Dan Snow's History Hit - The Forgotten Massacre at Dartmoor Prison

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

During the War of 1812, the last time Britain and the United States went to war with each other, more than six thousand American sailors ended up in Dartmoor Prison. At the end of the war, prisoners remained behind Dartmoor’s walls for months after peace had been ratified. The prisoners’ fury at their continued incarceration led to an uprising on April 6, 1815, and then to a massacre: nine Americans were shot dead, the last men to be killed in a war between the two countries.Nick Guyatt is a historian, author and lecturer in modern history. Nick joins Dan on the podcast to discuss the extraordinary story of what happened at Dartmoor during the War of 1812, what really took place in the prison, and how the tragedy created a brief and fiery outrage in the United States but then slipped from view.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I've got a strange story to tell you today.

It's the story of the last Anglo-American violence in history. Well, there was a bit of a fight, I think, over a little island next to Vancouver that involved a pig getting shot. But basically, bear with me, it's the story of the last Anglo-American violence, interstate violence, kind of. It involved the British prisoners shooting at a number of American prisoners of war in a gigantic prison in Dartmoor in 1815, over 200 years ago. These American prisoners were being held until the final peace negotiations had been agreed, the ink signed and dried on the peace treaty that ended the so-called War of 1812 between Britain and America. These American prisoners had been brought from all over the world where they'd been seized by British naval vessels

and they had been warehoused in a gigantic purpose-built prison in Dartmoor which folks is still a prison today. Wow. This prison had been built to intern the expert professional sailors of Napoleon's fleet during Napoleonic Wars thinking it would do grave damage to the French Admiralty as they tried to resurrect their forces after Trafalgar if many of their most experienced sailors were imprisoned in the UK. The story of the prison and the story of the French and the Americans within it has just been written up by a very brilliant historian. He's a professor in North American history. He's Nick Guyatt. He's at the University of Cambridge and he joins me on this podcast to talk all about it. If you want to listen to my interview with Simon Mayo about this prison that I recorded years ago, you can do so on History Hit

TV. You can also watch documentaries about Trafalgar on there, about Nelson's Navy. I mean, we are long documentaries on the Polar War. So I've got to be honest, we've got one on Austerlitz, Waterloo, we've got loads. And we just got a new documentary dropping very soon about tactics and weapons used in the Peninsula War. Lots of great documentaries on history at TV. You just follow the link in the notes attached to this podcast. So click on that link. It'll whiz you straight there. But in the meantime, here is Nick Guyatt talking about Britain's most terrifying prison. Enjoy.

Nick, thank you very much for coming on the pod. Thank you so much, Dan. It's great to be here. So when Britain took French prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars, where was the default place to put them? Well, I guess originally the idea was you wouldn't have prisoners at all, right? Like, the plan would be that they take your prisoners, you take theirs, and you just swap them over. But partly as a function of the fact that the Royal Navy was incredibly good at capturing the enemy, Britain ended up with this big kind of surplus fairly early on in the war. So by 1795, 1796, there's already a pretty big imbalance. So the initial plan is, let's stick them in prison

hulks. As the war carries on, and as that surplus gets bigger and bigger, the assumption is that potentially a prison on land might be a good place to put them. And we can get into why prison hulks are a bad idea. I mean, maybe it's like self-explanatory why they're a bad idea. But that's where the seed of this comes from, this imbalance between a number of prisoners being taken on each side. Let's talk quickly about prison hulks for Ballardy, because they're disease-ridden, hellish, damp, nightmarish places. They're also really expensive.

They don't even save you money, because you need to crew them, right? So essentially, these are former naval vessels for the most part. You need a crew of people there. They're kind of lashed to the shore, but they're also still sort of afloat. So in that sense, these guys, you've basically got naval officers and prison guards on this ship, which has got terrible sanitary conditions in which tons of prisoners are dying. It's costing you a fortune and you need a different solution. So that's the sort of roots of this moment where you get a desire by the British government to think about building prisons on land. of this moment where you get a desire by the British government to think about building prisons on land. Is it the case that in previous wars there wasn't the same emphasis on prisoner taking?

