‘Where is this leading, Mr Collins?’
The lawyer again mopped his brow and darted a glance at him, but looked away at once. ‘The improperly constituted court, and Baron Huddleston’s disregard for due and correct legal procedures, do give me some technical grounds for an appeal. However, even if successful, the result will not be an acquittal but a retrial, and…’ He fell silent, his jaw working as he steeled himself for what he had to say next.
Tom watched him for a moment. ‘Mr Collins, what you have told me shows that you knew that the trial was a charade from beginning to end. Yet you chose to leave Stephens and me — the men you were defending — in complete ignorance of this. You allowed us to nurture the hope of acquittal, when you already knew—’
‘I swear I did not know this myself until the trial had begun,’ Collins said. For the first time, he raised his eyes and met Tom’s gaze. ‘Captain Dudley, you are a truthful man, even when it is to your detriment. I owe you at least as much honesty and I apologize for concealing this from you, but I felt it better for you to live in hope than to go through the ordeal of the trial knowing that your fate was already sealed.’ He hurried on before Tom could speak. ‘Huddleston summoned me to his chambers to remonstrate with me over the line of defence I was pursuing. He let it be known that the home secretary was taking a personal interest in the case and that the future prospects of us both depended on the correct verdict being reached.’
He glanced towards the waiting policemen and lowered his voice. ‘As I was dining at my club some nights later, I received a visit from an emissary of the home secretary. It was made clear to me that, providing there were “no mishaps or unforeseen errors” on my part, I was to be recommended to Her Majesty for a knighthood and elevated to the bench within the year.’
‘And that is your reward for your part in this,’ Tom said. ‘I congratulate you on your good fortune.’
Collins flinched at the contempt in his voice. ‘I understand your anger, but I hope, sir, that when you have time to reflect on this, you will feel that I have continued to defend you to the best of my abilities despite those blandishments. As I said, there were a number of legal failings in the proceedings, which I could use as grounds for an appeal, but I must advise you that there is nothing to be gained by further prolonging the case.
‘The full weight of the establishment, from Her Majesty the Queen and the home secretary to the justices sitting in judgement upon you, is united against you. They are determined that this case will end in your conviction and a sentence that will deter others from doing as you have done.
‘You have my sympathy, but you must prepare yourself for the awful sentence which must be passed to uphold the laws of England. And rest assured, as soon as things can go through their form, you will be granted a free pardon, we are all sure.’
‘Let them do their worst,’ Tom said, ‘and be damned with you and all of them. You and your peers have conspired to heap further trials on ourselves and our families, who had already suffered as much as human souls can endure.’
‘But the laws of England must be upheld,’ Collins said.
‘Even if upholding the laws of England requires the denial of justice to Englishmen?’
‘It has been done to outlaw the custom of the sea.’
Tom gave a bitter laugh. ‘It has done no such thing. What it has done is to outlaw the truth. Ships will still wreck and men will still be cast away. Men will thirst and men will starve, and men will do what they always have done in order to survive, for no instinct is stronger than that. But never again will men return to these shores and freely confess what they have done. The evidence will be hidden, consigned to the deep; and the survivors will say that they lived on tallow candles, shoe leather, plankton or God’s fresh air. They will know the truth of it, and their interrogators will know, but that truth will never again be expressed. The custom of the sea will continue but, like the whores in the crimps and rookeries, polite society — your society, Mr Collins — will be able to pretend that it does not exist. Common folk like me will know better.’
He stared at him. ‘I hope your career brings you satisfaction, Mr Collins. I bid you good-day.’ He turned his back until he heard the door clang shut behind him.
Stephens’s head was still bowed, but Tom could see tears falling in the dust around his feet.
They were led out to the waiting Black Maria — a dark, stinking, horse-drawn wagon, with a central corridor dividing cells so cramped there was barely room to stand. They were driven slowly north towards Holloway, the horses straining to pull the ironclad wagon up the steep hill from Islington.
When the great doors of the prison at last closed behind them, Tom and Stephens were taken from the Black Maria and made to stand before the reception counter while a clerk recorded their age, religion, offence and sentence. All their possessions were noted in the ledger, which the two men had to countersign. They were stripped of their clothes, which were taken away to be cleaned and stored against their release. The garments of particularly filthy or verminous prisoners were simply burned.
Naked and shivering with cold, Tom and Stephens were weighed and medically examined, then forced to wash with lye soap and hosed clean. They were issued with prison clothes, given a lecture on the prison regime by the head gaoler and then taken to their cell-block.
As the door clanged shut and Tom was left alone in silence and semi-darkness, the displays of waxworks in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s were already being rearranged to include a crude likeness of ‘The Cannibal Captain, Tom Dudley’.
Chapter 21
Holloway was a prison for men, women and boys of eight years and over. As Lord Coleridge had suggested, it was newer and better equipped than the notorious gaols like Newgate or the rotting prison hulks moored on the Thames at Woolwich, but the system it operated was as cruel and degrading as any in the civilized world.
Always brutal and dehumanizing, the prison system in the early nineteenth century had also been irredeemably corrupt. In the 1830s turnkeys were doubling or trebling their wages through the sale of food, liquor and tobacco to inmates with the means to pay for them and bribes to allow male prisoners access to female inmates willing to act as whores. The infirmary was also full of healthy prisoners paying bribes to sleep in a bed.
Captain George Chesterton, the governor of Coldbath Fields prison, introduced a new regime, ‘the silent system’, in 1834. It removed much of the corruption, but it also replaced the random cruelties of earlier eras with a system requiring the isolation and degradation of every single prisoner. The regime was enforced by whippings and floggings which Chesterton described as ‘beneficial, nay indispensable’.
There was no heating or lighting, and no instruction or productive employment of prisoners. Every inmate was totally anonymous, addressed only by the number of his cell incised on the brass badge on his cap. The work of hard labour was mostly carried out in the cells, prisoners ate alone and never communicated with or even saw the other inmates. They were hooded whenever they left their cells for exercise or any other reason.
The punishment for talking was normally confinement in one of the refractory cells in the basement on bread and water. Those cells had only a wooden bench for a bed and a chamber-pot, and when the door was shut, according to Henry Mayhew and John Binny, who wrote a contemporary book on London prisons, ‘They not only exclude a single beam of light but they do not admit the slightest sound.’