This bizarre press conference had been preceded by a sortie by prison officers into the hall that helped free 27 of the 41 trapped, but it was no soft touch – flying slates, bottles and other makeshift weapons injured 34 of the officers. Three were so severely hurt they had to go to the Royal Infirmary, one man with a broken ankle and others with cuts and bruises. Detectives had been dispatched to the Royal to interview the injured and the police had also set up an incident room at Baird Street police station to collate information on what was going on at the prison.
The situation inside the prison in the early days was almost impossible for anyone on the outside to visualise. Today Dale Elliot is First Line Manager in the prison, a pleasant, humorous, fit looking man in a crisp white shirt, proud of the two ‘pips’ on his shoulders, sitting in his office in front of the inevitable computer, competently answering telephone queries from his staff. Back in 1987 he was a prison officer with just a few years’ experience. Nothing had prepared him for what was to happen that week in the jail. Some say the trouble had been brewing for months, which may be the case, but Dale says the officers there on the day were truly taken by surprise by the riot. And even now no one can pinpoint with certainty what exactly started the mass violence, though there are theories galore. It came like a lightning strike out of a clear sky. Though inside the dark world of Barlinnie you don’t see too much of that. In these days there was little contingency planning and training for an outbreak of violence such as happened that bitterly cold week in January.
The first Dale heard of what was going on in the prison and on the roof was in a late-night phone call to his home and on the first morning he was there at five along with fellow officers from Barlinnie and elsewhere. He was to be on duty in this major emergency for many long, dangerous hours. What Dale saw on entering B-Hall was a nightmare – rubbish and debris piled up on the stairs, blocking access to the top floor where the hard core of the rioters was holed up. Stones, slates, woodwork, mattresses – anything the prisoners could lay their hands on was hurled on to the stairs. The warders were marshalled much of the time by a well known and highly experienced Barlinnie officer, Bob Mutch, who, with other senior officers, was trying to create some sense of order in a nightmare environment.
Working to try and clear this mess was dangerous as well as arduous. The scene was chaotic and confused. Makeshift missiles flew about the heads of the warders. ‘It was,’ says Dale, ‘a miracle that no one was killed,’ though plenty of blood did flow. ‘Brave,’ says Dale, is the only adjective for the guys who were trying to restore order. Their stamina was also tested – many stayed in the jail for up to 56 hours without a break. At home their families waited and wondered though Dale says there was a great support network with wives of warders looking out for themselves and each other, starved of real news about what was going on. But they knew the danger that faced their guys in the front line.
Even in the midst of all this there was a touch of prison humour. Dale recalls that the rioters holding the hostages gorged on crisps, Mars bars and juice looted from the prison supplies. Naturally the pharmacy and the canteen had been early targets for the rioters. However, as later reports confirmed, the hostages were not too brutally treated though a rioter gave a tough warning to one: ‘Stop eating all our Mars bars or we will give you back!’
While all this was going on in B-Hall the staff were trying to maintain some normality in the rest of the prison. Dale remembers, rather surprisingly, that in that perverse way of Scots, many of the prisoners in the other great halls who were not involved in the riots but were aware of what was going on, were almost on their best behaviour, showing some solidarity with the warders.
One tale underlines the fact that even at the height of the riot and afterwards some inmates did not share the feeling of the mob who were hanging sheets from the rooftop with ‘Slasher Gallacher’ emblazoned on them. Not long after the riot was over there was a prison concert and a skit in which one of the cons appeared dressed up as Governor Andrew Gallacher. The audience rewarded this appearance with a deadly silence, but the so-called ‘Slasher’ Gallacher, every eye on him, simply burst out laughing. And so then did the audience.
There had been violent mood swings from the protesters in the early days of the protest. After the so-called peace pledge for the night made at that bizarre press conference, fire hoses had been trained on the roof but they were switched off swiftly when shouts from the roof claimed, ‘Guys are going to be fucked about if you don’t turn the water off.’ The authorities did so and claimed the hoses had only been intended to flush loose slates and debris off the roof.
