by Wray Hunt - Sussex County Magazine 1932

 

The employment of women in responsible official posts is, by the feminists, accounted a new thing. I had accepted their view on this point, more or less, until I had occasion to study the court rolls of the Sussex Quarter Sessions, when some surprising facts came to light. To be brief I found a woman employed in a position that the most advanced feminists do not demand in this year of grace 1932.

 

The lady in question, was a certain Ann Smart, and her employment was that of keeper of the Petworth House of Correction, the local prison for West Sussex. It was apparently a hereditary job, for during the years 1750 to 1800 the post is held successively by Samuel Smart, his widow Ann, and his son Thomas. Of course, like all such posts, this was farmed out. The keeper of the House of Correction received a small salary, but had to keep the prisoners out of her own pocket, being reimbursed each quarter sessions: but first she had to buy the post. Presumably the bills sent up to the Justices showed a profit for Anne Smart, for she could not exist on the miserable salary allowed, and there were also fees: "recommitted till he has paid his fees" is quite a common entry in the Rolls.

 

One wonders what Ann Smart did about certain of her duties. It was the task of the keeper of the House of Correction to administer the discipline of the house to vagrants and petty rogues, and Ann Smart had plenty of such, of both sexes, in her charge. It would also be her duty to whip convicts through the streets when that very common sentence was passed upon them. One wonders whether the redoubtable Anne did this herself or by deputy? If the latter she would have to pay for the service, the regulation fee being half a crown for a whipping administered in the gaol, five shillings for whipping at the cart's tail. plus the hire of horse and cart.

 

I picture Ann Smart a great coarse red faced female, of the Hogarth-Gilray school. ruling her little kingdom with a rod of iron and a fierce tongue. No woman of less stern mould could hope for success in the task. for the records of the prison suggest that she must have had some tough customers to control at times, and we hear of no sums disbursed for assistant gaolers at Petworth, though there were two at the Cliffe prison in Lewes where one Charles Cooper reigned during the whole latter part of the eighteenth century, save for one interval, during which he was an inmate of his own prison on a charge of negligently allowing a convict to escape. Strange to say he did not lose his post.

It must have been a strange life for a woman, controlling a prison full of ruffians of both sexes, with no separate cells, except a few black punishment holes where the prisoners were chained by the necks to the walls, or, if one bill is to be trusted, confined in thumbscrews, presumably not the mediaeval torture implements, but an arrangement like the finger pillory that caught and held the thumbs of refractory prisoners so that struggling and resistance gave intense agony.

Ann Smart's days cannot have been dull. She must have known that every time she passed through the common room of the prison she was in peril of assault, if not worse.

 

Prison mutinies were common enough when the blackguards confined therein were herded into a common cell, allowed anything they could beg, buy or steal in the way of drink (spirits were forbidden, but Mr Pickwick's experience at the " whistling shop" was not peculiar to the Marshalsea) and, unless under sentence of hard labour, had nothing to do but drink, gamble and plot.

 

I wonder if she had in her charge the last woman to be burned in Sussex, almost the last in England, a certain Anne Cruttenden, as to the details of whose fate I can find no further reference than a badly torn bill for fuel and a cart for the gruesome ceremony. She must have been coining or husband murdering as these two offences, classed as " Petty Treason " were the last which carried the penalty of the stake, mitigated by the humanity (?) of the eighteenth century by the provision that the victim should be previously strangled, unless the executioner bungled that job, as he did in the case of the notorious Catherine Hayes.

 

This was in 1776. The last case in England occurred some ten years later. I wonder too whether a few of our more advanced feminists would have liked her occupation? It was, I imagine, profitable enough, and certainly as responsible as the most advanced woman could desire.

 

 

 

 

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