In the first walk in 2005 he was also arrested for leaving Saughton with no clothes. He must have been one special Barlinnie prisoner. You wonder what the assorted knife men, thieves and druggies who were his companions in jail thought of his crusade.
8
BROKEN BATONS, BROKEN HEADS
There are many players in the never-ending war on crime on the streets of Glasgow – the perpetrators of violence themselves, the cops who track them down and jail them, the staff of the prisons who contain the bad guys when convicted and try to send them back outside after their term behind bars in a condition that makes them less threatening to society, well-paid lawyers by the hundred and many, many overworked and under-appreciated social workers. And day after day there are thousands of newspaper readers who avidly follow the goings on in what – regardless of recent massive improvements – can still be a violent and dangerous city for some of its residents. Keeping track of crime can be a life-long armchair hobby, equally fascinating whether followed from TV or radio or the pages of the red tops or the less sensational, but equally interested broadsheets. Glaswegians are world famous for their appetite for news. And crime is always on the menu.
Readers of the crime pages got some tasty reading on one of the most dramatic days in the history of Barlinnie, 21 December 1934. But the grim prison out in the east end of the city was not actually page-one news that day – the full story of a remarkable bloody weekend in the Bar-L took some time to emerge. But prisons were on Page One, with Peterhead for once outplaying Barlinnie on that day.
The Record reported the sad news that the famous actress Jessie Matthews had lost a baby not long after its birth. And RAF planes were searching the Syrian Desert for a missing Dutch airliner. But the lead in the paper was ‘Chained convict sensation’. The chained convict was none other than that Scottish criminal legend Gentle Johnny Ramensky. Ramensky was no stranger to Barlinnie, prisons generally or lurid headlines. The son of Lithuanian immigrant parents, Johnny was born in the Lanarkshire mining village of Glenboig in 1906 and became perhaps the most skilled and most famous safebreaker in Britain. The exploits of this ‘peterman’, as the criminal fraternity called safebreakers, entertained and fascinated Glasgow newspaper readers for decades.
And he served his country well in time of war. He joined the commandos in 1943 and became an instructor in the art of safe blowing. Many times he was parachuted behind enemy lines to break safes and steal enemy documents. Ahead of the front line he broke into safes as the Eighth Army moved across North Africa, including a raid on the headquarters of Rommel himself. He also broke into the strong rooms and safes of Goering’s headquarters in Schorfheide in Germany. But he could never stop the safe breaking habit even when out of the army and after the war he was back in his old routine.
In his career he managed to get himself sentences adding up to more than 50 years. And he was responsible for changes in the way prisons were run. To better understand the emotions behind the headlines of December 1934, and why he was page-one news, even before his army exploits, it is important to realise the position Ramensky held in the public consciousness. He was ‘Gentle Johnny’, a folk hero no less. His nickname came about because he seldom if ever resisted arrest. If the police felt his collar he went quietly to the cells to take his medicine. And it is interesting to note that he was often the victim of his own success. Detectives arriving at a crime scene and noting that it looked a sophisticated job shrugged their shoulders and said: ‘Ramensky!’ His gentle side showed remarkably when, after one arrest, he warned the authorities ‘that care should be taken’ opening a safe he had robbed. He did not want any amateur hurt by the gelignite he had left behind.
Back in 1934 he had been the only man ever to have escaped from Peterhead. So inside yet again for another safe he’d blasted open, he was sent to solitary and clapped in leg irons, inhumane treatment even in those days. The barbaric use of such cruel restraint on such a gentle character leaked to the public and caused outrage. This led the then Secretary of State to order a review of the prison service and leg irons was banned thereafter.
As the Glasgow public devoured the stories flowing from Peterhead, trouble was breaking out on their doorstep in Barlinnie. And the seeds of the trouble all those years ago would touch a chord with anyone who read about another episode in the prison, many years later. There are similarities in what went on in the mid-thirties to what happened in the closing years of the century.
