The convict biographies of Thomas Limpus, Charlotte Walker, Annie Sullivan, William Buckley, Mark Jeffrey and Ikey Solomons will be exhibited in the latest Bob Shoemaker and Tim Hitchcock collaboration ‘Criminal Lives, 1780-1925: Punishing Old Bailey Convicts’. After nine months of picture researching, object sourcing, narrative writing and caption creating, the exhibition plan has been passed to the London Metropolitan Archive’s conservation and graphic design teams to bring to life. The exhibition will be opening at the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) on 11 December 2017 and will run until 18 May 2018.
Alongside period images from the LMA’s extensive holdings and visual reproductions from The National Archives, The British Museum, The Royal Academy, National Library of Australia, State Library of New South Wales and the Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office, the exhibition will be showcasing a number of objects and artifacts. These include convict love tokens, a truncheon, a late nineteenth-century convict uniform with ‘broad arrow’ design and a reproduction prison uniform that was used as part of a study of Millbank Penitentiary for the Channel Four series Lost Buildings of Britain (2004).
Now we’ve got the convict uniform, we just need to find a mannequin and get it to the LMA!
Join us for the exhibition launch on 14 December! To find out more and to book a place, visit Eventbrite.
Reconstructed prison uniform to a British design c. 1816 (2004).
Source: Private collection of Richard W. Ireland.