Laura Sellers

I’ve recently been on a very disappointing archive trip, but very enjoyable holiday to the Isle of Wight. I’m working on a chapter for my thesis on medicine and juvenile convicts in the 1830s-1850s and Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight was built for Juvenile boys destined for transportation. My parents, grandparents, brother and boyfriend decided to come with me (my grandparents lived in Portsmouth most of their working lives so it was the holiday destination of choice) so we had a week away, and I thought plenty of time to get all the research I needed.

Before I went I contacted the local archive to check they had papers relating to the prison, in particular I’m interested in the early years when they were working out how Juveniles should be treated, what their medical needs were and how the prison medical officers responded to the challenges. When I arrived the local archive only had information from post 1900, since the prison was opened in 1838 that’s a lot of missing paperwork!

No one knew where I should start looking for the missing paperwork, although all the staff and friendly locals who were in the archives endeavoured to help me. We went through the filing system, which is in beautiful quaint drawers not online and I found the names of my Prison doctors but not much more than that. Amongst the shelves of local history I found a small book called “though the small wooden door” by Brain Manson, who had worked at Parkhurst as a guard and along with his colleagues had written a history of the prison. This fascinating but brief history hinted that somewhere there were sources relating to the early days of the prison at least up until 2000 when the book was published.

I called every archivists, local museums, local library on the Isle of Wight that I could, I due to the part time nature of many of these services I struggled to find people to talk to. I eventually emailed the Isle Wights local newspaper – success they thought they knew who might hold the stuff – one of the authors of the book and a former prison guard at Parkhurst. I had a name but no contact details and so far I haven’t been able to track them down yet. The reporter I spoke to had written a small piece on the book when it was published 14 years ago and seemed to thing that the material I wanted was either a) in Parkhurst, one of Britain’s highest security prisons or b) in the loft of one of the guards involved in writing the book.

So wish me luck.