The Barlinnie Story

by Robert Jeffrey

  Also by Robert Jeffrey

  Gentle Johnny Ramensky

  A Boxing Dynasty (with Tommy Gilmour)

  Real Hard Cases (with Les Brown)

  Crimes Past

  Glasgow Crimefighter (with Les Brown)

  Glasgow’s Godfather

  Gangs of Glasgow (first published as Gangland Glasgow)

  Glasgow’s Hard Men

  Blood on the Streets

  The Wee Book of Glasgow

  The Wee Book of the Clyde

  *

  Clydeside People and Places

  The Herald Book of the Clyde

  Doon the Watter

  Images of Glasgow

  Scotland’s Sporting Heroes (with Ian Watson)

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  ALSO BY

  EPIGRAPH

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  1. FLYING SLATES, BURNING MATTRESSES AND HOSTAGE HELL

  2. BULLY BOYS, COLD CUSTARD AND A POWDER KEG

  3. WAITING FOR A CO-PILOT AND OTHER MISERIES

  4. HUMAN RATS, CHESS AND OUT THROUGH THE WINDOW

  5. DIRTY CUPS AND FINDING GOD BEHIND BARS

  6. DOG BOXES, CHAMBER POTS AND COMPENSATION

  7. FAMOUS FACES AND DIRTY UNDERWEAR

  8. BROKEN BATONS, BROKEN HEADS

  9. TROUBLE IN THE CELLS, TROUBLE IN WESTMINSTER

  10. DEATH AT THE END OF A ROPE

  11. THE BSU – SO SUCCESSFUL THEY SHUT IT DOWN

  12. A MURDERER, A BAMPOT AND LIVES TURNED AROUND

  13. AT WAR IN THE BAR-L ON LAND AND SEA

  14. THE ELECTRIC CHAIR AND PLUGGING IN TO HISTORY

  BARLINNIE TIMELINE

  GOVERNORS OF BARLINNIE PRISON

  INDEX

  COPYRIGHT

  I would like to thank the friendly and efficient staff of the Glasgow Room in the Mitchell Library for their help in the production of this book. Also Bill McKinlay, former Governor of Barlinnie, his secretary Jane O’Brien, current Governor Derek McGill, Ron Ferguson, Dr Grant Jeffrey and a legion of lawyers, lawbreakers, prison officers and policemen.

  RJ

  Carradale, Argyll

  To the men and women of the Scottish Prison Service

  INTRODUCTION

  Iconic. That is the word for Barlinnie, Scotland’s largest jail, aka the Bar-L. The former Governor, Bill McKinlay, jocularly reckons that worldwide the name is better known than Edinburgh Castle. Though let there be no doubt that Barlinnie is no tourist attraction despite the huge numbers of repeat visitors. This massive sandstone edifice, in the east end of Glasgow, was opened in 1882 and the newspapers of the time remarked on the light colour of the stone it was built from, which was said to shine in the summer sun.

  Over the years the stone has turned to a grimy black and the sunshine of hope that saw the massive building project as a solution to overcrowding in Glasgow’s Victorian prisons has withered. Barlinnie has been, almost from the moment it opened, overcrowded. It is still in 2011 clearly, in the phrase of the day, not fit for purpose. In particular because that purpose is much more than incarceration. ‘We are not here,’ said Bill McKinlay, ‘just to take people’s freedom away. We’re here to be facilitators and to allow people to change.’ Those, that is, who have the will to change.

  Bill McKinlay is a vastly experienced member of the prison service. Everything he knows from his long service in all sorts of jails and in many different roles underlines his belief that HMP Barlinnie should be blitzed by the wrecker’s ball and a new start made in Glasgow in a new prison. He is not the first to think that way and he is not alone. He acknowledges that there are those who argue that these sandstone monoliths must still be useful if for no other reason than they are still standing. ‘Well, so are the pyramids. But no one has been buried inside them for some time,’ former Governor McKinlay points out wryly.

