the press and public were outraged at this exceptionally harsh treatment of a man of some distinction.28
Van Diemen’s Land was then the only Australian colony prepared to accept convicts transported from New Zealand, so Pickering faced a return to the place where he had been imprisoned two years earlier. While the sheriff negotiated with ships’ masters for a suitable rate for his passage, the young fraudster spent two months in the fetid Auckland gaol, although he was permitted to walk up and down outside its walls during the day.
Eventually the schooner Sisters agreed to carry him, and in December 1841 he was led down the short and squalid stretch of Queen Street to the waterside with irons on his legs. Pickering had become known and liked in the town during his confinement there, and Aucklanders who witnessed this humiliating spectacle decried it as a ‘judicial display of cruelty’.29 Certainly, leg-irons were a severe punishment in themselves. They could weigh 14 kilograms and, according to another prisoner, as they were fixed in place, ‘each stroke of the riveting hammer causing a sensation of pain something like toothdrawing’.30
Pickering’s fate, however, was not yet sealed. En route to Australia his ship called at the Bay of Islands for firewood. By then he had evidently been released from his irons and acquired accomplices on board. He and a companion slipped down the ship’s side and made for shore in its dinghy. Pickering spent several weeks at large before he was captured and returned to Auckland Gaol, his ship having long since sailed. He then faced a second and much more tedious wait behind bars while a new passage was found for him. As an escaper, he was kept inside the gaol at all times and not permitted beyond its walls either for exercise or to work with the hard-labour men. He appears to have made use of this enforced idleness with his customary imagination and energy.
The town’s Anglican clergyman, Reverend John Churton, made regular pastoral visits to the gaol and conducted a Sunday service in one of the cells. Although he was ‘frequently gratified by finding a desire for spiritual knowledge and improvement’ among the prisoners, he was alarmed to discover that few of them, even the most devout, could read and write. In an early attempt at prison reform, Reverend Churton urged the acting Governor, Willoughby Shortland, to introduce literacy classes in the gaol and offered to personally provide ‘all books that may be required for the above purpose’.31
Shortland was cautiously encouraging, and invited the sheriff to respond to Churton’s offer. Coates suggested that all prisoners serving more than nine days should in future be required to attend classes in the gaol between six and seven in the evening. That extra time would be found by cutting their breakfast and supper times by half an hour each, so that ‘the hours of labor [sic; i.e. hard labour outside the gaol] may not be interfered with’. The schoolmaster, who would, it was presumed, be one of the inmates, would also conduct compulsory morning and evening prayers, and a Sunday Bible reading if the chaplain was unavailable.
Sheriff Coates advised Shortland that:
[A]t the present moment there is one person in the Gaol fully capable of undertaking the charge of the School, but his sentence is seven years transportation. The individual I allude to is ‘William Phelps Pickering.’ He has now been confined for thirteen months in the Gaol at the expense of the Government, during that period I have found him obedient and orderly, and with the exception of his escape from the vessel in which he was forwarded to Van Diemens Land I have had no cause of complaint against him. I would therefore humbly suggest that His Excellency might be induced to take the case into his consideration and to commute his sentence to imprisonment in this Colony with hard labor for such period as His Excellency may deem proper.32
This plea for mitigation of Pickering’s sentence was echoed by the local paper, which urged that ‘His Excellency might shew [sic] a little mercy. We understand [Pickering] has been very useful in gaol, in teaching the other prisoners to read and write … We trust Mr. Shortland will take this opportunity of manifesting that he has the wish, as well as the power to exercise the Divine attribute.’33 Later, Pickering even claimed that while held in the gaol he had saved the life of an assistant gaoler.34
At that time an intervention by the governor was the only provision, short of a royal pardon, that could give a convict early release from a sentence of transportation.35 Shortland advised the sheriff, ‘Whilst the convict Pickering shall remain in the Gaol at Auckland his services will be temporarily made use of at School … But I cannot provide him a pardon — his offence being greatly aggravated by his attempted escape.’36 This decision deprived the inmates of any further chance of education and ended Reverend Churton’s hopes for their school. In May 1843, Pickering was placed on board a Hobart-bound vessel for the second time; with him were 12 other men, most of them sentenced for relatively petty dishonesty offences. This time the voyage was without incident, and Van Diemen’s Land received its first New Zealand convicts.37
During his two terms in the Auckland gaol, William Pickering was popularly regarded as an ill-treated victim of the justice system who deserved more lenient treatment on the grounds both of his crime and his class. A similar dispensation was often extended to another category of offender, the debtors, who made up a significant element of the gaol population from its earliest years. They could be imprisoned for up to three months, the term generally being scaled to the amount they owed, and in that time could expect to receive better treatment than the common criminals.38
