The Cascades Female Factory Audio Experience
The Cascades Female Factory Audio Experience provides an overview of the history of the site as well as the stories of the women and children that spent time here. Most of the structures and buildings that made up the Cascades Female Factory have been removed or lost with time. Today, you can take your time as you wander through the space and listen to true tales of the courage, resourcefulness and resilience of the women lived, worked and aspired to a better life outside these same walls. The audio experience fills in the space between then and now.
The Cascades Female Factory Audio Experience
Chapter 18: Yard Five (Location: Yard 4)
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Yard Five no longer exists. It was built on the other side of Yard 2. It was the most modern of all the Yards.
If at Cascades Female Factory, we recommend you listen to this chapter from the gates in Yard 4 (stop 18).
Yard Five was the final yard to be constructed. It was also the first of the yards to disappear from view. It is now covered in houses but let’s try and imagine …
Remember where Yard Two was? Yard Five was built on the other side of Yard Two. Yards being named in the order they were built rather than their position.
Built in 1852, it was the most modern and spacious of the Yards. Along its wall adjoining Yard Two, ran a two-storey building. On the ground floor was a mess room where 400 women could be fed in one sitting from a kitchen which had boilers and scullery. At night the mess room became a school where the women were instructed in religious education.
Upstairs was dormitory for 212 women. The women who slept here were pass-holders awaiting employment. They were not undergoing secondary punishment and so security here was minimal. The dormitories had windows and skylights, unlike the closed, unventilated dorms in Yard One, and a fireplace.
Pipes now brought water from the rivulet to the Factory and Yard Five had flushing, separate toilets. Far more hygienic and private than the communal privies of other Yards.
Superintendent May also made changes to Yard One and Yard Two. In Yard One he had the inner walls and central buildings demolished and stone steps built in front of the Chapel’s entrance. May wanted to create an open space in which convicts could be supervised more easily.
Yard Two was remodelled, again for surveillance purposes. The wooden frames on which the laundry was hung out to dry were removed from the Yard and placed on the outer wall of the building. May believed the clothes and linen, hanging out to dry, impeded a clear view of convicts – there was to be no more chatting among sheets, no more hiding from the Overseers and Watchwomen. The Yard was now bare, and it became an inspection ground.
On Sunday mornings, the convict women stood in silence as their clothing and cleanliness was inspected by prison officers. The Superintendent read out notices and, in a shaming exercise, the names, offences and sentences of women guilty of any misconduct that week. During these Sunday morning musters, the convict women were forbidden from speaking to the Superintendent or any officer.
Hygiene and problems with overcrowding may have improved but very little improvement was made in the well-being of convict women – especially in these final years of the Factory where an intrusive regime of constant surveillance was implemented.