The Breakwater Prison

For human misery in the mass and over a long period I suppose there has never been anything in South Africa to match the Breakwater Prison. The evidence is abundant. It was in July, 1846, that Mr. W. E. Gladstone presented to the British Cabinet a dispatch from the Governor of the Cape urging the need for a breakwater to protect the shipping in Table Bay during winter gales. Mr. Gladstone himself suggested that it should be built by convict labour. The convicts were assembled. In 1860 Prince Alfred, afterwards Duke of Edinburgh, pressed a silver trigger and thus tipped the first load of stone. That was the first and last touch of luxury in the whole enterprise. For more than half a century after that white, native and coloured prisoners toiled in the quarries and harbour, carrying out one gigantic task after another. The prison became one of the most feared in the world, a place that ranked in the criminal mind with Dartmoor and Devil’s Island. You could still form an idea of the terrors of this prison by walking through the open gates in Portswood Road before the V + A waterfront was constructed and gazing at the treadmills.

Thomas Bowler’s painting of the ceremonial “tipping of the first truck” by Prince Alfred to start the construction of the Table Bay breakwater in 1860, and the solitary confinement cells. The gates were wide open, but something of the old atmosphere of hardship and despair still remains within the turreted walls. Here was Old Newgate under our southern sun. Several warders who were stationed at the Breakwater Prison have fascinating stories. One of them landed in Cape Town in 1888, a penniless lad of eighteen, and became a warder for lack of anything better to do. He found himself among an odd assortment of colleagues — ex-soldiers, ex-policemen, seamen who had deserted their ships, adventurers without references. The pay was one shilling and eight pence a day, and four pence was deducted for messing. “We fared well,” the old warder assured. “There were always a few first-class chefs among the prisoners.” The warders carried old and battered Snider rifles, but they were never trusted to load or fire. They kept tobacco in their ammunition pouches, and relied on fixed bayonets in emergencies. Only the head warders had serviceable weapons. That was the time when I.D.B. (illicit diamond buying on the Kimberley fields) was being punished savagely in an attempt to stamp out the traffic. Magistrates could, and sometimes did, award ten years’ hard labour for this crime, and the minimum sentence was five years. There was no option of a fine. Thus scores of men who were not criminals in the ordinary sense were trapped and sent to the breakwater merely for being found in possession of uncut diamonds. As one writer in 1895 remarked: “The breakwater depends entirely for its rate of progress on the output of I.D.B. convicts from Kimberley.”

Many of those who experienced the full horrors of the Breakwater Prison should never have been awarded hard labour. Yet doctors, lawyers, army officers and other educated men fell into the merciless net and learned the meaning of penal servitude. There were also international crooks who had hastened to South Africa during the diamond and gold booms like vultures to a feast. Some became wealthy; most of them ended up on the long, grey stone breakwater in Table Bay. Perhaps there are a no more old ones who sit around where criminals gathered and talk of the “old breakwater days” — but not wistfully. They wore the broad arrow in those days, and each man had his number stamped on the back of his jacket. Dangerous customers marched out to work in chains. The rings were riveted around their ankles, and they lived in chains for months at a time.

At five o’clock each morning the “rouse bell” sounded. The wards, as they called the dormitories, were bare, with concrete floors. Each man had bed boards with a mat, a pillow, and three blankets. The doors were unlocked at five-thirty and the mieliepap breakfast was served. At six work started — quarrying and loading stone. Lunch, always stew and bread, came at midday. From one to five, they laboured again, and at five they clumped back for their evening soup and bread. They could walk the yards for a spell, and then at eight, they were herded back into the wards. It was the pitiless monotony that made men give up hope. This, they knew, would be their lot for all the years they served at the Breakwater Prison. The wards were lighted at night so that every man could be watched. Towards the end of the century arc lamps with hissing carbons were used. Each half hour during the night a bell tolled. Then the warders on duty along the walls would chant their monotonous reports: “Number one, and all’s well.” And so on from post to post. “Halt! Who goes there?” a sentry would challenge. And back would come the inevitable cry: “Visiting rounds!”

