Winter 1859 rolled into spring 1860. A cornerstone had been laid, but nearly three years after William Thomas’s plans for Toronto’s new jail based on “Pentonville England Reformatory Prison” had been submitted to the city’s Committee on Police and Prisons, building operations remained at a complete standstill.
In April 1860, for some unfathomable reason, the committee submitted Thomas’s plans to the Provincial Prison Inspectors. (This should probably read “resubmitted,” as at the outset the province must surely have given his designs its stamp of approval.) These gentlemen were based in Kingston, and, as it so happened, they had a prison on their very own doorstep: the Kingston Penitentiary, which had been receiving rave reviews.
To illustrate: After visiting the United States, famous author Charles Dickens had breezed through Kingston during his Great American Tour of 1842. He was not impressed with the town (“Indeed, it may be said of Kingston, that one half of it appears to be burnt down, and the other half not to be built up”), but he loved the prison: “There is an admirable jail here, well and wisely governed, and excellently regulated, in every respect. The men were employed as shoemakers, ropemakers, blacksmiths, tailors, carpenters, and stonecutters; and in building a new prison, which was pretty far advanced towards completion. The female prisoners were occupied in needlework.”
Such a glowing testimonial could hardly have failed to capture the inspectors’ attention, although, as J. Alex Edmison dryly commented in a short history of the penitentiary written in 1954: “I am sure that when the author of Little Dorrit visited the prison they did not put on a special flogging of Antoine, aged eight, or Elizabeth, aged twelve.” (Fortunately, these inhumane practices were eventually discontinued.)
A massive limestone structure that has dominated the lakefront in Kingston for more than 180 years, this institution, which housed prisoners with long-term sentences, was British North America’s first true penitentiary. For upward of a century, it served as the model for other federal prisons in Canada. Originally called the Provincial Penitentiary of the Province of Upper Canada, and now called the Kingston Pen for short, it opened its doors to its first six unwilling occupants in June 1835. The large cellblock contained 154 cells, which originally measured twenty-nine inches wide by eight feet deep by just over six-and-a-half feet high. When first built, the compound was surrounded by a tall wooden picket fence, and by the late 1840s there were industrial shops on site for various trades, such as blacksmithing, carpentry, and tailoring. Way back, there were also a large farm and stone quarries, making the institution totally self-sufficient.
Kingston Pen was modelled on Auburn Prison in New York; Pentonville on the competing Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. Charles Dickens, you will remember, had visited Eastern earlier on in his travels and found it hateful. An 1838 essay on prison discipline by college professor Francis Lieber lays out clearly the difference between the two penological models:
The Auburn system (so called because it is most fully, and, as some think, most successfully, carried out at the penitentiary at Auburn, New York) separates the convicts by night, but suffers them to work together during the day, requiring however the most rigid non-intercourse. Hence it is also called the social and the silent system. The Pennsylvania system … separates each convict from the presence of his fellows … secluding him night and day from all intercourse with the world.… Hence it is called the separate or solitary system.
The prison inspectors in Kingston now proposed scrapping the existing plans for the Toronto Jail, which were based on the separate system (complete and utter mind-numbing isolation of prisoners at all times) in favour of one modelled on the social system (communal work in silence during the day; confinement in tiny, solitary cells at night). The two ideologies were alike in insisting on the strictest discipline at all times.
What could have motivated the inspectors to rethink the structure, and the underlying penal philosophy, of Toronto’s jail? Were they swayed by Dickens’s persuasive words, or were they patriots looking for a superlative “made in the Province of Canada” prison to use as a template? Whatever their reasons, they effectively moved the goalposts halfway through the game. As noted in the Toronto city council minutes in May 1860: “The Provincial Prison Inspectors dissented from and objected to the plan of the Pentonville Prison, England, from which the plans of the Toronto gaol have, in part, been adopted.”
And while they were at it, they also changed the basic configuration of the cells: “The Inspectors object to the construction of the cells along the outer walls of the building and require that the same shall be constructed in the centre, with the hall, or keeper’s walk, between them and the outer walls.” Although this new arrangement overturned the reformers’ fundamental architectural requirement of a clear view down the centre of the cells to ensure constant surveillance, the inspectors noted that it would offer greater security against prisoner escapes. It is possible that they had been influenced by the May 1860 Quebec Memorandum of the Board of Inspectors of Asylums and Prisons, which stated that “there should be two rows of cells in each story placed back to back; they should open upon spacious corridors, well heated, well lighted and well ventilated.”
