Millbank continued to be a centre of great criminal interest to the very end. As has been shown, it became the depot and starting-point for all convicts sentenced to penal exile, and when a peremptory stop was put to transportation, it worked in with the substituted system of Public Works prisons. For fifty years it was a receptacle for male and female convicts undergoing the first period of separate confinement, the preliminary to associated work with greater freedom. Notorieties of all kinds passed through it; and the names of almost all the celebrated prisoners of the time were to be found upon its registers. There were murderers who had scraped through and just escaped the death penalty, such as Dixblanc, the French cook who murdered her mistress in Park Lane. Constance Kent, who confessed to the mysterious crime of killing her infant brother, spent many years at Millbank; the cruel and infamous Stantons, who starved poor Alice—— at Penge, began their retribution there; Madame Rachel, the would-be benefactor to her sex which she desired to make beautiful for ever, tried her blandishments on more than one Millbank matron. It was my fate to welcome the Tichborne claimant to durance vile, to watch him wasting from excessive obesity to a decent and respectable size, lachrymose and repentant, but secretive and defiant to the last. The moving spirits in the De Goncourt affair, Kurr and Benson, made Millbank their medium of communication with the dishonest detective officers who for a time shook public confidence in the London police force.
Millbank served for other prison purposes. In its latest phases, part of its accommodation was leased to military authorities and it was long the home of court-martial prisoners. When the State finally acquired all prisons of every category in the country, it was used for the retention of venial offenders sent by petty sessions and police courts.
The end came in 1891, when Millbank was finally closed and the site surrendered by the prison authorities to the government Office of Works.
Here the London County Council have built dwellings for the poor; a handsome military hospital for the Guards and London District has been erected by the War Office; and the trustees of the Tait bequest have put up a fine gallery to house the valuable pictures with which that munificent patron has endowed London. Thus buildings of a new and very different character have now replaced the old Penitentiary.