Sheriff Coates had requested separate accommodation in the gaol for debtors since at least March 1842, and several months later two debtors’ cells and a dayroom were added to the southern end of the prison.39 The debtors were still obliged to share cooking and dining facilities with the other prisoners, and the sheriff regarded this situation as quite inappropriate for offenders of their status. In 1843 he reported that they ‘will not, nor can it be expected that they should, associate with Felons to cook at their fire’.40
The following year a self-contained debtors’ prison was built just behind the main cellblock, along the bank of the Waihorotiu Creek. The perimeter fence there was low and insecure, so that ‘a very trifling hindrance is presented to the obstruction of the fugitive’.41 However, the debtors do not appear to have taken advantage of the opportunity for easy escape, and confinement was apparently not dreaded by the town’s defaulters. One early report describes ‘several flashy young men there, chatting, smoking, in a most enviable state of insouciance’.42
No separate provision at all was made for young offenders, whose numbers increased sharply after the unexpected arrival during 1842–43 of two shiploads of ‘Parkhurst boys’. These were former inmates of Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, Britain’s first and at that time only juvenile prison. In an especially heartless display of bureaucratic ineptitude, about 120 of these hapless boys, aged from 11 to 20, were transferred directly from Parkhurst to the other side of the world.43 The Colonial Office did not see fit to consult New Zealand’s fledgling administration over its decision, and citizens of Auckland were astonished and dismayed at the sight of so many undersized and unaccompanied new migrants trooping down the gangplank. ‘The chances are ten to one against them in such a country as this, where temptation and opportunity are so frequent, and so inviting,’ the Daily Southern Cross fulminated, ‘and being from early youth trained to vice, they naturally betake themselves to it with an appetite sharpened by the temporary restraint [of their emigration passage] … We are now being put in the position of receiving everything that is offensive in the convict system, without any advantage whatever.’44
Auckland Gaol at its most expansive. This 1855 ground plan shows Queen Street running from left to right across its lower edge and Victoria Street West along the right-hand side. ARCHIVES NEW ZEALAND, BLUE BOOK OF STATISTICS, 1855
The boys had been given some trade training while in prison in England but found no demand for their skills in the nascent township. Without support or funds they were left to fend for themselves, and the same newspaper report predicted that ‘when they are detected in their bad practices among the Europeans, they will immediately find their way into the native settlements’.45 Some destitute boys did indeed seek support from local Māori and were reported to be ‘living with the Natives at the native pahs in almost a state of nudity, or at best but covered with a rag of an old blanket’.46 Others were sent to labour in the copper mines on Great Barrier Island, and the more fortunate found work on Auckland’s roads, where, however, they were soon reduced to working in bare feet. ‘This is not by any means proper,’ declared the press. ‘If the Government work them, they ought to keep them in food and clothing.’47
Britain’s Colonial Office had earlier promised that no convicts would be transported to New Zealand, and this distinction over Australia was highly prized by Auckland’s respectable citizens. Since the Parkhurst boys had been released from prison under a conditional pardon, they were, strictly speaking, not transported convicts, but this point of law meant little to aggrieved Aucklanders. However, the colonial government was then critically short of funds and Shortland could do little beyond requesting the British government send no further shiploads of crime-prone youths. He reminded the House of Lords that while New Zealand was colonised ‘on the faith that it should never be inundated with a convict population … the inhabitants of Auckland are now in constant dread of thefts and robberies from the “reformed convicts” ’.48
Indeed, and unsurprisingly, many of the boys quickly resorted to vagrancy and petty thievery. For the first time since Auckland was established, bolts and bars were in demand to secure shops and houses, and the term ‘Parkhurst boy’ became ‘a proverb for lawlessness and vice’.49 The gaol received so many of them that by 1843 more than half its inmates were aged under 18. Dr Johnson found that they arrived there ‘in a most filthy state and generally out of health’, and some, at least, may have wished they had never left the relatively well-run conditions of Parkhurst.50
In December 1843, one young recalcitrant escaped from the lockup three times in succession and was sentenced to the rare punishment of a whipping. Thomas Somerville, the superintendent of the hard labour prisoners, was ordered to administer this sentence and, to his lasting credit, refused to do so. His humane insubordination was applauded by the local paper, which pronounced: ‘No man possessed of any self-respect could be expected to degrade himself’ by inflicting ‘such beastly and degrading punishment’.51 The paper’s editor questioned whether it was even lawful for the magistrate to order anyone ‘to be flogged in a free country’.52 Gaol records show that the whipping was carried out nevertheless.53
As it struggled to accommodate such unforeseen pressures as the influx of Parkhurst boys, the gaol’s regulations and physical structure evolved in a piecemeal and haphazard fashion. Management of the country’s gaols had not yet been placed under the control of any central authority, so it was left to individual and local initiative to determine how each institution should be run.54 Auckland Gaol was fortunate to come under the direction of a dedicated and, by the standards of the day, humane sheriff who developed regulations that were later emulated at other prisons throughout the country. This man was Percival Berrey, who replaced James Coates as sheriff in September 1843.