It was at some stage in the 18th century, isn't it, that they work out that actually skilled mariners, skilled sailors, are essential to be denied to the enemy if they fall into your possession. So the idea of mass incarceration was relatively new in this period. Is that fair to say? A friend of mine called Renaud Morieux, who teaches here at Cambridge, has an amazing book called The Society of Prisoners that came out a few years back. And he gets into this in great detail. And one of the really interesting things is that some strategists and kind of tacticians on the British and French sides think that actually it would be a really good idea just to get shot of any prisons of war because they cost so much to keep in your custody. But just as you said, Dan, there are also other strategists and government officials on both sides who think that mariners in particular are of such value to the enemy that it is a really good idea to keep them in your custody. But again, it's that sort of trade-off between expense and the strategic advantage you get by

denying this skilled labour force to your enemy. And people don't agree. No one quite knows what's going on either, right? Is Napoleon happy about the fact that Britain's resources are being drained with all of these sailors? Or is Napoleon like furious because all of these sailors are not anymore in French ships? No one really knows on the British side. We'll come to building prison on the land. It seems so interesting, the modern parallels. Today, people always talk about prisons as great economic opportunities and the places where they're going to be placed. And that seems to be the case here as well.

It wasn't just handy for the great ports of the southwest. It was seen as a real boon to the area. I should confess I'm a historian of the US or of colonial North America mostly. So I haven't written a lot of British history before. And one of the things I found fascinating was that this is kind of the moment where the modern prison gets born. So we've been talking about prisons of war,

but this is also a moment where ideas about modern penitentiaries are really kind of coming into focus. And one of the big sort of ideas behind a modern penitentiary is it could act as a kind of engine of economic development. So Jeremy Bentham, a famous social theorist and philosopher, he's really, really big on this. It's like, you know,

build a prison somewhere, all kinds of great things will follow, you're going to have a big labour force that you can hire fairly cheaply, lots of other people will be drawn to the area, you know, it becomes this kind of tool for renovating places, which again, if you think about the modern image of prisons, most of us don't want to live near a prison back at the beginning of the 19th century the opposite is the presumption right that actually everyone will want to be near a prison because that helped transform the region and that's where we get the logic behind dartmoor prison which opens in 1809 so it took three years to build yeah dare i ask how state of the art of this prison how um laid down according to nordic progressive principles presumably i mean in a way it was state of the art but again it's a sort of

good reminder that what we think of as state of the art like maybe 20 or 30 years later people will think was perhaps not so bleeding edge so one of the assumptions about darmore is that with these prison hulks there's not a lot of space, right? So everyone's cramped, everyone's below decks, it's very unsanitary. So with Dartmoor, the plan was first, let's build it big. So essentially, you have this gigantic mile circumference stone wall enclosing five and then later seven large kind of prison blocks, which are actually kind of almost like warehouses, not like a modern prison with individual cells, but rather three big open floors in each one of these blocks. And the state of the art part was,

it's really important these prisoners get some air. So why don't we just have these giant barred windows? We won't glaze them, but there'll be a really nice circulation of air. Now that makes sense unless you're in Dartmoor in December, by which I mean like Dartmoor between like August and May, right? When it's really, really grim. So actually that idea of kind of being kind

and being kind of like cutting edge about prisoner welfare actually becomes the bane of the prisoners' lives because it's an incredibly cold and grim place so much of the year and that creates its own health problems, right? Approximately, so how many prisoners would be held there and of them how many would succumb to these tolls and illnesses well the initial capacity the plan for the capacity was that you would be able to fit around eight or nine thousand prisoners into darmore but then as i said they expanded the prison so rather than having these five prison blocks, they ended up squeezing another two in. And again, because they had this big stone like granite circumference wall, in effect,

they couldn't like build outside the prison. So they just had to kind of cram these two extra blocks into the middle. On that first winter, so 1809 to 1810, hundreds of French prisoners died of disease. And again, this isn't a big surprise. I mean, a lot of people died of disease in jails during this period. But it was an immediate hit to this idea that Britain was doing something kind of progressive and liberal and benevolent by creating this prison. And it set up a whole series of rumours, you know, throughout British political life about like whether Dartmoor had built in the wrong place or whether Dartmoor was actually doing more harm than good. And so it had a very, very bumpy opening, this giant prison. You do say in your book it was next to impossible for human beings long to survive.

