Facebook post #045 (Nov 2020)
In 1856, there was a sensational trial at the Birmingham assizes. Lt. William Austin had replaced the well-known reformer Alexander Maconochie as governor of the Borough Gaol. Maconochie, the prison’s first governor, had been retired due to the perceived laxness of his regime. By contrast, his former deputy Austin had instituted a reign of terror. A Royal Commission had investigated a whistle blower’s accounts of the inhumane treatment of skinny 15-year old, Edward Andrews, convicted of throwing stones, scrumping apples and stealing a piece of beef. He had been punished cruelly when he couldn’t manage the routine hard labour of endlessly cranking a weight on a machine, and had committed suicide. Austin was himself jailed.
His replacement as governor at Winson Green (later HMP Birmingham) was David Meaden, my gt-gt-gt-grandfather. He was a former warder at Pentonville and Parkhurst prisons, and likely to have been present when Queen Victoria visited Parkhurst in 1845. She remarked on the loneliness of the boys in the routine initial solitary confinement, and with more satisfaction on the practical skills they learned. 1500 boys were sent to Australia and New Zealand from Parkhurst. During their training, the boys were guarded in the fields by soldiers with muskets and bayonets, presumably including David.
David’s first wife was Eliza Waddilove, daughter of ‘gentleman’ James Waddilove and sister-in-law of the unfortunate Zillah from last week’s post. Her first husband had died in Lambeth at age 30, a couple of years after they lost their only child. She had two daughters with David, and died at age 33. The elder daughter was Eliza Meaden Meaden, David clearly not wanting her to lose her identity when she married!
When he married Eliza, David was the son of a farming family from Blandford in Dorset. He had enlisted in the Life Guards (pic is contemporary), possibly via the Dorset Yeomanry Cavalry. He was based in the Regent Park Barracks (pictured), designed by John Nash. Accommodation was, however – as too often over the years – sub-standard. By the time Eliza jr was born, he was a different sort of guard – on the London & Birmingham Railway!
David remarried on Portsea Island in 1843, and was a prison officer by 1845. He went on to be ‘an active and zealous officer’ at Winson Green, but was replaced when the government took over the prison in 1878, possibly as a result of three prisoners escaping the previous year.
In 1964, ‘great train robber’ Charlie Wilson escaped from the prison. In 1995, Fred West killed himself there. In the same year, the prison was accused of being too lax by its own Board of Governors. In 2018, it was taken over by the government after a privatised regime of ‘violence, drugs and squalor’.
There is a picture of the cranking machine, tightened by ‘screws’ (!) here: https://www.facebook.com/…/a.21454939…/1597193173771813/
