York Museums Trust Blog

This is probably one of the most celebrated types of bowls produced by Lucie Rie – the dribbly iron glazed rim is a famous design feature of her work.  It’s a large bowl (over 28cm in diameter) and has warped slightly due to its size.  Rie threw her pots with very thin walls and then made them even thinner by cutting back the pot with a razor.

The bowl, along with 42 other pieces, was given to us by the collector Henry Rothschild (1913 – 2009).  Rothschild was a hugely influential figure in the British crafts scene and founded the Primavera gallery in London in 1945.

Rothschild had a particular affection for bowls and described this bowl as his favourite, his “Desert Island Disc pot”.

Lucie Rie (1902 – 1995)

Bowl 1949 is on Display in the new Gallery of Pots at York Art Gallery.

Shooting a replica pistol from the Dick Turpin era – the early 18th century. 

This afternoon was the first time this demonstration was done live in front of visitors and luckily it worked first time (the gun is not that reliable).

No stagecoach customers were harmed – the pistol was loaded with real gunpowder but fired only balls of tissue.  Turpin would have used lead shot.

The demos are part of the Summer Fun Events programme at the Castle Museum.

York is busy right now.  Hundreds of thousands of visitors come to the city and August is a very popular time to make the pilgrimage. And pilgrimage is a good word for it, ever since early medieval days people have travelled to the city from far and wide.These ‘tourists’ as they are now called have always been an important part of the city’s economy.

What is surprising though, is just how many of our visitors come from the UK rather than overseas.  Even before the recession introduced us to the ’staycation’ (Brits holidaying at home), 80% of York’s visitors were British.The new Prison exhibition at the Castle Museum is proving popular too, but not quite as popular as when the museum first opened….

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.

In the fourth of his blogs Jim Butler gives a behind-the-scenes account of the build-up to our new major York Castle Prison exhibition.

We knew from the outset of this project that by unearthing the Prison’s history we would encounter troubling and emotive issues. 

Perhaps one of the most disturbing accounts we discovered was the tragic tale of Martha Chapel, a teenager who killed her newborn baby and was hanged for murder six weeks later. Martha was a servant girl, described as industrious and good-tempered, who was 18 or 19 when she fell pregnant while unmarried in 1802. The identity of the father was never discovered, though some claimed it was her employer. Whoever it was, the court established that she had no reputation as a ‘loose woman.’Martha took a new job about three or four months before the baby was due which meant she could not have looked pregnant or she would not have been employed . She told no-one she was pregnant and may not have known herself.

Complaining of being ill and in pain she gave birth, alone, on June 15, 1803 and the baby, a girl, was found dead shortly afterwards. A doctor said Martha must have killed the baby with her own hands. Martha defended herself, saying she was rendered delirious with pain and, having never given birth and with no idea what was happening, mangled the child whilst trying to hasten the delivery

 A jury took just ten minutes to find her guilty and Martha, of Ackworth, near Wakefield, was hanged at the ‘new drop’ –  the large white doors on the Castle car park side of the museum building   - on August 1, 1803. Her body was dissected by surgeons and it is unlikely she ever had a grave. Martha was quoted at trial. ‘I am a wretched woman, it was my child. I never meant it harm…I loved my child before I saw it.’Within 30 years her conviction was being questioned as unsound as attitudes to new mothers and illegitimate birth very, very slowly began to change. It wasn’t until 1922 that the crime of infanticide was created, which meant a new mother couldn’t be put to death. The act recognised that a mother might suffer derangement as a result of childbirth.This tragic tale tells us too much not to be mentioned at all but we won’t have an actor recounting the story like the others. Some of the details, particularly surrounding the body of the baby, are just too shocking for an area accessible by very young children. Instead it is likely that Martha’s story will form part of a designated learning programme where the sensitive issues raised can be more thoroughly and appropriately explored.

In the third of his blogs Jim Butler gives a behind-the-scenes account of the build up to our new major York Castle Prison exhibition.

