Yours?
Mine?
Theirs?
Whose?
Why?
What for?
Fuck it …!
It’s all mad to me!
I’ll stick to my own journey.
‘It’s safer’
Welcome to my world of prisons.
Keep kicking
Till the angels come.
LOCATION: Newport, Isle of Wight – get there by ferry or hovercraft.
CAPACITY: 400 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Closed‘B’ – Male (mainly sex offenders).
OPENED: 1963 as a prison for Category ‘C’ males and in 1970 became a dispersal prison.
HISTORY: Dubbed ‘The Island’ because of its location, was closed down in 1983 when prisoners wrecked the place.
This jail is right next-door to Parkhurst Prison on the beautiful Isle of Wight. You can get to the island from the mainland by ferry or hovercraft. Albany was the first maximum secure dispersal prison with electronic doors, and it was influenced by the Lord Mountbatten report in the early 1970s that was brought about because of the many prison escapes.
I actually first landed here in the mid-1980s and from day one I felt the ‘atmosphere’ – shit. It is a very claustrophobic place with tiny square cells and little space to do anything in. The whole place reeked of despair. It had seen its share of riots, shit-ups, violence and hardships.
But nobody had ever escaped from here, which is probably why it had this imposing atmosphere about it. But it had one saving grace – lovely fish and chips on a Friday. I mean it, their fish and chips were as good as any in the country. And it had a bloody good canteen that sold a good selection of cakes and fruit. And you could order ‘meat’.
Each wing had its kitchen area, so you could cook up a nice meal. It also had a great gym.
Sammy McCarthy (ex-British featherweight boxing champ) was the gym orderly. Sammy copped eighteen years for a blag with East End gangster Harry Batt. Harry was an old pal of mine, one of the best.
Once, Sammy was cleaning up in the gym, whistling away, when all of sudden a loud-mouthed con got very argumentative; he was actually abusive to Sammy. Now this guy was maybe 14st. Sammy was just an old man, still a flyweight. ‘Excuse me,’ Sammy said, ‘Could you please calm down and treat the gym a bit nicer?’
‘Fuck off you little …’ That is all he managed to get out. Sammy had let one fly – BANG – the loudmouth was out cold.
That is Sammy – a total gentleman. And one of the nicest cons I have ever met. A wonderful man!
There was a con in Albany, a gay chap we called ‘Mary’. He was harmless, but I must say, he did look like a bird. A lot like that Una Stubbs who used to act in ’Til Death Do Us Part.
Anyway, Mary worked in the tailor shop and some con was bullying him, but it turned out Mary was no walkover. The con ended up dead with a pair of scissors through his chest.
It was also here that my next-door neighbour hung himself. I could actually smell shit. I thought it strange. He had topped himself by tying the sheets around his neck, tying the other end to the bars and jumping. It’s fact, people who hang themselves always shit themselves. The bowels and bladder just empty automatically when the muscles relax.
This may sound insane – death also has a smell to it. Don’t ask me to explain that because I can’t. But death lingers on in the air we breathe. It is a very strange smell, and would you fucking believe it, this con that hanged himself actually owed me four Mars bars. We had had a bet on the football, and I won, not that I’m saying he topped himself to get out of paying me.
Albany did have a nice big field which we used to run round on weekends. And in the summertime, the Island, as we called it, was the place to be. We were all tanned and looked liked we’d just spent the week in Tenerife. Do you know that if you got sunburn then the prison authorities classed it as being self-inflicted and they didn’t have to give you anything for it? Kind-hearted bastards! But despite the sunbathing, it was still a bad jail to be in, nobody seemed to be happy, so I wasn’t surprised to learn that it had been torn apart by the cons in 1983.
When I was there, Jennifer Rush’s ‘The Power of Love’ was number one in the pop charts. Fuck me, you may well ask, how can I remember that? Easy – I smashed the TV set because of it! During the song, cons were making too much noise and it upset me. Could that girl sing! What a voice …what a song. One of my all-time greats.
My time at Albany came to an end when I was in the kitchen; I hit a Rastafarian with a wok a dozen times over the crust. I caved his big, fat, ugly head in, the thieving bastard. He was a cell thief. He had to have some!
I actually wanted to cut his fingers off but my pal, Big Albert, said, ‘No, Chas.’ So I thought, fuck it, I’ll just cave in his canister!
I am giving Albany 1/10, and that’s only for the fish and chips.
LOCATION: Armley, Leeds.
CAPACITY: 1,250 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Dispersal and Remand – Males.
OPENED: 1847 and only had a capacity of just over 300.
HISTORY: Has had extra wings added to it over time and now acts as an allocation prison, sending prisoners received from the local courts to more permanent accommodation. Although this prison is officially titled ‘Leeds Prison’, it has become commonly known as ‘Armley Prison’.
