Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [71]
But even Holloway’s presence was benign compared to another prison, Pentonville, that fronted Caledonian Road, a short walk southeast of the Crippens’ house. Its facade was no more or less dreary, but the frequency of executions conducted within imparted a black solemnity to its high, blank walls. Upon its opening in 1842, reformers called Pentonville a “model prison” in recognition of both its innovative design—four clean and bright cellblocks jutting from a central hub where guards had a ready view of every level—and its regimen, “the separate system,” under which all of its initial 520 prisoners were kept in what later generations would call solitary confinement, each man alone in a cell and barred from ever speaking to his fellow inmates. The point was to compel prisoners to contemplate their behavior and—through solitary work, daily religious services, and the reading of soul-improving literature—to encourage them to shed their unhealthy behavior. In practice the separate system drove many insane and prompted a succession of suicides.
In 1902 the prison became a center for execution. This did not please the neighbors, although anyone with an appreciation of history would have seen this new role as a fitting return to the district’s roots. In the 1700s an inn stood in Camden Town by the name of Mother Red Cap, a common stop for omnibuses but also the end of the line for many condemned prisoners, who were hung at a public gallows across the street. Public executions became great picnics of malice and drew increasing criticism until Parliament required that they be conducted within prison walls. By the time the Crippens arrived in Hilldrop Crescent, one remnant of prior practice remained enshrined in law and served as a persistent and depressing reminder for families living near Pentonville that they had a prison in their midst and that there were men within its walls who knew precisely the moment at which they would die. The law required that prison authorities ring the bell in the prison chapel fifteen times upon the completion of each hanging. This became wearing for neighbors and certainly for prisoners next in line for the gallows; for Belle it became another marker of her own social decline.
One immediate neighbor of the prison, Thomas Cole, grew sufficiently concerned about how the executions were affecting adjacent streets that he complained to the home secretary, a youngish man named Winston Churchill. “The Building,” he wrote, “is surrounded by Houses occupied by respectable working people who find much difficulty in letting the apartments. It is also causing the Houses to remain empty and of course much loss to all concerned.” He closed by asking, nicely, whether these executions couldn’t take place elsewhere—in particular at a prison called Wormwood Scrubs, “which is, I believe in an isolated position?”
Cole’s complaint made its way through the Home Office to the governor of Pentonville Prison, who responded promptly, in equally civil language and with empathy. After noting that indeed one of the major streets bordering the prison, Market Street, now contained several empty houses, he stated, “I do not think that the carrying out of executions here causes the difficulty in letting apartments, at least to any appreciable extent. The fact of a prison in itself being in a particular spot is bound to