The Barlinnie Story

by Robert Jeffrey

  The youngsters, filled with anger and resentment, some thirsting to get back to their girlfriends and families, some simply thirsting to get back to their old violent ways, are a different kettle of fish. These are the guys the officers have to fear. Lashing out at your captors rather than being concerned about why you were jailed in the first place is sometimes their first priority. For this reason the distribution of privileges to the well-behaved in prison is important. As is the system of grading. Walter Norval was Status One in military prison. In Barlinnie he was, for a spell, Category A.

  On this occasion he was inside for bank robbery rather than assault or attempted murder. And that rankled, giving him a lifelong belief that on occasion the justice system put crimes against property on a higher level than crimes against people. To be Category A you were judged to be a ‘menace to society’ and, of course, such status had an effect on your daily life in prison. Category A prisoners in the late forties were locked up all day except for a one-hour exercise period. Even when in their cell they were under constant observation. And the so-called exercise was taken walking round the first landing in circles after the ordinary cons who were deemed less dangerous had gone to work in the sheds making willow baskets or whatever. Incidentally, prisoners are conditioned always to turn left on leaving cells to ease congestion on the narrow metal alley-ways. Meals were delivered to your cell, denying you the association of eating with the other cons, and no one was supposed to speak to you through the door. In case anyone did not realise you were a special case, and did not fully understand the menace to society you were, a huge letter A was affixed to your door.

  The regulations are always a challenge to prisoners and Norval had many friends in Barlinnie keen to make his Category A incarceration a little more bearable. Some would take the risk of smuggling a paper through his door or even an illicit cup of tea. Some of his fellow inmates of the time were famous figures often making headlines in the Glasgow tabloids, such as Billy Fullerton, offspring of the founder of the Billy Boys, and Tony Smith. Of these two, Norval told me that ‘both lads were 100 per cent genuine cons. The screws would shout to Tony and Billy to get away from my door, but the lads would just tell them to fuck off as they were talking to a friend!’

  But it was the very prison system itself that was to end the Category A deprivation of Norval. Cons get used to a constant stream of visitors and folk they label callously as ‘fucking do gooders’. Visiting dignitaries and folk interested in prison conditions and helping in the redemption rather than revenge stakes are a welcome and frequent sight.

  Prison visitors play a vital role. On one occasion a group looking round the jail saw the strange sight of a solitary Norval plodding around the largely empty hall. One of the dignitaries, an MP no less, did not like what he saw. And when the visiting group sat down later to discuss what they had seen, he asked some awkward questions about the treatment of the lone walker. To this enlightened politician it seemed that the Category A criminal was already being punished for his crimes without the extra punishment of being segregated from the other villains.

  Within minutes, Norval was ordered down to the desk where a warder asked what would now be called a no-brainer: ‘Do you want to mix with the others in the shed and be able to have your meals in the dining area with your friends?’ The question did not need to be asked twice. The incident illustrates the power of an MP and the importance of regular prison visiting and inspections by people not professionally involved in the system.

  The removal of Category A status allowed Norval to find himself in the work sheds and in the company of such villains and old associates from Maryhill as Barney Noon and Billie and Vinnie Manson. But if the Godfather had expected this to lead to a quiet life with his old criminal mates he was wrong. Pretty soon there was a knock on the door and he was bundled into a car heading north for further hardship in Peterhead. Incidentally, he had a spell in the dog boxes in Peterhead at the end of the journey.

  Another noted Barlinnie potential Cat A prisoner was Paul Ferris. In 2000 he was doing time in the south but was sent up to Barlinnie for a brief spell to catch up on some accumulated family visits. He tells the story in Vendetta, a highly readable true crime book written with Reg McKay. As a potential escaper Ferris was not told in advance the actual date of his visit. So when he was roughly wakened one morning he had only time to snatch a few belongings before beginning the trip north. He threw a few things, including a book he had been given by a fellow prisoner, into a holdall and jumped when the officers said jump. The book he took with him was Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The con who had passed it on recommended it as the best crime novel he had ever read. This could have raised the alarm bell of a wind up, but Paul Ferris knew that the donor of the book was a highly educated somewhat intellectual Irish nationalist who was behind bars for his politically motivated actions. Ferris tried hard to come to terms with the works of the Russian literary legend. He couldn’t make it. Bloody hard going, was his review.