It is not really a surprise. Anyone with even the most fleeting experience of working at the coal face in the journalists’ trade remembers some old hack or other who spent his time diluting the enthusiasm of fresh-faced young kids new to the news room, and bursting to make a name in the writing business, by exclaiming at every opportunity to anyone who would listen that there is nothing new under the sun. A favourite expression of such wizened and cynical journos was that in news stories ‘only the names change’. This is the stuff of cliché and caricature. But at the risk of falling into that trap, I have to say after too many years in the trade that there is something of a truth in such pontificating. The story of the Bar-L is no exception. In its long life it has seen riots and disturbances that could have come out of the script of a Hollywood movie written with James Cagney in mind. On the prisoners’ side it seems rioting on the roof, planning an escape or smashing a cell is something of cyclical pattern – ‘only the names change’! Likewise for those in the business of imprisoning the villains who roam the streets of Glasgow and at the same time trying to make them fit for society on their release. ‘Pioneering’ schemes to reform and rehabilitate the denizens of gangland are a regular recurring feature of the penal system.
In Glasgow today you will still get pub arguments about the success or failure of the Barlinnie Special Unit – aka the Wendy House or the Nutcracker Suite – which created worldwide interest from its inauguration in 1972 until it was closed down in 1994 amid lurid allegations of a lax regime that had an elite breed of super criminal luxuriating in drugs and sex behind bars. The Unit had massive press coverage, much of it generated by its success in reforming such as Jimmy Boyle and Hugh Collins. But behind its formation was the simple theory that the guys who cause most trouble in most jails are the ones with nothing to lose, long sentence inmates with no blue sky at the end of the tunnel. If you have no future, the present hell you live in can’t get more hellish – even if you take to attacking prison officers or smearing your cell with excrement.
At the time the Unit was seen as groundbreaking. But the thinking behind it was showing itself as early as the thirties. For the first few years of that decade the Governor was a somewhat controversial figure called R M L Walkinshaw. In those days prison life was truly hard, a punishment. Now enlightened thought is clear that the taking away of your liberty, having every moment of your life ordered, is in itself a huge punishment. But in the twenties and thirties there was little thought given to preparation for freedom or of even little privileges to make prison life more bearable. But Governor Walkinshaw was – as the creators of the Special Unit were to be so many years later – prone to what we would now call ‘thinking out of the box’.
Acting without official sanction, he introduced some relaxations in the regime. His liberal interpretation of the prison rules was to lead him into all sorts of problems with the authorities and indeed cost him his job at Barlinnie, and when he was judged to be a bit of a soft touch he was moved to Greenock. At this time prisoners were not allowed to talk to each other when exercising in the prison yard. They walked around silently under the gaze of watchful officers who would stop any chat. This, incidentally, was the reason for the theatrical convention of criminals talking out of the side of their mouth, something the makers of prison films love to exploit. The reason was obvious – the officers from the governor down thought if the inmates were allowed freedom to chat they would use it to plan escapes, attacks on warders they disliked, or even criminal ploys on release. But it is interesting that Jimmy Bo
yle expounded the view many years later that the initial success of the Special Unit was largely due to allowing the prisoners the opportunity to talk problems through together. Seventy-odd years ago it was not a view widely held, to say the least. But Governor Walkinshaw was of the opinion that turning a slightly blind eye to exercise yard chat would help humanise life in the prison. A clear nod in the direction of the ethos of the Special Unit – treat a man with some decency and you should get some similar respect in return.
To his credit he also introduced games of draughts and cards to recreation time for prisoners. But, again, rather in parallel with what happened in the Special Unit, what you might call ‘privilege creep’ began to develop and the slightly more relaxed regime in the prison was sowing the seeds of serious trouble.
Another problem was that the prison was by now so close to the criminal stews of the east end of the city. When Barlinnie was built it was out in the country. Now housing was beginning to surround the prison. This was a time of massive gang problems in Glasgow and many of the gangsters had friends inside the ‘big hoose’. And most lived in the east end, many now with a daily view of the grim edifice in which villainous mates were doing time as a result of their lawlessness. The prisoners could be seen working in the fields nearby and the quarry, breaking the rocks for bottoming to use in the construction boom in the city. Sometimes, too, outsiders could hear shouting from the inside of the high walls.
