Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown

by Roy Chubby Brown

  About ten of us stepped forward. Once again, my papers were stamped. I now had two stamps. One more stamp and I’d be facing a dishonourable discharge.

  By the time I got back to Middlesbrough, I’d decided that I’d had enough of the merchant navy. But what to do instead? Sandra Pallent, my girlfriend from school, provided the answer.

  I’d been writing to Sandra the whole time I’d been at sea and met up with her as soon as I was back in Grangetown. One evening she laid her cards on the table. ‘If you go back to sea,’ she said, ‘I am finishing with you.’

  I loved Sandra. I thought she was wonderful, but I didn’t want to go back to labouring on building sites and at factories. ‘What am I going to do?’ I said.

  ‘You’ve been waiting on tables, you’ve been working in the kitchen as a second cook and bottle-washer, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, come to Scarborough and you can do just the same, but on dry land. I’ll get you a job at the Southlands Hotel where I’ve been working.’

  I discovered that I was a good waiter. And at seven pounds a week the money was much better than at sea. I had more tables than any other waiter, my cutlery always gleamed, my dumb waiter was party polished and I’d soon trained myself in silver service. Sandra didn’t like it. She was a waitress and I was encroaching on her patch. And to make matters worse, I was popular with the other staff. Sandra and I were always arguing. Sandra would accuse me of fancying the other waitresses. And sometimes she was right. I was seventeen and surrounded by young lasses. It was difficult not to fancy at least some of them.

  As usual, our relationship was on and off like a whore’s drawers. Sandra started going out with a lad she’d met who was working at another hotel. And I’d taken a fancy to a stunning girl who did the washing-up in the Southlands’ kitchens. But the other relationships never lasted. Sandra and I always ended up getting back together.

  I got in with a couple of Scottish lads who were also working at the hotel. One night they took me aside. ‘Will you keep a lookout?’ they said. ‘We’re going to break into a shop down the road.’

  ‘Course I will,’ I said. As usual, I didn’t give a moment’s thought to the possible consequences.

  In the early hours of the morning, we met outside the gift shop, a shabby place with buckets, spades and a row of toy watches in the window. There was nothing of value in it except for the contents of the till. The two lads disappeared around the back of the shop while I stood on a corner that gave me a clear view along two streets. The lads had been gone only a few minutes when the alarm went off. Within seconds, the shop was surrounded by police and I was running as fast as my legs would carry me. I looked behind me. Two coppers were chasing me. We all got caught. Less than a week later I was in Armley jail in Leeds, having been convicted at Scarborough Magistrates Court of breaking and entering.

  For a seventeen-year-old lad, Armley, one of the toughest prisons in the country, was a frightening wake-up call. Surrounded by convicted rapists, murderers, drug addicts and downright head cases, I didn’t dare look at anybody in case they took it the wrong way. I was meant to be at Armley for only a short time, until I had to appear in court again for my sentencing, but it dragged on for three months.

  Six weeks after I was locked away a letter arrived at Armley. It was from Sandra. ‘Dear Roy,’ it said, ‘I’ve met somebody else. We love each other … I know this is going to hurt but I never know where I am with you … I might never see you again, so it seems best if we end it now.’

  I was devastated, but determined not to give up. I wrote to Sandra every day, but she never wrote back. When I wasn’t writing letters, I’d sit in my cell, counting the bricks on the walls and gazing at the picture of Sandra I’d stuck up above my bed. Shortly before I was sentenced, another letter arrived. It was from Sandra’s mam. ‘Sandra doesn’t live here any more, Roy,’ it said, ‘so just forget it now.’ By then, one of the other convicts had stolen my picture of Sandra. I’d been upset and angry when I first noticed it had gone. Now I thought they’d done me a favour.

  A few days later I was back in court for sentencing. In those days they were allowed to refer to your previous record. It took them more than forty minutes to read out the list of my petty criminal acts, from stealing bottles of milk off doorsteps to six weeks in Medomsley Detention Centre.