  By this time Barlinnie did not have accommodation for Cat A prisoners and Ferris was held in the segregation unit known since the days of the Special Unit as the Wendy House. This meant no free association with the other prisoners and 23-hour lock ups every day. He knew some of the others on the wing and as they moved around to showers and the visiting room they had short conversations with each other. In an observation on this Ferris remarks in Vendetta: ‘On earlier occasions in the Wendy House I would have received a bollocking from the screws for such breaches of the rules, but this time they were more relaxed and treated inmates with respect. It resulted in a trouble-free zone. Why can’t all prisons learn that?’

  Whatever the validity of such advice from hardened cons, Ferris was asked in one of these conversations if he had any books to read. Ferris did have a bundle of books by his favourite crime novelist, James Ellroy. He was not inclined to hand these over. Instead he told the young inmate he had been talking to that he had a cracker – ‘the best crime novel I have ever read’. ‘Brilliant,’ the young guy replied. The Dostoevsky was duly handed over to a prison officer, as was required by the rules, to be passed to the unsuspecting young con. Anything that keeps the mind in gear in solitary is given a chance. So the recipient of the literary gift opened the pages and read. Each time Ferris met this guy in the wing he asked how he was getting on. To begin with he was told ‘great’ but at a subsequent meeting it was admitted that, ‘I am finding it a bit hard going.’

  Paul Ferris, playing the role of literary advisor, urged him to press on and told his pal that after a few hundred pages or so it became easier. The young con persisted. But as Ferris tells: ‘About ten days after I had passed over The Brothers Karamazov I was lying out in my bunk totally engrossed in some really good novel. The whole wing was in total silence when “Ferris, you dirty rotten c***!” rang out. Page two hundred plus had been reached, as had the realization that it just did not get any easier. His fellow inmate had lost the plot, literally, and knew that he had had the piss taken out of him.

  In a letter back to his IRA friend in the English jail, Ferris recounted the tale and got a letter back to say that the original donor had also struggled with the book! Apparently the book is still doing the rounds of prisons with the well-worn recommendation, ‘the best crime novel I have ever read …’ Maybe some day in some jail some con in solitary confinement will give Dostoevsky’s tale of spiritual drama and moral struggle the same credit as such as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, both admirers of the Russian masterpiece. Or maybe not.

  Ferris also gives some insight into prison visiting. He remarks that meeting a close family member in jail was a hard reminder that he was locked up, a slap in the face about what he could not do to help those he loved. He took a week to get over every visit. I suspect that many in jail have similar feelings. It is a big part of the punishment.

  Ferris and his version of life in Barlinnie featured in one of the most famous trials in Scottish criminal history. In the end
Paul Ferris ‘walked’ – as the city’s criminals like to describe a trial that sees the accused released. In 1992 Ferris, then a baby-faced 28-year-old, and looking for all the world like a successful businessman without a care in the world, stood trial in Glasgow’s High Court charged with killing Arthur Thompson Jnr and also accused of six drugs and violence charges. The trial ran for 54 days and was at the time the longest-running murder trial in Scottish criminal history, with unofficial estimates putting the cost at £750,000. More than 300 witnesses were cited in a trial that was said to have every ingredient – sex, drugs, humour, violence, love and tragedy. The humour, some of it in Barlinnie, interests us, but right away it must be said that Paul Ferris left the court a free man, found not guilty on all charges and able to stand at the top of the court steps posing for newspaper and television photographers before taking perhaps the most famous of all ‘walks’ back into the dark world he had inhabited.