This prison was originally designed on the ‘modern penitentiary principle’ of four radial wings. Firstly, it was a local prison catering for those around the West Riding area of Yorkshire. It played a role in judicial executions from 1864 to 1961 when ninety-four (including one female con) were executed within the prison. In 1864, the first double execution took place outside of the prison walls, which was to be the only public execution. The execution took place with up to 100,000 sightseers looking on as James Sargisson and Joseph Myers met their deaths and were left to hang for the time limit of one hour before being cut down and buried within the confines of the prison.
The most famous prisoner to be housed at Armley Prison was Charlie Peace (1832–1879), an infamous Victorian criminal. In 1879, Peace was executed by hanging in Armley Prison. A violent blagger of his time, Peace was serving time for robbery, murdering a copper and the attempted murder of another copper. By time Peace was nineteen years old he was already on his way to becoming a hardened career criminal, just like me!
At one time in Peace’s career, he actually moved to Hull and opened a café but he still continued burgling and would always carry his piece (revolver). In one incident, a copper trying to arrest Peace was shot and killed; in the mélèe, Peace escaped. Would you believe, though, that two other men (totally innocent) were arrested for the murder! Two local villains, brothers John and William Habron, were arrested for the crime. William was convicted and sentenced to death but fortunately reprieved and later pardoned.
Charlie Peace shot and killed another man in a love triangle and then escaped capture when he hid out in London for over two years where he continued with his burglaries. Eventually, Peace was caught committing a burglary; he gave a moody (false) name, but was grassed up by his mistress who thought she’d collect the reward money. Police travelled from Yorkshire to Newgate Prison, where Peace was held, and correctly identified him.
Peace stood trial at the Old Bailey in November 1878, and on the charges of burglary and attempted murder he was sentenced to life in prison. But it doesn’t end there. There was the slight problem of another murder he had to answer for. The love triangle killing of a Mr Dyson saw Peace being shipped to Sheffield, where he was charged with murder on 18 January 1879 and, at his subsequent trial, it took the jury ten minutes to find him guilty; he was sentenced to hang. This was a celebrated case and caught the imagination of the public.
While Peace was in the condemned cell, he confessed to the murder of the policeman he had killed during the bungled burglary and, as a consequence, William Habron was given a pardon.
The date for hanging Peace was set fo
r Tuesday, 25 February 1879, and it was to be a private affair, although four newspaper reporters were present. The following day, a large piece appeared in the press, and even Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum had the execution scene on show.
The only woman to hanged at Armley Prison was Emily Swann. This was a double hanging; alongside her was John Gallagher, 30, her lover. Both were hanged on 29 December 1903 for the murder of Swann’s husband, William.
For those wishing to collect data about Armley, I can tell you that the last double hanging at Armley was Thomas Riley and John Roberts on the 29 April 1932. Soon after this, double hangings stopped because of the time it took. Not out of concern for the condemned!
The last hanging to take place at Armley was that of Zsiga Pankotia, 31, a Hungarian national, on 29 June 1961. The executioner was Harry Allen.
And then I landed there a few years later.
I landed here back in 1975 for the first time and it started from the second I got off the van – eyeballing, pushing, shoving and verbal. Nothing seemed to have changed since the last hanging.
A gauntlet of gruesome-looking types met me, and led me all the way to the bowels of hell. Shining tunic buttons, polished boots and pudding-bowl haircuts … what a neat bunch of bastards they were. Nowadays, half of them look like tramps. Back then, it was a pleasure to take a beating from such a smartly turned out bunch of screws when fighting them.
Their block was down under B Wing. It was like an old castle dungeon and, in fact, the place was built like a fortress.
This place wasn’t just put together with bricks and mortar, but big slabs of Yorkshire stone. It was cold and made you shiver to the bone; no heating, one blanket and a smelly mattress added the finishing touches to the décor. I can imagine what the condemned felt like while waiting to be executed. In fact, execution was preferable to this.
There was no window (glass or plastic), just cold wind blowing in through a hole where a window used to be with the stink of despair rushing in with it.
The place was infested with vermin – rats, mice and screws. They served my meals cold. The reason for my being sent to Armley was over some assaults on screws in another jail. Hence the reception committee. They were waiting for me! That’s how it works in jail. If you attack a screw, you attack them all. You attack their system. So they love it when you arrive.
And Armley was the tough jail of the North; it also had the highest suicide rate of YPs (young prisoners). Armley jail saw three young prisoners take their own lives by hanging, all within the space of five months, from May to October 1988, and then a further two hangings in the beginning of 1989 – both were YPs.
I knew my stay here would be a crazy time, so I gave it my best shot … that’s where I ripped my door off and wrecked their precious little block. It was truly worth the drubbing I got for it. I remember that I was making my way through the cell door. A fellow con, Dave Anslow, was also making his way through his door. I managed to get through my metal door; then they had to close those cells down and we both ended up in ‘strip cells’.
