After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Prison Hulks: Floating Hells for Convicts

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

Convicts, illegal dissections, disease, all taking place on ships described as "Wicked Noah's Arks" where conditions were even worse than in notorious prisons like Newgate. Transportation to Australia awaited those who survived, and they counted themselves the lucky ones. Today it's the dark history of the Prison Hulks.Our guest is Dr Anna McKay from the University of Liverpool who researches the lives and experiences of prisoners across the British maritime world. Her essay 'Allowed to die?' won the Royal Historical Society's Alexander Prize and her latest book proposal is shortlisted for the 2023 Ideas Prize. https://www.anna-mckay.com/ Edited by Tom Delargy, Produced by Freddy Chick, Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/

Opposite us rises the bulky form of the Hulk, painted black and white, and with her naked and puny-looking spars degraded to the rank of clothes props for the convicts. She stands in curious contrast to the light steamers that dance by her, and little sloops that glide like summer flies upon the surface of the stream, almost under her stern. Through groves of tumbled wheels and masses of timber, past great square buildings from the roofs of which white feathers of steam dart into the clear air, we go forward to the water's edge. A heavy mist lies upon the marshes on the opposite bank of the River Thames.

The cold, grey light of early morning gives to everything its most chilly aspect. At 5am we step aboard with the determination of spending an entire day with the Hulk's 500 and odd inmates. As we run up the gangway of the Silent Hull and survey the broad decks in the misty light, the only sounds heard are the gurgling of the tide streaming past the sides of the black-looking vessel and the pacing of the solitary water guard. The water guard proceeds to open the hatchways and we descend in company with him to the top deck

in order to see the men in their hammocks before rising for their day's duties. The hammocks are slung so close to one another that they form a perfect floor of beds on either side of the vessel seeming like rows of canvas boats but one or two of the prisoners turn on their sides as we pass along the deck and we cannot help

speculating as we go upon the nature of the felon dreams of those we hear snoring and half-moaning about us. How many are with their friends once more, enjoying an ideal liberty? How many are enacting or planning some brutal robbery? How many suffering in imagination the last penalty of their crimes, how many weeping on their mother's breast and promising to abandon their evil courses forever, and to how many is sleep an utter blank, a blessed annihilation for a while to their lifelong miseries. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddy. And I'm Anthony. And today we're heading to the Hulks. That is, the grim, floating prisons that male convicts were sent to as they were punished for their crimes,

and in some cases, awaiting transportation to the colonies. To set the scene, we just heard an account of a visit to one of these ships by the Victorian journalist and reformer Henry Mayhew. Our guide today to the floating hells known as prison hulks is Dr Anna McKay. Anna is a historian at the University of Liverpool whose work focuses on the experiences of prisoners across the British Empire throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Anna, welcome to After Dark. Hello, thanks for having me. Wonderful to have you here. Now, one thing that I think we need to set out from the beginning

of this episode is the difference between a prison hulk, and we can talk a little bit about what that is, what that looked like and convict ships in this period everyone knows the stories of people who were convicted of crimes and sentenced to transportation to places like australia but prison hulks are a slightly different beast they may look similar but they do have a different function don't they so can you tell us a little bit about what a prison hulk is and the difference between that and a convict ship? Yeah, so like you say, we have this big story of Australia where it's like the founding fathers of Australia are convicts. They arrive on the first fleet in the end of the 18th century. But

what prison hulks are is they're the stage before transportation. So thousands of men who were sentenced to transportation would have experienced life on board the Hulks before they were then transported to Australia. So the Hulks are a kind of like stepping stone in this big process of transportation. And they're really interesting because we kind of forget about them in the story of Australia, the story of British prisons, and they were just experienced by tens of thousands of men across the late 18th and 19th century. I was just going to say, Anna, if you can give us a sense of what a prison hulk looks like. So it is a ship, right? And what life would be like aboard for some of these