  In the ongoing Barlinnie story thousands have been buried, and are continuing to be buried, in the great, echoing halls. Cast out from society, sentenced to pay for their crimes in one of the toughest, most infamous prisons in the world. Alcatraz, the Bangkok Hilton, Folsom, Strangeways, Pentridge, the Scrubs … Barlinnie has an infamous place high in the list of the world’s most fearsome jails. And still, day after day, the buses – now owned by a private company – ferry the guilty from some of the busiest courts in the world through the crowded streets of Glasgow to begin their time. But it’s no consolation to those who are in a living hell that they are part of the ongoing history of one of the world’s iconic prisons.

  That history is a strange mixture of villainy, humanity, tragedy, drama and hope. The hope is that the future for this grim place, and those incarcerated in it, will improve. That somehow the hope of the Victorians who built it will turn to reality, the hope that redemption will finally triumph over revenge. There is, however, no great grounds for optimism since for most of its 120 or so years of life Barlinnie has been a permanently overcrowded and, until as recently as 2002 when slopping out ended, an unsanitary repository for thousands of lawbreakers. If hope is a contentious issue, the drama surrounding Barlinnie is undeniable. Down the years the prison has sparked thousands of headlines. Drama and danger go with the job, as those in the prison service who are charged by society to look after the villains know only too well.

  This Barlinnie Story is not a formal or indeed a chronological history of the prison it is an unofficial, perhaps sometimes idiosyncratic, attempt to chronicle some of the momentous events in the long turbulent life of an establishment that is infamous worldwide. And an attempt to let ordinary Glaswegians, who have never darkened the doors of any prison and are never likely to, get a taste of what life was like down the years for prison officers who fostered their careers in the ‘Big Hoose’ in the east end, as well as for the men who festered there, sometimes taking the short walk from the condemned cell to the gallows.

  There is no shortage of drama – escapes, hangings, unrest, political prisoners, a groundbreaking and visionary experiment in prison reform, humanity and brutality. All these are part of the story and the history of Barlinnie.

  1

  FLYING SLATES, BURNING MATTRESSES AND HOSTAGE HELL

  The happenings in the east end of Glasgow one week in January 1987 were as spectacular as anything seen in the jail since it opened its doors to the city’s villains in the 1880s. Many insiders, and those who had read the Prison Inspectorate’s reports with diligence, were not surprised at the violent outbreak of disorder. They had seen it coming. But one of the officers who was on the front line in the chaotic battle to secure the prison told me that he and his colleagues were not ready for the scale of what happened. In fact most of those who had read the warning signs were taken aback by the enormity of the ’87 riot – the longest lasting siege in the history of Scottish prisons.

  When the pressure pot that was Barlinnie finally blew its top, the confrontation between prisoners and staff was violent, dangerous and potentially deadly. The newspapers broke the story on the morning of Tuesday, 6 January 1987, though anyone in the vicinity of the prison on the Monday could have seen the drama first hand as cons on the roof threw slates at the prison officers. Even concrete blocks prised from the floors were dropped on officers in riot gear by prisoners who had wrecked large areas of the jail and smashed their way into the pharmacy in search of drugs.

  Inevitably the early reports were confused as to exactly when the riot started and what was really going on behind those high, thick walls of age-blackened sandstone. For five dark, cold midwinter days the story unfolded in a hotchpotch of lurid headlines, speculation, leader articles, features and spectacular pictures. It was big news worldwide. The press and television had a field day – this was a prison
riot on their doorsteps, as spectacular as anything Hollywood could dream up, a potential life and death struggle between some of the hardest men in Scotland and their jailors.

  It was a fairly hysterical few days as the press reported – or sometime guessed at – the twists and turns in the drama, day by day. Illustrative of the intensity of the media coverage was the fact that after a helicopter and film crew had flown over Barlinnie, the Scottish Office successfully applied to the Civil Aviation Authority for a ban on flights over the prison. They claimed the flights were interrupting negotiations. Aye, right, as they say in Glasgow. A more serious matter was the news the prisoners were getting from the radio on the progress of the riot and at one stage Radio Clyde and BBC Radio Scotland imposed a seven-hour news blackout as it was believed the airing of too much detail could hamper talks between the two warring sides, then at a delicate stage.