It’s a fair bet that we’d all secretly rejoice at the discovery of a real roguish character among our ancestors.Maybe a highwayman like Dick Turpin or a political dissident cruelly hanged for fighting for a fairer society.Well, you’ll have the chance to find out if such a character really existed among your forebears as a key part of our exhibition will be a search database situated in the heart of old cells.

Visitors will be able to type in their own name or town/village and see if one of their own possible ancestors was once incarcerated within the gruesome gaol.The database is the work – and I mean countless hours of hard, painstaking work – of a big hero of our exhibition, researcher Dr Katherine Prior.Katherine has worked for many months pouring over the National Archives, British Museum records, regional archives, ancient newspapers, prison plans and written accounts of trials and hangings. Her painstaking trawl busted a few long-held myths, not least the long held belief that Turpin had been held in a cell opened to the public for many years when in fact he was more likely to have spent his last few hours in a different part of the gaol. But it’s the new information on individuals, be they murderers, rogues, debtors or petty thieves, that have really added to the buzz about this exhibition.

My previous blogs have focused on the crimes of Turpin and Elizabeth Boardingham, the last woman to have been burned at the stake in Yorkshire. But Katherine’s research has also brought us the sympathetic character of William Hartley, a man with a strong claim to be regarded as a political prisoner.Hartley, a poor tailor from near Halifax, was one of 17 Luddites executed at the prison in January 1813.

The Luddites, named after their fictional leader Captain Ned Ludd, were skilled textile workers forced into poverty by the machines of the industrial revolution and the wars against France and the USA.  At a time when unions were banned, they formed illegally with the hope of relieving their plight.They raided the house of wool-stapler, George Haigh, both for his weapons and to try and force him to charge less for the milk he sold.  But soon after, Hartley was captured on the dodgy testimony of a turncoat, Joseph Clark, desperately trying to save his own skin.Hartley, who was 41, a widower with seven children to support, admitted his presence in the raid but denied being a leader or demanding or receiving any arms. He stuck to his story in the prison and he may have got away with a lesser sentence if not for the authorities’ feverish desire to crush the Luddites. He was one of 14 hanged on a single day – perhaps the largest number executed at once in Yorkshire’s history – in front of a huge crowd and a large number of troops.

What became of his orphaned children (their mother, probably weakened from lack of food, died six months previously) is not known. Hartley asked for their plight to be published in the hope they might receive charity.A sad detail of the story is that Hartley, who had no previous record of criminal activity, initially couldn’t face seeing his daughter before his death.A tragic tale. That we can tell it is thanks to the work of Dr Katherine Prior.

In his second blog about the build-up to our forthcoming York Castle Prison exhibition, Jim Butler, Learning Manager, tells the tale of the last woman in Yorkshire to be burned at the stake.

Elizabeth Boardingham, a victim of her time and a ‘must’ character for our Prison exhibition. Although tragic by today’s standards, Elizabeth’s story reveals much about the appallingly unfair position of women in the highly patriarchal society of 18th Century England.  But by no means was she a shrinking violet.  In fact, aside from the manner of her death, it was her strength and determination in the final days of her life that made her irresistible to us.

Elizabeth, from Flamborough in the East Riding of Yorkshire, was married with five children and in her early 30s when her husband, John, was sent to York gaol for smuggling in 1775. 