prisoners? What would the experience of setting foot on a vessel like that be? So imagine if you're sentenced to the dock in the Old Bailey, you're standing there, you get seven years by a judge. So you're taken in a chain gang down to the Thames and you get taken by boat along the Thames down to say Woolwich or Chatham or one of these sort of Royal Naval dockyards, not too far from London in lots of cases. You arrive at the docks and there's this big old ship. And these prison hawks were actually like ex-naval ships a lot of the time so things like HMS Victory that we think about now they actually got converted after being in these kind of big naval battles they were all battle scarred you know their hulls were blasted open by cannons and you know their their masts and

rigging had been removed and you know you're taken to one of these things and you board the decks and you go on board and you basically live on board an old ship for up to seven years. Some people were there for months, some people were there for years, and that's just your life. So instead of a prison system, which we think about as being this kind of like quite regimented, basically a building that you would live in. You're instead living on a boat. So it's all, it's creaky, it's smelly. You know, the air from the Thames is kind of disgusting throughout the 19th century. And yeah, you live on board, you sleep in a hammock and every day you're rowed out to shore and you labour on the Thames or you labour in the dockyards.

And what they're doing there is they're building up sort of fortifications, you know, they're cutting down timber and they're basically sort of human, you know, labour and things like that. So that's what they're doing. So a lot of people might be familiar with prison hulks from, say, Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, where Pip is slightly haunted by the presence of this prison hulk that's waiting in the near distance where Magwitch and other convicts are held and escape. And actually, this threatens their community. But actually, this idea doesn't begin in the 19th century, does it? It has earlier origins. The prison hulk systems came into light in 1776. So we have the War of American Independence

breaks out in 1775. And prior to actually that point in time, Britain had always transported its convicts to the American colonies. So like Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay and places like that, where they worked on plantations. Literally, that's from like the 1718 Transportation Act. It's even further back than that, just kind of informally. So people had always been transporting prisoners. But what happens with the American War of Independence is that suddenly the gates are closed and they're no longer able to transport convicts and basically get rid of them to America. So the British government suddenly in this state of flux, you know, what do we do? Our prisons are overcrowding. Where should we put all our convicts?

So they suddenly just look around and they say, well, look, we're in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, you know, and the American Wars, all these kind of global wars are happening. There's loads of ships lying around that have been battered and bruised in battles, and we don't know what to do with them. So they just said, right, let's use these old ships. So 1776, they start this thing called the Hulk Act. And it's just a temporary act. It's only supposed to last just a few months because Britain assumed that they're going to win the war with America and they can just start transporting people back again. But instead what happens is the Hulk system works in England for about 80 years. It goes on for ages and ages. And yeah, just tens and tens of thousands of people pass through them over time.

One thing that always strikes me about prison hulks, Anna, and I don't know how much you kind of come across this in your research, is just how literate people were when it came to ships and that actually a lot of people would have spent time on ships not as criminals, possibly before they themselves ended up in prison hulks. You talked there about prisoners during wartime being put into hulks and actually something that I researched in my book was prisoners who had been captured in the Caribbean in the 1790s during the war between Britain and France, who were then transported to Britain, to the south coast, to be prisoners of war. And a huge portion, something like 2,500 prisoners who had been previously enslaved by the French in the Caribbean, had been freed to fight the British, captured by the British and brought over. When they got to the South Coast, it was the black prisoners who were put onto a prison hulk and the white prisoners were kept on the shore. the experience of those individuals being aboard possibly ships that had taken them during the slave trade to the Caribbean, if they were first generation slaves, often they would be second or

third or even fourth generation, I suppose, by that point. Then on a ship, maybe during a battle, during war, being captured in the Caribbean, then coming across the Atlantic to Britain, and then being put on a prison hulk. There's just so much maritime experience, experience of those sort of spaces, those floating, claustrophobic, dark, grimy, dangerous spaces that it's quite hard for us to capture today, I guess, because a lot of those environments don't exist anymore. Obviously, prison hulks, maybe with the exception, I think, did you mention the Victory was once used as a prison hulks maybe with the exception i think did you mention the victory um was once used as a prison was that right yeah so the victory was used as a

