Holloway Prison was one of the most infamous prisons for women in the world. A London landmark for 164 years, it was home to women from all walks of life and convicted of every sort of ‘crime’ - from stealing coal to ringing the Prime Minister’s doorbell, from forging clothing coupons to protesting against nuclear weapons. Its prisoners included some of the leading freedom fighters of our age, but the vast majority were always imprisoned because of poverty and injustice, addiction and abuse.
Holloway first opened as a House of Correction in 1852, mainly for men and boys. It was a model prison, built to resemble a medieval castle, and its purpose was to be a ‘terror to evil doers’. Inmates were kept isolated and silent at all times, and while wealthier prisoners could pay for their own furnished ‘apartments’ and send out to Harrods for food, most slept on hammocks, ate only gruel and worked for 10 hours a day.
In 1902 Holloway became a female only jail, and it soon became synonymous with the fight for women’s rights, with the wide scale incarceration of the suffragettes. The prison remained central to the suffrage movement, and in 1918 Irish nationalist Constance Markievicz became the first woman elected MP, from inside her cell at Holloway.
Image: Teresa Billington, the first suffragette jailed at Holloway
The prison went through several transformations over the following century, reflecting shifting views on the nature of women, crime and punishment. There were several times when it nearly closed altogether. In the 1920s and ‘30s penal reform was on the national agenda, Holloway’s old rigid style of discipline was replaced with education and training. Lilian Barker, assistant prison commissioner, campaigned to have the prison demolished and replaced with smaller units in the country. But when World War Two broke out, the plans were put on hold and so began another shameful period in Holloway’s history when around 3600 Jewish refugees were jailed on route to internment camps on the Isle of Man.
In 1945, the regime inside Holloway changed again with the appointment of the first woman governor, Dr Charity Taylor. This was the beginning of a ‘psychological approach’ to women prisoners and by the late 1960s there were plans for a new Holloway once more. The old Victorian castle would be pulled down and in its place would be a hospital, a ‘place for healing’. The campaign group Radical Alternatives to Prison argued that Holloway should be phased out altogether; it was time for a total rethink of the nature and purpose of prison. But the building went ahead, and was finally completed in the late 1970s.
Holloway soon became notorious again, in particular the unit for ‘highly disturbed’ women, C1. Conditions on the unit led to the formation of the campaigning group Women in Prison. In the 1990s, Holloway’s reputation was one of its worst, and the chief inspector of prisons walked out in disgust ‘appalled that any country could treat vulnerable women in the way that I saw in Holloway’. But its very last inspection report in 2015 found a much-improved prison, with ‘exceptional’ staff and ‘excellent’ mental health services. That same year the government announced it was no longer fit for purpose, women would be treated more humanely in ‘conditions better designed to keep them away from crime’. The following summer, Holloway closed and around 500 women were shipped out of London. On 17 June 2016, over a century of incarcerating women came to an end when the last prisoner ever to be released from Holloway walked out the gates.
The story of Holloway Prison is one of victimization and oppression; it is also a story of resistance, survival and bravery. Holloway was the site of state sanctioned murder, with five women executed on its grounds, but it was also a place of reform, where visionary prison governors tried to mitigate the horrors of the penal system. For some inmates, Holloway was a place of torture, yet for others it was a refuge and a place of safety. The Women’s Building will serve as a testament to those who were jailed, and those who worked, behind its forbidding walls.
Caitlin Davies is the author of Bad Girls: the Rebels and Renegades of Holloway Prison, published by John Murray and long listed for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing. https://www.caitlindavies.co.uk/bad/
