SILENT HORROR

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22356, 29 February 1936, Page 3 (Supplement)

SILENT HORROR

EXPERIENCE IN PADDED CELL A British woman who was locked up in a prison padded cell for a day told a London journal of her adventurous life. She is Miss Gertrude Eaton, who has devoted 30 years of her life to prison reform. In the course of her experience she has examined at first hand prison conditions in Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland and Italy, given persecuted political prisoners sanctuary in her own home and befriended old criminals looked upon as hopeless cases by the authorities.

Now she is devoting her whole time to international prison reform. She is a member of the fifth Commission of the League of Nations. "I am a great believer in seeing conditions myself," Miss Eaton stated.

"In Prague I persuaded the prison officials to lock me up in one of the padded cells used for violent prisoners. The experience was awful. I was left there in utter darkness in a tiny, confined room dead to all sound in a suffocating atmosphere. Not a murmur filtered through from the world outside. "Even the sounds of movement I made myself were deadened by the padded walls. The horrors of being penned in that cell indefinitely are too awful to imagine—yet there are hundreds so confined in Europe at this minute. If they are sane when they go in they are fortunate if they can retain their reason for long." Befriending political refugees who fly to Britain from the Continent now takes up a great deal of Miss Eaton's time. Many political prisoners and exconvicts come to thank Miss Eaton for what she has done. "There was one Qld gentleman,' she said, "who had served 27 years in various prison sentences for housebreaking. Yet I knew there was something fine about the man. He had twice saved people from drowning in the Thames at the risk of his own life. He was genuinely devoted to children. _ So 1 told him I was going to trust him. "I told hiin that every Sunday so long as he kept straight he could come to my house to dinner. All that old man wanted was someone to take an interest in him. For years he came, week after week, to take that Sunday meal at my house, and became a good citizen."