Prisoners at the London Tower

carved into the walls of the tower is a telling reminder of its darker history names and symbols cut into the stone by prisoners bear witness to the incarceration of hundreds of people inside britain's most notorious prison throughout their history these buildings above all others in england have captured the popular imagination as a place of imprisonment and torture the real story of imprisonment here is far from popular myth the tower wasn't built as a prison and there are no purpose-built dungeons but fortress walls designed to keep people out were also perfect to keep them in over the centuries the tower has held kings and queens disgraced nobles enemies of state and even east end gangsters as well as the poignant carvings left by prisoners there is also living proof of the towers days as a prison the yeoman warders today they provide the human face of the tower acting as guides for visitors but in the past they were the towers jailers the waters have always lived inside the tower and the prisoners frequently live with them locked up on a separate floor the titles of the yeoman warders recall their role as prison guards john kahan is the yeoman jailer and phil wilson one of his yeoman sergeants i don't know where that's right today there aren't any prisoners for john to guard but on ceremonial occasions the jailer still carries a sinister staff of office his role was to escort the prisoners from here the tower of london out through the traitor's gate here behind us out onto the waterfront and then up river to westminster which is where the trials took place in those early days and the tradition of the axe which i carry which is my staff of office as the jailer here at the tower the history behind that is that the axe on the outward journey would always be in the bow of the boat the jailer stood up front the axe would be pointing outwards away from the prisoner who would be sat in the stern but then on the return journey if the prisoner had been found guilty the acts at this time be turned towards the prisoner knowing full well seeing the axe of that blade pointing towards them that the only escape now was to be death but death wasn't the only way out of the tower as the very first prisoner kept here was to discover ranulf flambard was a major political player in the year 1100 the details of his story have been uncovered by curator jeremy ashby it's one of the great ironies of tower of london history that our first recorded prisoner is also our first recorded skp that's randall flambard the bishop of durham flambard itself is probably a nickname but it comes from the french word for a flame it was a reference to his driving energy that he's a hot shot or a live wire people that at the time who hated him said it was because he was always burning up with the fires of lust and avarice he was clever ambitious good looking so naturally everyone hated him flambard was imprisoned by henry the first when he came to the throne he was the bishop of durham but he'd also been the chief tax gatherer of the previous king william rufus in a popular move the new king henry threw flambard straight into the tower bishop flambard was in the habit of bringing good food and wine into the tower and entertaining the guards now i propose a toast to the frog accounts show on one such occasion he made sure that the wine he provided was stronger than usual and more abundant the guards drank everything on offer and as the evening wore on they eventually collapsed into a drunken stupor bishop flambard waited for the right moment before retrieving a rope that had been smuggled in tying the rope around a window pillar bishop flambard climbed down the wall of the white tower the rope wasn't quite long enough and he had to jump the last few feet but his friends and accomplices were waiting for him on the ground with a horse and they spirited him away across the sea so first prisoner first skp not the last skp either but flambard's rope trick wasn't a guaranteed escape method in 1241 another similar attempt went horribly wrong this is a contemporary illustration by matthew paris among who chronicled the event it shows griffith applewellin a welsh prince locked up by henry iii he made a rope from knotted sheets but he'd eaten too well in prison and halfway down it snapped griffith fell head first to his death his head crushed into his body but not all early tower prisoners were desperate to escape one french king enjoyed such a luxurious lifestyle here that he had little incentive to leave in 1360 king john ii of france was captured in battle in the anglo-french war that is still recalled in the chapel windows in the east window of st john's chapel you've actually got the coat of arms here showing the three lines of england and the three fleur-de-lis of france they're quartered and that's a development in heraldry that happens in 1340 pretty much as a declaration of war when edward iii decides that he has the claim to the throne of france as well as that of england once he had been captured king john was locked up in the tower and held for a king's ransom the white tower became temporarily king john's palace and this the saint john's chapel became king john's chapel a perfect place in which to put and rather impress king as important as the king of france i'm very interested in his time here in the tower of london because it's one of the most lacks and permissive regimes i think of any prisoner that i've ever encountered here in the tower