prisoner of war hospital ship around the same time as your portchester castle prisoners actually so you know they would have all kind of been in the dockyard together so yeah like we said there's this big period of warfare but prison hulks are starting and also they're capturing prisoners of war overseas and bringing them back home even though though you might get captured in the Caribbean, you're somehow transported back to England. And then you wait to be exchanged or you wait to be sent back and things like that. But all of these ships are all happening in the dockyards at exactly the same time. And I think that's so crazy because there's actually, I was thinking about it the other day, there's this really cool quote from this woman called Lady Jerningham in the 18th century. And like in her diary, she writes

that she went with her son in like just a small boat and they rode around Portsmouth together. And they went to listen to all the different voices of all the prisoners in the boats that they passed by. So they're actually like rowing past the prisoner of war ships. And they're saying, it's great because we can hear all these Spanish and French voices. And it's like Babel, you know, all these chattering languages. And then they go to the next ship, you know, one over and it's a convict ship grated with iron bars, you know, so they're more heavily fortified, but they're like, Ooh, look, there's convicts in this one. And I just think that's crazy that everyone's, yeah, it's all happening at the same time. We have all these flows across the ocean of convicts, we have prisons of war, we have enslaved people, and it's all simultaneous. And I don't know, like Britain's just getting on with it aboard the same vessel if it's used as a warship or as a ship to trade

or to transport enslaved people. And then it has this other life as a prison hulk. And just thinking about that fantastic quote that you mentioned, that's incredible. I've not actually come across that before. How do you go about in the archive accessing these spaces that predominantly don't exist anymore? How do you go about seeing what that experience would have been like for people? It's weird because when I started out, I thought, oh God, it's going to be really difficult finding the voices of convicts because like you said, can they read? Can they write? Can they actually record their own experience? But actually, when you sort of read between the lines of all those

archival sources, you're looking at, you could sit down in the archives and you could look at a report that says we have this number of convicts today. So number one, you found their names. And then number two, sometimes they say how old they were. Sometimes they say they could read or write. They actually record that because they're interested in whether prisoners are literate or not. Because sometimes if you then get transported to say to Australia, they're like, we're interested in people who can read and write. We need a clerk in our office. So, you know, they're recording details about people. Sometimes they even say they've got freckles. They've got, you know, a broad chin and things like that. And they're saying that

because if they escape, they can find them again. They can say, we're looking for a guy with blue eyes and blonde hair. Or tattoos is another common one, of course. Yeah. I love it when I find a convict with a tattoo. Yeah. So, you know, you kind of begin to kind of sift through all this information and, I mean, it's not nice, but I was going to say, luckily for me, there's a lot of records about convicts out there because people were interested in prisoners. You know, If you pass through an administrative process, whether that's a poor house or a prison hulk or even just a prison, someone's going to write your name down. They're going to write your age down. They might even record whether you've

been badly behaved or not, whether you tried to escape or whether you got drunk. And so through all of that, and then you kind of go back to those, say, a letter from an overse from an overseer that's, you know, written in Bermuda on the Hulk's air. And they're complaining, saying, excuse me, all the convicts have got drunk. What do I do? Then you can go, oh, wasn't there a convict in Bermuda who was written down as drunk that I've seen before? And you go back, you cross-reference it. So you're kind of hopping between all these different sources until you finally say, I think that's the full story now. I think I've got it all.