The ground floor plan of the Toronto Jail, from the original set drawn up between 1857 and 1859 and based on Pentonville Prison in London, England. These plans were rejected in 1860 after construction of the building had already begun, and William Thomas was obliged to redraw and resubmit his designs.
Puzzlingly, the inspectors also condemned the “radiating principle on which the rear wings had been originally projected.” These wings had been considered but never included in the designs. Having no alternative, the Toronto city council acceded to these demands, and it was back to the drawing board for Thomas.
Once Thomas had painstakingly redrawn the plans, he made the journey to Kingston himself in July 1860 to submit them. At the same time, he requested an additional $20,000 to cover the expense of changing the plans and redoing the foundations.
By November, the din of dysfunction in the Toronto city council had become deafening, and Thomas found himself in the excruciating position of having his professional integrity and decisions challenged and ridiculed by a hostile member of the city council.
The man in question was James J. Vance, alderman for St. David’s Ward, located just west of the Don River, and chairman of the city council’s Board of Gaol Inspectors. Vance was a blustering bully. When on one occasion a fellow alderman proposed that the board should report on proposed changes to the plans of the jail and any costs that might ensue, Vance replied that he would ignore any motion and bring in the reports in his own good time. In fact, he declared, if his fellow alderman tried to force the issue, he would “tear the reports to atoms and strew the pieces on the Council floor before the members.”
Vance was more than merely quarrelsome: he was a violent man, well known to police in Toronto. The press reported in great detail that during his term of office he was fined $10 plus costs for brutally assaulting a man “with his clenched hand, which knocked him down, and when deponent was down he kicked him, which kick broke four of his teeth.” There were also credible allegations swirling about that Vance was quite comfortable accepting bribes from tradesmen and contractors.
Vance had been a constant thorn in William Thomas’s side. Against Thomas’s objections, he proposed that white brick should be used instead of stone for the front façade of the central block of the jail. Fellow members of the council were outraged. “If the centre was built of brick the effect might be to make the Gaol a laughing stock,” protested one. While they had Thomas as the architect, they “ought to abide by his opinion,” said another. “Before five years were passed the Gaol would be a disgrace to the City if the proposed alteration were made,” warned a third.
Obviously realizing he could not win that particular battle, Vance shifted his attack to the heating and ventilation systems. Thomas proposed to heat the whole building with steam generated from just two boilers, scoffed Vance. And for ventilation, to erect a brick shaft at great expense. Over a twenty-year period, the cost of fuel alone would be enough to build another whole jail building. “Such were the Architect’s absurdities,” he concluded. “Why, the man was mad!”
As Thomas explained in a letter, “of the different methods now in use in heating buildings, I believe it will be found that steam combines all the advantages of the best, without the defects of others.” Vance and the board vetoed this. “Upon mature consideration the Board … abandoned the hot-air system on account of its inadaptibility [sic] to the resources of the gaol, the difficulty of obtaining a water supply for steam usage being great.”
By this time Thomas’s health was failing fast, and these personal and professional insults must have been the last straw.
On December 27, 1860, a bold headline in the Globe regretted the DEATH OF MR. THOMAS, “a well-known and highly respected architect, long resident in this city.” Mr. Thomas, the paper reminded its readers, “will be remembered, not only for his kindly social qualities which endeared him to a numerous circle of friends, but for the services which he has rendered to the architecture of Toronto. To him we owe some of the most tasteful buildings of which our city can boast.”
William Thomas, master architect, dead at sixty-one.
The death of Thomas, who was survived by his wife and six of ten children, could hardly have come as a shock to his family and friends. He was diabetic, described as having suffered from “long and continued illness.” In late 1857, Thomas and his wife had made a last, desperate trip back to England in the vain hope of finding some relief from his debilitating disease.
With his younger son Cyrus Pole Thomas taking care of family business out east, the torch was passed to William Tutin Thomas to complete the thankless job their father had started three years earlier.