He also asked the Secretary of State to consider the advisability of securing the immediate liberation of prisoners at the jail and giving them their fare, or a token, to allow them to travel anywhere in Glasgow. He wanted to know, too, if full regard was being given to the demoralizing effect on the prisoners, who ‘whether old offenders, first offenders, or juveniles were herded together in the same tramcar’.
The answer was to the effect that the prisoners were free, although arrangements had been made to take them to the centre of the city by tram. It was said that they left the tram in an open part of Cathedral Square, not far from the other Glasgow prison (Duke Street) and near the Discharged Prisoners Aid Society offices. It was said the prisoners were accompanied by a warder though he was not in charge and that attempts were made to separate first offenders and juveniles from habitual offenders. The Scottish Secretary said that the prisoners were met by friends who he would not call a ‘crowd’. This odd tram journey, with its hint of the cattle truck approach, was eventually dropped and prisoners allowed to leave by the main gate. These days you hear of released drug barons being met by mates in Rollers. Changed days!
There is nothing like a reading of House of Commons debates on Barlinnie to get a picture of what the place was like in previous eras. One politician who had much to say about conditions in the prison was the well-remembered Labour politician William Reid in whose constituency, Glasgow Provan, it lies. Before looking at some of his comments on the life of the inmates, it is fascinating to see, away back in February 1960, an echo of today’s comments on the need to bulldoze the place flat.
William Reid suggested to the Secretary of State for Scotland that he should agree to the early demolition of this prison: ‘It is now too old to modernise and bring up-to-date.’
He also said: ‘This prison has outlived its usefulness. It was built more than 80 years ago. When it was built it was out in the country. Now it is surrounded by housing schemes. The inhabitants of those houses are seriously concerned about the happenings there and the possibility of escapes.’
The ‘happenings’ mentioned by William Reid are worth recounting. He began his questioning of the Secretary of State, John Maclay, by saying he wanted to call the attention of the House to the state of affairs at Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow. He said that since the beginning of the year, just a few weeks, he had received a large number of complaints – allegations of ill-treatment of prisoners, particularly the treatment of a constituent who wanted to write to him and the concern of folk living near the prison about the dangers of escape. He went on: ‘Since the beginning of this year the happenings in this prison, as reported in the press, have been astounding – hooch parties, riots, sabotage, assaults, smuggling of whisky, smuggling of cigarettes, and even a plot to murder the governor.’ He further said that this state of affairs was a blot on the fair name of Glasgow and a challenge to the Government to do something about it. He said that the Secretary of State had gone into the allegations and made a straightforward reply that confirmed the allegations ‘although we may differ as to the deduction to be drawn from these facts.’
He said that the most serious complaint was about a letter written to him by a prisoner who was one of his constituents. According to Mr Reid this letter was suppressed by the governor. The local MP’s outrage was heightened by the fact that he claimed not only was the letter not delivered to him but the writer was punished for penning it and given six days solitary.
An interesting contrast to all this is the story of peace campaigner Brian Quail’s letter on prison conditions in 2001 (dealt with in detail earlier) delivered to sundry politicians, newspapers and fellow activists. On the letter from his constituent, Willie Reid was incandescent: ‘Did anyone in this house ever believe that such a state of affairs – dictatorship in its vilest form – could exist in the greatest democracy the world has ever known? Every citizen in this country has a constitutional right to complain to his Member of Parliament regarding legitimate grievances. But the governor of Barlinnie says “not if I can stop it”.’
From all this passion and concern it is easy to see why Willie Reid was re-elected time after time. The story of the Letter that Never Was had him in full flow, and it was a sorry picture he painted for his listeners, languishing in plush leather seats 400 miles from the mayhem in the ‘Big Hoose’.
When in solitary, the writer of the letter went berserk, or bersie, as the inmates would have it, and broke his cell windows. Willie Reid had some sympathy – ‘Is it surprising that such a prisoner being so brutally treated should go berserk?’ He went on eloquently to point out that no one in the Commons had a greater respect for law and order than he did but he took the view that prison should be a place for reformation as well as punishment. In his view, good Government would see that prisoners are treated with kindness as well as firmness so that when they leave prison they do so determined to go straight.
Another contributor to this debate was Arthur Woodburn (Clackmannan and East Stirlingshire), a man with an interest in penal reform and good foresight. He recounted a visit to Polmont Borstal in the past when there was a great deal of violence around. He said that he thought that shutting up virile young men in cells at five o’clock at night automatically raised resentment and left them for long evenings with nothing to do but nurse grievances.
He elaborated, touching on some of the philosophy that was later to lead to the forming of the Special Unit – if people are shut in cages they develop all sorts of grievances against society and against the warders. Bad blood develops and ‘the kind of violence talked about by my Honourable Friend is the result’. Sometimes a prisoner and a warder become positive enemies just because they get on each other’s nerves. He was all for that old favourite of sending the bad guys to some remote island off the west coast and putting them to productive work on the land. It was a dream that might have worked, but the old time-stained walls of Barlinnie still stand and inside still, from time to time, feuds fester.