they obviously didn't put him in the white tower for security because he was allowed to go anywhere he wanted he paid a visit on king edward iii and the queen down the river at westminster and when the peace treaty was finalized he even hosted a return banquet for them here at which he was the host this i say had become his palace and they came here as his guests to their own tower of london we know exactly what this high status prisoner was putting on the table because his household accounts still survive after 650 years it's the account of one of the clerks of the tower of london to the expenses for super salva custodia domini johannes regis frankie so that's the latin for the lord john king of france in for our turin lundoniaram inside the tower of london this tells us that he was kept very comfortably indeed monday the 25th of may 10 pounds of almonds six pounds of rice one pound of peppers one pound of ginger but the main ingredients on the bill of fare for that monday 12 chickens or hens three whole carcasses of mutton and the whole day comes to 67 shillings tuppence hate me stuart peachy is a food historian who specializes in recreating original recipes of the past the treatment that john ii is receiving in the tower is not what um some simple rebel that's been banged up in there would have received certainly i mean with the sheer quantities of meat that he's getting he's certainly able to support a court um or large numbers of guests he's probably feeding 50 to 100 people a day it's incredibly lavish and as i say it's like that every day the written evidence makes it clear that the ingredients for king john's meals came from very far and wide if we look at the spices like ginger and pepper coming in from areas like indonesia would be the typical source by the time it gets to this country we're looking at something that's a very exotic product and it's going to be well out of the purse of most people this man can eat it in bulk a pound of pepper a pound of ginger on a daily basis extraordinary a dish of mutton roast mutton prepared for somebody as exalted as king john of france would have been diced after being cut from the bone and then covered in the sauce containing those expensive and impressive spices that would emphasize his status to his courtiers and guests there are a variety of reasons why king john would receive this sort of treatment one aspect is that the man in charge of him is really the king of england and to denigrate monarchy in any monarch even when he's your prisoner is to denigrate the whole institution of monarchy the money that's being poured out in entertaining this french king is a good investment because they're intending to get more back in ransom than they're paying out but king john's ransom was never paid he died while still a prisoner in england the story of the tower as the state prison had only just begun the tower was to become a prison fit for an english princess the young woman who had become queen elizabeth the first throughout most of its history the main way to get in and out of the tower was by the river thames for princes and prisoners it was the perfect way to dodge the crowds and traffic of the london streets behind me now blocked in is the archway which gave direct access from the river into the tower which was effectively the front door to the fortress for many centuries consequently a large number of the people who came here would have first come into the tower through this archway and this has led to an association between some of the town's most famous prisoners and this gateway and consequently has acquired the name traitor's gate the most famous prisoner associated with the traitor's gate is princess elizabeth she would later become queen elizabeth the first but when she arrived here at the tower in 1554 her life was in extreme peril princess elizabeth was implicated in a protestant uprising and the catholic queen mary tudor her half-sister had ordered her arrest and imprisonment in the tower i think we can only imagine that she must have been absolutely terrified her mother and berlin had come to the tower accused of treason when she was not much older than elizabeth and had never left have been beheaded here and for elizabeth everything did look extremely bleak at this time and i think it must have been just about the most scary journey that she would ever make that trip from from whitehall to the tower desperate to clear her name of treason elizabeth had already written to beg her sister mary for mercy i've got in front of me here the actual letter that elizabeth wrote to mary on the eve of her arrival at the tower trying to convince the queen that she elizabeth hadn't been involved in this this plot against her it's written in the very very distinctive handwriting which is characteristic of elizabeth very very clear very beautiful script and in the letter she explains to mary that she knew nothing about the plot she wasn't involved that she's been much maligned by people who said that she was involved and then if we turn it over here carries on over over leaf she finished sort of making her case if you like here and then at the bottom she says i humbly crave but only one word of answer from yourself so she's saying all i need is just one one word from you to stop this arrest happening to so to hear my to hear my pleas for for clemency from you and then she signs off here again making her statement of her own faithfulness and loyalty to the queen very clearly she says your