TWELVE people were hanged at Glasgow’s Duke Street Prison between 1902 and 1928. The last woman to be hanged in Scotland, Susan Newell, met her fate at the prison on October 10, 1923, for the murder of a Coatbridge schoolboy. “It was learned afterwards”, this newspaper recounted the following morning, “that the prisoner walked steadily from the condemned cell to the scaffold, preceded by two Roman Catholic sisters.”
It was the first time a woman had been hanged in Scotland since Helen Blackwood, in 1853.
The last hanging at Duke Street took place in August 1928, one George Reynolds being executed for murder.
There had been a prison in Duke Street since 1792. It was enlarged in 1823-1824, and completely rebuilt between 1875 and 1892, when the chapel, and residences for the governor and warders, were added.
Read more: Herald Diary
In June 1959 it was announced that the condemned cell at Duke Street had been pulled down. Once the entire prison had been demolished, work would start on building 400 homes in three multi-storey blocks. The Evening Times ran the photograph seen here (main image, far right) of a group of visitors - possibly media representatives - being shown the trap-door in the execution block. The visitors also saw one of the cell blocks (right, bottom). The prison’s high walls (right, top) were something of a local landmark.
There had been a prison in Duke Street since 1792. It had been enlarged in 1823, and completely rebuilt between 1875 and 1892.
As real-crime author Douglas Skelton observed in 2015, in a short video report for STV, the prison for decades was home to thieves, murderers, political activists and suffragettes. They were sent her to be punished, they were sent here to await trial, but some were sent here to die.”
Conditions within the prison, he added, “were not ideal - life was cramped and dirty and often brutal.”
One notorious incident happened in May 1921 when an armed group of IRA volunteers unsuccessfully tried to free an IRA commander who was being driven under armed guard in a police van from a city court to the prison. A police inspector was killed in the exchange of gunfire. The Glasgow Herald described it as “one of the most dastardly outrages in the modern history of Glasgow.”
Wendy Wood, the notable Scottish patriot, once spent time at Duke Street, after she refused to pay a £15 fine for not keeping up her National Health Insurance contributions. “Her subsequent protests at conditions for the women prisoners,” says the online Glasgow Story, “contributed to the decision to close the prison in 1955.”
By the time the prison was closed in August 1955, it had become the main prison for women in Scotland. There were 207 single cells, 12 for men and 195 for women.
Upon closure, between 30 and 40 prisoners were transferred to Gateside Prison, Greenock. Duke Street’s governor, Elspeth Hobkirk, became the new Gateside governor.
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