All this passion from well-known socialists brought a patrician response from Tory John Maclay who tried to put the current concerns into perspective by explaining some of the details behind this particular outbreak of trouble. The start was apparently caused by a ‘trivial’ matter. It is remarkable how often in retrospect any disorder in the great prison seems to have been sparked off by a minor matter. It is, no doubt, a consequence of the natural tension that always exists between ‘caged’ men and their captors, however humane the majority of the officers are. This time shirt buttons, of all things, caused the trouble. There was no problem with shirt cuffs or collars that did not fit or did not close properly. Instead, in what John Maclay said was a Hogmanay prank, the buttons were jammed into the locks of some of the cell doors. This meant prisoners had to be moved to different cells and there were two disturbances but the Scottish Secretary told MPs that the normal running of the prison resumed on 4 January and that 11 prisoners were punished. Ten of these had their punishments awarded by the sub-committee of the Visiting Committee and one was dealt with by the governor.
A few weeks later there was more trouble with a number of prisoners demonstrating against the regime. This time the serious nature of the unrest led to the suspension of all communal activities like work parties, communal dining and recreation. Not for the first time the prison had been put into the position where the normal routine was suspended and prisoners locked in their cells.
Explaining all this to the Commons, John Maclay fell into the trap that from time to time ensnares us all – stating the self-evident. He said it was obvious that the inhabitants of Barlinnie are by their nature not the most law abiding of our citizens in Scotland. Really! But he ploughed on, putting this particular outbreak of disorder in context by pointing out that only around 15 prisoners out of a prison population of more than a thousand had been disciplined.
After he had sat down there followed one of those esoteric little arguments that the members of the House of Commons seem to enjoy s
o much, even to this day. George Lawson of Motherwell, who had listened carefully as the tale of unrest had unravelled, was moved to point out that the Right Hon. Member (Mr Maclay) had spoken of punishments being ‘awarded’. Never mind the disturbances, cells being damaged and missing letters. Instead, Mr Lawson thought: ‘it is rather strange that prisoners should be “awarded” punishment. Surely punishment is inflicted?’ Mr Maclay was not taking this semantic lecturing and replied briskly that he ‘would not like to argue a point of wording but that “awarding” punishment is a phrase which I have known all my life, certainly since it was awarded to me good and hard. I think it is a normal phrase.’
Whether or not it was inflicted or awarded, in this case prisoners were punished and their punishments were largely decided by the Visiting Committee. Mr Maclay felt that the committee’s activities had been perhaps unfairly denigrated to the House and he took the trouble to explain the system. He described the committee as a very important body drawn from a very wide selection of local authorities, men (sic) of the highest integrity. He said they did a difficult job and were completely dispassionate in their approach: ‘The governor has the right to report serious discipline offences to the committee and if they wish he can attend any hearing. The committee can have free access to prisoners in their cells or in an area away from prison officers.’
This was linked with the business of the letter that had so upset William Reid. Mr Maclay made a telling point, in much less hysterical manner than his questioner who had ranted on about a vile dismissal of democracy. He said that if a prisoner is to be allowed to use a letter to a Member of Parliament for the purpose of making complaints about his treatment, which he would not be allowed to make in an ordinary letter, and which he had not made to the prison authorities, the result would be that a prisoner could bypass the appointed channels for the investigation of such complaints and could make, with impunity, the most malicious and unfounded allegations against particular officers. This he said seemed undesirable and likely to undermine the authority of the visiting committee. True, but in the case of Bahadur Singh there was real conflict about whether or not he had correctly complained to the authorities before he got his MP involved.
As a newsman I was interested in further comments on this debate in the press. This spat took place many years ago but some of the comments are in tune with what has tended to happen throughout Barlinnie’s history. John Maclay was defensive of the work of the prison staff and said that because they worked so much by way of moral influence and not by repression, and were dealing with excessive numbers, it is not surprising that they have to face Hogmanay pranks or disturbances generally. It is also not surprising, he commented, that discharged prisoners sometimes take exaggerated reports of such doings out of the prison to the press. The old patrician briskly made the comment that ‘I think we should keep our eye not on these incidents, but on the wider aspects of criminal justice. I know that it is not easy to do so, particularly with the daily press which is above all interested in news.’
Too true. Down the years the hard-nosed news editors of the Glasgow papers have thrown out a welcome mat to released prisoners with a spicy tale to tell. However sensationally such tales from the inside are presented, it perhaps is not a bad thing if it alerts the general public to what is going on. And it does help raise what was called – even back in the sixties – frank debate.
10
DEATH AT THE END OF A ROPE
There can be no doubt that the most expert witness who could have been called in any examination of the case for and against capital punishment is the late Albert Pierrepoint, perhaps the most famous executioner in history. A sometime visitor to Barlinnie, he is said to have executed more than 600 people, including 17 women and hundreds of German war criminals. The debate for and against the rope goes on to this day and frequently those who have at any time been involved in the actual process of a legal killing say they are against it and express an opinion that if those who bray for the return of the gallows actually witnessed an execution they would change their minds. So when looking at the subject of hanging, in Barlinnie and elsewhere, Pierrepoint’s views on his own career carry great weight.
