This historic place was registered under the Historic Places Act 1993. The following text is the original citation considered by the NZHPT Board at the time of registration. Information in square brackets indicates modifications made after the paper was considered by the NZHPT Board.
Taranaki is thought to have been settled by Maori around 600-700 years ago. Archaeological evidence suggests that pa were being built in the region as early as the 15th century. The area which would become New Plymouth was populated by Te Atiawa, and a major settlement of the Ngati Te Whiti hapu was the fishing village of Mataipu, at Ngamotu near Paritutu and the Sugarloaf Islands.
By the time of the colonial settlement of New Plymouth in the early 1840s, the pa at Ngamotu, called Otaka Pa, was still populated but many other strongholds in the region had been abandoned following attacks by taua from the Waikato a decade earlier, which had prompted a major migration of the remnant Te Atiawa population to Otaki, Wellington and Marlborough. One such abandoned pa was at New Plymouth very near to the future site of the New Plymouth Prison. Wells, writing in 1878, states that the ruins 'of a very strong pa were observable before the war on the top of Marsland Hill ...The name of this stronghold was Pukaka.' Te Atiawa levelled the top of this hill and created terraces and kumara pits on the sides.
European whalers initially arrived along the Taranaki coast in the first half of the nineteenth century. Organised colonial settlement at Taranaki was first instituted by the Plymouth Company in 1839-1840, who arranged to purchase land from the New Zealand Company for the settlement of immigrants from Devon and Cornwall, although this purchase would be much disputed in the future. The site of the township was chosen and laid out by Chief Surveyor F.A. Carrington, and settler ships arrived from March 1841 onwards.
By this time the Plymouth Company had fallen into financial difficulties, and was formally merged with the New Zealand Company in May 1841. Settler ships continued to arrive, but disputes around the Crown's role in transferring land out of Maori ownership, and between tangata whenua over who had the authority to transfer land were already evident, frustrating all involved. An enquiry by Commissioner Spain in 1844 upheld the initial European purchase of 60,000 acres, but this was re-investigated by Governor FitzRoy (1804-1865) and reduced to 3,500 acres. Over the next 15 years large blocks of land were purchased by the Governor on either side of New Plymouth, but tensions (both inter-tribal and between Maori and Pakeha) continued to escalate, and the series of prolonged conflicts that ensued are now commonly known as the Taranaki Wars. The situation was further inflamed by the New Zealand Settlement Act of 1863, which allowed the Government to confiscate large amounts of iwi-owned land as retribution from those Maori who were deemed to have played a part in the hostilities, whether the individual hapu of the area confiscated were actively involved or not. This led to 185,000 acres of land within Te Atiawa's rohe (district) being confiscated.
Complaints from anxious settlers eventually forced the Government to station troops at New Plymouth, and the site of the former Pukaka pa was transformed into a military stockade and barracks in 1855. The reserve, a hill at the convergence of what is now Downe and Robe Streets and bordered to the southeast by the Huatoki River, was renamed Marsland Hill after a friend of Plymouth Company agent Captain Liardet's, and a further 12 metres was levelled off the summit, where galvanised iron barracks brought over from Melbourne were erected. A wooden military hospital building set on the southern slopes of the hill was also presumably built around this time or soon after, to serve the Imperial troops injured in the ensuing conflicts. Marsland Hill remained the headquarters of the British Army in north Taranaki during the 1860s, throughout the major battles of the Taranaki Wars.
As the frequency of battles decreased the British troops were gradually withdrawn, until the last detachment of the 50th regiment left in 1867. In 1870 the Government proclaimed that they would reuse the existing wooden hospital building in the Marsland Hill barracks to respond to a pressing need in the community: a new prison to replace the outdated facility on Devon Street as the new district jail.
The need for a new jail had been recognised since the early 1850s and had provoked extensive discussion within the provincial council and in the forum of the Taranaki Herald, but it was instead decided to prioritise the bridging of the Waiwakaiho River. The town's first real lock-up was a simple floorless wooden shed with no floor, sited on Mt Eliot, which entered into local legend on the night that five drunken prisoners escaped from their incarceration by together lifting the gaol off the ground from the inside, walking it over to the edge of the hill and toppling it down the slope, freeing themselves once again. The next gaol was constructed in 1844 on Devon Street, beside the Te Henui Stream, but was again considered to be a very inadequate facility, with prisoners forced to endure inhumane conditions that residents felt gave the town a bad name. Timber was ordered for the erection of a temporary gaol 'on the site of the old pound' to rectify the situation in 1864, but from early December 1864 through 1865 advertisements were placed in the Taranaki Herald calling for plans for a new permanent facility on a site 'at the Henui', presumably near the Devon Street lock-up. A tender was even accepted for the supply of stone for this construction, but it appears the project was again stalled due to limited resources for public expenditure, which was at that time managed by the Provincial Council.