highness is my faithful subject that have been from the beginning and will be to my end elizabeth so this is a really really strong statement of her own loyalty to the queen she sends this to mary mary gets it reads it but refuses to do anything and so the following day regardless of this attempt to prevent it happening elizabeth is taken to the tower of london it delays her arrival by 24 hours because the tide turns but it doesn't stop the end result which is her arrival as a as a prisoner accused of treason at the tower of london like her mother ann berlin elizabeth arrived at the tower by boat knowing that she might never leave it alive popular history has it that the princess came into the tower through its most notorious entrance but this romantic notion is not based on historic fact in the instance of elizabeth it's long been said that she arrived by traitor's gate and it was here that she disembarked but interestingly in her case there was actually a contemporary description of her arrival that specifically says that she came in at the drawbridge there was no drawbridge at trata's gate but on this tudor plan it's clear that there was one further down on the wharf that makes these steps rather than traitors gate the far more likely landing site of princess elizabeth what you probably would have done would be to disembark at the wharf and then cross over the moat over the little drawbridge that was in the position of this bridge and then she would have gone into the tower through this doorway which is called the bywood poston and that means that it's essentially a back door if you like to the tour of london so despite the fact that she was accused of treason and so as the legend or the myth goes would have been brought in by traitor's gate in this particular instance we know pretty much for sure that she in fact comes in on this little footbridge here behind me once she'd arrived at the tower protocol dictated that elizabeth be given a prison fit for a princess she was put here in the langthorne tower which was rebuilt by the victorians so elizabeth as a prisoner even though she's a princess she's lodged as a princess and that's a really key point about prisoners regardless of what you're accused of largely you are lodged according to your status in the world as a person and as an aristocrat or as a commoner as a princess you are still treated in that way when you're in the tower and she was also allowed another liberty which which prisoners were sometimes given which was the freedom to walk in the garden elizabeth was not the only prisoner in the tower at the time there were other protestants here in the beacham tower there is a carving representing the coat of arms of four brothers the dudleys around the edge are symbols representing each of the brothers who were held here including oak leaves for robert dudley by the time elizabeth arrived one of robert's brothers and his father had already been executed for treason against queen mary robert's own life was in danger but evidence now suggests that even though he was a closely guarded prisoner robert would have met princess elizabeth at the tower these two documents here make it clear that they had every chance of actually meeting when they were there this document here is the minutes of the privy council which was the equivalent to the cabinet of the day which show us that she and robert dudley who was to be her great favorite and and love of her life if you like had every opportunity of meeting at the time they were both in the tower and one of the orders in this minute the series of minutes for the for december 1553 specifically says that the lieutenant of the tower is to allow the children of the late duke of northumberland of whom robert dudley was one to have the liberty to walk within the garden of the tower and then this document here is made several months later after elizabeth has arrived at the tower and the second one of these says specifically item her grace that is princess elizabeth to have liberty to walk in the garden whensoever she doth command for noon and afternoon so these make it clear that both these two people the same age they're 20 years old they were later to become closer than elizabeth was ever going to be to anybody were at this period during their imprisonment both allowed to walk in the garden and it's highly likely they both would have taken advantage of this privilege and highly likely therefore that they would have met but their romance was doomed dudley's lack of royal blood made it impossible for elizabeth to marry her lover he married another she never married at all but elizabeth never forgot the relationship they forged whilst imprisoned in the tower time had passed on the moment when they might have married had come and gone and it turned it came to everybody's attention that it was politically impossible really for elizabeth to marry robert dudley but they were obviously still very close and here in this volume is a letter which is dated the 29th of august 1588 and is sent from robert dudley to elizabeth and it's a very very normal letter it doesn't say anything particularly special but the thing is that two weeks after this letter was written dudley died and elizabeth must have taken this letter and added below the sort of address which is here which says to the queen's most excellent majesty in his hand and then underneath this this address is written in elizabeth's own hand three little words which just simply say his last letter after she