  ‘The spot has become a boil,’ the magistrate said. ‘And now it needs to be lanced. I am sentencing you to two years’ Borstal training.’

  The two Scottish lads, whose idea the burglary had been, had clean records and got off with suspended sentences. While they walked out of the courtroom with relieved expressions, I was carted by the police down to the cells. Two hours later, I was pushed onto a prison van to return to Armley. As the Black Maria stopped at the traffic lights in Scarborough, I looked out of the window. Sitting in a Wimpy Bar, drinking cups of tea with their girlfriends, were the two Scottish lads. One of them was kissing his girlfriend passionately. A big smile creased the other lad’s face as if he didn’t have a care in the world. It had been their idea and they’d got off. I was taking the rap. They were with their girlfriends, while mine had jilted me for another lad. It broke my fucking heart.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BORSTAL BOY

  EVERY DAY THE same questions dominated most of my waking hours. What am I going to do if they remove my vocal cords? Will I ever talk again? Will I ever get back on stage? Should I open a little café? What else could I do? Should I get a job in a pub, playing a piano? Or should I get a drumming job with a band, just to get a few bob in? All sorts of things went through my mind, but one thought was bigger than all the others. What would be worse – to die or never to speak again?

  And then I pulled myself together. I thought back to what I’d been through to reach my late fifties and, compared with some of that, fighting cancer was nothing. I’d been through tougher times on my own, with no money and no family to support me. Now I had my wife’s love and care to support me and enough money to afford the expertise of the best cancer specialists in the country. I’d been through a lot worse.

  I spent three months in Armley jail, waiting to be assigned to a Borstal. From Armley they sent me to Leicester jail and from Leicester to Wormwood Scrubs, where a Prison Commissioner would decide to which Borstal I should be sent. The Scrubs, a huge overcrowded Victorian prison on marshy wasteland in west London, felt utterly alien. They put all the lads awaiting Borstal allocation in Scrubs Block B, a foul, filthy place where the air buzzed with the stench of urine and dirty, sweaty adolescents. The cells were disgusting, the blankets and laundry were soiled and stained, and cockroaches crawled everywhere. Most of the inmates were Londoners who raised their eyebrows when they heard my Teesside accent. I knew to keep my head down if I wanted to avoid trouble.

  As soon as I arrived, I was given jobs to do – cleaning out the toilets, scrubbing landings, washing down the stairs or feeding the animals on the farm. I’d been in the Scrubs about a month when a screw came up to me with a malicious smirk on his face. ‘You’re cleaning out the lifers,’ he said.

  Accompanied by two guards, I was taken to the high-security area of the prison, a group of six or seven steel-clad buildings fenced off in its own compound. Some of the inmates had been in prison for fifteen or twenty years and were now deemed sufficiently safe for day release. These murderers, bank robbers and serious criminals were let out after breakfast to work as painters, decorators or labourers. They had to be back in their cells by half past five. My job was to clean out their cells, often while they were in them. I’d always thought I was the toughest teenager in Grangetown, but I was petrified by these bona fide hard nuts. One of them had been an associate of the Kray Twins. Another was dubbed Frankie the Axe Murderer by the inmates, who would speak of him only in whispers.

  I was cleaning out one of the lifers’ cells one day when a short, bald fella who looked like a butcher came up to me. ‘What you doin’ here, son?’ he said.


  ‘I’m going to Borstal,’ I said.

  ‘What happened?’

  I thought it best to exaggerate my crime. ‘Oh, I robbed a shop,’ I said casually.

  ‘Did ya?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, puffing out my chest and trying not to show my nerves. ‘Three of us broke into a shop.’

  ‘Oh right, a shop.’ he said. ‘D’you wanna drink?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said, not knowing if it was best to be polite or stand-offish. The lifers had much better facilities than the rest of the convicts. This one put the kettle on.

  ‘What did you do, then?’ I said.

  ‘I got rid of the wife.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said, hoping that my false bravado didn’t show through. I looked at the fella. He was only about five foot, four inches tall. I couldn’t imagine him being strong enough to kill anyone.