until you finally say, I think that's the full story now. I think I've got it all. So Anna, if you were unlucky enough to have found yourself in one of these prison hulks, what are the conditions? What are the experiences? What are people experiencing when they are confined in these spaces? They're not very nice. You have to compare them to what a prison on land was like. So imagine going into a cell in Newgate, how stinky and overcrowded and busy and noisy and just exhausting that is. Well, put that onto a boat, and that's kind of what the Hulks were like. So yeah, the conditions were pretty awful. Sometimes moored up in mud, the Thames, the tides of all the weather ships were moored, moored up in mud. The Thames, the tides of where the ships were moored would get stuck in the mud,

so that could be really smelly. At the point in the 19th century, people still believed in miasmas, so they would think that disease was spread through this contaminated air. So imagine you're living on board a convict ship and your toilet's emptying out into this sludgy wasteland below, and then you get TB. Everyone's like, it's the hulks. The hulks have caused this disease. And cholera, they get blamed for cholera and loads of other diseases. But obviously, it's just poor sanitation. So convicts are having to drink the water from the Thames, for example, because it's not exactly clean now. But imagine it in the 1830s. It's not a great life. You know, you're up at, say, six in the morning and you get rowed out to the dockyards after your breakfast, which is not

very filling or nutritious. It's normally just a kind of mush that they put together called burgoo, which is a kind of like convict porridge, which I think is just like bad grains. And so, you know, you're given your bowl of burgoo and then you get in the boat and you go out to labour in the dockyards. And, you know, there's tons of accidents, you know, horses run away and timber falls down. People get their, you know, hands crushed and, you know, someone in Bermuda gets crushed by an anchor falling down, you know, into the sort of area where he's working. Convicts are even working in diving bells. So they're going underneath the water to actually labour on sort of parts of the dockyard that you can't reach unless you're underwater. So really high risk jobs. And it's kind of punitive as well. You're being made to work hard jobs because you're

a prisoner. So they're kind of putting them to all the dirty work. And so you get back at night, you're exhausted and your bones are aching. There's no bath or anything. You know, you're given another bowl of mush. And then they say, right, it's time to do your reading and writing now. You know, so imagine working for like 12 hours in the dockyard and you come back home and then they say, right, we're doing sums today. Because in the 1820s, they started to teach convicts how to read and write because they thought this is a good reform.

You know, we're reforming people. We're teaching them to read and write so that when they go back into society, they're better citizens. But it's exhausting. That's a crucial difference, I suppose, between the 18th and the 19th century prison hulk. Obviously, in the 18th century, the prison system, generally, whether it's aboard a ship or on land, is just about removing that person from society for a certain period of time until they can pay their debt off or until they go to the gallows or are transported. But in the 19th century, there is that reform idea brought in and this idea that prison itself can be a transformative experience and something that can make someone a better person or a better citizen

in society when they come out of that. That's so fascinating. The other thing that's really striking me, Anna, while you're talking there is about the fact that these people who are malnourished, mistreated, they've had their two bowls of, what did you call it? Burgoo. Burgoo a day, that they're existing on these meagre rations. And yet during the day, they are helping to build the infrastructure of Britain, of its empire, the very machinery and foundations of what keeps the country going and keeps it growing in the world and the sort of source of its international power. And that they are part of that, but at night they are removed back onto

the hulks. And I wonder if you can maybe speak a little bit about how the hulks were perceived from the mainland as well. You spoke about women in the 1810s rowing out to see the prisoners of war in hulks and the convicts in the neighbouring hulks, is there a sense that these are frightening people who are offshore because they're not fit to be with the rest of society? Is there a sense that the hulks are just mere convenience and they're no different from maybe walking past some big London prison like you mentioned Newgate a moment ago? Do people see them differently? Is there a fear about them? Is there a resentment? Because they are there on the horizon all of the time yeah what's really interesting about the hogs like i mean you know because you can kind of track this change or shift in opinion over time so sort of

beginning of the hogs in the 1770s you know they're new they're kind of scary they're weird on the landscape so you know just imagine waking up in Woolwich and looking out of your windows and seeing, you know, this kind of big dirty ship full of prisoners outside. So, you know, the locals did not like them. They complained they were noisy and dirty. And, you know, I mentioned they kind of blame them for disease and, you know, local sort of crime rates. You know, people were always terrified of an escaped convict. Like we see at the start of Great Expectations, everyone's like, right, he's out. Let's go get him. Everyone is scared of convicts. But what's really interesting is over time, it kind of changes. So we go from this fear of the convict. If you come into contact with one, you're going to be contaminated and you might even turn into one yourself.