had heard the news of the death of robert dudley she must have taken it out again and reread it and then written at the bottom this little statement which really sort of sums up how she must have been feeling but she was never going to get another letter from him this was it this was the end at the end of the story for them and i think those three words communicate a whole world of emotion um that elizabeth had and felt about about dudley which which is very difficult to get any feeling of from from bits of paper that survived from this period instead of meeting her death at the tower as elizabeth had feared she met the only real love of her life elizabeth was imprisoned for just three months there was no evidence to link her with a rebellion against her sister she survived the tower and in five years time queen mary was dead elizabeth was queen herself and as queen elizabeth the first she didn't shrink from using the tower to lock up anyone who threatened her throne the tower was busiest as a prison during the period of religious upheaval in the 16th and 17th centuries when catholics and protestants became the deadliest of enemies in 1570 the pope excommunicated queen elizabeth the first this relieved english catholics of their oath of allegiance to her making the queen vulnerable to attack and every catholic suspect of treason in 1597 the catholic john gerard a jesuit priest was accused of treason and imprisoned here in the salt tower one has to remember that the tower is only used for people who are considered to be either very very important in terms of their status or accused of very very serious political crimes john gerrard wrote a detailed account of his time as a prisoner it gives us a rare insight into how elizabeth dealt with her enemies he was interrogated about a possible network of catholic assassins and spies my guards led me away and took me to the tower of london they assigned me a room on the first floor and handed me over to a water in whom they had a special confidence and for my bed i i'll arrange for some straw to be fetched sir tell me what shall i eat well food can be provided sir my my wife is a very good cook will this ensure my comfort uh wine sir would be extra god's blessings on you yeoman i walked around my cell in the dim light i found the name of the blessed father henry walpole cut with a chisel on the wall it was a great comfort to find myself in a place sanctified by this great and holy martyr after i had made my prayer my mind was at rest and i lay down to sleep on the straw that night i slept very well in fact that graffiti is still on the wall here today which is over here one of the many wonderful inscriptions left by prisoners over the centuries and you can see henry walpole here so john gerard mentions in his account he actually says i saw carved into the stone the name of father or paul and it gave me great solace i find it so amazing that in 1597 jared is in this room and he says i saw this and you see it now and look how what fantastic condition it's in and you can just say this is what he looked at the authorities were determined to find out the identity of the other catholic plotters they used basic tudor interrogation techniques they said they'd have to put me to the torture every day as long as my life lasted until i gave them the information they wanted the gentleman standing around me asked whether i was willing to confess now i cannot and i will not i answered hanging like this i began to pray i could hardly utter the word such a gripping pain came over me horribly simple but very very effective and he's left in this state for four days um in the hope that he will then um give information to the lieutenant to the tower and to therefore the queen about uh the supposed networks of catholic spies in england at the end of three weeks as near as i can remember i was able to move my fingers again and hold my knife in my hand and help myself i had some money and used it to bribe my water to bring me secretly several things i wanted including some large oranges i was thinking of another use i could put them to in time he is allowed to go and visit somebody called john arjun who was a catholic a prisoner as well and who inhabited a tower which was just on the other side of the privy garden the privy garden was outside the window here and he is allowed by his water to go to and from the cradle tower to visit arden the cradle tower was only a few yards from gerard's tower but significantly closer to freedom this is actually the roof of the cradle tower which was the building in which john arden who was john gerard's friend and fellow catholic was lodged and it's from this roof here that they made their very very dramatic attempt to escape from the tower and the crucial idea about the escape attempt was that from the roof here of the cradle tower unlike almost all the other buildings that prisoners were kept in it was literally only a sort of big jump to be outside the fortress to be on the wharf here there isn't another layer of of defenses here apart from the moat itself which they had to cross gerrard came up with an ingenious plan to get his friends outside to help him to escape every day i did exercises to regain the full use of my hands my finger exercises consisted of cutting orange peel into small crosses stringing them onto a silk thread i made a rosary all the time i stored the juice from the orange in a bottle my next move was to ask my water to take the rosary to my friends i asked him