Poking some fun at the imperturbable turnkey of prison number 7

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 308.

The bleakness of the physical setting simply stunned many of the Americans; they could not believe, they said, that such a spot existed in England; there was not a bush or tree, and even rabbits and birds seemed to find the moor too forsaken a place to live. The local people believed it was alive with demons and ghosts at night; none set forth from the nearby town of Princetown if it meant being caught on the moor after sundown. Valpey said he saw the sun three times in the first month he was there and not at all the next two months. The yellow woolen prison jackets and trousers the men were issued made the prisoners themselves the only colorful objects in a landscape of unremitting drabness.

But many of the jailers were kind and apparently felt a kinship with the Americans, at least as compared with the thousands of Frenchmen they had had charge of for the previous eight years. One day Benjamin Browne was standing with a group of Americans who were poking some fun at the imperturbable turnkey of prison number 7 when a French prisoner, who had been taken in an American privateer, decided to join in the fun and, striking a comical pose, began razzing the jailer—“Jean Bull, Jean Bull, rote beef, rote beef, pomme de terre—God tam”—whereupon the Englishman calmly raised his fist and knocked the Frenchman down, to tumultuous cheers from the Americans. The jailer explained he “could take a joke from a Yankee, because they were cousins loik,” but was not going to put up with it from “a frog-eating Frenchman.”