Wandsworth (HM Prison)
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HM Prison Wandsworth Gaol is a British prison in the Wandsworth-area of South London whose former inmates include writer Oscar Wilde, mobster Ronnie Kray [1] and Ronnie Biggs, a participant in the Great Train Robbery, who successfully escaped from the prison in 1965 from which he eventually was able to flee the country.
Wandsworth was the site of 135 executions, from 1878 to 1961 who among those executed include traitors Duncan Scott-Ford, William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) and John Amery as well as murderers George Chapman, John George Haigh and August Sangret.
It was built in 1851 when it was known as the Surrey House of Correction. It was designed according to the humane Panopticon principle with a number of corridors radiating from a central control point and each prisoner having toilet facilities (subsequently, the toilets were removed to increase prison capacity and the prisoners had to engage in the purposefully humiliating process of 'slopping-out' until 1996). Wandsworth contains eight wings on two units. The smaller one, containing three wings, was originally designed for women but now houses the Vulnerable Prisoners Unit - primarily those convicted of sex offences.
In 1930, armed robber James Edward Spiers committed suicide in front of a group of Justices of the Peace who were to witness his being strapped to a six-foot wooden triangle set up before an iron pillar and receive 15 lashes, then a form of corporal punishment [2].
During his tour of Europe during the early 1930s, silent film star Charlie Chaplin visited the prison [3].
In 1951, it was chosen as the site for a national stock of two types of implement for serious corporal punishment inflicted in prison under Magistrate's orders, either as part of the original sentence or as disciplinary punishment under the prison rules : birch and cat o' nine tails
One of the last prisoners to be executed, 19-year-old Derek Bentley, was hanged in 1953 before the gallows were dismantled in 1998. The execution chamber is now used as a tea room for the prison officers.
As of June 2005, the operational capacity of Wandsworth Prison was 1416, making it the largest prison in London, and the second largest in Britain, after Liverpool.
The prison was featured in the pulp novel The Reluctant Gunman by W. Howard Baker.
