Objects recently made in Holland—The Napoleonic prisoners at Norman Cross, Perth, Dartmoor, Stapleton, Liverpool, and Greenland Valleyfield

Ever since the days when enemy soldiers and sailors were first interned for protracted periods of time, it has been a practice for the incarcerated men to while away the tedium by making little odds and ends of things as souvenirs. Their wares are often of extreme interest, as they help us to gain some idea of the class of people who have been interned on particular occasions and the ability and skill they possessed.

At the present moment, objects of no little interest are gradually finding their way into England, which have been made by the men interned in Holland who evacuated Antwerp after its fall, and, no doubt, many will be the treasures which our brave soldiers will bring back with them when they are freed from the concentration camps in Germany. Needless to say, all such curios will be valued by the collector more and more as time rolls on.

In the present chapter, we shall confine our remarks to the handiwork of the French and Spanish prisoners captured during the Napoleonic wars, because sufficient of it has been preserved to engage the attention of the treasure-hunter. One word of caution is necessary, at the outset: such objects are easily counterfeited, and, on this account, must only be bought from reputable people unless documentary proof of genuineness is forthcoming.

The Napoleonic prisoners were quartered in various districts of England, and for many years on end, thus our statements can only be made generally.

The chief settlement was at Norman Cross, near Peterborough, and, though the huge and dingy buildings which served as prisons no longer stand, the place is marked by a cross which was unveiled on July 28, 1914. The craft of the Peterborough prisoners ranked high, as visitors to the local museums will readily acknowledge. Their wares were chiefly made out of the beef-bones left over from their rations. The writer treasures a most exquisitely made set of dominoes carved from bone and ornamented by brush, quill, and knife which came from this settlement. A photograph of the set is given among the illustrations of the present work, but the delicate tracery and the coloured panels of the box have lost much of their charm in the process of reproduction. There is nothing unfinished about the dominoes; each is perfectly squared and the dots are scooped out and coloured with black enamel. When one remembers that the tools at the disposal of the workers were few and primitive, their productions must be accepted as truly marvellous. Another example of the work of these men which is worth mentioning is to be seen in the Peterborough Museum; it consists of a miniature bone or perhaps ivory guillotine, perfect in every detail.

Perhaps it will be well to mention that the inhabitants of Peterborough displayed much interest in the Frenchmen's art, and a regular market was held daily within the prison walls from ten to midday, whilst history records that as much as two hundred pounds was given in a week for these curios.

At Perth, another of the concentration centres, the products of the prisoners consisted of carved boxes, wooden and bone puzzles, toys and strawplait goods. Indeed, the skill which the men displayed in this latter class of production was so high that it outclassed all local work of a similar nature. From straw which was dipped in various coloured dyes these clever workmen made tableaux of a most gorgeous nature and framed them with carefully shaped pieces of wood. They also dug up the clay in the courtyards and modelled it into little statuettes of sailors, soldiers, and people of notoriety, whilst they cut pieces from their clothes and worked them into ornamental slippers.

Their ingenuity did not stop here, for they forged bank-notes to while away their tedious hours, and foisted them on to those who came to the prison market. In this matter the following quotation from the Perth Courier of September 19, 1813, is interesting:[30]—

"We are sorry to learn that the forgery of notes of various banks is carried on by prisoners at the DepÔt, and that they find means to throw them into circulation by the assistance of profligate people who frequent the market. The eagerness of the prisoners to obtain cash is very great, and as they retain all they procure they have drained the place almost entirely of silver, so that it has become a matter of difficulty to get change of a note.

"Last week a woman coming from the Market at the DepÔt was searched by an order of Captain Moriarty, when there was found about her person pieces of base money in imitation of Bank tokens (of which the prisoners are suspected to have been the fabricators), to the amount of £5 17s. After undergoing examination, the woman was committed to gaol."

The Perth prisoners earned for themselves a very bad name, for not only did they counterfeit bank-notes, copies of which are still to be found by collectors, but they fell to all sorts of dishonest practices. A favourite ruse of theirs was to bargain with a customer and then offer to wrap up the goods which were about to change hands. The wrapping-up process was completed out of the unwary purchaser's view, but instead of enclosing the curio they included a lump of clay or piece of wood of similar shape. If the customer came back to complain, the seller was seldom found, and even when he was discovered it took a deal of threatening and verbal eloquence to obtain redress from the defaulter, whose one security was the iron railings which separated him from the outside world.

The prisoners at Dartmoor also made knick-knacks, but the Governor here forbade the sale of woollen mittens, gloves, straw hats or bonnets, plaited straw, shoes, and articles made out of prison stores.

At Stapleton, outside Bristol, the bootmakers of the neighbourhood complained of the sale of shoes in the prison market The prison-made article, however, was usually more a thing of ornamentation than of use, and so the bootmakers' complaint seems somewhat unwarranted.

At Liverpool, the Frenchmen made trinkets, crucifixes, card-boxes, toys, snuff-boxes, horsehair rings, and hair watch-chains, using their own hair in the manufacture of the two latter articles.

At the Greenland Valleyfield prison, the making of straw into strawplait was for a while a profitable pastime, as the following passage shows:[31]—

"The employer gave out the straw and paid for the worked article, three sous per 'brasse,' a little under six feet. Some men could make twelve 'brasses' a day. Beaudoin (a sergeant-major of the 31st Line Regiment) set to work at it, and in the course of a couple of months became an adept. After four years came the remonstrance of the country people that this underpaid labour by untaxed men was doing infinite injury to them; the Government prohibited the manufacture and much misery among the prisoners resulted. From this prohibition resulted the outside practice of smuggling straw into the prison and selling it later as the manufactured article; and a very profitable industry it must have been, for we find that, during the trial of Matthew Wingrave in 1813, for engaging in the strawplait trade with the prisoners at Valleyfield, it came out that Wingrave, who was an extensive dealer in the article, had actually moved up there from Bedfordshire on purpose to carry on the trade and had bought cornfields for the purpose."

Thus it is clear that the curios made by prisoners of war embrace a wide range of interesting objects, and that there is much fascination to be had in collecting them. The reader who would know more of the lives, the romances, and the sufferings of these unfortunate men should read Francis Abell's capital book bearing the title "Prisoners of War in Britain."