  ‘Have you been in here a long time?’ I said.

  ‘Eighteen years.’

  ‘Was it worth it?’

  ‘Was what worth it?’

  ‘Killing your wife.’

  ‘Well …’ he said, speaking very slowly as if I was stupid. It was very menacing. ‘At the time, I was a pig farmer in Norfolk and I come home and I catch my wife in bed with my brother. So I killed the pair of them.’

  ‘Oh.’ I felt very naive. ‘Was it in all the papers?’

  ‘National news it was. But they never found no bodies.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I fed ’em to the pigs. They ate the bones an’ all.’

  I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. I never thought that as a young lad I would be mixing with these characters. I wasn’t a gladiator, but I’d been thrown in with the lions.

  After a few months at the Scrubs, the prison authorities assigned me to Guy’s Marsh, a Borstal at Shaftesbury in Dorset. As soon as I arrived, I was given a cold shower, my hair was shaved into a very short back and sides, and I was handed a Borstal uniform of short trousers, itchy underwear, a rough shirt and socks that didn’t fit. Only the socks and underwear were regularly changed: we got clean ones once a week, after the weekly shower.

  Because I had a relatively minor record – burglary, theft and street fighting were pipsqueak offences compared with some of the crimes committed by Borstal-bound lads – I had been sent to a liberal open Borstal. Nevertheless, anywhere that cooped up several hundred lads, all with little regard for law and order, was going to have trouble. Mixing with them, I was bound to argue, fight and get into trouble. And I soon did.

  Borstal was a strange mixture of strict discipline, corporal punishment, manual labour, handcuffs, leg-irons and physical education. The aim was to instil discipline by making us keep to a rigid timetable. It was early to bed, early to rise, regular mealtimes and regular toilet breaks. Everything went by the clock. By six a.m. we’d be on the parade ground, running on the spot, the screws slapping our legs if we didn’t lift our knees until our thighs were parallel to the ground. Mornings were spent doing our chores – scrubbing, polishing, cleaning – interspersed with classes or several circuits of the parade ground. Most afternoons there would be some kind of physical activity, then more classes in the evening until at eight o’clock we were banged up for the night.

  I was playing football for my house one day and scored a goal against a house that nobody ever beat. You just didn’t. They were the hardest cases of all, mostly cockneys.

  In the shower after the match, I was washing off the mud when the curtain was pulled back. ‘Awight, ya fackin’ cunt,’ a voice said through the steam and spray. I could make out three or four lads, but it might have been more. The first kick landed. I was naked and alone. They were wearing boots. Another kick. Then a punch. I swung out into the mist, but failed to connect. ‘Ya fackin’ wan’ it?’ one of them shouted and the kicks and punches rained in on me.

  I don’t know how much later it was stopped. They’d gone when I came to my senses. I was in a right state. I’d cracked my ribs and I looked a mess, but I knew there was one rule when you got beaten up like that. Don’t grass.

  That evening, one of the screws stopped me in a corridor. ‘Who did it?’ he said.

  ‘I just fell in the shower,’ I replied.

  ‘Nobody falls in the shower,’ he said. ‘Nobody looks like this …’ He was right. My face looked as if it had burst open. My mouth was swollen, bruised and bloody, although I’d managed to keep my teeth. I’ve always been dead jammy with my teeth.

  By the time it had all calmed down and I had recovered, I knew exactly who had beaten me up. So I took them out one by one. I spotted the first one – Marriot – in his billet one day. I walked in and shut the door. ‘Right,’ I said, ‘just me and you. Now.’

  He went for me, but I was too fast. I didn’t half smack him. I hit him about forty times before he hit the floor.

  The second one was a mixed-race lad from east London. I was in the kitchen pouring custard on the jam roly-poly when he came along. ‘I see you’ve beat Marriot up,’ he sniggered. ‘I’m gonna get you for that. You are gonna get so—’

  So I whacked him over the head with a ladle. He screamed as burning custard dripped down the side of his face. The screws were on us in the blinking of an eye, sparing no punches as they pinned us down. Kicking wildly and screaming at the top of my lungs, I was hauled out of the dining room with a couple of screws on each limb. Outside the dining room they beat me until I was limp, then dragged me along the corridor and threw me into a cell. Within days I was at Portland, Britain’s toughest Borstal, a place reserved for lads considered exceptionally difficult nuts to crack.

