OTAGO DOCK TRUST FREEZING WORKS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXVI, Issue II, 12 January 1901, Page 77

OTAGO DOCK TRUST FREEZING WORKS.

Constructive Criminals. CLEVER THINGS MADE IN PRISON. A convict recently expired in a Milanese gaol leaving behind him a really wonderful specimen of work performed under very exceptional difficulties. The work in question constituted a model of the famous Milan Cathedral, and although the executant had had nothing to guide him beyond his me-

niory. the model was said to be exact in every leading? detail. The construction was carried out with the help of the rudest tools, supplied to the man by the warders, who took a great interest in the undertaking. The work occupied no less than six years, and it is now the property of the governor of the prison, to whom the dying malefactor bequeathed it with his last breath. From time immemorial convicts have distinguished themselves in the

direction of ingenious constructions. As far back as 1789. a prisoner in a French penitentiary built a very beautiful model of a water-mill, though how and where he found the tools and materials it is impossible to say. seeing that the gaol officials were sternly unsympathtic. and did not, as in the case quoted above, aid the prisoner by lending him working implements. This mill was exhibited some years ago in an American “ dime museum.” where it excited a verv consider-

able amount of interest, and it was afterwards purchased by a spectator for no less a sum than loodols (about £2O). To manufact lire a watch while under a sentence of penal servitude would seem to many persons an almost inconceivable feat of patience, ingenuity, and persex era nee. yet such an article was actually made by a Bradford convict named Styles some years ago. A working watchmaker by trade. he so Utilised scraps of old metal and other materials which he found while engaged in his daily convict la lour that at length he had made him self a set of tools suitable for watch manufacturing purposes. and six months later he had turned out a per feet specimen of a timepiece. On one occasion during the watch’s inception he was detected ami reported, but the governor, so far from reprimanding the ingenious fellow, complimented him upon his work, and expressed much interest in the feat. Soon after the completion of the extraordinary work the poor fellow’ fell into a condition of languor and died, which would seem to imply that tin* making of the watch had helped to keep him alive. A convict undergoing imprisonment at Toulouse for savage assault was responsible for the construction of a model hospital, with beds, surgical tables, and all the rest of the paraphernalia connected with such institutions. while another criminal incarcerated in a gaol in Western America built a very faithful model of the Washington Senate House. It appears strange that men possessing such talents for working under difficulties should not devote their jMiwers to honest work, and thus obviate the necessity of carrying out their constructive tendencies in prison.