In June 1870, almost a decade after the Chatham riots, a tough, young army officer, Major Arthur Griffiths, became deputy-governor of the convict prison there. He was shocked by what he saw, and he was no novice to prison work, having been in charge of the Gibraltar convict establishment. The riots had been caused in part by a sudden reduction in the already meagre diet. Nine years later he could still see men ‘greedily devour the railway grease used in the traffic of trucks’. He heard stories that some were driven to eat earth, candles, frogs and worms. He knew of men who would throw themselves under moving trucks, preferring the amputation of a limb to having to endure this sort of existence. Self-mutilation to escape flogging was not uncommon. It was a vain sacrifice since, as the governor told the Royal Commission of 1878–9, ‘there was no reason why they should not be flogged because they had only mutilated an arm or a leg’. Griffiths ‘could not help commiserating the convicts’ yet was ‘powerless to mitigate their sufferings’. He thought the system indefensible:

Griffiths was a most interesting governor, had a most interesting professional background and would have a most interesting future career as a writer on military and penal matters, as well as being a novelist. He would publish over sixty books, including an invaluable autobiography. Born in 1838 into an army family, he attended one of those public schools which was a ‘Spartan institution, run on bare, economical lines’, where there was no cosseting and nothing but the plainest food in insufficient quantities. It was a valuable preparation for his later career.