There is a particular irony embedded in the Du Cane family’s London legacy. On Balham High Road stands Du Cane Court, the building their land made possible, once marketed as the “Aristocrat of Apartment Houses.” In west London, running alongside the grey battlements of Britain’s most notorious prison, Du Cane Road carries the same name. The man responsible for the second of these was Sir Edmund Frederick Du Cane: Royal Engineers officer, colonial administrator, accomplished watercolourist, and the most powerful figure in Victorian prison administration. That he was buried, as was his family’s custom, in the churchyard at Great Braxted in Essex, within sight of the family seat at Braxted Park, gives his story a final return to the soil from which all the Du Canes grew.
Essex Origins and a Military Education
Edmund Du Cane was born on 23 March 1830 at Colchester in Essex, the youngest of four sons and two daughters of Major Richard Du Cane of the 20th Light Dragoons, whose own mother was a daughter of Thomas Ware of Woodfort in County Cork. The family’s Essex roots ran deep: Colchester had been associated with the Du Canes since the days of Richard Du Cane the MP, and the Braxted Park estate less than twenty miles away was the family seat. Edmund’s upbringing was military in character and Essexian in geography, a combination that shaped both the discipline and the local loyalty that ran through his life.
He attended Dedham Grammar School until 1843, then a private coaching establishment at Wimbledon from 1843 to 1846, before entering the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in November 1846. At Woolwich he proved an outstanding student, passing out at the head of his batch at the close of 1848 having taken first place in both mathematics and fortification. He received his commission as Second Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers on 19 December 1848, joining at Chatham before posting to a company of Royal Sappers and Miners at Woolwich under Captain Henry Charles Cunliffe-Owen.
Western Australia: The Education of a Prison Administrator
The most formative years of Du Cane’s career took place not in England but on the other side of the world, in the young Swan River Colony of Western Australia. From 1851 to 1856 he was employed there in organising the labour of convict workers on public works, a posting that gave him an intimate practical education in the management of large bodies of men under compulsion, the logistics of construction using prison labour, and the administrative mechanisms by which a penal institution could be made to function as an instrument of useful work rather than merely of punishment.
The Swan River Colony had only recently been opened to convict transportation, the Colonial Office having acceded to the colony’s request for convict labour in 1849 as a solution to its chronic shortage of free workers. Du Cane arrived into this experiment and took charge of its practical operation with the methodical energy of a Royal Engineers officer trained in mathematics and fortification. He was promoted First Lieutenant on 17 February 1854 and stationed at Guildford in charge of works in the eastern district of the colony.
On 18 July 1855 he married Mary Dorothea, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel John Molloy, a veteran of the Peninsular War and Waterloo with the Rifle Brigade, at St John’s Church in Fremantle. The marriage, solemnised at the edge of the known world, united two military families. Mary died in 1881, leaving Edmund with three sons and five daughters.
He was also, throughout these years and throughout his subsequent career, a practising artist. An accomplished watercolourist with wide interests in archaeology, architecture and Napoleonic history, he took his artistic materials on expeditions into the Western Australian interior, producing sketches that survive as some of the earliest visual records of the colony’s landscape. A set of his watercolour sketches of Peninsular battlefields was later exhibited at the Royal Military Exhibition at Chelsea in 1890, a display that set him alongside his niece Ella Du Cane, who would go on to become the family’s most celebrated painter. That two Du Canes of different generations, one a prison administrator and one a floral watercolourist, shared the same artistic habit of careful observation rendered in watercolour is one of the quieter coincidences in the family’s history.
The Making of a Prison System
Du Cane returned to England from Australia and in 1863, on the recommendation of his former commanding officer Lieutenant-Colonel Henderson, who had become Chairman of the Board of Directors of Convict Prisons, he was appointed Director of Convict Prisons as well as Inspector of Military Prisons. The appointment placed him at the administrative centre of the British penal system at the moment when that system was under sustained public and political pressure to reform itself.
The Victorian prison establishment was, in the early 1860s, a fragmented arrangement of central convict prisons, local prisons administered by county and borough authorities, and military detention facilities, each operating under different rules, different standards and different philosophies of punishment. Du Cane brought to this disorder the same instinct for system and rationalisation that he had applied to the organisation of convict labour in Western Australia. His method was administrative centralisation: a single national prison service, under central government control, applying uniform standards of treatment, labour and discipline across all establishments.