for a piece of paper to wrap the rosary in lastly i obtained his leave to write a few lines in charcoal all this he allowed suspecting nothing at all in my action but in fact on the same sheet of paper i wrote to my friends using the orange juice as invisible ink by holding the note to the fire the secret message could be read my friends received the rosary wrapped in the paper they knew that given the chance i would have written a secret message as i used to do when i was with them by this means jared is able to make the arrangements that are necessary for him to make his escape with arjun i asked my friends whether they were prepared to take the risk and if they were to come on a certain night to the far side of the moat opposite the squat tower i had described also they were to bring a rowing boat to make our escape i told them to pin white handkerchiefs on the front of their jackets as we wanted to be sure of their identities then i attached a stout cord to a heavy weight this i threw to my friends on the wharf below they must find the cord and tie it to the free end of the rope this done we would draw up the rope by pulling up the other end of the cord which we held in our hands when the rope was made fast i climbed down and prayed for god to help me gripped the rope with my right hand and took it in my left i was still very weak and with the slack rope and my body hanging underneath i could make practically no progress as long as i was able to hold onto the rope i could recover a little of my strength and then using my legs and my arms as well as i could i managed thanks be to god to get to the wall on the far side of the moat gerard's successful escape was a public relations triumph for english catholics he had defied the infamous tower of london and took every opportunity to claim that this proved god was on his side for prisoners and warders alike the focus of the towers community has always been the chapel of saint peter at vincular today there'll be a christening service for matthew the grandchild of yeoman warda richard sands matthew i baptize you in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy ghost amen we receive this charge in 1605 another christening took place here that of a child born to one of the tower's most celebrated prisoners sir walter rawley what i'm holding now is the register of the chapel royal of saint peter advincula in the tower of london but because this is the tower of london every so often you get references to prisoners as well and this is the most famous of those references what it says here is karu rawley was baptized the 15th of and then in the spine it says february and on the second line the son of sir walter rawley knight kt sir walter rawley had been an english hero in the time of queen elizabeth he famously explored the world and brought back exotic treasures however in 1603 shortly after james the first took the throne sir walter found he had acquired too many enemies in high places accused of treason he was banished to the tower the great explorer and his family were confined in the bloody tower this room became rawley's universe but it was too small for him and his growing family the bloody tower itself was altered and extended in order to make room for their household we know that uh between in a account running from 1603 to five there are entries for working out of holes for the beams and joists for the new floor to be put in to divide into two the bloody tower and created a new room on the floor upstairs so in fact where there'd only be one big room uh beforehand now there were two so slightly better conditions for the family to be living in so really some quite substantial alterations and this really does tell us a lot about the status of a prisoner such as walter raleigh that at public expense they were prepared to make such alterations to the tower for his lodgings to make life just slightly more comfortable for a man of his rank and stating in the lieutenant's garden just outside this window special prisoner sir walter grew botanical specimens he brought back from his voyages including tobacco rawley took over one of the outhouses in the garden here he experimented with the plants he grew in the tower and turned them into medicines despite being locked up rawley gained fame on the outside as a healer a steady stream of visitors came to see the prisoner and try his guyana balsam hoping for a miracle cure the balsam was an obscure blend of rare ingredients 40 vegetable substances were pounded in spirits of wine and distilled then mixed with powders of pearl red coral musk and antimony i thank you so much although confined in the tower sewalter was still able to keep up many of his favorite pursuits he wrote a book the history of the world it became an instant bestseller outselling shakespeare but all this acclaim couldn't get him out for 13 years the tower was the only world sir walter knew his only means of escape was to tempt the king with new riches from the americas the gold of el dorado but instead of finding gold rawley ended up fighting the spaniards something king james had expressly forbidden the expedition was an utter failure when he came back he came back not as a hero but in disgrace and the spanish were able to put pressure on james the first to have him executed in 1618 not here in the tower of london but in old palace yard westminster many ways one of the most glorious careers of any of our people of that period in fact ended really rather sadly and with a