Well, that's what one of the people who was stuck there said. And again, I shouldn't smile. I'm very enthusiastic about this, obviously, because I think it's an amazing story. But in a way, I often find myself smiling at the grimness of it and the sense that these prisoners, you know, who'd experienced privations, right? I mean, most of them were sailors, whether French or later American. These are guys who are used to a rough life. Even these men, when confronted with the kind of immensity and the bleakness of the prison and of the moor, they kind of abandon hope. And they have this sense of huge despair about where

they were, and also about not knowing when they would be freed. Because of course, that's the other torture of being a prisoner of war. It's the uncertainty, there's no sentence, you have no idea whether you'll be there for a week, or a month or 10 years, as many of the French prisoners were. And you say they were sort of overcome, some of them do. I mean, some of them seem to sort of lose their minds, they become deeply traumatised. Yeah, I mean, there was a group of French prisoners. And again, history has, when it's remembered them, has tended to kind of conjure in comic terms. And these were known in the prison as the Romans. And they were called the Romans because they hung out in the top floor of one of the prison blocks, which is known as the Capitol. So Capitol with an O at the end and Romans and so on. So that was the association. And these guys were basically

the people who had lost all hope and had also kind of collectively begun to lose their anchoring in kind of reality and civilized behavior. So one of their characteristics was that they went naked around the prison, at least in their own block. Another was that they would pull all their blankets together. They were all issued with a blanket. They would basically pierce a hole in the blanket. And then when they needed to visit one of the other prison blocks, they would just throw this over their head. So they have this kind of smock as they walked around. And another characteristic about them was that they were very violent. And I won't necessarily get into all the gory details, but even again, these hardened

sailors who were in the prison elsewhere looked upon the Romans as a kind of breed apart. And when you peer into the records, you realise that one of the reasons for their despair and their kind of derangement was that many of them had been in British custody for 10 years or more, and had no idea if it would be another 10. You can give us a few gory details if you like. Well, there is a famous instance. This is actually perfect. There's a thunderstorm outside. So this is actually, the sound effects, if you're listening to this, are real.

So one of the things that the Romans did was they went regularly to the kitchens in search of the scraps that were put outside at the end of the preparation of food each day. And all of the other prisoners would basically leave them alone at those moments. There was an interruption to the food supply in the prison, which basically meant that it was just a bread ration on a particular day and these scraps weren't coming from the kitchen. The Romans, these desperate French prisoners, became so aggrieved and anxious at this that they saw a cart that came through the prison grounds to pick up the rubbish, drawn by a couple of horses, and they descended upon the horses, according to multiple accounts,

and they actually killed them there and then. Some had knives, some basically tore them to bits, and they began eating these horses while the horses were still alive. It's pretty gory, right? alive. It's pretty gory, right? And this memory of these prisoners eating the horses comes back in a really kind of terrifying and kind of evocative way when one veteran of the prison runs into one of those Romans about 30 years later in France when he's become a Catholic priest and kind of remembers the experience when they go to dinner. Our observer fixates on the lips of the guy who'd been eating the horse 30 years later when he's kind of eating politely. And it's just a moment where he kind of falls through time and it's extremely chilling.

Isn't it Dan Snow's history hit? We're talking about massacring Americans in British prisons. More coming up. Hi there. I'm Kate Lister, sex historian and author, and I am the host of Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society, a new podcast from History Hit.

Join me as I root around the topics which have been skipped over in your school history lessons. Everything from the history of swearing to pubic hair, satanic panic, cults, there is nothing off limits. We'll be bed hopping around different time periods from ancient civilizations to the middle ages to renaissance and early modern right up to now. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. now i very weirdly had on the podcast years ago simon mayo the famous british radio dj and he was so moved by the story of this prison he wrote a novel about it particularly what we can talk about next which is the americans who suddenly arrived because of the so-called war of 1812 for reasons that we will not go into now, Nick, because it is too miserable and complicated, Britain and America find themselves at war as well, as Britain being at war with Napoleon from 1812 onwards. And you get a vast number of Americans thrown into the mix as well. Six and a half thousand in total. And although some of them are exchanged by the end of the war,

