Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison: Fifteen Years in SolitudeBidwell, Austin
General
Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison: Fifteen Years in Solitude
Bidwell, Austin
Bank fraud -- England; Bank of England; Bidwell, Austin; Criminals -- Biography
"It being known that Bidwell was expected from Havana in the
Moselle, an enormous crowd assembled in Milbay pier to await the
return of the steam tender with the mail, in order to get a sight
of the prisoner, and so great was the crowd that it was with some
difficulty that Bidwell and his escort managed to reach cabs, and
were driven to the Duke of Cornwall Hotel adjoining the railway
station. They left by the 12.45 train for London. A crowd of
20,000 persons were present to see them off, and cheered Bidwell
heartily.
"Bidwell will be taken before the Lord Mayor in the justice room at
the Mansion House this morning."
Accompanied by my escort of six, I arrived in London one bright Spring
morning, just as the mighty masses of that great Babylon were thronging
in their thousands toward Epsom Downs, where on that day the Derby, that
pivotal event in the English year, was to be run. All London was astir,
and had put on holiday attire, while I, now a poor weed drifting to rot
on Lethe's wharf, was on my way to Newgate.
Newgate! Then it had come to this! The Primrose Way wherein I had walked
and lived delicately at the expense of honor, ended here!
"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap," was written by one
Paul. The wisdom of many was here and condensed in the wit of one, and
one with the shrewdest insight into things and a practical knowledge of
human history.
I was a prisoner in Newgate. Newgate! The very name casts a chill; so,
too, does a sight of that granite fortress rising there in the heart of
mighty London. Amid all the throbbing life of that great Babylon it
stands--chill and grim--and has stood a prison fortress for 500 years.
Through all those linked centuries how many thousands of the miserable
and heartbroken of every generation have been garnered within its cold
embrace! What sights and sounds those old walls have seen and heard! As
I paced its gloomy corridors that first night, pictures of its past rose
before me so grim and terrible that I turned shuddering from them, only
to remember that I, too, had joined the long unending procession ever
flowing through its gates, which had heaped its walls to the top with
one inky sea of misery.
In the cruel days of old many a savage sentence had fallen from the lips
of merciless judges, but none more terrible than the one which was to
fall on us from the lips of their ferocious imitator, Justice Archibald.
I found my three friends already prisoners there, and a sad party we
were. When we said good-bye that night on the wharf at Calais, where we
sat star-gazing and philosophizing, we little anticipated this reunion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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