Berrey evidently had some legal training, as he had earlier been considered for the post of Auckland’s Crown Prosecutor. He drew up a comprehensive set of regulations designed to improve standards of order and hygiene. These listed the bedding and clothing allowance for each prisoner, including a ‘smock-frock’ or long over-shirt.55 The protocols for admission and discharge of prisoners, their routine tasks and obligations, and general rules of discipline and behaviour were laid down. Singing, conversation and ‘angry expressions’ were forbidden, as were ‘games and amusements of any kind’, and tobacco. The regulations changed very little over the next 10 years, although they were slightly relaxed from 1849, when the ban on talking was restricted to prohibiting ‘loud conversation’.56
The specified daily food ration consisted of four ounces (a little over 100 grams) of meat, 24 ounces of bread, 12 ounces of maize meal and 8 ounces of vegetables. Especially well-behaved prisoners, and those recovering from illness, might be permitted a larger ration of meat. Those in solitary confinement or facing some other punishment were limited to the daily bread ration and water. This spartan and monotonous diet remained largely unaltered until the 1860s. The midday meal was invariably a soup or stew made from the cheapest cuts of meat and cooked by inmates chosen for this task. Breakfast and supper consisted simply of bread and water. Not surprisingly, illness was frequent and medical authorities expressed repeated concerns at the nutritional inadequacies of the prisoners’ diet. In 1844 Dr Johnson applied successfully for ‘medical comforts’ — tea, sugar, rice, oatmeal, sago and wine — for his sick and convalescing patients.57
If the gaol’s regulations are a reliable guide, the daily routine, like the diet, was unchanging year-round. It began at 6 a.m., when the turnkey made his rounds, unlocking each of the cells. Inmates then had 15 minutes to dress and another 15 to sweep and wash their cells, ‘during which time the bedding is to be suspended in the airing yard and then folded in the smallest possible compass’.58 From 6.30 they washed themselves thoroughly under the observation of the officer on duty. At 7 a.m. they were assembled for roll call and a short prayer service by the gaoler, followed by the bread-and-water breakfast.
At 7.50 the hard-labour men were mustered by their overseer and issued their tools before setting out ‘in couples and in orderly fashion’ for the day’s work, either in the prison’s own stone-breaking yard or on public works beyond its walls. They were under the command of overseers who permitted no talking, especially to the public. Meanwhile the other able-bodied prisoners, including all women, carried out regular gaol duties such as cutting firewood for the cookhouse and preparing the midday meal.
In 1843 a prisoner named Tolley refused to go to work because ‘his shoes were so much broken he was afraid of hurting his feet, and exhibited his shoes to the court, which were certainly very bad’.59 Sheriff Berrey later obtained tools and materials for making the heavy hobnailed boots issued to the men who were engaged in stone-breaking, laying ditches, building jetties and other public works.60 Prisoners who possessed the skills to make and repair boots were greatly valued.
The men worked from eight until noon, and then returned to the gaol for their midday meal, when they were required to have ‘clean hands and face’. They worked a further four hours in the afternoon, then washed up and unrolled their neatly stacked bedding. A roll call at 5.45 was followed by more prayers and Bible readings and a search for contraband, succeeded by a final meal of bread and water. The prisoners were then locked up until morning. Apart from those sentenced to solitary confinement, prisoners of every kind — first offenders, hardened criminals, juveniles and the mentally unwell — spent the next 12 hours in each other’s company.
The only variation in the weekly routine was on Thursday, when the chaplain led a prayer service from 4 till 5 p.m., and Saturday, when the work day ended at noon, leaving the men the afternoon to wash and mend their clothes and generally prepare the prison for the following day. Sunday was a rest day, apart from the compulsory morning divine service. This ritual was held in a cell, there being no designated chapel, with the women, remand prisoners awaiting trial, petty criminals and felons seated on forms in separate groups. Ironically, this was one of the only occasions during this period when prisoners were ever classified into these categories.61 The Anglican chaplain led the service, although a Catholic priest visited every Saturday and ‘dissenting’ ministers occasionally.
The hard-labour men’s tasks were allocated by one of the town’s more influential officials, the Superintendent of Public Works. His entirely unpaid labour force should, in theory, have made a substantial contribution to the never-ending need for new works and maintenance. In practice, the hard-labour gangs achieved relatively little. The superintendent could never be sure how many men would turn up for each day’s duties, since most were sentenced only to short terms. The incidence of sickness among them was so high that at times half the potential labour force was in the gaol’s rudimentary infirmary. Those who did shuffle out to their appointed tasks were often, and understandably, unenthusiastic about performing them. Māori, in particular, ‘can seldom be trusted upon the road’, Berrey found, presumably because of the increased opportunities for escaping, and he suggested they should be put to dressing flax and weaving mats instead.62
‘The quantity of work performed by the men convicted of hard labour has not been more than equal to half the number of days they have been employed,’ the superintendent complained in 1843, and he recommended introducing ‘some coercive measure’ to improve the output.63 The sheriff had a range of such measures available to him, including the use of irons, the bread-and-water punishment diet, solitary confinement for up to 14 days at a time, or some combination of these.64 Berrey acknowledged that these penalties might not be sufficient to control his worst troublemakers, especially as he could not prevent other prisoners from supplementing the bread-and-water diet of men under discipline. He proposed adding a new refinement to the punishment regime, borrowed from British gaols — a heavy treadmill on which prisoners would be required to trudge for a fixed number of hours each day. As a bonus, he said, the treadmill could also grind corn for the prisoners’ meals, saving almost £3 a week on the food bill. At that rate, he estimated, the human-powered mill would pay for itself in eight months.65
This ingenious plan was not approved, and instead the sheriff was provided with two secure solitary cells beneath the courthouse. They were known as dark cells, suggesting that they had no windows or other light source. For as long as the town had no other facility for treating the severely mentally ill, these patients were also routinely held in gaol even when not charged with any crime. In 1849 William Yates, a 40-year-old ‘free person’, was held there ‘that he might have the benefit of attendance of the Colonial Surgeon’.66