Tempers and emotions were running high. A humane side to the protest surfaced briefly with the release of a prison officer who was a diabetic and urgently needed insulin. In contrast, the bright lights turned on the protestors angered them to the point that the press corps was showered with stones and slates, one hitting Herald photographer Arthur Kinloch. But the reason behind the riot was now slowly beginning to emerge. During the day the prisoners’ spokesman repeated allegations about brutality in the prison system. This theme was echoed in the three banners that were hanging from the upper parts of B-Hall. One read, in a reference to the governor, ‘Gallagher is brutality’; a second read ‘To the death’ and the third said ‘Sammy Ralston was tortured.’ Ralston, nicknamed ‘The Bear’ and a long-time thorn in the flesh of the prison authorities, was convicted on a robbery charge and was serving six years. He had previously staged a solo rooftop protest in November ‘86 while on remand on the robbery charge. The protestors claimed that he had been beaten with sticks and gagged to muffle his screams. Ralston’s mother travelled to the jail to see him, convinced that if he was alright, ‘I could tell the boys on the roof’. She was not allowed to do so.
Whatever the truth about the treatment of Ralston it was now the turn of the prison staff to suffer a form of torture. During the second day of the siege, prisoners had set fire to a mattress and yelled that they had trapped prison staff behind the blaze. It was chilling stuff: ‘We had them screaming for mercy. We gave them it. We put out the fire. We won’t do it next time.’ The rioters then brought a succession of riot shields, batons and a riot helmets through the hole they had knocked in the roof and held them up as trophies. This was no doubt an attempt to convince the press that they had ‘won’ the equipment in a battle with the staff. The authorities thought the trophies more likely came from a storeroom in B-Hall.
Rather ironically the Scottish Home Affairs minister, Ian Lang, had been due to visit the prison that day but urgent government business took him elsewhere. However he went on TV to say that any prisoner alleging brutality could have complaints investigated by the police or the procurator fiscal, acting independently of the prison service. He also defended the prison service’s record and said a lot was being done to rehabilitate prisoners. He also played down the stories of overcrowding in comments that seemed to fly in the face of the facts. On the brutality allegations, the secretary of the Scottish Prison Officers’ Association, John Renton, said: ‘I ask you to consider this. Thirty-four of my members have been injured. I have heard no reports of prisoners being hurt. It’s nonsense.’ So ended the second day.
The Herald had now decided that the trouble at the Bar-L (and Peterhead and Saughton before it) was now grave enough to earn what the paper’s staff called ‘a long leader’. It was a good one that did not miss the mark. Ian Lang was not alone in pointing out that prisoners could complain to the police or the procurator fiscal. The then director of the Scottish Prison Service, Alistair Thompson, had made similar remarks at the time of the Saughton and Peterhead incidents. To describe such remarks ‘as ingenuous would be charitable’, thundered the paper. The paper wanted reforms aimed not at just suppressing the recurrent violence but removing its causes. Good sound sense. To do this, it pointed out, would be very much in the interests not just of the prisoners but also of the prison officers and the public, ‘which pays £200 a week for eac
h of the 5,000 prisoners in Scottish jails.’
On 8 January, three days after the start of the saga, it took a sinister twist – fire raising. Not this time in the prison but at the home of an officer who had been involved in the Peterhead siege, John Crossan. He lived just a couple of miles from Barlinnie in Haghill. Mr Crossan, his brother and his parents had a lucky escape. His mother smelled smoke seeping into the flat and called the fire brigade. Officers using breathing equipment rescued the family and neighbours across the landing. It all highlighted the dangers, on and off duty, faced by prison officers. Tempers were running high in the underworld as each day the papers and television showed the dramatic scenes of the rooftop siege. John Crossan, who himself had been held hostage in the Peterhead siege, found time to sympathise, in the midst of his family’s plight, with that of the Barlinnie hostages. ‘I feel for them because I know what they are going through. I can only pray that they get out all right.’