whimper rather than a bang the colonies sir walter helped to establish would within 200 years be fighting with britain in the american war of independence a conflict that brought here one of the most politically important prisoners the tower has ever held charleston south carolina usa at the start of the revolutionary war of independence to break away from british rule this is one of the most prosperous cities in america and it was from here charleston's richest and most influential politician started a journey to raise money for the war a journey that would end in the tower of london on the 6th of october 1780 one of the most sensational prisoners the tower has ever witnessed arrived here a man called henry lawrence president of the american congress thus proto president of the united states of america this was a man who'd left america to go to europe to raise money to continue the war of independence he was caught by the british on the high seas and brought here to the tower of london where he was imprisoned on the green or the parade as it was then known i think the only candidate that's still standing here which may have accommodated lawrence is number seven tara greene there was an extraordinary coincidence in this situation the constable of the tower of london was charles cornwallis who was at the same time a prisoner in america held by lauren's revolutionary allies jeff parnell the keeper of tower history has traveled all the way from the tower to charleston to explore the truth behind the lauren's story the wealth of this fine town was built on plantations run with slave labor over a third of all slaves brought into the colonies came in through this port henry lawrence made his fortune here and profited from slavery himself he was the richest man in the colonies before the revolutionary war and gave much of his fortune to the war effort the journey that led him to imprisonment in the tower of london began here lawrence would have known this street very well indeed east bay street and these big houses on the left their merchants houses and they had their walls and jetties and docking facilities on the right what's that number jeff has tracked down a direct ascendant of henry lawrence still living in charleston this is the home of john laurens iii known to his friends as chip hey hello come in chip's home is full of memorabilia of his ancestor imprisoned in the tower oh yes now that is henry isn't it this is henry lawrence that is henry you do wonder don't you what lawrence must have made of the tower of london it's rather gloomy medieval castle he quite prided himself on being a seed of the revolution you know an american it was as though he took the bad luck of being caught where in fact henry henry relish being in the middle of all of this this is one of the the few things henry lawrence was an extremely important political prisoner amongst the lawrence family papers are the original detailed terms of his imprisonment at the tower the conditions were exceptionally strict its set of orders issued for the gentleman jailer looking after henry lawrence to keep a close prisoner close meaning confined very confined then you get no ink or paper brought to the prisoner the warders must not suffer the prisoner to walk in any other room blah blah blah so he's got to be supervised when he's out and about and the gentleman jaina is to ensure that the prisoner is locked up at night and in the morning just in case he forgot but lawrence was a leader of britain's revolutionary enemies so the tower authorities were desperate to make sure he had no chance to communicate with his allies but the very nature of his confinement at the tower undid their careful plans lawrence was imprisoned in the home of yeoman warder futrel and his family on tower green they were his only hope to communicate with the outside world henry set about winning them over evidently henry was a very amiable gentleman even after the war one of the warden's children came to america and actually stayed with martha lawrence ramsey his henry lawrence's daughter for a short period of time they they kept on there's even uh i think henry lawrence left one of his wardens a legacy the time of his death and considered him a friend jeff's heard that there's evidence in columbia university about how henry exploited the close relationship with his yeoman warder how were official documents and treaties written by lawrence being smuggled out of the tower so james the document i was really keen to see is the the narrative that lauren's prepared covering his stay at the tower of london and i assume that document you have in front of you is it right this is in henry's hand and he entitles it capture and confinement in the tower of london but probably written while he was still in london oh yes almost certainly he was not uh permitted to have pen and ink so he wrote in pencil and a lot of these pencil messages were brought out of the town one way or another and uh and the authorities were clearly aware that things were being smuggled out of the tower and they made one or two attempts to sort of get to the bottom of it i mean do you have any theories as to who was in effect smuggling out the pencil messages i think reading between the lines and and looking at what happened subsequently that it was probably the warder futrell and his wife that were assisting henry they have a long relationship afterwards henry even recognized him as i mentioned before in his will and brought two of their children