KINGSTON PENITENTIARY, by Y S Lee

When giving people directions to my house, I sometimes say, "Turn right at the Penitentiary." They usually think I'm joking, but in fact I'm entirely serious. I live within view of Kingston Penitentiary, Canada’s oldest and most notorious prison. 

Kingston Penitentiary, c. 1901 (photo from "Souvenir views of the city of Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and the Thousand Islands, River St. Lawrence", 1901, via wikipedia)

Kingston Penitentiary was built in 1833-34, using blocks of limestone quarried by convict labour. (Actually, the building is older than the country itself: until Canada’s Confederation in 1867, the city of Kingston and its penitentiary were located in the British colony of Upper Canada.) When Charles Dickens visited Kingston in 1842, he found the town distinctly underwhelming. It had just suffered a disastrous fire that razed large portions of the city centre, including City Hall and the public market. Dickens’s rather sniffy assessment? “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.”

He must have cheered up as he drove westward along the shores of Lake Ontario, because when he reached the nearly-new Penitentiary, Dickens had nothing but praise for it: “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.” I’m willing to bet that everything was extra-tidy and well-organized that day, for the celebrity visit. 

This building houses the woodworking and machine shops for inmate instruction. (photo credit: Boardhead, via wikipedia)

Dickens’s impression of the prison might seem excessively rosy but the Pen was a newer facility, built along more humane principles. For example, teaching trades to inmates aimed to reduce recidivism. However, prisoners were also subject to very strict discipline: inmates “must not exchange a word with one another under any pretence whatever”. Further, they “must not exchange looks, wink, laugh, nod or gesticulate to each other”. Inmates were flogged for breaking these rules. At the time of Dickens’s visit, there were roughly 400 inmates, including 24 females. The women were housed in “the Female Department”, a separate building within the grounds, until a new facility was built for them in 1934.

Some of the nineteenth-century inmates were children: there is a record of Antoine Boucher, an eight-year-old boy, who was sentenced to either two or three years’ imprisonment (my sources differ) in 1845. A twelve-year-old named Elizabeth Breen is also on record as having been flogged, as well as an eleven-year-old called Alex Lafleur. His offense? Speaking in French.

In its early days, those employed at KP were required to live within earshot of its bell. In the event of an emergency, the bell was rung and all employees mustered to help out.

An aerial view of Kingston Penitentiary, ca. 1919 (photo credit: Library & Archives Canada, MIKAN no. 3259972, via wikipedia)

The penitentiary was in continuous use for 178 years until it was closed in 2013. Kingston Penitentiary was designated a National Historic Site in 1990 – an honour that sat uncomfortably with its use as a maximum-security jail. Because of its historical significance, it can’t be razed. There’s already a national penitentiary museum across the street, in the former warden’s Victorian red-brick home. And who on earth would buy a condo retrofitted into a place of such suffering? Until someone figures out how to use the space (the site is next to a harbour and looks out onto Wolfe Island, the largest of the Thousand Islands) there it stands, a constant reminder of the gritty and shameful aspects of our history.

(In October 2013, I was privileged to take a tour of the now-empty prison with my camera. If you’d like to know more, please check out Kingston Penitentiary, Part 1 and Kingston Penitentiary, Part 2 at my personal blog.)

Eglantyne Jebb, The Woman Who Saved the Children, by Clare Mulley

Ninety-five years ago this month, in May 1919, a remarkable woman called Eglantyne Jebb, and her sister, Dorothy Buxton, changed the world.

Many years ago, I worked as a rather struggling corporate fundraiser at Save the Children. One day I came across a line written by Eglantyne, the charity’s founder, when she was also finding it hard work to raise funds. ‘The world is not ungenerous’ Eglantyne wrote, ‘but unimaginative and very busy’. That struck a chord with me, and I became rather intrigued about this woman, who spoke with such immediacy but who is so little known today.

Eglantyne Jebb at her Save the Children desk, c.1921

In 2001 I went on maternity leave to have my first child - thereby showing far less dedication to the cause than Eglantyne, who never had children of her own and worked tirelessly for the charity until she died. As I had two weeks before my due date, I decided to spend a some time finding out a bit more about Eglantyne.

