Britain's Most Notorious Prisoners

by Stephen Wade

  This is Bronson. Because so many men inside have developed that mindset, they see in him the absolute extreme of that profile: he had fought in every arena open to him. The trajectory of dissent in a prison career goes from adjudications to escalated offences, then to a reputation for trouble that sticks like super-glue to his prison name and number. Charles Bronson has done this and more: he has taken it to the level of a finely tuned performance. His imagination has formed his projected self into a warrior. His endless press-ups become combative against his own standards. His confrontations become more extreme. The result has been, as he put it himself, ‘The world left me behind more than a quarter of a century ago. I’m a lost man – what more can be said?’

  His first stretch, after three lenient decisions made on him as a juvenile, was seven years for armed robbery, in 1974. He was born in Luton in 1952, and was often in fights as a young man, but his own account of that time is mostly of mindless escapades and adventures on the road and in petty theft. The seven-year term became fourteen years; he was released in 1988 but was free for only two months before he was arrested again. His prison life cost him his marriage: he was married to Irene and has a son, Michael. His family background was in Aberystwyth, where his parents ran the Conservative Club. In his teens, the family moved to Ellesmere Port in Cheshire. He has married again, to Saira Rehman, who influenced him to become a convert to Islam. Again, that did not last, and they were divorced in 2005 and he left the new religion behind him.

  Only four years of his long prison life have been spent in the jail community: otherwise he has been in solitary confinement. The total time he has spent outside prison walls since 1974 is four months and nine days. After his hostage exploits, his last appeal against the life sentence was turned down in 2004. There was a parole hearing in March 2009 but the question of any parole was dismissed, as he had not changed attitudes and behaviour in prison.

  In March 2009, he undoubtedly achieved the status of what is called now a ‘legend’. This is because a feature film was made about him, with Tom Hardy in the title role. This was simply, Bronson, and the man himself told the press: ‘I never dreamed I would ever have a movie made of my life. I have never glamorised crime or violence. All I ever do is expose the system for what it is.’ He revels in being the legend, but still the paradox remains, as with so many of the subjects of this book: how do we explain the fact that Bronson may be kind and gentle with children and people with learning difficulties and yet be capable of extreme and thoughtless violence?

  Peterson took the name Bronson after the actor, for reasons largely to do with the image he wanted for himself. What has happened is that he has become the myth he constructed himself: he has said that prison was always a war for him. Inside, that is a formula for long-time suffering. He has understood that the average con submits and toes the line, but he himself has fought every inch of the way on his long road as a notorious prisoner. It is hard to find a prison memoir with no mention of his name included. Yet, for all the adulation accorded him by younger prisoners, and in spite of the bizarre exploits and eccentricities, some of his attacks and hostage situations have been far from humorous. His assault on Phil Danielson, the teacher at Hull, is indicative of exactly why Bronson cannot be moving about in normal society. He dragged his hostage around the jail after punching him. The reason given, in Bronson’s book, is that the teacher had criticised one of Bronson’s cartoons: ‘I’d wanted words with Phil Danielson, the teacher who had insulted one of my cartoons, since December … Who was he to slag it off?’ This highlights the fragile nature of his personality – he can act in a childlike way when irritated. He is so concerned to create his personal world of self-projection, of egoistic presence in the prison community, that he will take no negative statements.

  What follows, in his book, Bronson, contradicts the ruling about publishing writing about the criminal’s offences. What Nilsen has been banned from doing, Bronson has in print: he writes about what he did to the teacher and how he trashed the place around him.

  The more the image of the man is contemplated, the more it has to be said that Bronson himself has kept the fight with the Prison Service alive. After all, causing a stir does fend off the boredom. He is most likely generating some new plan as I write this: every day is a prelude to a mind game. Prison officers have to live every day with this kind of devious strategy. Every movement in a prison is a tense moment. Movement means vulnerability; coming out of a pad is to be available for a vendetta or a hate attack, just as Sutcliffe was when he walked out and went to the recess. The old prison adage that ‘happiness is a locked door’ – when we look at Bronson from the officers’ point of view – and yet there is a talent in the man which needs to be sustained and nurtured. It could be that his art and writings are enough to do that. But it has to be considered that there could be another master plan. We have to pray that he is not blacking up and sharpening a table leg at this moment.

  He is in the Wakefield prison ‘cage’ at present (2010). Bronson has described this in his book, The Good Prison Guide: ‘It is a cell with two doors, first one door, then behind that a second door, a caged door. The outside door is solid steel. The inner door is an iron gate with a steel mesh on it and a feeding hatch in the bottom. We are fed like beasts in a zoo … Our life is spent, twenty-three hours a day, caged up. You come out for one hour in the yard, alone. Never less than eight screws wait for the unlocking of the inner door.’

  There is the dilemma society has with Charles Bronson and those like him: the treatment of them like animals is deemed necessary because they behave like animals, as Bronson demonstrated when he dragged the teacher around Hull jail with a rope tied around him. Yet Bronson is a creative mind, a loose cannon just as much as the wildest artists who have through history wrecked their lives without the residence of a prison cell.

