On this day … 1 July 1843

The Preston Chronicle reported the following case before the Preston magistrates involving an eight-year-old boy charged with theft, who was found guilty and sentenced to a month’s solitary confinement and a whipping. The ‘(n.)’ in the report signifies that he could neither read nor write.

‘Peter Foster, 8 (n.), charged with stealing, at Preston, one morocco case, containing one silver knife, one silver fork, and one silver spoon, the property of William Duryer.

‘Margaret Burres, servant to Mr. Duryer, stated, that being washing-day when the theft was committed, the back door was open. It was always open on such occasions.

‘Harriet Bretherton, witness, called: prisoner offered her the case for sale: offered it for sixpence: Believed it to be stolen, and seized the prisoner, but he so kicked and screamed that she could not hold him: Retained the case and gave it to Curle, police officer: Prisoner said he had bought the case in the Market-place.

‘Joseph Curle, police officer, apprehended the prisoner: Knew him by description: Prisoner said he had found the case in Mr Duryer’s yard.

‘The prisoner’s mother, who was in court, was called up and reprimanded by the Chairman [Thomas Batty Addison], who attributed much of his misconduct to the want of parental superintendence.

‘Verdict – guilty: Sentenced to one month’s solitary confinement and to be whipped.’

The case was just one of many similar that were coming before the town’s magistrates. The problem of how to deal with juvenile delinquents had been taxing the authorities, both locally and nationally, for some time, as an editorial in the Chronicle a few years earlier, in 1839, had made clear.

The writer was worried by the growing number of offenders, many of whom were children, and by a system badly designed to deal with those children. Prison was not the answer, he maintained, because there the children were schooled in criminality by the older prisoners. That was, possibly, one of the reasons magistrates so frequently sentenced children to solitary confinement, to keep them out of the clutches of the prison Fagins.

One of the benefits of prison, the editorial explained without a hint of criticism, was that solitary confinement could be combined with whipping and the treadmill to teach the offender to fear committing further crimes. But in many cases involving children, it argued, a simple whipping was often all that was needed. However, the magistrates could not choose that alternative, because sentencing guidelines laid down that the whipping had to be accompanied by imprisonment.

The solution proposed by the Chronicle was to establish reformatories for young offenders, attached to the town’s workhouse rather than the prison, where the children could be kept away from evil influences, and provided with instruction as well as punishment.

The above image from Barney Smith’s Preston Digital Archive comes with the following information:

‘Inmates work the treadmill at Preston Prison in 1902. Note the high back wooden chairs in the foreground. It seems that this particular treadwheel was of the ‘double decker’ type as another wheel appears at the top of the image.

‘The treadwheel was a penal appliance introduced in 1818 by the British engineer Sir William Cubitt (1785–1861) as a means of usefully employing convicts. Designed in some cases to handle as many as 40 convicts, the device was a wide hollow cylinder, usually composed of wooden steps built around a cylindrical iron frame. As the device began to rotate, each prisoner was forced to continue stepping along the series of planks.

‘The power generated by the treadwheel was commonly used to grind corn and pump water, although some served no purpose at all other than punishment. The use of treadwheels was abolished in Britain by the Prisons Act of 1898 although this would seem to conflict with the date of the above image.’