Prisons Part One: Mrs Georgina Weldon, Legend of HMP Holloway

Before I begin, I should say this post is massively tainted by my own biases and opinions, but that shouldn't be a problem because I'm right about it all.

This is Mrs Georgina Weldon, one of my heroes. Mrs Weldon was born Georgina Thomas in 1837. Her father had inherited a great deal of money and as a consequence, decided to dedicate his time to being a Conservative MP, as dreadfully rich people are sometimes wont to do. Most of Georgina's childhood was spent in Italy being a talented opera singer, but in her late teens she decided to marry a lieutenant called William Weldon. Georgina's father most certainly did not approve of the marriage and so he disinherited her. It turned out that Georgina's new hubbie, Mr Weldon, was a bit of an arse, who not only refused to allow his wife to perform professionally on stage, but also had a long-standing affair, complete with love-child. Georgina, meanwhile, remained childless.

Horrible Mr Weldon

Eventually, Georgina Weldon took her fate into her own hands and in 1871 she forged a friendship with the French composer, Charles Gounod. Goundod somehow ended up living with the Weldons and unsurprisingly rumours began to circulate about an inappropriate relationship between himself and Mrs Weldon. His response to this was to run away back to Paris (and his wife). Georgina was NOT PLEASED. Unfortunately for Gounod, he had left a number of his belongings at the Weldons' residence, including (most pressingly one assumes) the only draft of his opera Polyeucte. He wrote to Georgina, asking for her to send him his belongings. She replied with a big fat NO.

The Unfortunate Charles Gounod

Gounod was left with only one option in the face of such obstinacy, and he began the painful process of reconstructing the opera from memory and notes. When he had been working on it for an entire year, Georgina had a change of heart and sent him the original. She had written her name in a huge scrawl across every page using a crayon.

The next thing Georgina Weldon decided to do was open an orphanage in her own house. She also got heavily into spiritualism because y'know, multi-tasking. Mr Weldon was not up for either of these things, especially the gaggle of all-singing, all-dancing orphans littering the nice posh house. I say all-singing and all-dancing because Georgina had decided not just to open an orphanage, but that it would be a musical orphanage. Perhaps this was the inspiration for the musical Annie. We'll never know.

Partly because he was horrible and partly because Georgina was mildly bats, in 1878 Will Weldon decided to have his wife sent to an asylum. Two doctors came to speak to Georgina, masquerading as people with an interest in musical orphanages. Convinced that Georgina belonged in an asylum, they signed the lunacy order. But Georgina could smell a rat and when the orderlies came to remove her to the asylum, she legged it, and somehow managed to stay hidden for a full seven days, after which period the order to have her committed ceased to be valid.

Having escaped her horrible husband's horrible plot, Georgina decided to get even. She wanted to sue her husband, but the law prevented married women from suing their spouses. 

She waited for four years, during which time she published a memoir of her ordeal, entitled The History of my Orphanage, or The Outpourings of an Alleged Lunatic and How I Escaped the Mad Doctors. The passage of the 1884 Married Women's Property Act meant that Georgina could finally sue her husband. And she went for it. Over the course of a number of years, Georgina sued everybody who had had a hand in her committal. At one point in 1884, Georgina had seventeen cases ongoing at once, and was known publicly as 'The Portia of the Courts'. To finance her legal challenges, Georgina took up roles in the music halls and even appeared in an advert for Pears' Soap.

Sometimes, people sued Georgina back and she lost. As a result, she served a month in Newgate and six months in Holloway, having been convicted of libel, but as late as 1905 she was still out there suing men. She was legendary. Later in life, her popularity with the public waned somewhat and an eight volume legal memoir was pretty much ignored. Having presumably sued everybody she had wanted to, Georgina began conducting séances. One of the people she contacted through her mediumship was poor old Charles Gounod, who even in death was awarded no peace from Mrs Georgina Weldon.

Georgina Weldon died in 1914 and was buried in the family vault in St Dunstan's Church in Mayfield, Sussex. Later that same year, her long-estranged husband finally married his mistress.

Over the years, HMP Holloway had been home to a great number of interesting women, with unexpected stories, from violent Suffragettes to vengeful and libellous opera singers. Caitlin Davies has written a wonderful book on the history of the prison called Bad Girls: The Rebels and Renegades of Holloway Prison. It's fascinating and I highly recommend that you buy it here. One of the stories Davies tells in her book came as a huge surprise to me - I had never heard that there were German Jewish refugees imprisoned within Holloway's walls during the Second World War. 

In Davies' book she recounts an interview with Katherine Hallgarten, whose Jewish mother, Ruth Borchard, was imprisoned at HMP Holloway. Borchard was born in Hamburg but had arrived in England as a refugee in 1937. When war broke out, the British began implementing internment, supposedly using a categorisation system to determine which "Aliens" were most likely to be a security risk. However, Davies writes, 'such was the confusion over classification that Category A men and women may have included as many anti-Nazis and Jews as actual Nazis'. 

Ruth Borchard later wrote a novel about her experiences at HMP Holloway, fictionalising the institution as Holmdale Prison, which she described as having rows of 'hollow-eyed little windows'. Though Brochard arrived at the prison with her infant daughter, Katherine, the authorities told her that the baby would not be allowed to stay and the two were separated. Many of the women at Holloway had had their children removed for the duration of their imprisonment, and in her novel Borchard wrote of the hysteria that engulfed them - with some, 'the nurses had to hold the mother while they tore it away'. 

I won't say any more about this shameful and terribly sad period in Holloway's history because I want you to buy and read the book! It really is brilliant.

Next week, I'll be keeping you locked up at HMP Holloway, but dragging you into the 1960s, where we will meet those who will remain in prison until they die, including a very famous serial murderer who liked to commune with pigeons.