Caring for our Criminal Past: Conservation of the Register of Prisoners Released from HM General Prison, Perth, 1880-1884.

In early December 2023, Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives was awarded £2,638 by the National Manuscripts Conservation Trust to undertake restoration work on a remarkable and unique volume containing nearly a thousand photographs of prisoners incarcerated at HM General Prison, Perth. 

The register, which is part of the Aberdeen City Police collection, contains nearly a thousand mugshots with accompanying details of prisoners released from Scotland’s General Prison at Perth between 7 April 1882 and 18 January 1884. Constructed in 1839, the General Prison at Perth housed long-term convicts serving sentences exceeding nine months and those categorised as “lunatic” prisoners. The book contains photographs of the head and upper body of seated prisoners, and is accompanied by descriptions of the individual, their crime and where they intended to reside following their release.

 Although the National Records of Scotland holds a similar register for Greenock Prison covering 1872 to 1888, the Perth Prison Register is otherwise unique and is believed to be the only surviving example for this institution. It therefore forms a rare visual record of Scotland’s prison population in the early 1880s, and provides evidence of efforts to monitor ex-convicts.  

 

The register is related to the Perth General Prison registers held by the National Records of Scotland (NRS) in Edinburgh under the reference HH21/47. However, there is a gap in the NRS’s sequence of registers, covering the period 1879-1887, which this volume partly fills, therefore adding to its historical value.  

 

The volume was immediately identified as a priority for conservation on its deposit. The cloth covering on the book is abraded and patchy; the first half of the block is detached and the sewing has also failed in this section. Pages are loose and 25 are missing; the whole block is cockled. The generous grant from the NMCT will enable the volume to be stabilised so that it can be handled and used by the public in our searchrooms, while retaining as much original material as possible. The work will also enable the volume to be digitised and the content made available online. 

 

The proposed treatment is to: 

• Photograph and document the object before and after conservation.  
• Mechanically clean the bookblock and cover with brush and sponge.  
• Disbind the sewing and where still attached remove the bookcloth from spine.
• Repair tears with Japanese paper adhered with wheat starch paste.  
• Guard back folds of gatherings with Japanese paper and wheat starch paste.  
• Resew gatherings on new supports with linen thread using original sewing holes if possible.  
• Line spine with archival paper and create a tube hollow.  
• Consolidate and repair corners with wheat starch paste and Japanese paper.  
• Reattach boards with transverse lining.  
• Re-back spine with new book cloth.
• Rehouse in archive clamshell box.

This conservation project will be completed later in 2024 and will enable us to make the volume accessible to the public for the first time. It will also facilitate use of the volume more regularly in outreach work, particularly in connection to Aberdeen’s annual Granite Noir crime writing festival, to which our Archive's service is a regular contributor. 

In the meantime, if you are interested in the names of the convicts that appear in the volume, a transcription is available here.

[Reference POL/AC/6/7]

Phil Astley, Team Leader - Archives