  Hundreds of thousands of words were spoken at the trial, keeping eight shorthand reporters so busy that you suspect some might have had a claim for repetitive strain injury knocking around at the back of their minds. Keeping track of what was going on was a mammoth task. One Herald reporter alone was said to have filled 40 notebooks. Despite the gravity of the charges, laughter in court was not infrequent. The evidence of some of the witnesses occasioned hilarity. Commenting on the testimony of one woman who had given evidence, a witness told the court that she was an alcoholic and at the time she ‘spoke to the polis she was not compos mental’.

  The Herald diary, famed for seeing the humorous side of life, did a roaring trade in tales from the trial. One of the best allowed it to award what it called The Most Abrupt Change of Evidence Award to a hardened criminal who described a fellow villain as ‘not a very nice’ person. Asked to clarify his remark he immediately replied: ‘He is a fucking toerag.’

  At times even the judge, the legendary Lord McCluskey, found it hard to resist a smile. When told that a witness had decided, in some haste, to go down the coast to Irvine on holiday, without any luggage, he inquired incredulously: ‘Didn’t he bring a beach towel?’ And he also got involved in an exchange with Ferris about goings on in the Barlinnie segregation unit. There, it seemed, the prisoners had a passion for chess, that age-old test of intellect, and played by shouting moves from their cells to each other. One newspaper reported that Ferris, already the possessor of full hard man status, gained admiration for his mental prowess by winning £500 in one move. Trial reports said that at one point the judge became quite engrossed in the finer points of the move called ‘castling’, something that Ferris had apparently been explaining to his fellow prisoner. Such is life in the Bar-L. At times.

  5

  DIRTY CUPS AND FINDING GOD BEHIND BARS

  The reign of Queen Victoria was marked by what the history books usually describe as ‘a growing humanitarianism’ and some would say that Barlinnie was an expression of such a process. It was designed to alleviate horrible overcrowding in Her Majesty’s Prisons in Glasgow. The fact that it ended up with more prisoners than it was designed for, almost from day one, is regrettable, but it should not be allowed to obscure the visionary thinking of its builders. The Victorian era put great weight on the Christian religion and values. Just how seriously the subjects of the Queen took their faith is evident in the church inside the walls of the prison. It came into use in the 1880s shortly after the five great halls began to be filled by assorted villains pulled from the streets of Glasgow and sentenced for their crimes to confinement in the Bar-L.

  Today the church, almost at the centre of the whole complex of cellblocks, health centre and workshops, is still remarkably impressive. The images of imprisonment are largely unseen, with no iron bars and generally no clanking of keys in locks. It is as like a church in a prosperous suburb as makes no difference. Though, curiously, there is a shortage of stained glass. Today it is used for worship by several different faiths and also as a theatre space for performance and events by groups from within the prison and outsiders giving the occasional concert or other entertainment. Sitting in this extraordinary and exceptional church it seems to be almost haunted by the shades of the men, and at one time women, who worshipped here – a disparate group, unreformed hard men using the Kirk as a brief escape from the cells, prisoners who had found faith during their incarceration, men days away from the gallows and prison staff of a religious disposition.

  Religion plays a big role in prison where the long lonely hours are inductive of deep thought. Men locked away from their fellows for years have time to consider their life and their ways. Many, of course, do not give a jot – their only concern is to get out from behind bars and back on the streets to resume old ingrained lawless ways. Others, with much time to reflect, take to religion, or maybe resume any religious notions they had in younger, saner days. And the ministers of religions who visit the jail are in great demand to interpret what concerns of conscience, or no conscience, a prisoner has. Men of the cloth are welcomed generally, although in its early days the Special Unit was a chaplain-free zone. In particular, chaplains can be of great help to youngsters preparing for release. A friendly face in a dog collar, one of the many part-time visiting chaplains, stands out from the youngsters in coloured sweatshirts and jeans, the lads ‘who have dun wrong’, as the old prison song has it.