The Governor's 1870 proclamation to make use of the existing military hospital building on Marsland Hill was a solution which maximised efficiency of resources, and there are also some indications that this site had been earmarked as the location for the town penal facility since the 1850s. Although now in the centre of New Plymouth city, the site of the new gaol was at that time hidden from the town behind the hill, of which other parts had been designated as cemeteries.
A reporter from the Taranaki Herald visited the new gaol on Marsland Hill in October 1871, soon after the building was occupied. Approaching along a 'well formed and metalled road', the reporter met Mr Bosworth, the gaoler, in the storeroom in the right wing of the building, which also contained the female ward, a reception room for visitors, and a passage past the exercise yard (paved in cobbles) to the cells. The cells were praised for their security, with cement floors laid over a layer of stone to prevent escape by undermining, and each was lit and ventilated by a fanlight over the door. Opposite of the cells was the cookhouse and dining room, and to the rear was another large yard for those sentenced to hard labour to break stones in. This yard also contained two cells 'very strongly made, without a particle of light being able to penetrate into them' for the solitary confinement of 'refractory prisoners'. The gaol also contained a kitchen and chapel, and upper storey rooms for the gaoler and his family. At that time only the right wing of the building was occupied, but additions were planned to extend the facility, including a ward for debtors and an exercise yard for female prisoners. It was this building which would became the basis for the present prison complex.
In the mid 1870s a scheme was also being developed for the construction of a brand new Central Prison - a major national penal facility - to be built at Moturoa in New Plymouth, four kilometres away from the Marsland Hill gaol. It was planned to then subsequently make use of convict labour to build the town a breakwater. New Plymouth had suffered from the lack of a safe port from the earliest days of the colonial settlement, and the construction of a breakwater and port facility was considered to be of the utmost importance to the town, and it was this need that saw the town being chosen above others as the site for this government-built central penitentiary. This central penal establishment was seen as the most efficient way to achieve the regime of severity and surveillance deemed necessary for all long-sentence prisoners in the colony, in order to prevent the emergence of a criminal class.
The intended Central Prison represented the penal philosophy of the time, developed from the English system first proposed by influential prison reformer John Howard in 1777. Howard, in his book The State of the Prisons, argued that the classification of prisoners into 'types' of felons - sorted by offences, age and gender - and their separation and solitary confinement, combined with punitive measures like hard or industrial labour, would prevent 'contamination' and general disruption, facilitate discipline and encourage reform. Howard's arguments were influential in the development of an international prison reform movement. Inspector of prisons Captain Arthur Hume, appointed in 1880, would push this philosophy through in New Zealand by instituting an extensive prison building program to enable the realisation of the 'progressive stage system of classification', but some of those involved in developing the New Zealand penal system were already thinking along these lines.
Colonial Architect William H. Clayton (1823-1877) in 1876 reported that designs and working drawings had been issued for the proposed Central Prison at New Plymouth, after two years of study of 'plans and details of nearly all the prisons in England and Ireland, from which I have gathered (as I believe) such information as will enable me to erect an establishment as complete as any in its class in other parts of the world.' The radial-winged building was planned to accommodate 408 prisoners plus the necessary facilities, and historian R.I.M. Burnett believes it to be the first gaol in New Zealand architecturally designed to be 'an all-embracing separate confinement institution modelled strictly on English lines' since Thomas Fitzgerald's designs for prisons at Wellington and Nelson in the early 1840s, neither of which fully came to fruition. The complete New Plymouth design would also never be fully realised, as the protests of the New Plymouth populace at having hundreds of the country's worst criminals in their midst, along with the bureaucratic disarray following the abolition of the Provincial Governments in 1876, saw the plans for a Central Prison in the area abandoned soon after.