  Situated next to Verne prison and built on the Isle of Portland, a peninsula off the coast of Dorset that juts about four miles into the English Channel and which is battered by winter storms, Portland Borstal was worlds apart from Shaftesbury. At the time it was a top-security institution. I was now mixing with teenage murderers, rapists and young armed robbers. The lad in the next cell to me had poisoned his grandmother.

  The first thing I learned – and I learned it very quickly, else I wouldn’t have survived – is that when you enter a place like Portland Borstal you can’t just be yourself. It’s absolutely impossible. You shed your personal identity the moment you walk in through those heavy gates. And in that instant you adopt one of the Borstal archetypes or face the painful consequences. You had to be a poof or a hard case or a gang member or a grass. That was it. You had to fall into one of those personas. So I was in a gang. It meant I had other gang members to look after me and I looked after them. Once in a gang, nobody would come near you.

  The other thing you learned double quick was that every day you would see, hear and experience things that you would never mention outside Borstal. Things happened that were kept strictly within the walls of the institution. I’m not proud of what I saw or experienced in Portland, but it all happened. I saw lads in there getting gang-raped. I saw bullies mentally torment or physically abuse their victims until they were fit only for a straitjacket. There was a gay bloke on our landing who was quite happy to wank off whoever wanted it. I saw him do it to just about every lad on our landing, gay or straight. They were all very happy to be serviced.

  Prison and Borstal are always glamorised on television or in films, but it was nowt like Porridge or any of those programmes. There were no friendly cell mates who helped each other out. I mixed with a bunch of complete arseholes who would talk about getting out and robbing post offices or killing people. They weren’t sorry for what they’d done and Borstal wasn’t going to make them change their ways. All it did was delay the time until they committed their next crime.

  The Portland regime and routine were much tougher than at Shaftesbury. Our cells were inspected daily. We had to polish our boots, buff the floor and make sure the sheets on our beds were as taut as a painter’s canvas. We even scrubbed and dusted the pointing between the bricks in the walls. Everything had to be perfect. If not, you’d be thrown in E Wing, which
meant non-stop punishment and running around the assault course with a log on your back at five o’clock in the morning.

  The usual routine was rise at six-thirty to slop out, clean, wash and polish. Then we had to stand to attention outside our cells with our uniform pulled tight and our closely shaved hair brushed. A screw would shout ‘Right turn!’ and we’d all march down for breakfast, which was palatable but paltry. We’d take the meagre breakfast back to our cells and be locked in to eat it and get on with our work. We used to sew mailbags or count seeds into envelopes for gardening companies. Some of us were allowed out of the cells to shovel coal into the boilers or to tend the vegetable gardens. At dinner time we’d put on our shorts and vests, run around the yard for twenty minutes, then walk for the rest of the hour, after which there’d be classes in the afternoon. After school it was back to sewing bags or metalwork until we were locked up in our cells at four o’clock. We’d put on our muck – our overalls – and queue up for our tea, which we ate in our cells or in a mess hall. Usually, we’d be banged up at six o’clock, but occasionally we’d be given an hour’s recreation from six until seven o’clock, during which we could watch television, read a book, or play snooker, table tennis, cards or darts. Lights were always out by eight-thirty, when I would just lie in my cell, talking to the blokes I was locked in with or counting the bricks just to keep myself sane. I’d start at one end of one of the walls and keep going until I’d counted every single brick in my cell. It gave me a tiny sense of achievement that wasn’t part of the prison regime.

  On arriving at Portland, I was assigned to Nelson House and shown to my cell. I’d been in my cell for only a few minutes when a message was passed on to me, the first contact with anyone on my landing. ‘Barney Mulraney wants a word,’ it said.