The murky past of a sinister institution now converted into modern homes
Cadavers unearthed on the site of a housing development in Fishponds could turn out to be the remains of French soldiers and sailors who took part in the massacre of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s black freedom fighters 200 years ago, in what became modern day Haiti.
This is just one of the fascinating revelations that emerge from Chris Bowkett’s pithy retelling of the story of Stapleton Prison,The Misérables of Bristol, published by Bristol Radical History Group (BRHG).
There is historic irony in the fact the Napoleon sent 20,000 troops from post-revolutionary France to put down the successful slave-led rebellion against slavery in what is now Haiti. Clearly there was no thought about ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ when it came to taking control of valuable assets. When the black Governor-General Toussaint L’Ouverture turned up for talks with the French, he was taken prisoner and shipped to France. He died in jail the month before Britain again declared war on France, in 1803.
The prison was originally constructed to accommodate prisoners from the American War of Independence when other Bristol jails proved problematic. The first building, constructed in 1779, held 500 Spanish and 13 Dutch combatants who supported the rebellious American states. It but soon required expansion.
Conditions were grim. An American wrote of his colleagues: ‘many of them, too, coming from the worst grades of society, with habits imbibed from those haunts of wretchedness, soon lost, by gambling, what little means they had. … they sacrificed their clothing to this nefarious practice, and, now pinched with cold, and half starved for want of food, and with no regular mode of exercise, … Many sickened and died; others became almost frantic with hunger; and that most abominable vice, theft…’
Prisoners were required to help build new wings and it would eventually be big enough to hold 6,000. Among the French prisoners were 700 captured during an unsuccessful attempt to support the Irish rebellion against the British in 1798.
More than one in ten of Stapleton prisoners, or the ‘Fish Ponds depôt’ as it was also known, died in captivity, including the victim of a duel over a game of marbles!
The French prisoners were allowed to run a weekly market outside the prison where they sold all manner of home-made items. In 1808 a Mr. Birtle, Secretary of the Bristol Society for the Suppression of Vice, purchased “a variety of devices in bone and wood of the most obscene kind”, but art dealer Thomas Rohan would later praise the wood carved figures animals and straw marquetry of a Noah’s Ark made by the prisoners.
Exquisite models of an execution guillotine carved from bone and a fully-rigged warship illustrated in the book are tributes to the finesse and skill of imprisoned craftsmen.
Chris Bowkett interrogates the murky past of a long-forgotten Bristol institution, painting a vivid picture of life and death in Stapleton Prison. In doing so he places Fishponds in the midst of the tumultuous events which beset Britain as the 13 fledgling states of America threw off the imperial yoke, and Britain’s neighbour across the channel decapitated the monarchy and began new life as a republic.
It is said some local women had children by prisoners, and that Lebeq’s Tavern in Easton was founded by one of many prisoners who did not return home when the wars were over. Perhaps this slim volume which sheds light on another of Fishpond’s darker secrets, will spark off more investigations into links between the people of today’s Fishponds and those who went before.
The slim volume ‘The Misérables of Bristol: Soldiers and Sailors of Stapleton Prison’, by Chris Bowkett, costs only £3 and can be purchased online from BRHG