Instead, efforts were directed towards expanding and redeveloping the existing jail on Marsland Hill into a permanent regional penal facility - albeit on a smaller scale than the proposed Central Prison. Extensive construction work on the existing facilities was deemed necessary in order to institute the classification system of separate confinement. [Although it was reported in the Taranaki Herald on the occasion of the retirement of William Bosworth, the gaoler, that the design of the new prison was ‘entirely his own’, it is probable that some of W.H. Clayton’s design ideas were adapted for the project, or least had a strong influence on the architecture of the New Plymouth Prison.] Clayton's appointment as New Zealand's first and only Colonial Architect, during the period of implementation of Julius Vogel's expansionist schemes for public works and immigration, saw him contribute greatly to New Zealand architecture in the eight years he held this office, where he was responsible for the design of hundreds of public buildings.
Repairs and work to improve the permanence of the old structure (originally wood with iron plates to secure the walls) was underway by 1878, with the walls, roof and partitions of the building being replaced with concrete and the yard enlarged in 1879. At this time the exterior walls were being constructed, and a dressed stone bearing the inscription 'New Plymouth Gaol 1879 - J Bosworth, Gaoler' [or H.M.G., Bosworth, 1879'] was reportedly installed in an entrance archway to a yard [facing the gaolers' cottages]. The six new cells were 7 x 10ft (2.13 x 3.05 metres), and were 'fitted up with all of the latest improvements.' With Hume in charge of driving the progressive stage system classification scheme there was more impetus behind the project, as he felt that until new purpose-built facilities were constructed across the country 'classification can only be of a superficial kind, unworthy of the name'. Consequently, the 1881 Department of Prisons annual report on prison labour records that 23 prison labourers were being employed on 'new prison buildings' at New Plymouth, and similar reports continued for the next seven years. In 1885 Hume reports that the number of prisoners at New Plymouth was increased, 'in order that building may progress more rapidly', and 'another wing of the prison has now been completed and is ready for occupation.' The same year Hume writes that the new prison at New Plymouth, along with those underway at Mt Cook in Wellington and Mt Eden in Auckland and those pre-existing structures that were adapted (such as the Lyttelton gaol), 'should afford ample accommodation for a complete cellular system of classification.'
Construction of the three-winged complex progressed in stages as a result of relying on prison labour to do the job. Although it apparently worked out at an average of three prisoners working to the same capacity as two free men, the benefits outweighed the slow progress, and prison labour was employed on similar projects as part of Hume's building scheme. The 1883 'Annual Report on public buildings and other works, North Island' in the Department of Public Works Annual Report states, of the slow pace of work on the new prisons planned for Auckland and Wellington:
'Prisoners can not be expected to take the same interest in work that free men do; therefore the building operations do not and will not progress so rapidly as they otherwise would were they done by contract. Moreover many of them are novices and have to learn or become accustomed to the particular kind of work on which they are employed; at the same time a very large amount of work has been done at both places and will compare very favourably with that executed by free labour.'
From around 1881 convict labour was also used to construct the breakwater at Ngamotu, an amenity that had been a long time coming for the people of New Plymouth. The work gangs, containing prisoners transferred to New Plymouth for the job, were marched to work under armed guard and waited out the tides and bad weather locked behind bars in a cave at the base of one of the Sugarloaf Islands. Along with other projects that prisoners were employed on over the years, such as roading and the construction of the hospital, the prison at New Plymouth has therefore contributed significantly to the townscape and facilities of the town. The land to the southeast of the Marsland Hill hillside played a large part in the punishment of those sentenced to hard labour; over the decades it has been quarried for stone by prisoners and as recently as 1958 an inmate told of his week spent 'cracking stones eight or nine hours a day':
'I heved [sic] rock till my back was going to break...It ran that way each day - cell to cold water; cell to quarry; quarry to cold water; cold water to cell. The monotony of it nearly drove me mad, but what could I do? I was a drunken driver and they must have intended to teach me a last lesson.'
New Plymouth Prison has had its share of infamous prisoners over the years. These have included Robert Wallath, known as 'The Highwayman', who terrorised the population of New Plymouth in the early 1890s by committing a series of armed robberies until being captured during his attempt to hold up the Criterion Hotel in July 1893. Wallath later penned a book about his exploits, A Highwayman with a Mission, and the well-known photograph showing his colourful highwayman's outfit was taken in the courtyard of the New Plymouth jail after his arrest. George Wilder was another character who caught the imagination of the public after his escape from the prison by scaling one of its highest walls in 1962, and his days on the run inspired the Howard Morrison Quartet to write the song George the Wilder Colonial Boy. It has also been suggested that Amy Bock, convicted for impersonating a man in marriage, served time with hard labour at New Plymouth.