to america and they're they're very close they maintain a correspondence for years afterwards well i mean that sounds eminently possible i mean i imagine for that length of time as you say in in close confinement they probably formed quite a bond well he lived with them absolutely and that that i'm sure is the explanation right right by using the promise of rewards for his warder prisoner lawrence was able to help the american war effort direct from the tower and it seems inconceivable that the administrators back in london thought they could hold on to all this forever sooner or later the american colonists were going to go their own way regardless what a english administrators thought about it the revolutionary war continued for 16 months whilst henry lawrence was locked up in the tower eventually he was traded for the release of the british constable of the tower charles cornwallis held by the american rebels on his return to charleston henry became known as tower lawrence but his imprisonment had taken him out of mainstream politics and he never regained his earlier prominence he retired from political life to mepkin his plantation which had been all but destroyed by the british in the war jeff has been brought to mepkin now a monastery to see where the towers american prisoner ended his days trappist monk brother elrid hagan takes him to lauren's family graveyard in the corner of the former plantation there he is the 24th of february 1725 and then died 8th of december 1792. presumably jonathan you're more than familiar with it this is composition this is charleston scottish or english immigrant stone cutters of the late 18th century that do this calligraphic sacred to the memory of that's their trademark very simple otherwise no no iconography henry asked that he be cremated before he was buried and just to make sure that he was dead and of course that was the whole point of the cremation that he would be buried alive uh they had one of the slaves i believe a lop off his head before they lit the pyre the pyre and and of course the story is that it rolled off down the down the bank into the cooper river so he lost his head here in the united states at least he didn't lose it at the time thank you so much for bringing me here and in a way it marks the end of my journey to find the tombstone it's a lovely spot and quite different to the tower of london all the leaves are coming down there for the next 170 years the tower was used on and off as a prison the very last prisoners were 20th century soldiers in breach of military discipline they were held in cells either side of the clock in the waterloo block just fifty years ago they held two of britain's most infamous criminals george pettifer sergeant major in the royal fusiliers was in charge of locking them up today's a retired lieutenant colonel he's returning to the cells well it's nearly 50 years since i was here it hadn't changed very much we had a cell each side of the clock and i see the cells are still healed used for something else the clock is still striking it's like every 15 minutes while i was here two of the soldiers george locked up here were already part of the east end underworld ronnie and reggie cray went absent without leave whilst doing their national service with a fusiliers george had to pick them up and bring them back to the tower we went down this police station up in east london picked up the crate winds i handcuffed each of them to one fuselage we got on the train to liverpool street and we got off the train at liverpool street and won the crate wins and i can't remember which one pointed out a group of eight to ten people mainly men and said that's my mother and father and some relatives we release the handcuffs so we can go and say goodbye i looked at them and thought if i release the handcuffs i'm probably never going to see these guys again and then i look for the way they look at me and thought if i don't release the handcuffs i may be even even worse trouble so against my best instincts and against all the rules i released the handcuffs and allowed them to go and say goodbye and i stood there for five minutes or so sweating rather and much to my relief a few minutes later mama craig brought me back one in each hand ronnie and reggie handed them over to me i handcraft each of them to refuse there brought them back to the top of london back in the cells here one here one the other side of the clock twin cells twin brothers doors still look the same look exactly the same i think you remember clanging these shot after the crate the last prisoners in the tower were to be two of its most notorious the tower is still one of the most secure places here in london and i suppose if the government wanted if time was to come back again we could still be a prison today we still have everything here as it's always been all of the towers all of the prison chambers the omen waters we're all still here so we could certainly very easily if the government decreed return back to our original roles of looking after the prisoners which our predecessors have done now for over 700 years very successfully well many got away you

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Views: 763,525

Rating: 4.695116 out of 5

Keywords: London Tower, Prison, Video, London, England, United Kingdom, Destination, Travel, Visit, Tourism, Tour, Tourist, Historical, Brar Films, 2012

Id: ZVBp9cYKFzw

Length: 48min 10sec (2890 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 30 2012