  A measure of the press hysteria was the number of bylines on the stories coming out in the papers day after day during the siege. In the eighties it had become quite normal for such as the Daily Express and Daily Record to run major news stories with anything up to ten reporters bylined. On occasion they even used the phrase Record or Express ‘team’ at the top of the story and at the end of the tale a list of those involved in compiling it was given. This was in the days when news desks still had bundles of money to throw at the coverage of a big story, the golden days before TV became king of news coverage. For the Barlinnie riot even the douce old Herald (then the Glasgow Herald) had a double byline on the first reports from the prison, the reporters, long time stalwarts Auslan Cramb and Maurice Smith, both major players in Herald history. But later in the week the broadsheets, even the broadsheet Herald, succumbed to the multiple byline as the story grew ever important. Other legendary Herald men like Barclay McBain, John Easton, Bill McDowall and Andy McCallum were soon enjoying their bylines at the top of the dozens of stories in the paper each day featuring the riot. This was the BIG story.

  In these days the Herald had a rather distant, superior attitude to its rivals. I remember from my days on the paper that the prevalent attitude was not to worry about missing a story, you just ran it the day after the tabloids, after all nothing really happened till the Herald printed it! Or so some who had been with the paper a tad too long thought. A remarkable little insight into this attitude came about when the first sputnik was launched. The newspapers of the day reacted as if little green men had landed on Earth. The Herald took it calmly, dismissing early wire stories as ‘unconfirmed reports’ and catching up on the historic event in leisurely fashion the next day.

  Incidentally the Record was, and probably still is, the paper of choice for the inmates though these days the Sun runs it close. Their faith in it was solid and not just based on the tales of the Old Firm, Celtic and Rangers, that covered the sports pages. Respect is a great word much in use by lawbreakers and the tabloid had earned the respect of the criminal classes, no doubt due to the space it gave to cover the constant Glasgow crime war between the gangs and the cops. And the in-depth knowledge the paper’s news desk and reporters had on the goings-on of the bad guys. This respect was so strong that a Record man had been called to help the authorities in the negotiations at riots at Saughton and Peterhead the year before the Barlinnie siege. In the late eighties the prison service was close to anarchy. In the ’87 Bar-L siege the prisoners shouted from the roof to the crowds below that they wanted to speak to a Record man. It didn’t happen. This was an era of trouble in most of Scotland’s penal institutions and the press guys were deployed with regularity to the country’s prisons. So much so that some of the reporters who had covered the other riots now gave serious thought to producing a T-shirt with the slogan: Scottish Prison Tour 86–87 – Saughton, Peterhead and Barlinnie. But in reality there was little to be humorous about.

  The Peterhead riot was a major incident and one prison officer, John Crossan, was held hostage along with more than 40 inmates by a group of three prisoners. This siege in the prison up on the cold north-east coast, which lasted for four days, created a Scottish prison record for such an event though a few months later the undesirable record for the longest siege passed to Barlinnie. The riot in P-head, as the prisoners call it, ended in a blaze that caused half a million pounds of damage. Talking to Barlinnie staff who had been involved in the five-day siege they wondered if, looking back, a desire to break the record was a factor in prolonging the disturbance. Certainly, once the record was broken, the Barlinnie riot collapsed pretty quickly.

  The Peterhead happenings had come less than a fortnight after a three-day siege at Saughton in Edinburgh when five men held a prison officer at knifepoint before giving themselves up. The trouble at these two establishments had been put down to alleged brutality against the inmates. And the same accusation was to become central to the investigation of the trouble in the Bar-L. All the media hullabaloo round the ’87 riot meant that a clear and concise picture of what really happened would take years to emerge. The calm legal language used in the HM Inspector of Prisons’ report of 1990 was as cool as some of the newspaper reports of the ‘incident’, as the authorities liked to call it, was overwrought. It stated the facts: ‘On 5 January 1987, following a number of seemingly unrelated incidents during the day, a major incident began in B-Hall [holding convicted prisoners] at 19.35 hours which was not resolved till the morning of 10 January. During the incident massive damage was done to the hall; staff were trapped in cells and other areas; fires were started to try to burn staff out of cells; and five staff were taken hostage. In the event, two of the hostages were freed or freed themselves within a very short time, and the others were released on the 8th and 9th of January respectively. The incident concluded with the surrender of a core group of 12 inmates at 09.28 on 10 January.’

