It was out of chance that I discovered the existence of John Edis, who for 35 years of his life was the Governor of the Cambridge Town Gaol. Or Borough Prison.
The Mill Road History Society / Capturing Cambridge Project have a full history of the site on Gonville Place from before the prison was built, through to the present Kelsey Kerridge Sports Hall and Queen Anne Terrace Car Park.
As buildings go, this one didn’t last very long. It was completed in the 1820s but was closed by an Act of Parliament in the late 1870s with the remaining prisoners transferred to the modernised County Gaol on Castle Hill. For most of its existence, its governor was John Edis, who ran the operation between 1840-75.
Above – the death of John Edis reported in the Chronicle of 24 April 1875 in the British Newspaper Archive
35 years is a very long time to be in charge of any public institution – in particular one that is accountable to others – in those days it was the borough magistrates which, in those days was chaired by the Mayor of Cambridge. Today, the office of the Mayor of Cambridge is purely ceremonial but in times gone by the Mayor had a number of powers. One of those was being chair of the bench of magistrates, a duty that survived well into the 20th century.
It was by pure chance that I stumbled across the existence of John Edis’ journal – an online search with returned Sean McConville’s History of Prison Administration from 2015.
Above – the footnote in McConville’s study. The importance of the footnote is that it tells me that the journal is in manuscript, and that it is in one of the specialist libraries in Cambridge – in this case the Institute for Criminology. This is also the same institution where the late Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones carried out their vitally important work and research – their untimely deaths coming as a shock to our city.
Digitising and transcribing manuscripts.
A couple of years ago I went along to a book-signing where a longtime Twitter-friend Prof Melissa Terras was launching a book about her groundbreaking research on academia and children’s literature (see the link below).
Before that, I had seen her give a talk some five years prior to that which has stuck with me ever since. It was at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge, and was on crowd-sourcing help for research (amongst other things. The reason why it stuck with me was because it featured the now completed digitisation of the Bentham Papers at University College London.
“Some 95,000 images from collections at UCL and The British Library have been captured in digital form, making them accessible to interested readers around the globe. “
Above – from the Bentham Papers project indicates just how much work was involved digitising all of the manuscripts, and then transcribing every single page.
There are a number of papers, collections and manuscripts that I have since become aware of in my study of local history in Cambridge which I think could do with digitising and transcribing. The papers of the Cambridge Women’s Suffrage Society & Cambridge Union of Women Workers at the Cambridgeshire County Archives are one group. The same goes for a number of meetings of the Cambridge Borough Council as was where big issues – in particular building projects – are being discussed. The diaries & journals of John Edis are another.
There is a straightforward reason why the Edis journals are ever so important to local historians is that they are likely to shine a light into the lives of those at the bottom of the social spectrum in mid-Victorian Cambridge. This will give us an insight into the struggles people faced at a time of huge social change in town. Remember that between 1800-1900 the population of Cambridge quadrupled. And that’s before we consider the technological changes of the railways, the telegraph and sanitation amongst other things brought about.
Injustices on the minds of local townfolk
This was also the time of the hated Spinning House – the Vice Chancellor’s Private Prison where proctors and their bulldogs would pick up unaccompanied women and throw them into jail (on the assumption they were sex workers) before hauling them before the Vice Chancellor to deliver his verdict.
The inquest of Betsy Howe overseen by the great Charles Henry Cooper , coroner, town clerk and antiquarian ensured that women imprisoned in there could speak on public record as to this outrage. 17 year old Daisy Hopkins was arrested that townfolk kicked up a huge storm to the extent that the Home Secretary and the Lord Chief Justice had to get involved – see the latter’s written ruling on the case here.
For social historians looking at the uses and abuses of power in Cambridge, the diaries of John Edis could prove to be a valuable source. But they remain undigitised and untranscribed in the Institute of Criminology…awaiting some researchers to unlock their secrets.
Lost Cambridge 