Holloway’s women
Enjoys a chronological account of Holloway Prison that illuminates the experiences of inmates
When Chancellor George Osborne announced the closure of Holloway Prison in his budget statement of November 2015, newspaper reports listed a roll call of prominent inmates, from political prisoners such as the Pankhursts and Constance Markievicz, to women guilty of murders such as Ruth Ellis, Myra Hindley and Rose West. These famous and infamous individuals have shaped the public history of the prison. Here however, Caitlin Davies aims to recover “the voices of all the women of Holloway”.
Built as a local prison in 1852, Holloway became a women-only institution from 1902. It held mainly short-stay prisoners, but also women awaiting the death sentence. Davies’s book only touches lightly on the administrative history of the prison, a full academic study of which is still to be undertaken. Instead, it takes a broadly chronological look at Holloway’s history.
The story starts with Selina Salter, who arrived at Holloway in 1866, aged 18 and already deemed an “incorrigible” offender. Salter’s story, in and out of the revolving doors of Holloway, the Union Workhouse, and the City Lunatic Asylum, was not unique, reflecting the stories of the many poor women who spent time there.
After revealing how “Holloway was central to the Suffragettes’ story”, Davies then moves on to the First World War and the interwar period, notable for the execution of the murderess Edith Thompson in 1923. Thompson was not the first female criminal to be executed at Holloway but her hanging was controversial. It had an impact on both the governor and the executioner, who attempted suicide two weeks later.
In the Second World War, the evacuated prison was used for the internment of enemy aliens. These included immigrants like Suzanne Schwarzenberger, a German lawyer who had arrived in Britain before the war after her brother had been condemned to death for leading an anti-Nazi organisation. Holloway also held those imprisoned under Defence Regulation 18B, including Nazi sympathisers and members of the British Union of Fascists, such as Diana Mosley.
We are then guided through the postwar era, under the governorship of Charity Taylor, who introduced many reforms including practical and academic classes. It was during Taylor’s tenure that (in July 1955) the nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis was executed, a hanging that added to the pressure for penal reform and the abolition of capital punishment.
While this study doesn’t contain significantly new insights into Holloway’s history, it does provide us with a biography of a prison over its lifetime, adding to the few single study accounts that we have of British penal institutions. Davies also focuses unapologetically on the inmates’ stories, and gives us an insight into the processes of her research, recounting visits to the prison, crime scenes, and burial places. All this makes Bad Girls an enjoyable and enlightening read, which has
much to recommend it.