As the thrusting little capital expanded in size and sophistication, its gaol sluggishly followed suit to eventually include a room for measuring, searching and recording new arrivals; a surgery; bedrooms for the turnkey and hard-labour overseer; and a house for the head gaoler. The prison yard was overlooked by a watch-house for the town’s police force, which also provided armed guards when required. A number of doves were housed on the premises, perhaps because their gentle cooing soothed the prisoners, ‘who found in feeding the birds a relief to the monotony of their existence’.67
More raucous barnyard noises came from the pound in a corner of the prison yard, a vital facility in a town whose properties were rarely fenced and where dogs, cattle, horses, goats and pigs roamed the streets at all times. Unclaimed animals were sold at auction, and ‘if a dog was not claimed within a day and a night it was killed’.68 Unclaimed goats, however, were released on Rangitoto Island, where they thrived and multiplied in the scrub-covered gullies.69
Sheriff Berrey frequently pressed the Colonial Secretary for further funds to improve his facilities, but there was little anyone could do to ameliorate the unhealthy conditions, given the gaol’s location in a damp valley floor, beside a stream whose waters had deteriorated to become an open sewer named the Ligar Canal. Diarrhoea and dysentery featured constantly among the complaints on the list of prisoners too ill to go out to work.70
When, in 1844, Governor FitzRoy asked his Colonial Surgeon to account for the constant sickness among the prison population, Dr Johnson ascribed the fault equally to the state of the prison population and to its site, compounded by ‘crowded and ill-ventilated cells and irregular food’. Some prisoners, he said, were ‘men of dissolute habits and enfeebled constitutions, most of them convicts from the other colonies whose sentence had expired’. These already debilitated men were further weakened, he acknowledged, by heavy labour in the cold, wet Auckland winter, and by their confinement in a gaol ‘on a swamp which although drained must certainly create damp in the buildings — also that the water at one time was unwholesome being impregnated with decayed vegetable matter, but it has been improved by sinking the well deeper … without doubt the various diseases have been prolonged from want of a proper hospital room and nurse.’ FitzRoy declared himself satisfied with these explanations, and appeared to feel that no further action was necessary.71
The gaol’s unhealthy surroundings were not noticeably improved after the walls of the polluted Ligar Canal collapsed and was rebuilt as a stone-lined and enclosed drain. This watercourse still ran through the gaol yard, directly behind its main cellblocks, reeking in warm weather and dank in winter, and periodically overflowing after heavy rain. In July 1845 a heavy flood carried away part of the fencing around the gaol. The Superintendent of Public Works directed the hard-labour men to replace the fences, but a few weeks later another winter flood caused more damage.72
By this time the outbreak of war in the north had filled Auckland’s streets with troops, and with refugees from Kororāreka who often spent their time ‘hanging about the town and getting drunk’.73 To accommodate further detachments of British troops sent out from Australia, the Albert Barracks was constructed on the hill above the gaol. A senior officer observed that of the 67 Māori who laid the stonework for its walls, all but one were both literate and sober.74 His own men were less reliable, and gaol records show that troops served terms of hard labour for offences such as ‘indecently exposing their person in a public highway with intent to insult a female’.75 In October 1847 the gaol held 21 soldiers serving hard-labour sentences, many of them, according to Berrey, ‘very desperate characters’. He pleaded to be able to transfer his military prisoners to the more secure Albert Barracks, and this request was eventually approved.76
Prison authorities made intermittent and tentative efforts to recognise the distinctive customs of Māori prisoners. For two years, between 1844 and 1846, Māori were exempted from imprisonment for debt on the grounds that their ignorance of the law meant they could not ‘justly or safely be subjected to the more severe penalties thereof’.77 When ‘Temenia’, a Ngāti Whātua man of some rank, was sentenced to three months with hard labour for stealing a cap from a general store, he was allowed to remain in the dock while his friends approached to hongi and cry over him. They took advantage of this opportunity to spirit him out of the courtroom before Berrey and his constables could do anything to prevent it. Armed troops from the barracks immediately launched a vigorous but ineffective search, and a few days later Temenia handed himself in. The incompetence of the military and the probity of the chiefly offender provided proof, said an Auckland newspaper, ‘that the inhabitants of this colony would be much safer under the actual protection of the natives as formerly [i.e. before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi], than under the present nominal Government of England’.78
In 1848 a prisoner named Ruaki was given six months with hard labour for stealing one of a pair of boots, his Pākehā accomplice stealing the other. After four months in gaol, Ruaki was gravely ill with dysentery and tuberculosis. ‘He appears to pine away under confinement and unless a change takes place I have no hesitation in asserting that his life is in danger,’ said Dr Johnson. Sheriff Berrey petitioned the governor to discharge this offender so that he could be cared for by his own people; Ruaki’s conduct had always been ‘unexceptionally good’, he wrote, and Governor George Grey agreed to the request.79
Some years later another Māori prisoner was also discharged early because of illness. Te Waere was gaoled for assault, although he had been declared insane some months earlier by two Auckland surgeons. Berrey pointed out that the town’s newly opened Hospital for the Insane was full but that Te Waere’s relatives were anxious to take him back to Rotorua where he could remain in their care. Again the governor agreed to a pardon, observing that the case had ‘caused some excitement among the natives’.80
In both these latter cases, it was to the advantage of the gaol staff to have the problematic prisoners removed from their care. In other circumstances where prisoners faced unjust or inhumane conditions, they had few means to complain of them or to apply for remedy. In 1846 the first ‘Ordinance for the Regulation of Prisons’ was enacted, authorising the appointment of Justices of the Peace to visit each gaol at least monthly to validate the punishments imposed within them, to hear complaints of unjust treatment from prisoners, and to send quarterly reports to the governor.81 Few such appointments seem to have been made in Auckland for the lifetime of the gaol, although grounds for complaint by the prisoners were not lacking.
