But Captain Groves soon seated himself firmly in the saddle, and made himself felt as master. The promptitude with which he grasped the position is proved by his early orders. On the first day he found out that there were no standing regulations in case of fire. No fixed system or plan of action was established, but it was left to the governor, at the moment of emergency, to issue such instructions as might suggest themselves. There were no stations at which the several officials should take post on the first alarm, no regular practice with the fire engine; the machine itself was quite insufficient, and the hose out of repair. There had been one or two fires already inside the prison, and the consequences had been sufficiently disastrous; yet no attempt had been made to reduce the chances by previous forethought and arrangement. Captain Groves begged therefore to be permitted to frame regulations in advance and in cold blood, instead of leaving the calamity to be coped with amid the excitement of an actual conflagration. The fire question disposed of, the governor turned his eyes upon the appearance of the men under his charge; and, true soldier again, I find him complaining seriously of the slouching gait and slovenly garb of the warders trained under the late regime. “I think,” he says, “that the officers when together on parade, or at other times, should present something of the appearance of a military body.” He wished, therefore, to give them drill, and a waist-belt, and a smarter uniform. Again, he found fault with the armoury, and remarked that all the fire-arms in the prison consisted of one or two old blunderbusses, with brass barrels exceedingly short, and he suggested a stand of fifty carbines from the Tower. Next he made a raid upon the dishevelled locks of the convicts, remarking: “The practice of cutting the prisoners’ hair appears to be much neglected. I observe the majority of the prisoners’ heads are dirty; the hair long, and the whiskers growing under the chin.” To remedy this, he introduced forthwith the principles of the military barbers of that time,—the hair to be short on the top and sides of the head and whiskers trimmed on a level with the lower part of the ear—an innovation which the prisoners resented, resisting the execution of the order, one to the extent of saying that the next time he was given a razor he would cut his throat with it. But the rules were enforced, as all other rules that issued from Captain Groves. Not that the adjustment of such trifles satisfied his searching spirit of reorganization. He was much annoyed at the idleness and determined laziness of all the prisoners. They did not do half the work they might; the tailoring was a mere farce, and the little boys in Tothill Fields Prison picked twice as much coir-junk as full grown men in Millbank, and in a shorter time. As for great-coats, the average turned out was one per week, while they should have been able to complete three or four at least. The governor attributed this chiefly to the undercurrent of opposition to his orders from officers of the manufacturing department.