You go from that to then by the sort of mid-19th century, people are starting to say, hang on a minute, prison ships aren't as bad as the people who were saying we should still have them. So you get to see, by the 1840s, it's a long time that they've been going, like 70 years. But by that point, people are saying, I think convicts are actually being quite hard done by. I don't think that we should be treating them like this. And you start to see people criticising the system rather than being afraid of the convict in newspaper reports. And I just love that change in opinion. And I kind of think that Great Expectations taps into that because that was actually published in the 1860s and it's a bit later than the convicts, but you

know, it's a historical novel set in the Napoleonic era. So it's kind of characterising that fear that we see, you know, in the 1770s and, you know, Napoleonic era kind of hulks, scary hulks. But then, you know, it's almost like a thing of the past that he's looking back and remembering them as bad, like as almost as if to say, you know, we're different now, we've moved on. Well, if you were a convict on one of these ships, and now we've described how awful the conditions were, inhumane to some people, even contemporaries, one way to get off them was to be transported and to, in some cases, take a trip, let's say, to Australia. Could you describe for us, Anna, what that journey might look like? What was the process after which you're taken off the prison hook? What then begins to happen? What's the next part of that journey? A great journey of the convict. When you're, say, in the Hulks, they go around and they say, oh, he looks strong. He looks fit. He's a good worker. So you're immediately sort of singled out and they put your name down and then they say,

right, we need 50 people for the next convict ship. So you're taken off board and you're put on board a convict ship. So there's convict Hulks and there's convict ship. So you're taken off board and you're put on board a convict ship. So there's convict hulks and there's convict ships. So you're taken on board a convict ship, which when it reaches its full capacity, you know, like 500 people. And these are people who aren't just male convicts anymore. So you've got the male convicts from the hulks. They're quite a big proportion of the convicts that sail to Australia. But then you also have female convicts who were just in prisons and they've sort of been traveling down from wherever their jails or prisons and lockups were. They're traveling down the country to meet that convict ship, say in Portsmouth, the port where

it sails from. So they're all on board, right? And they're kind of segregated by class and decks. So there's like, say, three decks of a ship. They put up some iron bars to separate the men from the women. It's not just people roaming around all the time and talking and gambling and having sex and things. The men and the women are separate. And then you have militias and guards who are on board to make sure you don't get up to anything bad. And then you set sail. So the journey takes a couple of months. You go from, say, Portsmouth or Plymouth. Sometimes you stop off at Rio. So you go all the way across the ocean down to Rio, stop up and refuel, get some more water, get some more food. And then you go along the coast across to say Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, and then

straight to Botany Bay in Australia. So that journey's, you know, obviously people are seasick, people are dying, people are getting diseases. One of the things that you see in, say, a surgeon's log, they keep loads of records when you're on board the convict ships and sailing as well. Surgeons are like, these people have got syphilis, everyone's dying. People are coming on board with all these kind of diseases because sometimes you're chosen for being a good worker. Sometimes they just want to get rid of you. So they're like, oh God, get rid of that guy. He's been with us for ages. So they end up taking people who might be unwell on board, people die, still crowded, disease spreads on a ship, it spreads in any close quarters. So imagine that in the humid conditions of sailing down the coast of Africa. So it's not very pleasant.