Between 1917 and 1952, New Plymouth Prison was almost exclusively used for the incarceration of men convicted of sodomy and indecent assault on a male – that is, homosexual offences (sexual acts between consenting men were illegal until 1986). The prison’s Medical Officer Sydney Allen instituted a programme of moral therapy intended to redirect homosexual impulses into physical and cultural pursuits. Prisoners undertook exhausting hard labour alongside art classes and concerts. While they were closely watched, the men formed close relationships, with prison inadvertently functioning as a meeting place. Segregation fell out of favour from the late 1940s and the prison reverted to a local penal institution in 1952.
In the 1940s and 1950s the prime location of the prison on Marsland Hill - now in the middle of the growing township - was cited as one of the reasons (along with the status of the prison as the national facility for sex offenders) for a deputation from the citizens to have the prison moved to somewhere less prominent. However, the solid stone construction of the building meant that removal and reconstruction was not a realistic option, and Ministry of Justice staff could not justify the demolition of a building that although old was in a reasonably sound condition. The jail was instead reclassified as a medium-security prison in the mid 1950s and £36,000 spent on improvements, including the construction of a new workshop, ablution block and boiler room, as well as three new houses for staff.
Over the years the prison has undergone a number of repairs and modifications for operational purposes, but the basic structure, layout and fabric of the old prison has remained the same. The beachstone exterior walls were heightened sometime between c.1900 and c.1915. Administration offices have gradually filled in what were once yards directly behind the north-facing wall, and a unit was built in the yard to the southeast in the 1960s, but the exercise yard to the southwest remains as it has for approximately 140 years. Historic images show that there was once a guards' walkway above the central 'Dome' area of the prison, but this is no longer in situ. The site once also contained five warder's cottages (at least one dating from 1882), but these have now been removed, and in one case replaced with a modern structure in the 1950s.
In 1908 there was accommodation for 50 male and 10 female prisoners, with the average number in custody being 25. Today the prison holds 112 minimum to high-medium security prisoners, plus offenders on remand. The facility was majorly expanded around 1990 by the addition of a modern prisoner accommodation unit (now used as the more minimum-security unit of the two) adjacent to the original stone compound.
The cells in the original block at New Plymouth Prison are reportedly the smallest in the country by today's standards, although the ceilings are 15ft (4.5metres) high and the historical use of hammocks would have created more space. Current prison staff are proud of the historic status of the prison, and work within the limitations of what is the country's oldest prison building still in operation. The gaol at Lyttelton closed in 1921 and has since been demolished, and the Mt Cook prison was demolished in the 1930s. Dunedin prison (Central Police Station (Exterior), Category I, Record no. 4035, built 1896) was closed in 2007. Napier prison (Napier Prison Wall, Category I, Record no. 181, built 1862) was closed in 1993 and is now backpackers' accommodation. Mt Eden prison (Category I, Record no. 88, constructed c.1882-1917) is the second oldest existing facility that dates from Hume's prison building project, but is currently included in a major redevelopment which 'will see the end of Mt Eden Prison as an operational prison', as the old structure is converted to a staff and administration block.
New Plymouth prison remains as a physical testament to the development of the penal system in New Zealand, and a lasting reminder of a time when prisoners as young as nine years old could be sentenced to hard labour. The grimness of the foreboding stone walls and the starkness of the small cells - which have occasionally offered up hints of their former occupants (notes dating from around 1920, meant for another inmate, were found inside the tin sheathing of a cell door during renovation work in 2004) - have provided inspiration for artists such as Jono Rotman through their ability to strongly evoke a sense of restriction, isolation and hardship.
The site of the prison also has high potential to provide knowledge of New Zealand history through archaeological remains. For example, there are thought to be at least eight graves of prisoners within the prison confines, including that of executed prisoner Wiremu Hiroki, who was hanged in 1882. The wider surrounds of Marsland Hill are of noted archaeological importance, and bottles and other artefacts have been found within the prison grounds. New Plymouth Prison is regarded as 'one of the few surviving examples of archaeological deposits associated with military hospitals from the period of the New Zealand wars, and has potential to provide information relating to the everyday life and activities of the colonial military and the domestic life of prisoners in the later part of the nineteenth century.' The prison site also has significant archaeological potential to provide knowledge of Maori history. Around 1960 five Maori stone adzes were reportedly found by prisoners digging in the prison gardens, and were deposited in the Taranaki Museum.