For some months in 1848 the gaol held a woman whose adult life had been marked by degradation and misery. Irish-born Margaret Reardon lived with a former naval carpenter named Joseph Burns, and the couple and their two small children led a destitute and marginal existence marked by heavy drinking and violence. Local Māori felt sufficiently sorry for Reardon that they offered to help her plant a potato crop if she left Burns.82 In late 1847 Burns, familiar with naval routines, robbed a naval lieutenant named Snow of his pay. In the hope of throwing suspicion of the crime on Māori, Burns killed Snow and his family, mutilated their bodies and burned down their house on Auckland’s North Shore.83 Reardon fled from the shack where they had been living, taking their children with her, but Burns found her and attempted to cut her throat with a razor.84 Under further duress from her husband, she gave evidence in court that implicated a friend for his crimes. However, she later recanted, and her revised evidence saw Burns executed. In a theatrical demonstration of judicial retribution, the hanging was carried out on the site of his murders, before a crowd who had sailed across the harbour for the occasion in a flotilla of small vessels.
Four months later Reardon, whom newspapers referred to as Burns’ ‘miserable concubine’, was tried for perjury. She had no lawyer to defend her, and was found guilty and sentenced to transportation for seven years. She begged to be imprisoned in Auckland instead, even for an indefinite term, so that she could remain near her children. Chief Justice William Martin was unmoved, proclaiming that her earlier attempt to implicate others in the murders showed a ‘frightful degree of depravity’.85 Margaret Reardon was shipped to Van Diemen’s Land with seven other convicts in October 1848, the only woman to receive a sentence of transportation from New Zealand.86
By 1849 two rooms in the original Auckland Gaol cellblock had been converted into hospital rooms, one for regular patients and the other for the insane. The quality of care given to those patients was dependent largely on the other inmates selected to provide it. In February 1849 the post of ‘cook and nurse tender’ in the hospital was held by a court-martialled soldier of the 58th Regiment named Edward Sayers. Three months later his commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Wynyard, complained that Sayers was being indulged with special privileges such as tea and sugar, and was generally treated with ‘such leniency as amounts to an encouragement for crime’.
Inquiries revealed a very different story. The Colonial Surgeon reported that Sayers was ‘the most attentive man to his duties (which are extremely arduous) of any who has had the like to perform’, and explained that he had ordered Sayers to be given the tea and sugar ‘as medical comforts, deeming it necessary for his health whilst engaged in such severe duties’. Gaoler McElwain believed that the job of cook and nurse tender in the hospital was ‘the most severe duty to which any prisoner sentenced to hard labour could be put to’ and that ‘not a man in the gaol would do the duties that Sayers does’. Some idea of those duties was provided by McElwain’s turnkey. Sayers, he said, ‘is continually obliged to get out of his bed at night to attend the sick’ and ‘is very often up all night’. Furthermore, he had to clean the hospital thoroughly every day, a duty made particularly unpleasant by an insane patient ‘who is constantly dirtying the floors by relieving himself in the room’. Wynyard apparently declined to pursue the matter further.87
Conditions for female prisoners in the gaol improved very slightly with the addition of two women’s cells, excavated from a cellar space on the south side of the courthouse. They were tiny, very dark and poorly ventilated, with a ceiling height of less than 2 metres, yet by 1851 they were required to hold as many as three female prisoners at a time. These might include women breastfeeding their children, or ‘in daily expectation of confinement’ (confinement in this case meaning giving birth).88 Those using the courthouse complained strongly of the noxious odours rising through the floor from the bodily wastes of the inmates housed beneath it. Chief Justice Sir George Arney said that after Supreme Court sittings there he experienced ‘lassitude, vertigo, and a total prostration of bodily and mental vigour’, so the effect on those held in the cells themselves must have been far worse.89 The gaol still employed no matron or female attendant, and provided no separate area for women patients in its hospital cells.