So Anna, the prisoners who have been transported from the prison hulks to the convict ships, and they've done their journey, their big epic journey, and if they've survived that, they get to somewhere like Botany Bay. What happens to them next? How are they processed? And how are they integrated into what is already an established convict society, right? Yeah, so once they arrive, male and female convicts are basically sort of sorted out. And the women tend to go off into, say, domestic service. So they become servants, they become nursemaids, and even they work in factories and they sew garments for the growing colony. And then men tend to work in chain gangs. So I mentioned that

they were being picked for being good labourers. Well, they kind of know by now in the colonies who's arriving. And they say, right, okay, where's our 50 men who are good at working? So they kind of pick up people. And the convicts live in this area called The Rocks at the beginning in Sydney, which is just a sort of like a rough and ready convict settlement. And they live in their own houses. They share them with other people, but they go off to work every day and come back home at night. You'd think they have a little

bit more freedom as opposed to, say, that life on the hulks, which is really regimented, but you are still an unfree worker. You're not allowed to leave. If you are, you get punished. Thank you. powered Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII, who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So we've established that one way to get off a prison hulk is to go to Australia, say. Another way would be to die, which is going to take us to our next narrative. In May 1846, the convict Henry Driver was admitted to the hospital on board the Prison Hulk Warrior. Within five days of

arriving in the Prison Hulk's hospital, and being placed under the care of the chief surgeon, a man called Peter Bossy, Henry Driver was dead. We are told that this unhappy wretch had no sooner departed this life than the body, still warm, was carried over to the dead house, and the surgeon's knife was at work opening and dissecting. Entrails taken from the body were thrown into the river, where dozens had gone before. It was an open-air spectacle, visible to not only convicts on the warrior, but inmates on other hulks moored nearby. A man on a neighbouring ship remembered how a lot of thick blood came over the side of the ship and the entrails hung where the ears of the bucket are put on.

And a medical officer took and shook the bucket and shook them off and it was enough to make anybody's blood run cold to look at it. to look at it. Well, we've talked about the Thames being not great drinking water, and I think that's fair evidence of that. Anna, tell us about what turns out to be the convict corpse scandal, as it's known. How does that play out? Obviously, we've got huge transgressions in terms of the space of the prison hulk here the treatment of prisoners alive and dead how does that play out and how does it lead eventually to the demise of the hulks yeah this story is so interesting so yeah basically what happens is

a convict who's on the same ship as thomas driver he actually writes to a local mp he says look there's some really bad goings on on board the Hulks, and I'd like someone to come and look into it. And, you know, the MP kind of stands up in Parliament and he says, look, I think we should go and check this out. And there's a small sort of flurry of interest, shall we say, in the newspapers. And it kind of adds a bit of public pressure to the people in Parliament. And they say, all right, yeah, we'll commission an inquiry.

And so they send someone from the prison inspectorate, which is like this big kind of public body that looks after all the prisons in the UK, apart from the prison hogs. Because at that point in time, prison hogs still exist outside this bigger system of British prisons. And that's what's kind of wrong about them. You know, anything that isn't sort of centrally managed can actually then be, you know, subject to a bit of corruption, shall we say. This prison inspectorate goes down and he interviews 98 convicts and overseers and guards. It's a really, really thorough inquiry. He says to people, what's it like living on board these hulks? Are there problems with these medical abuses? Then he starts to learn the story of

Peter Bossie. He's a member of the College of Surgeons. You know, he's an upstanding member of community. He has a doctor's surgery in Woolwich that he has with his brother. But it turns out that Peter Bossy, the surgeon, is actually using the Hulks almost as a sort of training school for his doctor's surgery. So he's getting all of his apprentices to come around on the Hulks every day. He's not supposed to be doing that. He gets them to all come on board and they go around like it's a teaching hospital. So Bossy has this stick that

he uses to sort of tap the convicts on the head every morning saying, how are you doing, my fine fellow? And things like that. And everyone's like, this is insulting and it's weird. So, you know, the prison inspectorate are learning these kinds of things. They're writing it all down and, you know, they're making a few assumptions. And so they ask about the body of Thomas Driver and they say, what actually happened with him? And they say, well, he died. And the laws of the Anatomy Act that happened in the 1830s, 1832, that comes about and it says, you must not dissect a body within 48 hours. You have to do 48 hours waiting time before you then dissect a body or else it's illegal. And so the convicts on board the Warrior Hulk in Woolwich were saying they

