Thursday 30 January 1840 Somberly, Miss Martin calls the two little boys to her. Tomorrow their thirty day sentence will be up and they will leave her charge. Since their boisterous cellmates departed last weekend, the hours have slipped by slowly without incident. The Gaoler has not been required to reprimand the young boys who […]
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23 January 1840 We need to talk about Walter Tunmore because Sarah Martin needs to talk about him. Yesterday was no exception. ‘The boy Tunmore is so quick in movements and manner of speaking and impetuous in temper that it might seem he would be quick in learning to read’, she wrote in her journal, […]
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Sunday 12 January 1840 Sarah Martin gathers her strength to deliver her Sunday morning sermon in the prison chapel. Rarely does she miss a visit to the gaol but yesterday she regretted, ‘I am compelled by a bad cold to remain at home.’ In her absence, she now learns, the boys returned to their riotous […]
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On Christmas Day 1839 inmates at Yarmouth Gaol tucked into a hearty meal of roast beef and plum pudding paid for by the Mayor. I hope it was washed down with ale, as it had been in 1837. The festive dinner must have made a welcome change from the monotonous prison diet of bread and […]
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In 1845 the bricklayer, James Thirkettle, was sent to the solitary cell for a day for making marks on the back of his hand by pricking with a needle and ink. The Gaoler recorded only three occasions when he discovered prisoners pricking themselves in the nine years 1836-45 but tattooing was one of the illicit […]
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Isaac Riches was fourteen when first confined at Great Yarmouth Gaol in 1841. Picked up as a rogue and vagabond, allegedly in the act of stealing wood chooks, he was sentenced to six months imprisonment or payment of a fine. His parents, Christopher and Maria Riches, must have paid the surety for a week later […]
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I am an historian reading for a DPhil in History at Balliol College, University of Oxford. My research is most concerned with housing in Britain during and after the First World War. I've been called a political historian, a social historian, and a cultural historian. I don't see any reason to be one and not the other.
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