. Bromby’s response was firm but perhaps open to compromise: ‘Lockups are made sufficiently dark to prevent reading, but light is not wholly excluded. Any modification can be made in these which the Council might think proper. Corporal punishment cannot be administered without my sanction. I will see that this regulation is rightly enforced.’

Bromby administered corporal punishment on average once a year, ‘but always pretty sharply’ according to the Annual Report of 1863. For example, he ‘had to flog a peppery boy today for having stabbed another with a pen knife. The offender pleaded in justification 1. that he had not done it, 2. that he did it in play, 3. that the other chap was throttling him with three handkerchiefs.'”