                                                 Murder! Murder!
Soon after she ran off with one Thomas Aikney who, late one night following her husband’s release, stabbed John twice before running off. John staggered into the street, pulled out the knife, and cried ‘murder! murder!’ before collapsing, quite dead.  Aikney was caught and later convicted of murder but blamed Elizabeth for pestering him to do it. Here’s the thing: Despite denying Aikney’s allegations and the fact there was very little evidence to support her role in the attack, Elizabeth was not just convicted of murder, but of the much worse crime of ‘petty treason’ – a crime in which the perpetrator was thought to have subverted the natural hierarchy of society, eg a servant killing a master, or a woman her husband. It was punishable by the worst means allowable, public burning at the stake. Of course the actual murderer, a man, was simply hung while his lover burned.So poor Elizabeth Boardingham, victim of her time, was let down by a feckless husband, her lover and a male-dominated society who decreed that her crime as worse than actual murder. All this simply because she was a woman. From the 17th July, Elizabeth will be one of 8 characters brought to life by actors and projected into the cells where some spent their final days.  Of course the character the public are most interested is always Richard (Dick) Turpin who I discussed in my first blog.  But actually it’s the stories of other former Castle inmates, like Elizabeth, that will really bring home the (in)justices of life in the 18th Century.The £200,000 York Castle Prison exhibition opens on July 17 at York Castle Museum (the former 18th century county gaol on the site of the Medieval castle).

Jim Butler, Learning Manager, gives a behind-the-scenes account of the build up to the opening of the new York Castle Prison experience in July and tells of the sometimes gruesome and often heartbreaking secrets of the old prison.

It’s a strange fact that York Prison was always a tourist attraction, right from when it opened in 1705.Back then people would peer through the fence to glimpse the inmates and good money was paid for the thrill of meeting a notorious criminal in the flesh. The old gaol remained a place of real gruesomeness for two centuries, where many horrors were carried out.  However, that history was a somewhat obscured when the building was reopened as the Castle Museum in the 1930s. As home to a nationally-renowned and popular collection of artefacts and our famous, recreated Victorian Street, (which became a template for other popular museums around the world) it is easy to see why the Castle’s less wholesome history was glossed-over. To this day we find some visitors don’t release our museum was once the most important penitentiary in Yorkshire.  Yet the prison aspect of the museum has also been a source of fascination for many.  So much so it was no real surprise that the decision to invest £200,000 to create our York Castle Prison experience, due to open in July, has been greeted with such interest from both media and public. In fact interest has been so great I’ve been persuaded, to write six blogs detailing key aspects of what we’re trying to achieve with the project.  Naturally the fact that, in 1739, Richard (Dick) Turpin was imprisoned and spent the final days before his execution here has always been a draw.  Turpin will be one of eight prison characters featured in the York Castle Prison experience. Their sometimes grim, sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes comic testimonies recreated and filmed for use as part of an interactive experience.                                                                 Murder

However, visitors to the York Castle Prison can forget the Hollywood view of Turpin. As a respected museum with a strong culture of education it was an easy decision for us to concentrate on the truth of Turpin and dismiss the myths of Black Bess and dashing chases.  We have discovered a lot of information on Turpin in contemporary accounts, including court reports, written with a cold accuracy, all long before the process of romanticising this nasty criminal began with Harrison Ainsworth’s novel Rookwood in 1834.  In fact Turpin, a butcher by trade who was useful to a gang of cattle and sheep rustlers, once beat and tortured an elderly man while a fellow gang member raped a servant girl upstairs.  On another occasion he murdered a servant simply for recognising him.  He wasn’t even that bright or particularly handsome. Turpin, who had a badly pockmarked face, was caught when he needlessly shot a cockerel while undercover in Brough.  He then sent a letter home and his former teacher recognised his handwriting. Hardly a master criminal.  The script we have had written for his character really gives a flavour of the true man, possibly a first in literature.  Turpin is one of our more unsympathetic characters but some of our other prisoners had heartbreaking tales to tell. Watch this space for a sneak preview of their stories.  Another key feature of the York Castle Prison project will be to give the visitor a (small) sense of what life was like in a prison rife with diseases like typhus and smallpox and where many were malnourished and the turnkey – a prison warden – was all powerful.  We will divide the area into two parts, one informative and reflective, where visitors can explore and understand the broad history of the buildings and the other, more raw and immersive, a place of ‘ghosts’, where people will come face-to-face with the prison’s former inhabitants.