In his final blog before the opening of the York Castle Prison exhibition, Jim Butler explains what will be in the exhibition and why.
The Truth and Nothing but the Truth.This one statement perhaps best sums up our ambition for this exhibition.
Of course we want an entertaining exhibition: something to grab the attention, something fun.
But for us it had to be more than that. It couldn’t be tacky and it couldn’t be exaggerated.
It had to have truth.
But what is the truth? The nature of history means that it is open to interpretation and therefore the ‘truth’ may never be uncovered. However, we have sought-out and used every trace of evidence we could find (even meeting descendents of prisoners on the other side of the world) to guide and inform our vision of the Prison in the eighteenth century. We feel we’ve achieved the most accurate representation as possible, but it will be for you the public to judge if we have succeeded and we will greatly value any comment you have to make (see below).
Another key element for us is to show that the buildings that we all know and love as York Castle Museum were once a gruesome prison . The Baroque style of the Prison buildings is more greatly associated with stately homes, so I suppose it should come as no surprise that many visitors tell us they had no idea of the building’s history.
That’s one reason why the first half of the exhibition highlights the real, thick-walled, dark and dank cells where thousands of poor souls were incarcerated.
The idea is to offer visitors an ‘immersive experience’ which means we attempt to give an impression of what it was like to actually be in the gaol in the 1700s .
We have films of each of our real-life characters in individual cells, the very places they were once limprisoned. Amidst the sounds of chains rattling, doors slamming and children playing (reflecting the fact that some children were born and lived inside the grim walls), the first character our visitors will meet will be the turnkey, Thomas Ward, a thoroughly corrupt, nasty piece of work, who will make it quite clear it wasn’t just the prisoners who were rogues and scoundrels.
We hope that we get some atmosphere across with our strong stories but fall short of traumatising the children. We aim to show that some of the prisoners were perhaps jailed unjustly - whilst others deserved to be there.
Our thinking in the second half of the exhibition is to show where the prison fitted into the wider context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – times of great judicial change and prison reform. So we’ll feature a ‘what happened next?’ room where you can find out what happened to our characters mapped against a timeline of other significant events.
In addition, to encourage people to undertake their own research we have our database of names where you can find out if your ancestors were once incarcerated , executed or transported from here. There’ll also be a digital projection showing a virtual timeline of how the Castle site of the museum, Crown court and Clifford’s Tower has evolved from the days of William the Conqueror to today’s familar landscape .
Finally, there will also be a tiny cell adorned with photos of former inmates. Here visitors can contemplate what life must have been like in the Prison for those people whilst listening to the haunting poetry of a former inmate.
So how have we managed this fine balance of Entertainment, atmosphere and poetry coupled with cold, hard, unexaggerated fact? You’ll have to visit to find out, but trust me, like much to do with this prison, the detail is in the Execution.
Please let us know if you think we’ve achieved our aims or not and comment below.