In the early days each white convict slept with a native convict on each side of him — to reduce the risk of communication. Often there would be a thousand convicts within the walls. Sunday was the day of services and the weekly shaves, hair cropping and baths. The men were given razors until the custom became dangerous owing to attacks on warders. Then the convicts had their beards clipped for them. On Sundays the “prison widows” and children trudged down the Portswood Road to visit the men they had not forgotten. Once a month every man was permitted to see a visitor and receive a gift of small fruits. Nothing large enough to hide a file, a knife or tobacco was allowed. Interviews lasted twenty minutes, and the convicts remained behind wire netting. The aristocrats of the prison, for some queer psychological reason, were the “I.D.B.” men just as in a modern prison the skilled safe-breaker is treated by his fellows with some respect. The “I.D.B.s” always boasted that they had parcels of diamonds “planted” for the day of their release. Impostors who claimed to have dealt in diamonds when, in fact, they had been sentenced for less glamorous crimes, were liable to be set upon by genuine members of the fraternity.

One day two “I.D.B.” men who had just been released at the end of long sentences contrived to break the monotony. They drove round Table Bay Docks in an open carriage, lolling back like princes with cigars in their mouths. They wore gorgeous clothes, and as they visited gang after gang they waved genially to old friends and made rude gestures to the guards. Hundreds of convicts cheered them. It was the great topic of the bleak prison that night. The law was harsh, and as I have said, some men should never have been sent to penal servitude. Among the victims of injustice were several British regular soldiers whose time had expired while on active service. For refusing to obey orders when they should have been discharged, they were all sent to the breakwater. In the ‘eighties of the last century many criminal lunatics were treated as criminals; they, too, swelled the numbers in the ghastly prison. But the most pitiful case of all was a man who had come from a family of low mentality. He had seen someone climbing out of his wife’s bedroom window and had fired and killed the intruder. Only then did he discover that he had shot his father.

Percy Collingwood, one of the most skillful safe-breakers of his day, served a stretch at the breakwater during this century. Once the superintendent challenged him to open a new safe in his office. Within ten minutes Collingwood had got the door open with his bare hands. Collingwood was a well-educated man, too intelligent to attempt an escape from prison; but he helped two other men to escape. In 1918 he was deported from the Union. Convicts recaptured after a “break” usually received six months and twelve lashes with the cat-o’-nine-tails. In later years the maximum number of strokes was reduced to ten; but it was still a punishment that scarred a man for life. The “cat”, with its nine knotted thongs of whipcord, was pickled in brine to stiffen it. The prisoner was stripped to the waist and fastened by the wrists to the triangle. Each stroke was delivered with all the force a muscular warder could apply. It sounds like medieval torture, and indeed it is nothing else. Yet some of the men on the breakwater even risked this torture for the sake of freedom. One “I.D.B.” convict, a clever malingerer, contrived to be transferred to a convict hospital outside the Breakwater Prison. From there, escape was a much simpler matter, and he succeeded in reaching England. He was doing well in an honest business of his own when he met one of his old companions of the breakwater. The man was a blackmailer. At last, the victim refused to pay any further money, and so the blackmailer sent an anonymous letter to the police. The “I.D.B.” man was arrested. He appealed against extradition but failed. Back he had to go to the breakwater, the place six thousand miles away which he had never expected to see again.

Special cells were built in the prison in 1891 to hold men who had escaped so often that they could not be trusted in the ordinary wards. You can imagine seeing these steel and concrete cells in the prison quadrangle. The walls are fifteen inches thick. It would take dynamite to demolish them. And you could read the messages scraped defiantly on the walls. “Three days cells for two big smokes — this won’t break my heart.” “Frenchie” Ferroli was the desperado who caused the authorities to build these cells. He walked out of the Breakwater Prison in a warder’s uniform, swinging a pair of handcuffs and nodding a greeting to the sentries at the gate. He was caught while being shaved in a Cape Town barber’s shop six months later, and finally, he was deported. That was the only final solution to the problem of men like Ferroli.