The Bar-L was becoming something of an evil island in a part of the city that was growing. One of the problems of this proximity to normal life is that it facilitated tobacco smuggling on a major scale. Disguised drops of cigarettes and so on were hidden in the nooks and crannies around the prison, which the prisoner had access to when working under the eyes of the warders. But even the most efficient officer could not watch all of his charges all of the time. It was not too difficult to collect such valuable booty and smuggle it into the prison. In every prison in the world tobacco was a major problem and the so-called snout barons who controlled it had similar power to that of the drug barons on the outside. They were feared and controlled a sort of prison subculture. Barlinnie in the thirties was no different – access to illegal tobacco caused tensions and fed resentment. The untried prisoners were allowed to smoke when they exercised and indeed one of the warders was in charge of the tobacco box in the yard and opened and closed it at the end of each exercise period. The matches used at these periods lit more than tobacco in December 1934.
By this time official disfavour had led to a new governor being appointed, Captain James Murray. Murray took over a prison where the perception was that discipline had been allowed to slide. Barlinnie at this time was, in that much-favoured cliché of prison observers, a pressure cooker of discontent, and something had to give. The lid was blown off in late December 1934. Earlier in the year there had been signs of what was to come – there had been four escapes involving twelve men. Eleven were recaptured within two days though as an official investigation put it ‘one unfortunately drowned on the day of his escape’.
The real trouble began on 21 December. At that time there were around 733 prisoners in the jail. E-Hall was full of what were called ‘juvenile/adults’ and young men who had been kicked out of Borstals for trouble making or had infringed the terms of their Borstal release on license. The Borstal system was an attempt to keep young first offenders away from adult prisoners. But some of street-hardened toughs who were sent to such institutions were so unruly that they had to be sent to an adult prison.
It was perhaps a bit naive of the authorities to believe that Borstal would scare prisoners off a life of crime on release. Walter Norval, the city’s first Godfather, told me when I was researching Glasgow’s Godfather that on release, and back in Maryhill and up to no good, his time in Polmont was seen as a badge of honour, his spell there adding to his street cred. It in no way scared him off a life of crime that was to include a decade behind bars in Peterhead. So it’s easy to see that at the time of the disturbances in 1934, E-Hall with its juvenile/adults had no less of a build-up of pressure than the other Halls. Halls A and B had a full complement of adults, Hall C held the untried prisoners and Hall D was largely empty. The warders numbered just under 100 and the lines of battle were drawn for one of the most dramatic dramas in Barlinnie history.
On 21 December 1934, with the sad, bizarre ritual of a prison Christmas a few days away and a bitter cold seeping into the bones of prisoners and warders alike, the tensions in the prison finally erupted. Without any warning, a large number of prisoners who had been working in the stone yard and nearby work sheds downed tools. They ran shouting and yelling in a ferocious mob in the direction of the yard where the untried prisoners were about to take their exercise and where the tobacco box was held. Knowing what was coming, the warder in charge of the box bravely tried to close it before the advancing mob got to it. It was a vain effort. No chance; he was overpowered by men who were for the most part in custody because of violence. As an angry mob they were a fearsome sight. Like pirates parading sacked booty from a looted ship they ran with the contents of the tobacco box, in a noisy pack, back to the stone yard and workshop area to smoke their cigarettes.
But before they could get back into the safety of the sheds, Captain Murray, now aware of the seriousness of what was going on, promptly ordered the doors locked and the rioters left outside. With nowhere to go, the convicts returned to the stone yards, smoking on the way. But the blood was up and a group of the more determined prisoners went back to the workshop and kicked the doors in and shouted for the men inside to join them in the stone yard. It was pandemonium. The men were screaming and swearing at the top of their voices, pails and other prison bits and pieces were being thrown around. Two warders were chased by the mob through the door leading to E-Hall and the prisoners there broke out to run, again screaming and shouting, to the main group at the stone yard.
