Bank Plc Woolwich
Charles Dickens' Great Expectations opens with an account of the escaped convict, Abel Magwitch. Abel's prison ship was on the Thames Estuary, and the novel is a work of fiction, but in reality these prison ships were all too real and all too terrible. Most of them were moored on the nearby River Medway.
Prior to 1775, many criminals were transported, and England was able to rid herself of many a headache. The sentences of transportation started during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and the felons provided cheap labour for the American colonies. The American War of Independence put a stop to that, and so the British prisons became seriously overcrowded.
The Prison Hulks
It was decided to ease the problem by housing the inmates in outdated warships, soon to become known as prison hulks, and so two disused vessels, the Censor and the Justitia, were moored on the River Thames at Woolwich. These were specially assigned to convicts sentenced to hard labour. Soon, further prison hulks were set up at Chatham, in the Medway Towns, and Sheerness, Portsmouth and Plymouth. Towards the end of the 1700s, there were more than sixty hulks in service. They became a fact of life in Medway, and one of the most terrible of the hulks was the Brunswick, moored off Chatham.
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