come to the end of 1814, which is when finally Britain and the United States agree a peace to end the war of 1812, there are more than 5,000 stuck in the prison. And I mean, they've never seen anything like this, right? The French have been at war with Britain since 1794. So there's kind of like a memory or a kind of understanding of the grimness of British captivity. For these Americans, many of them have been captured nowhere near Britain. So they're mostly sailors, many of them are privateers, so basically kind of

a private navy almost going around trying to beat up British merchant ships. And these guys are captured on the high seas and taken to prisons around the world. I mean, this is another crazy thing about this moment. You know, Britain's got prisons in Calcutta or in Cape Town or in Bermuda or Barbados. Sorry about the evocative sound effect. I love it. All of these crazy places have got a British prison. And then in the summer of 1814, after the war with France comes to an end, all the French prisoners are turfed out of Dartmoor and sent back to France. All of this space opens up and Britain rather cruelly decides to concentrate

these prisoners from all these different prisons around the world on Dartmoor. So there's this kind of terrifying, fatal narrowing, right, of this entire global prison population on this one incredibly bleak spot in southwestern England. And I'm talking about people in prison in Canada. I mean, imagine being captured in Canada, and then being taken across the ocean to Dartmoor. I mean, it must have been so grim for these guys. So yeah, they're all there by the end of 1814. And another element that's so fascinating is many of them were black Americans. Yeah, I mean, this is something that I'm particularly interested in in terms of my own expertise and kind of previous research.

I mean, obviously, this is a moment in the 1810s or thereabouts. We're back in the United States. There's a big debate about slavery. And a lot of that debate is about not the morality of slavery, but rather whether or not black and white people can live alongside each other in freedom. I mean, when we think about abolition in the British context, you know, our Wilberforces and our Clarksons are basically talking about ending slavery on the other side of the Atlantic, and they're never expecting black people in Jamaica or Barbados to live in London, not in big numbers. So in a sense, the abolition problem for Britain is not an integration problem, right? I mean, the integration is on the other side of the ocean and there's very small numbers of white people involved.

They're mostly black societies. In the US, the huge challenge with abolition is that you're going to end up with a population that's like 20 or 25 percent black alongside white people. So that big debate is going on in the 1810s. That big debate is going on in the 1810s. What I found amazing was to think about how that debate was sort of transposed to Dartmoor, because around 1,000 of the 6,500 prisoner population is black. So in a way, if the debate in the US is about whether black and white people can live together in freedom, in Dartmoor, it's like, can they live together in captivity? And they're fascinating ways in which the story develops, because initially the white prisoners actually asked to be segregated from the black prisoners. But in the end, the two

communities, white and black, come together in all kinds of fascinating, surprising and unexpected ways. And there's the amazing character, the charismatic leader of the black prisoners, Richard, aka King Dick, Craphus or Crafus. He's a legendary figure. Is he the kind of prison boss who brings order to everything and makes sure everyone gets their rations and all that kind of stuff? Well, it's funny you mentioned Simon's novel, which I definitely recommend to your listeners. It's really, really interesting. Simon's book is mostly about 1815,

so the last kind of few months of the prison. So if you read and enjoyed that, you might appreciate looking at what I've done with regards to the kind of backstory. But he talks about Richard Crafus, King Dick, as he was known, very much in the context of a lot of historians and kind of writers and others have written about him as this kind of authority figure. So essentially, a very tall man, supposedly, some people said seven foot tall, some people said six foot four, a guy who'd come out of a privateer, so a young sailor, but one with this enormous kind of

physical presence, and someone that many people that wrote about Dartmoor claimed was this dictator, almost like a tyrant. And one of the things I try and do in the book is actually unpack and kind of deconstruct that a bit, because what we know about King Dick, we only know through sources written by white people. And again, as a historian, this is a big challenge, because for me, I want to tell the story. But I also want to let readers in on how we can tell the story. So we have this kind of crazy situation where we have this amazing space of like a thousand black men governing themselves in this separate prison block during the War of 1812. But everything we know about that space is written by white sailors. And the vast majority of those accounts are written much later.

