Robert Evan Roberts, Jailer 1853-1885

After having three long-service jailers, namely, Howard, Warner and Tregenza, who between them covered the sixty-six-year period between 1783 and 1849, Bedford jail suffered from the unsettled period just discussed. The years 1848 to 1853 saw the jail in the charge of the dying Tregenza, the exhausted Banfield, the fraudulent Foster, the evangelising Maclear and finally the competent Roberts. Fortunately the latter returned to the tradition of long service and remained governor until 1885.

Robert Evan Roberts was selected from fifty-nine applicants. At the time he was the jailer of the Westmorland county jail at Appleby and was aged 35. It is not clear what clinched the decision in his favour, but thirteen years later Roberts himself referred to the death of Henry Littledale, a former High Sheriff and one of the county magistrates, adding that he ‘was mainly instrumental in securing the appointment of Mr. Roberts as governor of the prison’. The choice proved to be a sound one: Roberts was highly professional and always ready to comment strongly on matters which he considered to be wrong. He was an innovator, and his ideas were by and large successful. He seems to have had the confidence of the staff, who in February 1865, for no particular reason, presented him with a silver inkstand inscribed, ‘As a token of esteem and gratitude for the past kindness to them’, whilst the female officers presented his wife with ‘a beautifully worked red antimacassar’.

Roberts certainly gave a considerable amount of thought to questions of staff. On 16 August 1856 he wrote in his journal that he was short of two officers, adding: ‘Whilst on this subject I may be permitted to state my opinion founded upon fifteen years, that retired soldiers and policemen do not as a rule turn out to be the most suitable men for filling the post of prison warders in a small prison like this, but on the contrary, in this prison alone they have shown themselves in every instance the most inefficient. Now in a large prison where there are congregated from a thousand to fifteen-hundred prisoners, soldiers are an acquisition to the prison staff—in those establishments the men are put to work in gangs on public works.