Back at the prison the authorities moved to cut off the inmates’ contacts with the outside world in an attempt to break the deadlock. By now 26 inmates were holding three officers hostage. The flocks of journalists covering the story from the doorstep of the prison were moved out of shouting range, 300 yards or so down the road from the prison entrance. Visits to prisoners and hostages were stopped. Earlier there had been emotional scenes when the wife of a protesting prisoner had turned up outside the prison walls complete with baby in pushchair. It was the sort of touch you might have expected in a Victorian melodrama, not during a potentially deadly siege. ‘You are only making it worse for yourself. Please come down. Ronnie, I love you,’ she shouted through tears to her husband. ‘You are going to get hell. Think of the weans.’
Her husband shouted back from the roof: ‘Don’t worry about me. I will be all right. Worry about the weans.’ He then announced to all and sundry that his was an individual protest, he was not with the mass of the rioters, and that he had been the victim of a police ‘fit up’, not a unique claim in Barlinnie. His wife was led away in tears but returned later in a second failed attempt to talk her husband down. The Sun, always quick with memorable headlines, labelled their story on this touching little scene – ‘Come doon, Ron, Ron, Ron’!
A more cerebral comment on this episode in the riot came more than ten years later in a first-class little book by Ewan McVicar (published by Glasgow City Libraries) entitled One Singer One Song, a collection of Glasgow folk songs. The writers of ‘Screw’s Barlinnie Blues’ were Jim McKenna, what the habitués of folk clubs call a floor singer, and a mate George Smith. A couple of verses ran:
A wee Glasgow woman came pushin her pram
Roarin and screaming up at a masked man.
Hey Ronnie ya eedgit come doon when you can
So’s I can go hame to ma bed.
But Ronnie was roarin back down to his wife
Get hame to your mother and get on with your ain life,
Big Slasher is up here and he’s wieldin a big knife
I wish I was back in my cell.
Subsequent verses in this clever bit of songwriting referred to Sammy ‘The Bear’ Ralston and his troubles with the prison officers. Typical Glasgow humour and music making!
At one stage earlier in the day there had been hopes that the siege was about to end. Eight prisoners gave themselves up voluntarily. Any optimism around also got a boost when the prisoners appeared willing to give hostage Andrew Smith up in a deal involving Sammy Ralston. Andrew Smith had been led onto the roof to make a plea for his life and that of David Flanagan and John Kearney. He used a megaphone captured by the prisoners during the siege to say: ‘Please don’t send anyone in – our lives are going to be in danger.’ He told reporters that the hostages were all ‘fine’. The prisoners were aware that this was the day Sammy ‘The Bear’ Ralston was making an appearance in Glasgow Sheriff Court on an unconnected civil matter. And indeed he did appear in court with stitching and heavy bruising apparent to the public. The offer made by the prisoners was that they would free Officer Smith if they were allowed to see Ralston in B Block for themselves. The offer was given some consideration.
But the mood of the mob on the roof swung again when the periodic chants, songs and threats were silenced as the inmates listened on a small transistor radio to reports from the court that confirmed Ralston’s appearance. The megaphone was back in action: ‘The man was all bruised in court, dished out by the fascist brigade.’ Ralston’s family were similarly angry. His mother Agnes said: ‘When the riot started I asked myself why are they doing this? Then I learned my son had been beaten up and stretchered out of B-Hall.’ She claimed that other prisoners had seen him and that this is what started the protest. Agnes Ralston went on: ‘It is hard to ask them to come down when you see the state of Sam’s face. They are frightened to come off the roof in case it happens to them.’
These were comments from outside the prison walls. But wearing heavy prison clothing in the bitter cold and flaunting captured riot helmets, the protestors continued in the same vein. ‘There is brutality throughout this prison. We demand an inquiry – a public inquiry, not an internal one, not a whitewash. We have human rights like everyone else. We are not exactly angels but that does not give them the right to treat us the way they do. We will only come out on stretchers.’