dissected him way earlier than 48 hours. They think that it was illegal. So they investigate that. Turns out it wasn't illegal. Turns out they did wait. But what actually happens is they realize that the people who are all the medical men on board the Hulks are actually just using them as kind of to do experiments and you know they mentioned that someone had a the head of a convict in a bucket they were going to give to a friend in maidston in kent and it's all these kind of you know you should not be doing that kind of things and they keep finding out you know that convicts who are in charge of like cleaning up the death houses after a convict's been dissected they might be the friends of another convict who had died. And so there's all these morally wrong things that are happening on board the Hulks. And they find out that the people in charge on board these Hulks are actually

dissecting the convict's bodies themselves just to determine the cause of death. But when they're being sent to the anatomy schools, the anatomists are saying, we can't actually work with these bodies. They're too mangled or broken. And so what happens in the end is they condemn the system. They say, this shouldn't be happening. And they say, Peter Bossy needs to be fired and removed from the Hulks immediately, which he is. And they also find out that the person who's in charge of the Hulks, who's a man who used to work in the home office, he's a clerk called John Henry Capper. They find out that he's so old and infirm because he's actually been in charge of the Hulks, who's a man who used to work in the Home Office. He's a clerk called John Henry Capper. They find out that he's so old and infirm because he's actually been in charge of the Hulks for about 60, 40, 60 years by then. They find out that his nephew, who's a greengrocer, has actually been running the Hulks on his behalf. They say, right, we need

to overhaul this system. What they do instead is finally the Hulks come under the control of the prison inspectorate. They're managing big prisons like Pentonville, Newgate, Millbank, all these ones that are working a little bit better than the Hulks. No prison in the 19th century is good, let's just say that. But these ones are working more functionally, should we say. And so what happens is underneath the charge of these people who are more enlightened about how a prison should be run, the hulks eventually close down. But that's a real watershed moment, that moment in 1847, that inquiry, where they realise that the hulks and the bodies of the convicts have been abused by the people in power. And so this inquiry takes place in 1847,

but it's not for another 10 years, 1857, right, where the prison hulks are actually decommissioned. What happens in that intervening decade to ensure that that sparks the end of these hulks? Well, now that the prison hulks are sort of under the purview of the prison inspectorate, these kind of men who are in charge can see that they're not working. They say, look, people are dying on board. The rations aren't as good. Convicts don't like being on the prison hocks as much as in other prisons. No one likes being in prison, but again, the hocks aren't good. In those 10 years, the prison inspectorates slowly wind the system down. So what used to happen when you've got a hulk, if it's too old and too battered, so battered that even the walls are

falling apart. So some convicts, they escaped literally by leaning against the rotten walls, which are saturated with filth and old water. And you could actually kind of push your way through the rotten wood in some cases. What used to happen was they'd just get a new hulk. They'd say, right, let's go to the Admiralty, Let's buy an old ship, something that's reasonable condition that we can use for, say, 30 years to house convicts. They stopped doing that. They said, look, when one ship is old and it can't be used anymore,

let's just get rid of it. Let's break it up. So they untangle it all and sell whatever bits and bobs they can to make a little profit. And then that's it. So you start to see a decline in actual numbers of hulks.