  And Barlinnie, perhaps more than any other Scottish prison, has a great history of men of faith working with the inmates to rehabilitate even the hardest of hard tickets – godfathers of a different kind from your Arthur Thompsons and Walter Norvals. The first full-time chaplain, Bill Christman, is a Barlinnie legend. He had an unconventional background for such a job. He was born not in Glasgow where most of the Barlinnie inmates breathe their first, but in Joplin, Missouri. His first job was as a salesman in a record shop specializing in rhythm and blues, not too difficult a task in such an area. But this remarkable man was not destined to spend his life behind the counter in a music store. A summer holiday break in West Virginia ‘where poverty was so dreadful it turned my values upside-down’ was followed by a slow recovery from a bout of pneumonia which provided time to think about life and values. He took the major step of deciding to study religion and here the chance that was to change his life played a part. A friend mentioned Edinburgh and its prestigious place in the world of religion and the idea of studying abroad appealed to the man from Missouri. One big advantage, he figured, was that if after a while in Scotland’s capital he lost the urge to study and continue in religion he could return home to the States causing the minimum of ripples in his life. And he would have had the character shaping advantage of working abroad.

  But, of course, Bill Christman stayed the course and graduated. He found himself ministering in Niddrie, one of the capital’s most depressed areas. Four years later he went back across the Atlantic on a prestigious scholarship to Harvard. But Scotland was his destiny. And he got a call to come back as minister in Easterhouse, down the road from Barlinnie. This was a parish with problems involving crime and poverty, but the area also had its share of decent folk doing their best for their families in difficult conditions.

  Bill Christman decided to accept the challenge. All that was missing was the airfare. But his fellow students had a whip-round to solve that problem. ‘Maybe they wanted rid of me,’ he joked. He was to spend seven years in Easterhouse at a time when the area’s gangs were getting maximum exposure in the local press. The scheme was, like others in Glasgow, the result of well-meaning thinking by the then Glasgow Corporation. Easterhouse, Castlemilk, Drumchapel and the like were what became known in the city as ‘outer circle’ schemes. Acknowledging the squalor of many of the city centre housing areas, huge new schemes, some with the population of places like Perth, were thrown up on green field sites in record time. The houses were fine, inside toilets and all mod cons. The trouble was the authorities neglected to provide, until many years later, civilised facilities like libraries, swimming pools, churches, pubs and
restaurants. The result was what one comedian called ‘deserts wi windaes’. And crime became a major problem in such areas with the police shorthanded – at one stage a couple of coppers on bikes were responsible for policing a population of more than 40,000 in Castlemilk – and stretched to maintain law and order among those decamped from the city. The new housing stock was a huge step forward from the hundreds of inner city homes that were barely fit for human habitation. But these older areas at least had some sense of community and history.

  Bill Christman and his ideas got on fine in Easterhouse and there were successes. Maybe his accent helped him with the locals – he said that it was by now ‘half American hillbilly and half Easterhouse’. At one stage he was running five football teams for young gang members, or potential members. This valiant attempt to show aimless youngsters that there was more to life than violence and aggression was on the whole pretty successful and Bill was able to tell an interviewer that: ‘Only one boy in any of those teams ever got into more trouble.’

  The next stop in a fascinating career was a move to the douce Lansdowne Church in the prosperous, bohemian, at least for Glasgow, area of the West End. But there were challenges here, too. Challenges that may have helped a prison chaplain in the years ahead. In the West End the challenge was, with the help of the congregation, ‘trying to build multi-faith bridges within a community’. The next stop was another testing challenge – a move to St Columba’s in the Firth of Clyde seaside resort of Ayr. This was a new congregation created by the merging of three churches and a different set of problems. His seaside sojourn ended when he heard about the new Kirk post of full-time prison chaplain at Barlinnie, the huge edifice that had played such a dominant role in his life in Easterhouse. He applied, got the job and was on the move again, remarking, ‘At each post along the way I learned something that matters.’