So one of the things I try and do in the book is actually figure out how we can tell what was really going on there. And the more I read and the more I thought about it, the more I came to suspect this idea of King Dick as this kind of tyrant, you know, only a tyrant could bring order to a black prison. I came to think that that wasn't really true at all. So the book's also kind of like a reflection on that, on that question of how we tell stories about black history and black spaces when our sources are almost entirely written by white people. Interesting, really interesting. Is it true that he liked putting on plays? Yeah, I mean, this is one of the amazing things about this particular prison block. So it was known as the Black Prison or

Prison 4 of these seven prison blocks. And I mentioned before that there weren't cells, right? So what would happen basically is that the Brits would let you go into one of the prison blocks, you'd hang up your hammock at night, and then during the day you'd take down the hammocks and you just kind of hang out. But for the most part, prisoners were allowed to visit the other prison blocks. So again, very unlike a modern prison, right? Rather than just exercise in the yard, you could actually go off and visit one of the other blocks. And so prison four, the so-called black prison, just ended up with all the best stuff. So for example, they ended up with roulette wheels, which they got from the French. They ended up with boxing equipment. They ended up with Bibles. They ended up with theatrical scenery. Now,

don't ask me how theatrical scenery got into Dartmoor Prison, but this enabled the black prisoners in Prison 4 to stage their own plays. They staged Shakespeare, they would stage farces from the London stage, all kinds of incredible stuff. And white people would come to this prison over and over again. And it's so funny because the accounts that are written after the war, when these white people are reminiscing about what happened 20 years earlier, very often kind of like make light of this or say they didn't really, they weren't really interested in the black prison or, you know, they only went there to laugh at black people. But actually, we have a few journal and diary accounts written in the prison by white people, and they tell a very different story. It's clear that they really enjoyed hanging out in the black prison. And one of them said, there's more entertainment in this block than in all the others put together. So again this is a story that was kind of lost as people

tidied up their recollections decades later. It's so interesting when you see all black performances nowadays of certain Shakespeare plays and think that unconsciously they're in the tradition of the prisoners of 200 years ago. It's amazing. Now tell me about the massacre. Unconsciously, they're in the tradition of the prisoners of 200 years ago. It's amazing. Now tell me about the massacre. All prison stories or many prison stories have a kind of terrible or fateful end. Look at that. Thunder cracking.

It's brilliant for the massacre. This is really, honestly, this is like we've seeded the clouds. Yeah, the massacre. Yeah, the end of the war. I mentioned before there are about 5,000 Americans who are left in Dartmoor at the end of 1814. When you end a war in the 18th century, it's not as simple as just saying the war is over, right? Even through much of the 19th century, what you need to do is get your peace agreement ratified. And depending on how far apart the parties to the war are, that means having people in London, maybe people in Washington, DC, agreeing to ratify the treaty before you can say the war is over. Oh, and it's worse than that, because once they've

ratified it in Washington, the ship's got to come back to Britain to say, hey, it's been ratified. So actually, the process of ending a war is a really long one. Back to Dartmoor, the end of 1814, there's an upsurge in disease in the prison. So it's actually the most unhealthy it's been during all the time that Americans have been there. The Americans are desperate to get out. It takes them until March to hear back from Washington that the peace treaty has been agreed. Now, at that point, middle of March, they should have been able to walk free from the prison. But the nefarious American consul in London, a guy called Reuben Beasley, the prisoners used to call him Mr. Beastly, he agrees that it'd be a really bad idea for the prisoners to leave until he can

arrange evacuation. So he actually keeps them in the prison. And of course, the Brits agree to this as well. So suddenly, our American prisoners are still prisoners of a war that everyone knows is over. There's a lot of frustration and anger in the prison about the fact that they're not being able to leave. March of 1815 is when Napoleon escapes from Elba, comes back to Paris and starts up the Napoleonic Wars again. So Britain is trying to grab every ship that it can to send materiel across to Europe.

No ships available to transport Americans back from Dartmoor to the US. The prisoners know this as well because you know everything in a prison. So huge despair. On the 6th of April, 1815, it's a rare sunny day at Dartmoor. Everyone comes out of their prison yards.

