Sent to New Plymouth

2 June 2024

For several decades, most New Zealand men sentenced to prison for sex with boys or other men were imprisoned in New Plymouth. They arrived by boat or train, accompanied by a warder, and were taken ‘up the hill’ to the forbidding stone prison in Robe Street. There they toiled in the damp quarry or the gardens; every evening they were locked in cells barely longer than the bed and no wider than a man’s outstretched arms. The food and sanitation were basic, the entire 1870s structure unheated. Staff tried to promote self-control and reformation: drill, lectures, church services, concerts and handicrafts. No good could come of homoerotic dalliances, they insisted, telling their charges to renounce their ‘perverted’ ways and become respectable citizens.

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Top: Prison exterior. Bottom left: A single cell, 2010s. Modern conveniences (flush toilets, handbasins and TVs) were added to the cells many years after the prison stopped accommodating homosexual offenders. Bottom right: the large exercise yard, 2010s. For several decades this yard boasted an extensive flower garden with palm trees.

Who ended up at New Plymouth? All sex between males was illegal before 1986, and about 520 prisoners convicted of homosexual offences found themselves incarcerated there between 1917 and 1954 (the last new admissions took place in 1952). While the prison catered for a handful of short-stay locals at any one time, the men who filled two of the three wings had been convicted of sodomy (anal sex) and ‘indecent assault on a male’ (all other sexual activities, whether consenting or not). Contrary to popular assumption, this was not a ‘sexual offenders jail’ in the broad sense: men found guilty of sexual crimes involving girls or women were distributed through the general prison system.

The gaol’s surviving registers contain some basic demographic information, but the Police Gazette reveals the prisoners’ ages, nationalities, occupations and sentences. The Gazette provides photographs of most inmates too.* Men ranged in age from twenty to their mid-sixties; younger offenders were sent to the borstals at Waikeria and Invercargill, and most older ones ended up in the more comfortable prison for elderly men in Whanganui. Seventy percent of New Plymouth inmates were New Zealand-born Pākehā, but very few were Māori. The policing of homosexuality was mostly an urban phenomenon, and rates of Māori rural-to-urban migration did not pick up until the regime was winding down. The remaining inmates were English, Scottish, Irish or Australian; there was a smattering of Americans, and a sole Chinese prisoner.

What about their occupations? Members of New Zealand’s elite (senior civil servants, lawyers, academics, doctors, politicians, managers, owners of large businesses, policemen, military officers) benefited from their high social status; they avoided arrest for homosexual offences in the first place. Given the urban focus of law enforcement, it is unsurprising that farmers and farm workers were under-represented in the gaol muster. At first glance it appears that labourers, a third of all New Plymouth prisoners, were over-represented, but in fact the number of incarcerated labourers reflected the composition of the wider labour force. According to the 1936 census, thirty-eight percent of all New Zealand’s employed men worked in the manufacturing, construction, rail and road sectors. Such parallel proportionality is also true of the prisoners listed as cooks or bakers by trade, along with those whose occupations were associated with the nascent queer subcultures of the 1920s and 30s: stewards, sailors, musicians, artists, drapers, barmen and porters [see here].

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A Christchurch factory during the 1920s: many of New Plymouth's inmates were labourers or factory hands.

There is less information on the relationship between offending and the sentences meted out by judges. Newspaper reports and court records, which survive for roughly a third of the prisoners, suggest most men who had sex with youths received sentences of around two years’ duration. But sentencing varied wildly for men involved with other adults. Some were probationed rather than imprisoned, including 26-year-old Wellington clerk Norris Davey, who later changed his name to Frank Sargeson and became one of New Zealand’s most well-known writers [see here]. Davey was arrested in Wellington in 1929 for masturbating, in private, with thirty-nine-year-old artist Leonard Hollobon. A few other men received sentences of five or six months' duration and saw out their time in the gaol closest to them.     

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 Alfred England (left), a steward, and Wenzl Schischka, a mariner, in 1921.

But some served much longer lags at New Plymouth. Hollobon, Davey's sex partner, spent four years of his five-year term there before his release on probation in 1933. In 1921, Alfred England and Wenzl Schischka, both aged 41, came to the attention of Auckland police after a lovers’ quarrel; England got five years and Schischka three. Twenty-six-year-old musician John Lander was convicted of buggery with thirty-two-year-old bootmaker Albert McGurk in 1914, and sentenced to life imprisonment. McGurk got seven years. Lander had been a regular on Auckland’s waterfront, ‘prostituting his body’, as police put it, from about 1909. He and McGurk remained friends while at New Plymouth. In 1946, by which time queer networks were well established in the smaller cities, hospital porter Kipa Sharland left court with a three year sentence after police learned of boisterous parties at his New Plymouth flat. There was much liquor and ‘a great deal of noise’, according to Truth newspaper, and several young cheese factory workers had sex with older men. One factory-hand wrote love letters to Sharland.

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Left: John Lander in 1922: he attempted to escape from New Plymouth Prison that year, but was quickly recaptured. Right: Albert McGurk in 1915, two years before his transfer to New Plymouth. A batch of prisoners, including McGurk, was transferred to New Plymouth from Mt Eden, Wellington and Lyttelton gaols in 1917.

The long-running New Plymouth experiment emerged out of government officials’ view that homosexual prisoners caused trouble in other gaols and required special attention – even though the prison rarely held queer men convicted of other crimes. One exception was Charles Mackay, sometime mayor of Whanganui convicted of attempted murder of returned soldier and would-be poet D'Arcy Cresswell [see here]. Another was an incorrigible young labourer, a thief and housebreaker sent from Auckland to New Plymouth during the 1940s. A fellow inmate named him as one of an unrepentently sexual group of men ‘whose company would never reform any inmate sent to mix with same’. The New Plymouth regime – physical labour, wholesome leisure activities, and often-idiosyncratic guidance from the prison’s medical officers – drew heavily upon the kinds of ‘moral treatment’ used in the country’s mental hospitals, but it was not especially successful.**

Eventually state decision-makers declared the experiment a failure. The last men sent to New Plymouth for homosexual offences were released in 1954, the institution became a local jail once again, and men convicted of sex with other males were pepper-potted across the New Zealand prison system. New Plymouth Prison closed in 2013, and it now sits empty on Pūkākā/Marsland Hill.

 

* Issues of the Police Gazette over seventy years old (ie those published before 1953) are unrestricted and in the public domain. Court and prison records are open for public viewing after 100 years.

** These aspects will be the subject of future blog posts.

 

Sources

Police Gazette, 1917-1953.

Dominion of New Zealand Population Census, 1936.

Brickell, C. (2021) ‘Psychiatry, Psychology and Homosexual Prisoners in New Zealand, 1910-1960’, Medical History, 65(1): 1-17.

Taranaki Daily News, 1 December 1924, p.6; New Zealand Truth, 22 May 1915, p.4; 13 March 1946, p.9.

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