Sheriff Berrey struggled vainly to defend such facilities and his administration of them. The subterranean women’s cells had been built, he said, to hold ‘a particular class of prisoners, namely drunken women with short sentences’, yet they were now occupied by women serving up to two years for crimes such as theft. The sheriff’s greatest concern was that ‘contact with male prisoners cannot be prevented’, since the fence surrounding the female cells was no longer adequate for its purpose.90 The truth, however, was that the entire gaol was a dilapidated facility and entirely unfit for its function. Its low-lying position alongside a drain choked with sewage and other wastes, and the constant overcrowding that saw criminals and lunatics packed together in cramped, shared cells created severe health risks, especially for those serving the longest sentences.91 During 1852 the annual inmate total reached almost 400, and in November of that year alone Berrey had 39 prisoners under his care. Although each of them was nominally entitled to two blankets, he had only 53 blankets to issue in total.92
These conditions were seen as a disgrace in a town now making self-conscious claims to respectability. In an 1853 editorial on ‘that inhuman kennel the Queen-street Gaol’, the Daily Southern Cross spared its readers no unpleasant detail of ‘the barbarous and perilous manner in which criminals and lunatics still continue to be packed within its narrow and fetid cells’, including the appalling odours released when the turnkey opened up those cells each morning. ‘In its very best condition, [the gaol] was but a confined and ill-contrived wooden structure. In its present, it is a rotten and ruinous hovel, overrun with rats, and only fit to be used as a place of torture.’
The article was a bitter corrective for those pious colonists who liked to think their young country had learned from the evils of England’s workhouses and prisons. Conditions in Auckland’s gaol compared dismally, claimed the newspaper, with those in England or even with the notoriously brutal Port Arthur penal settlement in Van Diemen’s Land: ‘We have received communications describing the state of the Auckland Gaol as absolutely revolting to humanity … One important measure of relief may, we believe, be easily and immediately afforded, and that is by removal of the insane to the Asylum provided by public benevolence for their reception.’93
Auckland’s long-promised Hospital for the Insane, within the grounds of the general hospital in Auckland Domain, had just been completed, and was presumably in a position to relieve the gaol of some of its most troublesome inmates. The criminal and violent mentally ill, however, were still held in the gaol ‘during Her Majesty’s pleasure’ (that is, indefinitely), rather than in the hospital. Justice Arney reported that one of these unfortunate men made a useful contribution to gaol hygiene, since he ‘indulges his propensity to sweep away or gather up every particle of incumbrance [sic] from the ground of the airing yard or the flooring of the rooms’.94
Later in 1853 one of the most significant developments in penal policy to that date contrived to add a much greater burden to the already overloaded gaol facilities. Ever since William Pickering stumbled down Queen Street in irons in 1843, the practice of transportation had enabled the colony to decant its most troublesome and longest-serving convicts offshore. New Zealand preserved this useful outlet for disposing of its least desirable citizens even as it firmly refused to accept the transported convicts of the mother country. The Parkhurst boys who arrived in 1842–43 were a deeply regretted and sole exception to this, one of the colony’s central principles. In 1845, and periodically thereafter, the British government asked New Zealand, as well as Australia, to accept shipments of convicts under the ticket-of-leave system. These were prisoners who, after long periods of hard labour in Britain, were released to the colonies under strict conditions specifying where they could live and work. New Zealanders objected strongly to this request. The paroled convicts could not be controlled, let alone reformed, in New Zealand, they cried, but instead would escape into the trackless bush. Governor Grey was especially opposed to receiving Irish political prisoners who, he thought, would have ‘an irresistible temptation’ to make their way to remote Māori communities and cohabit with their women.95
The idiosyncratic Grey also noted the hypocrisy of ‘sending our convicts from our own shores to those of another colony, at the expense of Great Britain, protesting at the same time against the felons of other countries being sent here’. He suggested that if New Zealand retained its most serious offenders within its own penal institutions, the colony would have much stronger grounds for refusing to accept hardened criminals from Britain and Ireland.96 However, transportation to Van Diemen’s Land was a politically popular option, and the courts continued to impose this sentence for some years in the face of the Colonial Office’s rising indignation.
Men were transported for years for nothing more serious than stealing small articles of clothing. The theft of farm animals was treated more harshly still, and in 1849 Justice Martin gave a total of 35 years’ transportation to an Auckland butcher for what he called ‘great and mischievous’ crimes — the theft of four cattle.97 A man could even be transported ‘for the term of his natural life’ — a sentence imposed on a 20-year-old corporal of the 58th Regiment for killing another soldier in the Auckland barracks. Another convict, Jeremiah Cooper, described in the court report as ‘a man of colour’, was sentenced to transportation for life for the attempted murder of Captain Abner Tucker in the Bay of Islands.
Auckland Gaol often held convicts from other parts of the country, since an affordable berth to Van Diemen’s Land was more likely to be chartered in Auckland than in any other port. These convicts were thus separated from their friends and families during the grim weeks and months while they waited for their departure, with little to do but contemplate their fate. In that time they received harsher treatment than other inmates. They were not permitted to work outside the gaol with the hard-labour men for fear they might escape, and in the earliest years were not even permitted to exercise in the yard.
This state of tedium and torment proved the undoing of a young Nelson man, the father of three children, named Owen Connor. He was sentenced to transportation for 10 years for stealing a bullock for food, and sent up to Auckland for several months to await a vessel bound for Port Arthur. Just one day before his ship was due to embark, Governor FitzRoy issued him a pardon. It came too late, since Connor had by then lost his mind.