There's high spirits, but also a lot of tension and anxiety. There's an altercation, a very minor one, between the prisoners and the guards. This creates a big standoff situation. The prisoners vent their frustrations, tear open their shirts, dare the British soldiers to fire on them. And one does. And then more than one does. And then suddenly the whole row of soldiers are firing. And then for the next hour or so, it's a bloodbath. So you have British soldiers chasing

American prisoners through the prison yards and essentially killing them in cold blood. And by the end of the evening of the 6th of April, nine Americans have been murdered, again, all unarmed. Three dozen or so have been mutilated, so with kind of life-changing injuries. And the American prisoners are carrying in their blocks saying, this will always be remembered. For hundreds of years, people will remember the Dartmoor Massacre, which they call it straight away. And then of course, poof, it vanishes. And most of your listeners have probably never heard of it. Isn't that amazing? They may now well have heard of it because of this podcast and because of your book, more importantly.

It is that extraordinary thing that it's about who tells the story, isn't it? I mean, there's every reason we should remember this because it's an extraordinary episode in British and American history. I mean, I found this fascinating. In terms of thinking about what history is, and what the kind of craft of history looks like, clearly these guys in 1815, they correctly know, and they know, they believe, that it's been like 50 years or more in which Britain and the United States have been almost perpetually in hostilities, right? So I mean, thinking about the Stamp Act and all that stuff that follows the Seven Years' War, right the way through into the War of 1812, the Revolutionary War is in the middle of all of that as well. You basically have daggers drawn between Britain and

the United States or the North American colonies back in the 1760s for half a century. Now, these guys cowering in the prison block on the 6th of April 1815 saying, we will always be remembered. cowering in the prison block on the 6th of April 1815 saying, we will always be remembered. They're like, hey, 50 years Britain's been a villain. In another 50 or another 150 or 250, Britain will still be the villain, right? Instead, those nine Americans killed in the yards at Dartmoor are the final, the last Americans killed in a war between Britain and the United States. No Americans have been killed since then. And they had no way of knowing that, that they would be marooned by the growing friendship and amity between Britain and the United States.

So they got forgotten. Now, nothing changed in the circumstances. Like they experienced this nightmarish thing. But for us, it lost all of its significance and power because it became inconvenient because of what happened next. So this kind of memory holding of the Dartmoor Massacre was not accidental, nor was it really willed. But it really encourages us to think about why we remember. And sometimes the things we don't remember, well, what's our rationale for not remembering them?

Nothing in the moment or in the past justifies it, right? It's just what happens afterwards that changes our sense of what's relevant and important. So I felt that a lot writing the story. It was a kind of act of recovery, but also a bit of a rumination on what we remember and why. What a lovely answer. Quite right. That's fantastic stuff. Thank you very much. In fact, it reminds me in 1917, when the first US naval ships arrived in the west of Ireland, some of the crew shouted at the Brits, you know, don't get too happy, we'd have happily fought you.

It was a toss of a coin whether we fought you or the Germans. And I always think that's, knowing what we now know, which was the beginning of a century of such close alliance and amity, that it's such a powerful reminder, it could easily have gone the other way. And by the way, we should finish up by saying, that prison that you've been listening to, listeners, what's happening there today? Oh, it's crazy. I mean, they keep finish up by saying, that prison that you've been listening to, listeners, what's happening there today? Oh, it's crazy.

I mean, they keep trying to close it, right? It's still a prison. It's still a prison. Ever since the 1950s, they've been trying to shut it down. And the Home Office actually announced 10 years ago that it would be closing in 2023. And that's in the book. But while the book was in production, the Home Office quietly announced it would be kept open for a bit longer. So I don't know when it's going to close, but it's the oldest bit of the British prison system. Yeah, it's a

strange connection, right, between the past and the present. It's extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary. Nicholas, you are the best. Thank you so much. What is the book called? The book is called The Hated Cage, an American tragedy in Britain's most terrifying prison. It's a good read, I promise. Thank you very much for coming on. An absolute pleasure. Thank you so much, Dan. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs,

this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History. As I say all the time, I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally. And finish. we'd really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors, that's flying high in the charts. We've got our medieval podcast, Gone Medieval, with the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got The Ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got Warfare as well, dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out wherever you get your pods. well, dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out wherever you get your parts. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.