During the entire day negotiations were being conducted by specially trained prison officers working in shifts and shouting up at the rioters high above them on the roof. As in all such situations, rumours abound. At one stage the talks break down, at another they make progress. For anyone not directly involved it is difficult to really know what is going on. One development was that the hostages were seen to take hot drinks given to them. The prison authorities were trying to play tough but supplies of heating, lighting and water were maintained to B-Hall.
The next day brought some real hope for the first time that the siege might end. The 16 inmates barricaded in B-Hall agreed to release Andrew Smith, one of the three officers being held hostage. This was in return for a promise of food. Right at the start of the siege, on the Monday, the rooftop rioters claimed to have enough food for a month, but by the Wednesday they were hungry and the provision of food was a negotiating tool for the authorities. So Andrew Smith was given up in return for food for the other two hostages and the rioters. Mr Smith was reunited with his wife and examined by a medical man and told his colleagues that he had not been physically harmed. Earlier in the day soup and sandwiches had been sent in for hostages and their captors alike. But as the cold January hours passed, something a little more in the way of what Glaswegians would call a meal was required.
By nightfall after the release of Andrew Smith, the inmates and remaining hostages, David Flanagan and John Kearney, were seen tucking into large plates of the much favoured Glasgow culinary classic, pie, beans and chips. In another gesture, the rioters let the authorities pass letters from their wives to the hostages. The action and drama in the prison itself was now being shared with the involvement of the courts and politicians of all stripes.
As the macabre scene was played out on the rooftop of the great prison, the procurator fiscal’s office and Strathclyde police were investigating accusations and counter accusations of assaults at the start of the siege. It was no surprise that Sammy Ralston, held in another of the prison’s great halls, was involved. The cops said they were investigating an alleged assault on him and separately the fiscal’s office issued a warrant for his arrest in connection with an assault on a prison officer.
The ban on visits was lifted that night to let Ralston’s mother into the jail to see her son. She stayed for an hour, around teatime, and emerged to tell ITV’s News at Ten that her son did not support the protest, though the perpetrators of the violence claimed to be demonstrating in his favour. ‘They are only wasting their time,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t like to see them up on the roof.’ That Ralston was simply an excuse for the rioters seemed to be confirmed by reports that were now coming out of the pri
son on how the riots started. It was a trivial event that led to the most dramatic episode in the prison’s long history. A row over some minor matter in the dining hall early on Monday morning had erupted into a full scale riot in a prison where, at the time, there was pent-up rage and anger, especially amongst the long-term prisoners.
After the siege was over, reports were to confirm that the mood in the prison had been ugly and dangerous for months, a mood fuelled by reports of unrest and riots in Saughton and Peterhead. There was no need for prisoners to have an ear to any grapevine to have their concerns heightened – the newspapers and television had been full of tales of trouble in the prison system for months.
It was reported during the riot that the start of it had been that incident in the dining hall. An officer trying to intervene had been hit over the head with a chair in true Wild West saloon fashion and other officers carried an inmate screaming and shouting away from the dining area. Mayhem broke out and other officers were hurt. The cause may have been trivial but the event was major.
After the end of the riot and the conclusion of the many trials and reports, newspapers were able to publish pictures of the devastation in B-Hall at the start and during the siege. The judge at the trial of some of the men involved called what was going on ‘a torrent’ of violence. The photographs graphically showed the damage – smashed cupboards, a floor littered with slates, lockers torn to bits, tea urns wrecked, furniture and crockery destroyed. The Sunday Mail had one remarkable picture of a hole in a wall of a cell. It had been dug out by trapped warders terrified that they were going to be burnt to death. Fearing berserk prisoners would set fire to mattresses placed against the cell doors, the officers frantically tried to escape, clawing at the walls with bare hands and makeshift tools. Their frantic efforts were accompanied by shouts from the cons of, ‘We are going to get you, you bastards.’ This led to a desperate, violent struggle between prisoners and guards and caused many of the injuries sustained by the officers. A total of 34 men were hurt, some seriously, others suffering minor injuries in what was virtually hand-to-hand fighting. Eventually they ran to safety through a hail of missiles thrown at them from above. Some did not make it. They became hostages.
The Barlinnie Story Page 2