In 1873 he submitted to the Secretary of State a comprehensive scheme for the transfer of all local prisons from county and borough to government control. The political argument was made with the characteristic directness of a Royal Engineers officer: the existing fragmentation was inefficient, the variation in standards indefensible, and the solution a national system under professional management. His campaign bore fruit in the Prison Act of 1877, which enacted the transfer he had proposed, nationalised the entire local prison estate, and appointed Du Cane as Chairman of the three-person Prison Commission, the body that would henceforth govern it. He was appointed KCB in the same year.
His philosophy of prison discipline was severe by any standard, and became increasingly controversial as the century progressed. The phrase most closely associated with his regime, “Hard Labour, Hard Fare, and Hard Board,” was not merely rhetorical: it expressed a genuine conviction that the purpose of imprisonment was deterrence, that comfort was a signal failure of the penal mission, and that inmates should emerge from custody having been materially and physically marked by the experience. His administration has been criticised for the mental and physical damage it inflicted on prisoners, and the critiques mounted toward the end of his tenure until his retirement from the chairmanship in 1895 following sustained parliamentary and journalistic pressure.
Wormwood Scrubs: Building a Prison with Prison Labour
Wormwood Scrubs is Edmund Du Cane’s most visible monument, and the one most directly associated with his name. He designed the prison himself, adopting what became known as the “telegraph-pole” plan: a spine of covered passageways connecting a series of detached cell-block pavilions, each oriented to maximise ventilation and the penetration of natural light into the cells. The plan was derived from the separate system of prison discipline, in which the isolation of individual prisoners from one another was the fundamental structural principle, requiring that the architecture itself enforce separation through layout and circulation.
Construction began in 1875, and the method of building was wholly in keeping with Du Cane’s administrative philosophy: the prisoners themselves manufactured the bricks on site, firing them in a kiln built within the prison grounds, and completed the ground floor of the first cell block by the winter of 1875. What followed over the next sixteen years was one of the most sustained examples in Victorian history of penal labour being turned directly toward the construction of the institution that housed it. The prisoners of Wormwood Scrubs built Wormwood Scrubs. The project was not fully complete until 1891.
The resulting building stands on Du Cane Road in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, its Victorian brick battlements and turrets as recognisable a piece of institutional London as any building of its era. Du Cane Road itself carries his name, a geographical permanence that ensures his association with the prison will outlast any printed record. He cannot have been unaware of the contrast: the Du Cane family’s Balham land, then still in private ownership, would not become Du Cane Court for another half-century. The name in west London, attached to hard labour and deterrence, preceded the name in south London, attached to luxury and the “Aristocrat of Apartment Houses,” by nearly forty years.
Final Years and Legacy
Edmund Du Cane died on 7 June 1903 at his London residence at 10 Portman Square, a Marylebone address that placed him, as it had throughout his working life, at the centre of the professional and administrative world he had dominated. He was buried at Great Braxted churchyard in Essex, the family’s ancestral parish, within the grounds of the estate that Peter Du Cane had established in 1745 and that the family had maintained for a century and a half.
His legacy in the history of British criminal justice is genuinely mixed. The Prison Act of 1877 was a significant administrative achievement, producing the unified national prison service that persists, in reformed and repeatedly revised form, to the present day. The physical fabric of Wormwood Scrubs, built by convict labour to a design that has been periodically criticised and periodically praised for its engineering logic, continues to function as a working prison in the twenty-first century. Against these institutional achievements must be set the human cost of a regime that prioritised deterrence over rehabilitation with a rigour that the Gladstone Committee, reporting in 1895, found to have caused unnecessary suffering.
What is less often noted is that the man who enforced “Hard Labour, Hard Fare, and Hard Board” was himself a watercolourist who carried his painting materials into the Australian wilderness and who exhibited his sketches at the Royal Military Exhibition. The distance between that sensibility and the institution he built is not easily collapsed, and the biographical honesty required of anyone writing about Edmund Du Cane is to hold both facts in view simultaneously.
Sources
- “Edmund Frederick Du Cane,” Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org
- “Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement: Du Cane, Edmund Frederick,” Wikisource: en.wikisource.org
- “Du Cane, Edmund Frederick,” Royal Sappers and Miners in Western Australia: sappers-minerswa.com
- “HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs,” Institutional History Society: institutionalhistory.com
- G. K. Vincent, A History of Du Cane Court: Land, Architecture, People and Politics (Du Cane Court Ltd, 2004)
- “Sir Charles Du Cane,” Australian Dictionary of Biography: adb.anu.edu.au