Then three men made a skeleton key, entered a room where the warders kept their civilian clothes, and walked out boldly into the yard. It was Sunday, the visitors were there, and the three men were mistaken for visitors who had wandered into the wrong part of the prison. They were ordered out of the gates, and gladly they went. A maniac named Harry Wilson was sent to the breakwater for sandbagging an Indian trader in Natal. He was a tall, slim man who could not bear captivity; and he escaped from the train bringing him to Cape Town. He was recaptured, but he attempted to escape so often that his original sentence of two and a half years grew to six years; and he received, at various times, a total of fifty lashes with the “cat”. They put him in one of the special cells, handcuffed, leg-ironed, and chained to a ring bolt in the wall. Still, he fought for liberty. One day he threw his breakfast in the face of the warder who had brought it in, and tried to find keys to fit his handcuffs. He was so troublesome that at last, the prison doctor certified him as insane, and he was transferred to the lunatic asylum on Robben Island. There he found a boat one day, rowed across to Sea Point, and left a simple message: “Good-bye-Harry.” That was the last that was seen of Harry Wilson. He was one of the small handful of men who were never recaptured. Another man hid in a train at the docks and steamed off to freedom.

But the most remarkable escape was that of a soldier named Holloway. Holloway had been sentenced to death for shooting his sergeant after he had been reprimanded on parade. When the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment he went to the Breakwater Prison. After only a few days there he was placed in a waiting room with another man until the photographer arrived to take the routine portraits. Holloway was in prison garb, but the other man was not. They changed clothes. Although Holloway was seen climbing the prison walls the guards failed to overtake him. Every ship in the harbour was searched. The hunt went on for weeks, but Holloway had vanished completely.

Among the lesser punishments at the Breakwater Prison was the treadmill. This cruel and senseless invention appears to have been in use in the old Cape Town “tronk” as far back as 1824. It was always reserved for men. There were two treadmills at the breakwater, and though the punishment was abolished in 1905, the rusty machinery is still there. I think it ought to remain there as a perpetual reminder of the evils that appear in prisons, and the need that still exists for a more humane system. The first breakwater treadmill was installed in the eighteen-seventies, and it held two victims at a time. A larger one, capable of holding six men at once, was built in the eighteen-nineties. The convicts called it “grinding air”. They were on a sort of moving staircase which began to revolve when they stepped on, and which had to be kept going at a steady pace. If the men slackened off the planks they stood upon came up and lacerated their shins. The treadmill was the customary penalty for laziness and petty gaol offenses. A man would spend the whole day, from nine to five, climbing these endless stairs, with only five minutes’ rest every half hour. Three days was a “stretch”, and then he would return to the stone quarries. Men who revolted against the punishment were handcuffed to a bar, and there they hung with every turn of the mill bruising their legs.

On a cold day, with a kind-hearted warder using the brake mercifully, the treadmill was tolerable. But in summer a sadistic warder would inflict torture by allowing the wheel to run too fast. I knew another warder who went to the Breakwater Prison in 1900 and remained there for ten years. By the beginning of the century some of the abuses had been remedied; but it was still a grim place, dreaded by all evildoers.

Eddie Guerin

It was the most interesting prison in the world, for almost every nation in the world seemed to be represented among the inmates, and some notorious criminals were serving sentences there. One was “Cuban” Jackson, who was deported to the United States. There he linked up with the celebrated Chicago May, and soon afterward received a life sentence for shooting Eddie Guerin. The convicts had books, draughts, chess, and a slice of cake at Christmas. In later years the steam kitchen turned out wholesome meals. The men needed it, for they did a harder day’s work than any other convicts in South Africa. The huge quarry in Table Bay Docks was hewn out of the rock by the hard-driven convicts decade after decade. The warder declared that stopping tobacco from entering the prison was impossible. Friends of the convicts hid it in the quarry at night, and despite routine searches, there were always leakages.

A more puzzling side of prison life was the news service. Often the convicts discussed the details of important events before the warders had heard the news. It was not until 1923 that the Breakwater Prison was finally evacuated. Then it became a native location, and a government research laboratory was built in the old punishment yard. The warder who was there during the first ten years of the century had served in many gaols and prisons, and he made a remark about the Breakwater Prison that still lingers in my mind. “I won’t say that it reformed men,” he summed up, “but it was the only prison I knew that kept a lot of men straight afterward simply because they were afraid to come back. I often met them in the street, and they told me so. No man ever forgot a stretch at the Breakwater Prison.”

Source: Green L. 1947 Tavern of the Seas. Cape Town published by Howard Timm