Looking through the papers in Save the Children's archive, then in the charity’s basement, I came across the leaflet below. Although entitled ‘A Staving Baby’, the photograph actually shows a little girl from Austria who is two-and-a-half year old. Her disproportionately large head, compared to her body, is the result of malnutrition.

Eglantyne's leaflet, 1919

In the top right hand corner you can just see Eglantyne’s scribbled word ‘suppressed!’ The exclamation mark shows her personal indignation at the policy of the British Liberal government to continue the economic blockade to Europe after the First World War as a means of pushing through the harsh peace terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Eglantyne believed that the British public was unaware of the terrible human cost of this policy and set out to change things.

In the spring of 1919 she was handing out these leaflets in London's Trafalgar Square, a traditional site for public protest. One account even has her chalking up the pavements with her messages ‘Fight the Famine’ and ‘End the Blockade’, in suffragette style. Eventually, the government had her arrested.

When her case same to court that May, Eglantyne knew that legally she did not have a leg to stand on as her leaflets had not been cleared by the government censors under the Defence of the Realm Act, which was still in place. Nevertheless she insisted on conducting her own defence and, focusing on the moral case, she gave the court reporters plenty to pad out their stories with.

The Crown Prosecutor is the only person in this story with a name to rival Eglantyne’s. He was called Sir Archibald Bodkin, and he did not spare Eglantyne in his condemnation. She was found guilty and fined £5. ‘This’, she wrote to her mother, ‘is the equivalent of victory’, because she could have been fined £5 for every leaflet she had distributed, over 800, or even been given a custodial sentence.

Furthermore, after the session had officially closed, but before the court had been cleared, Sir Archibald came over and pressed a £5 note, the sum of her fine, into Eglantyne’s hands. Technically she had been found guilty, but clearly in the Crown Prosecutor’s eyes Eglantyne had won the moral case. This would be the first donation towards a new fund that Eglantyne and her sister Dorothy now vowed to set up – the ‘Save the Children Fund’.

Daily Herald, 16 May 1919

As you can see from the photo above, of the front page of The Daily Herald, the British newspapers gave the story prominent coverage. Eglantyne was also featured in The Times, The Mail, The Mirror and The Guardian.

But Eglantyne knew that, pleasing though this coverage was, publicity alone would not feed the starving children of Europe. Determined to capitalize on the publicity, she and Dorothy decided to hold a public meeting and see if they could win further support for the cause. Being ambitious women, they booked the biggest venue they could find: the Royal Albert Hall. Reports tell us that in the event, there were not enough seats in the hall for the numbers of people who arrived.

Crowds queuing to hear Eglantyne Jebb and Dorothy Buxton
talking at the Royal Albert Hall, 19 May 1919

However, to their horror, Eglantyne and Dorothy soon realized that many of the audience had arrived with rotten fruit and vegetables to throw at the ‘traitor’ sisters who wanted to give succour to 'the enemy'. At first Eglantyne nervously mumbled her words, but her voice rose with her passion, until she called out; ‘Surely it is impossible for us, as normal human beings, to watch children starve to death without making an effort to save them’. The crowd in the hall were shocked. Then, in the silence, a collection was spontaneously taken up.

Within ten days Eglantyne, Dorothy and the fledgling Save the Children Fund had invested in a herd of dairy cows to provide a sustainable source of nutrition to the children of Vienna. Thousands of lives were saved, and that was just the start…

The Woman Who Saved the Children,
A biography of Eglantyne Jebb by Clare Mulley

I am proud, and very grateful, to have worked, even just for a few years, at Save the Children, an organisation which is still doing such wonderful work to save the lives, and improve the life chances of millions of children all over the world. If anyone would like a copy of my biography of the extraordinary and inspirational Eglantyne Jebb, which won the Daily Mail Biographers Club prize, you might like to know that all author royalties go to Save the Children.

Clare Mulley www.claremulley.com