Although now technically a free man, Connor seemed likely to remain in gaol indefinitely.98 He required the constant attention of a keeper, said Sheriff Berrey, as it was not just unsafe to approach him ‘but he keeps the prison and its neighbourhood in an uproar day and night’.99 In May 1846, while he and his cell were being cleaned, Connor escaped by rushing around to the debtors’ yard and leaping the fence. The gaoler quickly recaptured him, although ‘at considerable risk to his life’. The medical attendant thought Connor ‘permanently insane and of a most ferocious temper’ and suggested ‘some strong man [i.e. another inmate] to have the charge of him and to have authority to procure a straitjacket for him’.100 Connor does not appear to have died in the gaol, but his eventual fate is unknown.
In 1850 the British government informed its high-minded South Pacific colony that transportations to Van Diemen’s Land must cease from 1853. The colony’s Attorney-General responded by drafting the Secondary Punishment Act, which replaced transportation with a new sentence of penal servitude, meaning imprisonment within New Zealand while ‘employed on the roads or public works, or otherwise … kept to hard labour’.101 The recommended terms for this new sentence were longer than the conventional hard-labour sentences already handed out for regular felons, although somewhat shorter than the terms they replaced. Transportation for up to 10 years, for example, was replaced by penal servitude for four to six years. In both cases, however, a life sentence meant nothing less than that (unless commuted by exercise of the royal prerogative of mercy, i.e. by order of the sovereign’s representative, the Governor-General).
The Secondary Punishment Act would ensure that New Zealand’s penal policy for its serious offenders finally conformed to Britain’s stipulations. However, the Act would also require the size and security of existing prison facilities to be greatly expanded to enable them to manage these long-serving, escape-prone prisoners. The country’s prisons, including Auckland Gaol, were at that time under the control of their various provincial governments, which baulked at the expense of such remedial work. The Act was therefore deferred until 1855 to give the provinces time to carry out the vital upgrading.
In the interim, New Zealand judges handed out the dreaded sentence of transportation more freely than ever. The convicts thus sentenced were not subsequently transported, but held in gaol awaiting transfer to the planned new facilities where they would serve out their replacement sentences of penal servitude.102 In June 1854, a Māori named Taraiwaru was given seven years’ transportation for theft, one of the last convicts to receive this sentence from a New Zealand civil court. Three months later the practice of transportation ‘beyond the seas’ was formally ended by the implementation of the Secondary Punishment Act.
Taraiwaru did not survive for long after his sentencing, dying after just a few months in Auckland’s gaol. He had been a ‘strong, hale man’ when he entered the gaol, and a year later Māori in his district of Hauraki continued to feel troubled at the circumstances of his death.103
The passing of the Secondary Punishment Act had a further outcome, equally problematic for the overcrowded, understaffed and poorly equipped Auckland Gaol. It immediately became apparent that the long-established practice of sending hard-labour prisoners outside the gaol to carry out useful public works was not legal, since the power to order this activity was held by central government, while the gaols themselves had passed under the authority of provincial governments. For the next two years, until new legislation authorised the outside projects, the hard-labour men remained within the gaol at all times and spent their working hours crushing rocks in the stoneyard.104 The gaol’s annual returns record this dramatic transformation in the daily routine. During 1852 a total of 303 men worked at hard labour outside the prison’s walls. Two years later none did.105 Instead they milled around inside the yards, seeking to avoid the overseer’s eye and speculating about what they could expect from the new prison under construction on the southern fringe of the town.
Although not much more than 10 years old, the gaol was clearly beyond hope of renovation, and both its inmates and staff longed for the day when it was vacated. Until then, its decrepit state made escapes easy and tempting. Breaking through the perimeter fence was as simple as pulling away the boards, since in places the uprights were ‘too rotten to hold a nail’.106 Men broke out knowing that recapture, followed by solitary confinement and bread and water, was almost inevitable.
On a Sunday morning in the spring of 1855 the exercise yard held more than 70 prisoners, including 13 convicts who would formerly have been transported and who had ‘the highest pre-eminence in crime’. A remand prisoner named Wilson was awaiting trial for larceny and was permitted to work at his trade while in gaol in order to support his family. He could also receive meals from the outside. On this Sunday his wife arrived as usual with his breakfast. As the assistant turnkey opened the gate to the exercise yard to receive the steaming plate, Wilson and four other inmates rushed through it. The unfortunate turnkey, ‘a steady, sober man’, was forced to remain at his post to ensure that none of the other prisoners followed them. The police were called out immediately and by the end of the day four of the men had been recaptured, but the fifth, John Noble, was still at large a month later.107
In his report on the incident, Sheriff O’Brien attempted to describe the near-impossibility of maintaining security in the period after transportation. ‘I labor [sic] under disadvantages which my predecessor did not; with an increased Gaol establishment and criminals of a deeper dye to watch over, every vigilance should be used.’108 It must have been a considerable relief when, in 1856, the first of the penal servitude and hard-labour men were transferred to a brand-new prison. Yet it strains credulity to note that the huddle of decaying wooden structures in Queen Street remained in constant use for a further 10 years, congregating the town’s drunks, prostitutes, petty thieves, vagrants, lunatics, debtors and children together, as many as 14 to a cell.