But also what happens is they say, let's put more prisons close by. So say Chatham, convicts on the hulks start to build a prison on land. They do that in Portland too, near Dorset. So they're starting to actually build their own prisons. So they're gradually being moved off and those ships can be decommissioned as there's fewer and fewer and fewer convicts. But there's also less of a need to actually have convicts on prison hulks anymore because they're no longer transporting people to Australia. It's a real decline in the numbers of people who are being sent to Australia. Like from say the 1830s, there's huge debate sparking up in Parliament about whether we should keep transporting people. So there's all these kind of factors that all come together to finally end the Hulks in 1857

in England. Anna, it's been so fascinating to talk to you. Before we let you go, I just wonder if you have a particularly poignant story that you've come across in your research? Any one prisoner or group of prisoners from any Hulk that has really stayed with you, their story or a moment or an impression from an account that you've read? Is there anything that springs to mind that you'd love to share with us? Yeah, I mean, I'm really interested in convict escapes. It's kind of exciting, right? So there's this one convict that escaped that I just found his name in a newspaper. And I was able to trace basically his entire life through not only the criminal justice system, but just his life through different reports and convict ship registers and things like that. And he's called William Ritchie. And in 1824, he's sentenced to seven

years transportation for obtaining goods by false pretenses. So he actually forged a letter from his employer in London and said, can you please give me a tea chest? So he takes that down to this guy that's a cabinetmaker in St. Paul's yard. And he gets a tea chest, he pawns it, and then they find out that he forged that letter. So he gets seven years transportation and he's sent to the Hulks. And then you find his name in the Police Gazette in 1829, so about four years later. And it's because he's escaped. So he's escaped the Hulks at Chatham and he makes his way all the way back home to, say, Old Street, not too far from the Barbican Centre in London.

So he makes his way all the way back there. They find him after a couple of weeks and they catch him in the street because he's stolen something from a friend. He went around for dinner one night with someone, stole their pocket watch and he's on the run again. So a police officer finds him, grabs him in the street. It's a huge violent scuffle and then they haul him back to the Old Bailey and he gets transported to Australia. And you can find what happens out next. So he's there in the docks and he gets transported. It actually turns out that he's there with his wife, who's called Jane. And Jane Ritchie is transported as well. So she was kind of seen as like an accomplice to William

in stealing that pocket watch and the silver spoon there from their friend's house. And so Jane's let off the hook and William gets transported. But a few months later, Jane is also transported because she's stolen some bedsheets from her employer and she's destitute. So what else can you do? So she steals something. She's a convict servant. So she's working in New South Wales for an employer who himself was once a convict. So just the plot thickens. But she's working for him, while William is working in a chain gang. So he's working on the roads in the Blue Mountains in Australia, eucalyptus trees and cockatoos everywhere. And it's just this weird alien

environment. So they're both now in Australia. They never see each other again, because Jane dies in a hospital in Sydney. And two years later, William dies in Norfolk Island, which is this remote island. It's about 800 miles away from Australia, right in the Pacific Ocean. It was where the convicts were sent who had committed further crimes in the colony. So it turns out that William, he must have stolen something or done something that got him sent to Norfolk Island. So these people, they both started out their lives, you know, living small, humble lives in the East end of London. And they go all the way to Australia and they're buried there and they would never have seen each other again. They would have never seen their families again. And I just think it's

amazing that you can trace people's lives on the hulks and in this prison system in general, just across oceans and across the world and see what happened to them through looking at these tiny little report that some clerk kept in, you know, 1820 that we can still recreate and retrace someone's lives. Well, and I think that is the exact right place to leave it. It's great to have that overall image of a life almost and the transportation and the hulks and the prison ships the whole gamut there including his wife getting transported as well what an interesting story and a great way to unpick the lived experiences of people that were involved in these hulks or transported thank you so much to dr anna mckay for joining us and explaining all

about prison hulks and the transportation system it has been really interesting but also instructive for me that was i think a lot of people maybe mix up the prison hulk and the ships that were used for transportation so it's good to know a little bit more about the clarity between the two of them and if you've enjoyed this episode then please do leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts, subscribe, and until next time, we'll see you soon. really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget you can listen to all these podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. And as a special gift, now don't say we never give you anything, you can also get your first three months for one pound a month when you use the code AFTERDARK at checkout.