In his autobiography he wrote: ‘All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment convince me that in what I have done I have not prevented a single murder. And if death does not work to deter one person, it should not be held to deter any … capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except that revenge.’
And that thirst for revenge is still at large. However not everyone who has been part of the process of judicial killing is an abolitionist. A little documentary film, Hanging with Frank was shot in Barlinnie and won Best Film and Best Documentary in the Reel-to-Reel contest in Glasgow in 1998. Shot in grainy black and white it is a sombre and fascinating piece of work. It features Frank McCue – a former Barlinnie deathwatch officer – with the job of keeping an eye on the condemned man. This was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job shared by three shifts who often sat in the condemned cell drinking tea with the men waiting for the footsteps of the hangman coming to their cell door.
The victim and warders with him would not notice when the executioner spied on them through a secret window to make sure his calculations on the length of rope required were correct. There was an official table to refer to which equated the victim’s weight to the length of the rope required, but most executioners liked to have a look at the shape of the man who was to take the drop, just to make sure. Too long a rope and the victim was beheaded, too short and he was strangled to death.
What did they talk about in the condemned cell? Everything and anything other than the obvious – the approaching death of the prisoner – says Frank in the film.
The success of the film is not surprising. The public has a grisly fascination with executions. And the film is compelling and well made. That fascination in the art of judicial killing is well illustrated by the tale of John Amery, the son of the Secretary of State for India in the Second World War, Leopold Amery. John Amery was the first person to plead guilty to treason in an English court since 1654 and died on the gallows in Wandsworth in 1945. It was said that when the two men met in the execution chamber, Amery greeted Pierrepoint with: ‘Mr Pierrepoint, I’ve always wanted to meet you. Though not, of course, under these circumstances!’ Pierrepoint later stated in interview that the two men spoke at length. He said he felt that he had known Amery ‘all his life’.
In the award-winning documentary Frank McCue comes across as a world weary, down to earth sort of guy, a man who has lived a lot and seen a lot in his time, a man who would look more at home taking a grandchild for a walk in the park than someone at ease in the Hanging Shed, an expert in the details of executions, a man with total belief in capital punishment. At the time of the film’s release he claimed to still be on the list of those wanting to train as hangmen should the rope ever return. He knew Pierrepoint and had had a drink with him from time to time and remembers him as ‘as nice a man as you could meet’. He touches on the issue of mistakes being made and innocent men put to death, but in his view if there is 100 per cent certainty then the gallows should come into play.
That talk of certainty is interesting for, in the film, Frank McCue mentions the case of James Robertson, an ex-policeman hanged in Barlinnie, and seems mistakenly to imply that Robertson killed his wife but in fact the victim was his mistress. All very ironic when considering the need to be 100 per cent sure before anyone’s neck is stretched. In the film Frank McCue wanders round Barlinnie, remembering when he first joined the prison service in the thirties. And telling all sorts of tales about the grim ritual of execution and happenings in the death cell.
He mourns the fact that so much of the old Hanging Shed was torn down when it finally became clear that the hanging days were over after abolition in 1969. To the old prison warder it was sad that most of the bits and pieces of the executioner’s trade had been swept away, the ‘end of an era’. He shows the a
udience the rope used – three quarters of an inch thick Italian hemp – and points out that the actual noose had a covering of finest calfskin and remembers that the noose was placed over the hood on the victim’s head to prevent the hood blowing away in the updraft as the victim plunged through the trap. All this detail is delivered in deadpan Glasgow by a grand-fatherly figure, making his testimony all the more horrifying for opponents of capital punishment. If part of the argument against capital punishment is that if you knew the details you would be against it, then this is as near as the layman will get to an execution.
‘Hanging with Frank’, though a short film, is full of poignant detail, like the fact that the tea in the death cell came ‘from a big brown pot’ and that there was a constant supply of it. Frank, too, remembers that James Smith, who took the drop in 1952, celebrated his birthday in the death cell and had his cards delivered to him by the warders. He also spends some time in front of the camera at the spot where the bodies of the ten men who died on the Barlinnie gallows lie buried. He shows little emotion as he reels off the names of victims. I, too, have stood there and gazed down on the unmarked graves, noting that you can still see where the stone blocks in the wall of the prison were removed to allow the bodies – the property of the State – to be passed out, dowsed with quick lime and covered with earth. No headstones for these men. I found it more emotional than Frank, especially remembering that in more enlightened times, even with capital punishment still taking place, some of those hanged would have escaped the ultimate punishment because of the intervention of psychiatrists or perhaps, as in the case of James Robertson, the defence lawyer. Robertson’s counsel felt the ex-cop made matters worse for himself by not making clear that the victim was a mistress, not a casual acquaintance as he insisted to the jury.
The Barlinnie Story Page 14