I called Haron in glee the other morning, as I realised that the meeting I was about to attend was to take place in Newgate Street. The fabulous “Victorian Dictionary” provides the historical context, with a journalist’s description of attending a flogging at the infamous old Newgate prison:

Ten o’clock, and the prisoners were waiting. Through grim passages and corridors and across the yard where the gallows is erected, and so into a bleak hall, bare of furniture except for a table and a form or two, and over against the whitewashed wall on the other side the whipping apparatus - an odd looking contrivance with holes to clasp the wrists in, and secure hampering for the feet at the ankles. Then the executioner produced his cat-o’-nine tails… The handle was about two feet in length, and the “tails” about fourteen inches.

The 25 strokes took “exactly a minute and three-quarters”. If anyone out there would care to recreate the whipping frame and ‘cat’ for us, I should feel it to be my duty to provide a modern-day report on the efficacy of the punishment…

Sadly, my meeting was rather more mundane, although I spent some of it with a rather faraway gleam in my eyes…

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