  If there is one abiding image that sums up Bronson and his impact on the nature and media image of prison today, it is his walk across the famous circle at HMP Wandsworth. Noel Razor Smith has called the place ‘the hate factory’ and Noel was there when Bronson did the walk. The story is that cons always had to walk around the area (the base level of the central tower in the old Panopticon jails the Victorians made); but Bronson defied the rules and walked across directly. Noel recalls: ‘We hurried down to the recess and down to the end of the landing above the gate Charlie had entered through. And there he was. The front screw opened the gate that led to the centre and Charlie marched straight through … There were plenty of screws about, but they all deigned not to notice this prisoner …’

  CHAPTER 20

  Noel ‘Razor’ Smith: Best-selling Writer

  He once was the ‘frightener’ for the armed robbers. While others were on look out, or were outside revving the engine of the getaway car, he was holding a gun to a poor, shivering bank customer. He was able to instil fear with his voice and his confidence. The potential victims quivered and begged for mercy. But the bags were stuffed with notes and he and his gang roared off to count the profits and go out on the town.

  Today he is a well-known author and he is inside one of Her Majesty’s prisons. When he was asked what he will do when he is free again, he says he just wants somewhere to live and somewhere to write.

  This man is, in effect, someone the Prison Service should brag about, encourage, promote and show off as proof that time inside can change people for the better. Instead, he is struggling to maintain himself as a person who wants to weave words and change attitudes.

  In 2008, a letter was printed in Inside Time on the subject of prisoners’ blogs. It began with these sentences: ‘The prison system has strictly forbidden me to write for publication or have any contact with the media – therefore my question for the prison service … is this: according to Standing Orders and Prison Rules, convicted prisoners are not allowed to write for publication for payment. However, there is no mention or reference to prisoners writing blogs.’ The Ministry of Justice replied that writing fo
r the internet was covered in PSO 4411 which states that no writing must be done for profit for broadcast, publishing or television transmission.

  The writer of the letter was Noel ‘Razor’ Smith, best-selling author of A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun, published in 2004. This man has become ‘notorious’ because he wants to express himself. The letter about blogs was an attempt to find another way to put words on paper, and in his case, the words are not glorifying his crimes. He has a crusade in mind, to try to change some attitudes.

  Noel has said in interviews that prison transformed him. When he did his long stretch he was illiterate; he had missed school. Prison education brought out his creativity and used his powers of thought. In the former prison regime, before slopping out of cells ended in the 1990s, a creative person was unlikely to be noticed except in the accepted areas of a workshop or in a craft. But today there are several educational initiatives, many aimed at tackling the unacceptable figures on literacy in the prison population. Around the year 2000, as Will Self reminded us in an essay in The Guardian, ‘Home Office figures stated that in any one year 130,000 people are or have been in prison and around 50% of these individuals have poor reading skills … and 81% of all prisoners have writing skills below level 1.’

  In prisons today not only are there classes in basic literacy, but there is also the Toe by Toe scheme, started by Christopher Morgan and the Shannon Trust. The spur for this came from a long correspondence between Morgan and a lifer called Tom Shannon which became the book, The Invisible Crying Tree (a new edition came out in 1996). The Toe by Toe idea is based on a ‘buddy system’ and a thick red handbook is used, so that in a 20-minute session as often as possible (every day, in theory) two people work on the book, tutor and student. Prison officers may act as the buddy if they wish. Morgan has said that at its launch in HMP Wandsworth, there was a sense of challenge, but that more than 200 prisoners have completed the course.

  There is also now the residences established by the Writers in Prison Network, in which writers spend two days inside, working in all kinds of writing from drama groups to autobiographies, and from poetry to storytelling. Each year, six residencies are in place at prisons across the land, and products and results show that this work has a positive effect on the prison community.

  All this has been in place for Noel. In a feature written by Erwin James in 2004, Noel explained how his writing began, and James wrote: ‘His writing activities began as part of a business enterprise while he was in Albany prison on the Isle of Wight in the 1990s. An associate made greetings cards to sell to fellow prisoners. Smith, who was writing poetry, “trying to win the prison’s annual Christmas poetry competition,” would write the verses. “I haven’t got a clue where it came from,” he says, “It was just something I could do.” ’

  The rest is history. His books are now on every True Crime shelf in the libraries and bookshops. That began with the help of Will Self. Behind the book and the new life inside, there was personal tragedy. Noel’s son, Mark, took his own life after a spell in the young offender’s jail at Feltham. Noel felt some responsibility for the death.

  Noel is now notorious because of his transformation. His long criminal career began when he was a Teddy Boy and carried a razor; then later he became an armed robber, working in a team to rob banks and enjoy a wealthy lifestyle on the proceeds. He and the gang used to take two banks a month, and when he explains that life now he says, ‘You’ve got to detach yourself. So you tell yourself you’re a Robin Hood figure. If you sat down and told yourself the truth: I am a nasty, violent man, going out there and terrifying innocent members of the public … You cut yourself off.’