Auckland’s coroner revealed that the Queen Street Gaol inmates ‘are in danger of their lives by night for the buildings being of wood, in the event of a fire breaking out many of them would be roasted alive before the jails and cells could be entered and the inmates rescued’.109 A few years later the prison doctor suggested that a conflagration would be welcome if it could be confined to the gaol alone, since ‘[i]ts total destruction would be of greatest service’. Another doctor stated that it was ‘disgraceful to put people there, particularly poor debtors … being built beside a large open sewer, they must suffer from malaria’.110 Perhaps the most damning account of all came from Chief Justice Sir George Arney, who made a visit of inspection to ‘the revolting place with its foul odour and its promiscuous intermixture of men and women. Every kind of sexual activity from rape to sodomy punctuate the night-time lockup [and] for want of available facilities prisoners had to urinate and defecate on the cell floor.’111
The inmates at this time may have included four boys serving two months with hard labour for stealing from a house in Official Bay. The youngest was only eight, and in the dock his head barely showed above the railing. The magistrate noted with regret that when boys of this age went to gaol, they ‘came out worse than they went in, in consequence of the impossibility of keeping them separated’ from the older prisoners.112
The austere and precise Justice Arney went so far as to measure the gaol cells to ensure that his excoriations were soundly based. The two female cells beneath the Supreme Court, he discovered, each measured ‘11 feet 9 inches by 5 feet 2 inches, and are six feet from floor to ceiling’. Three or four women were sometimes confined in this space, leading Arney to conclude that ‘they must be packed almost as merchants pack herrings, lengthwise’. His persistence ultimately saw a matron, ‘a highly respectable woman’, appointed to take charge of the female inmates, but she could do little to improve the living conditions of those women whose cell overlooked the ‘filthy ditch’ running through the yard, choked with the refuse of the gaol’s privies and ‘the accumulated offal and sewage of the surrounding neighbourhood … As many as six and eight have at times slept therein at night, with a child or two, as it may happen, at the breast.’113
Many of the cells leaked in rainy weather, yet when one desperate debtor cut a small hole in the floor to drain off the foul water that had accumulated in his cell, he was severely punished and forced to sleep out in the passage where, Justice Arney said, quoting an imprisoned debtor, ‘four men are nightly packed like swine’.114 Why the Provincial Council continued to tolerate such conditions in a town whose wealth and population were rapidly increasing was a subject of mystery and speculation, but Justice Arney himself suggested that the Council hoped to purchase the gaol site and in the meantime was unwilling to carry out any improvements that might increase the value of the land. ‘Nor will the plea of economy hold good, since they have expressed themselves willing to spend from £10,000 to £20,000 on a new Supreme Court.’115
This civic abomination continued to serve as the site of Auckland’s public executions. On four occasions during the 1850s a condemned man was marched to a gallows erected outside its gates, and from the scaffold, above the bayonets of the armed guard arrayed in front of him, looked out at the crowd of spectators assembled to see what the New Zealand Herald called ‘the extreme penalty of the law’ carried into effect.116 The last of these men, John Killey, was executed in 1858, and public hangings were abolished later that year.
On a night in December 1863 a summer storm sent a flood of water a metre deep through the cells. ‘By 11 o’clock the water rose so high that men of 6 ft stature made their way to the safety of the guardhouse with difficulty, while persons of minor inches had to swim for it. A child of four years of age had a very narrow escape, it being extremely difficult to rescue him in the dark.’117 This incident prompted yet another crusading editor to flex his pen and deploy his choicest adjectives against this ongoing affront to public decency: ‘Under its pestilential roof the Court undergoes some of the sufferings of the Black Hole of Calcutta. When is this filthy and feculent [i.e. stinking] hovel, a disgrace to the finest street of the finest city of New Zealand, likely to be removed?’118
The answer, it transpired, was almost two wretched years later, in November 1865, when the last prisoners were moved to the new prison.119 The following year local businessmen arranged to use the yard of the abandoned gaol for a temporary market, but before the first stalls could be put in place a macabre excavation was required. The six men hanged outside the gaol had all been buried in its yard and only the body of the first of them, Maketu, had later been removed. ‘Respect for public decency,’ thought the New Zealand Herald, ‘should prompt the removal of the graves and the disturbance of the remains which they enclosed.’ Accordingly, in a strange precursor to the midnight exhumations of 125 years later, a group of men entered the gaol yard ‘between twelve and one of yesterday morning’, presumably a time chosen to spare the feelings of passersby. They disinterred the bodies and reburied them ‘in a remote and unused spot in Symonds-street cemetery’.120
That late-night ceremony finally brought to a close one of the most shameful and reviled institutions of the town originally named for Governor Hobson’s English patron, who held the title of Earl of Auckland. In a further tribute, Hobson gave the Earl’s attractive family name to the truncated extinct volcano, with a conical crater at its heart, which overlooked the town’s southern fringe. This gentle and accessible summit, the chosen location for the new prison, was named Mount Eden.