  Surrender – a lovely word for the authorities to use! But for a few days it looked more like ‘no surrender’ as convicts in balaclavas or improvised hoods with eyeholes cut into them, sometimes made from blackened pillowcases, roamed the roof tossing down slates to the great danger of anyone on the ground. The rioters had control over the top floor of B-Hall, hence the easy access to the tiles. They shouted and screamed abuse at their jailers, the world in general and the then Governor Andrew Gallacher in particular. They also hung sheets over the walls and between the chimneys with slogans like ‘Slasher Gallagher’ and ‘brutality’.

  The early stories in the Herald were calm, as you would expect, and it took a day or two for Scotland’s leading broadsheet to work up to the full fury expressed by its tabloid rivals, though when it did so it did it powerfully, including a particularly long leader, even for the Herald, analyzing why the Scottish prison system was in the state it was in. But the first words were matter of fact. On 6 January the lead story began: ‘Rioting prisoners threw slates from the roof of Barlinnie prison, Glasgow, early today and made allegations of brutality at the jail. One prison officer was injured after trouble broke out at B-Hall and up to 20 inmates were said to be involved. At one point seven men, two of them masked, could be seen on the roof. One claimed to be a hostage. The trouble is believed to have started at 8pm after a day of minor incidents.’

  There are a couple of skewed details in this early report: the trouble had started nearly 12 hours earlier than suggested and the incidents were far from minor.

  The report went on: ‘A group of prisoners on the top floor of B-Hall later threw missiles at prison officers. When the wardens retreated, the group barricaded itself on the top floor. Some made their way to the roof.’ The Scottish Office press team was about to start one of the busiest weeks in their history and they started with a predictably negative statement that seemed to run in the face of the facts. They denied that any hostages had been taken, though one of the men on the roof said he was being held against his will and that he had just four weeks of his sentence to serve. Another protester shouted down from the roof that hostages were being held inside the hall.

  The next day the pict
ure of what was happening inside the prison became clearer. By now there was talk of three officers being held hostage. The seriousness of what was going on could not be played down by the Scottish Office or the prison authorities and as darkness fell one of the hostages was paraded on the roof of B-Hall. A homemade knife was held at his throat and he screamed, ‘They are going to kill me.’ Maybe it was something to do with the bitter cold of a January night in Glasgow but, in any case as the light faded, the prisoners claimed from the roof, shouting to the throng of pressmen and police below, that they had reached an agreement with the authorities that there would be no more violence that night.

  The Scottish Office then named the three men held: David Flanagan, 28; Andrew Smith, 23; and John Kearney, 40. It was said negotiations for their release were being conducted with the inmates who had earlier trapped 41 officers on the top floor of B-Hall. Their bosses said all three men were married and were ‘experienced’ officers. These three and two others had barricaded themselves in a cell on the third floor of the hall to escape the violence of the disturbance on the first night. But the prisoners had broken into the cell and grabbed them, though the other two were released unharmed. The Scottish Office was now briefing the press in some detail and after the ‘peace pledge’ of the second night they announced that 120 of the 188 long- and short-term prisoners in B-Hall had left it. Many of remaining prisoners were out of their cells milling about and were given tea and sandwiches.

  The leaders of the group involved in the hostage situation, about 24 strong, claimed, ‘the prison officers have backed out and there will be no violence from the prisoners. Agreement has been reached on this. This is a peaceful protest but we are prepared to stay here until our demands are met. We would like to reiterate that the prison officers are being kept in good conditions, the best we can give them.’ The rooftop spokesman then shouted to reporters that the officers wanted messages passed to their families saying they were all right. It was a frightening, sinister and surreal scene with the prisoners masked and wearing bed sheets as cloaks. The spokesman then calmly told the reporters, ‘It has been a long day for all of us and you must be cold. I would like to say that is all for tonight. We will be out again at dawn.’