By now it was twenty to three in the afternoon. The subsequent inquiry into the events of that bloody weekend reported that much earlier, at around 12.20, one warder had warned the governor of impending trouble in the work sheds and stone yard. Years spent watching convicted men desperately wallowing in the anguish of their situation, filled with resentment and anger, give you a nose for the moment when suddenly the pot boils over. On this day, that warning from an astute warder was to prove valuable. The governor got a message out to warn all staff to ‘keep a sharp lookout’ for trouble. He also arranged for a reserve posse of warders to be at the ready for frontline action, the group being formed from men on store-keeping and other routine prison tasks.
On hearing that serious trouble had broken out, Governor Murray and a group of officers ran to the untried prisoners’ exercise area but by now the rioters had retreated to the north area of the prison. The governor and the warders first went to one of the work sheds where they found some inmates settled and ready to resume work, maybe calmed by a cigarette or two. The officers then ran to the stone yard. Forty-four adults and four juvenile/adult prisoners were there – the toughest of the tough, smoking and lounging about. Many had the hammers used for stone breaking, others knives used in the basket making shed. It was a frightening sight for the governor and a handful of his officers. Murray faced up to the mob with a plea to get them to lay down the hammers and knives. One old lag, who had a bit of respect from the other prisoners, asked the governor: ‘Is there going to be a shemozzle?’ By this he meant were the warders going to draw their batons and take on the prisoners in a rough house. But at this point, though the troubles of the weekend were far from over, a degree of sanity crept into the situation and the prisoners did indeed lay down their weapons. The extremely brave leadership of the governor had worked. It could have been a bloodbath – the prison staff were outnumbered by around five to one and three of the eleven officers were not even armed with batons. It took real guts to face the mob armed with knives and hammers and plead with them to lay their weapons down.
Eventually this
group of prisoners, their hammers and knives cast aside, was marched back to the cells, some still defiantly smoking. It must have been a sizeable tobacco box! Later in the afternoon the governor visited all the halls and sheds and for the moment things appeared back to normal.
All this – what the authorities described mildly as ‘a disturbance’ – happened on Friday the 21st, though the fact that the weekend approached made little difference to the men who filled the jail; for them one day was much the same as the next. No doubt the governor and his staff debated long their next move and on the Saturday morning around 50 prisoners known to have been involved in the events of Friday afternoon were moved to D-Hall which was more or less empty, with only a handful of cells in use. Two warders escorted each prisoner separately so this time the odds were well in favour of the officers. In D-Hall these men were put into alternate cells, an empty cell between each occupied one.
The fact that it was the weekend did however affect the attitude of the officers. The governor had intended to go in the afternoon to Edinburgh on a matter of a minor family business, not a good idea after the battle of the Friday. And around 1.30 in the afternoon, while the warders were on lunch break and only patrols were in charge of the cells, all hell broke loose in D-Hall. This was a full-blown prison riot. Loud shouting from the men behind bars was accompanied by the sound of glass windows being smashed and tables and furniture in the cells being pounded against the walls. Violent men were acting in concert and venting their anger by doing their best to destroy their place of incarceration in an outbreak of bloody fury.
The governor was still in his house in the prison area at that time and he got an urgent telephone call telling of the alarming violence in the cells. The chief warder, a man called Peddie, was not on the front line when the riot broke out, but he too was phoned and told to get to the prison fast and collect any additional warders he could on his way. It was a fast moving situation and the man in charge on the ground was Warder First Class Bates who headed with a small group of officers to D-Hall, warning them to have their batons at the ready. Unlike the previous day, no one was going to talk this lot of ruffians hell bent on destruction, out of their minds on violence, to submit without a fight. It was a warder’s worst nightmare and when Bates and his men arrived on the scene they unlocked and dived into the cells where the furniture and anything else lying around was being smashed. The prisoners lashed out with chair legs and makeshift weapons. The warders cracked batons on skulls. They seemed to have laid into the rioters with such a will that they had subdued them before the arrival of the governor and the chief warder. The busiest man in the prison after that was the medical officer.
The Barlinnie Story Page 12