  His writing is, without doubt, something that aims to counteract the glamorous True Crime volumes on the shelves, covers red like the blood described in their pages. The struggle to write has been tough. In his autobiography, he writes that he moved from small successes to large setbacks. Against the grain, he managed to be published in Punch, with help from John McVicar. But the first phase of the writing from prison was fraught with difficulties and, even today, in 2010, the obstacles are still there. When he wrote his first book, he recorded there the massive resource his life supplies for a potential writer: ‘Some people may wonder at my extraordinary memory of events, some of which occurred more than a quarter of a century ago. Part of it is that prison is so boring that we have little to do except remember …’ He had the huge stock of writer’s ‘material’ but prison regulations blocked the path.

  Basically, he was aiming to write for money, and there is a prison service order against that. Writing is only a minor part of the never-ending action-response life of the prisoner and his keepers. For every strategy inside to overcome a problem, the authorities have to conceive of a measure to deal with it. The most irritating and potentially threatening examples of this is the use of mobile phones inside prison walls. They are strictly forbidden, of course, but they are always there somewhere, secreted with great ingenuity and not always located in spins. Now, every prison has a device called a ‘BOSS’ – a Body Orifice Security Scanner. This scans for hidden weapons and other objects hidden in any dark place in the human physiology. It looks like a very uncomfortable arm chair. Refusal to submit to such a scan means that there will be disciplinary action taken.

  That is just one instance of something done to prevent prisoners getting involved in undesirable activities. After all, there are cases in which a man inside has used a mobile phone to initiate a hit killing, so this is no laughing matter. But what about the use of a pen or a keyboard in order to express what is bubbling up in the prisoner’s imagination? Writing is one of the most basic human needs in our society now: to be illiterate is the surest way to oblivion. We talk of ‘rehab’ and fail to see that creative writing, even for small profits which may be always given to charity, gives a person an immense injection of self-esteem – a kind of drug we like to think we all have, administered naturally.

  Yet the obstacles remain, and Noel Smith is in the thick of the fight to write and be encouraged. Once again, he is in a scrap. One huge problem with this whole activity is nothing to do with the system and the regulations: it is that prison writing can become great literature, as in Dostoievsky’s House of the Dead and Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island, or more recently than these classics, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book, The Gulag Archipeligo. But that success is usually linked to political status and major events. Prison itself, as in the British establishment, is something we are forced to regard as uninteresting, static, despicable and rather embarrassing to contemplate. We have a communal sense of shame, unexpressed, because we feel that, as the statistics of people locked up tops the 85,000 mark (in March 2010), there is a dark, nagging sense of failure and that we have all played a part. The politicians and papers tell us that it is down to poor parenting, the loss of family cohesions, the collapse of Christian ethics, and so on. What is forgotten or at least overlooked is the capacity for the people inside to effect a repositioning, if at least the talented ones inside are given the chance to exercise their talents in creativity rather than in villainy.

  Noel Smith illustrates yet another side to the prison identity as well, and this relates to his work and to other writing and painting, or drama, done ‘inside’. This is the notion of the ‘Chaps’. In prison, there are criminals who have killed or assaulted victims for a few pounds or for the satisfaction of their release of aggression. There are plenty of drug-powered cons who have done despicable things to grab the cash to fuel their addiction. Then there are the old-world career criminals who have their code of values and behaviour.

  These are the Chaps. I have worked with some of them, and I can confirm that there is real substance in this. A member of this elite will consider it wrong to act against a woman, or any category of vulnerable person; they despise a ‘grass’ and believe in communal help and support. They create a body of firm friends. There is something of the shadowy presence of Robin Hood in their thinking, yet you cross them
at your peril, because they are not dreaming of Sherwood Forest and men in tights. They can pack a firm punch and when aroused in indignation they are the enemy you dread, but their capacity for faithfulness and trust is infinite.

  The young, mindless and impressionable cons inside are called scrots or scrotes by Chaps, in contempt at the usual fare of bragging, superficial thinking and shallow, questionable values. The Chap is self-contained, dignified, capable of a solid, interesting discussion on something worthwhile. Prison engenders philosophers, and a reading group of Chaps is a pleasure to conduct. They also tend to have stories to tell: compelling, bizarre, eccentric, risky, wacky, sometimes childish adventure yarns. These do not involve random acts of violence; they are concerned with right and wrong when villains deal with straight-goers.

  Noel has written about how he always aligned himself with this ethos. He has written very powerfully about the reasons why there is such an allure about the renegade, tearaway con, the robber and the hit man, with the young. It is linked with their treatment inside: ‘On the other side, our prime examples of straight society were the bully-boy screws and cops and snidey magistrates, who had looked down their noses and passed judgement on us.’

  In fact, bearing in mind the depictions of the officers of that – the 1970s and 1980s – and the violence used to suppress behaviour which was considered unacceptable in the prison regime – it is surprising that there have been so many ‘Chaps’ with their old-fashioned morals and values still intact when on a long stretch.