Holloway Prison has encountered over a century and a half’s worth of change and transformation. The prison was one of mixed gender when it first opened in 1852, but due to the growth of female offenders it became solely for women in 1902, and is now managed by Her Majesty’s Prison Service.
The depths of the prison’s history lies with women such as Anne Miller Fraser and Norah Elam, who were the best known militant suffragettes of the feminist movement and were also anti-vivisectionists and anti-fascists. Norah Elam (1878–1961), also identified as Norah Dacre Fox in prison, was known to have been detained in Holloway Prison during both of the World Wars and on many occasions as a suffragette prisoner.
The prison’s walls have seen decade after decade of women who have fought for their right to vote and to be seen as equals in society. They’ve also enclosed women who have committed the most repulsive crimes, such as Amelia Sach (1873-1903) and Annie Walters (1869-1903) who were named the Finchley Baby Farmers and were hung within the prison’s quarters after committing countless infant murders. The women’s bodies were buried in the walls of Holloway Prison in unmarked graves, which sent out the message that these women were not worthy of commemoration. Their bodies were later unearthed and transferred to a single grave in a cemetery near Surrey.
Mary Park, aged 79, a resident of Highbury and Islington, where Holloway Prison is situated, has been around since the beginning of the Second World War and her mother, Janet Vaughan, was a suffragette at the time when women such as Norah Elam were imprisoned. Ms Park said: “The prison has changed a lot from what I remember, it was not what it is seen as today” she said, “there would have been no education and no luxuries like there are now”.
The prison grounds have seen other extremely noteworthy inmates, such as the infamous Oscar Wilde and even Diana Mitford who was renowned for her hatred due to being a friend of Adolf Hitler and wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Facists (BUF). Although the prison has seen many changes in terms of what they provide for inmates, such as education, workshops and behaviour programmes, the history of what was once known as Holloway Castle is one that will forever retain a part in Britain’s memoirs.
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