They had to call in reinforcements and a score of screws, some with dogs; they were all right outside our cell doors waiting for us – our plan, obviously, never worked.
Armley is run with an iron fist. Some screws put a pair of steelcapped boots on and look as if they feel they’re entitled to kick the shit out of you.
Another gauntlet awaited me after the roof job in Walton Prison. Once more, I felt their punishment in 1985 so I write from the painful truth – Armley is a hellhole and, for a young lad, it’s probably terrifying.
Believe me, it was awesome. It even amazed me, and that’s saying something because nothing amazes me.
In fighting them, I was black and blue. As if that wasn’t enough, they left me in the box; I was stripped off like a Christmas turkey. What a way to treat a guest! Especially in Her Majesty’s house of correction. Disgusting!
The doctor came to see me; I spat a mouthful of blood all over him. ‘Fuck off, you vet!’ My lawyer at the time was Ted Saxon. He came to see me. What a joke. They took his pen off him and give him a tiny pen an inch long!
They told him, ‘It’s in case he stabs you.’ Ted told them I would never do that to him. But that is how they like to work. They seem to get a kick out of intimidating people but it doesn’t work on everybody.
You might recall the ‘Free George Davies’ campaign in the 1970s. A big campaign to get George out of jail for a robbery he did not do. It took years to prove it. In the end, the campaign won.
You might recall the Headingley cricket pitch incident in which the cricket pitch was dug up at the famous Yorkshire cricket ground as a protest to speed up the freeing of George. It was Chapman who copped for it, a diamond of a geezer. He came into Armley on remand over that. I met him there. What a smashing chap he was.
Another top chap I met in Armley was Harry Marsden, a Newcastle armed robber; he was about ten years my senior. Only a small chap, jet-black hair, with deep-set eyes, what a fighter. Harry had the heart of a lion.
He just steamed into those Leeds screws like skittles. Sadly, Harry suffered some serious physical opposition and spent years in isolation, but he won in the end. He made it home and made a decent life. I’m still in touch with Harry to this very day.
The guy beat cancer, too. I told you he was a winner. Harry reminds me a lot of Frank Fraser, a gentleman, but fuck with him and you are crippled! He got out of prison and, eventually, after more trouble, he turned his life around and became a boxing coach in the amateur ranks. He even opened his own boxing club and made me Life President of it.
Armley bent and smashed a lot of good people … it broke men into mice. Paul (Sykesy) Syke’s arms got broken; Paul fought for the British Heavyweight title against John L Gardner. Sadly, he lost. Dominick Noonan’s arm also got broken and Joe Uradits received serious injuries all as a result of fighting with screws.
I recall John Massey – he was moved to Armley Prison after he beat a prison doctor up; it was what the man had coming to him. After he arrived at Armley, he had a really hard time. Later, John had the last laugh – he escaped!
I will add this; all of those suicides in Armley in the 1970s and 1980s, 90 per cent were youngsters! They were terrified! Driven to despair! I would say to all those bad screws from that era, hang your heads in shame, as you lot were responsible for that and you lot will have to face that in your last breath on the planet. This really is a hanging prison.
But like all jails, there were decent screws and some characters, like Roger Outram. He was a screw when I met him there and then he worked up to become Governor in Belmarsh Prison.
When he was a screw, he was a tough guy, a big fella, hard as nails. A typical Yorkshireman. Loves a pint. Loves a fight. But he was a fair man, never a bully. I have known him stand toe-to-toe with a con and shake hands afterwards. He never needed nine fellow screws to back him up. And he turned out a decent governor, too! Men like that, I can respect. But the ten who jumped on my head and those who bully YPs to the point that they hang themselves, I fucking despise the maggots.
Some maggots even bring in drugs for cons. A screw from Armley Prison was jailed for two-and-a-half years after he admitted attempting to supply heroin to an inmate. I’m dead against drugs, and this reinforces what I have already said about screws supplying cons with drugs.
At Leeds Crown Court, Martin Wood, 42, was convicted when the court heard how police drug squad officers stopped him as he arrived for work at Armley Prison, Leeds, in January 2003.
The undercover police searched Wood’s car and found 2.93gms of heroin wrapped in cellophane and hidden down his underpants.
Would you believe that Wood told the coppers that he thought it was cannabis he was bringing into the prison for a man called Dickinson in E Wing.
Armley, I believe, has all changed now, but it is still Armley to me. Always will be. Belsen is Belsen. Colditz is Colditz. Alcatraz is Alcatraz. And Armley is Armley.
A bit of paint or a new wing doesn’t take away the ghosts of the past. Why kid yourself?
I am giving Armley 1/10. That is for the cell door I ripped off that cons said couldn’t be done. Stick to your Yorkshire Puddings. Leave the door game to me.
LOCATION: Maghull, Liverpool.
CAPACITY: 436 beds. Ashworth High Security Hospital today consists of two sites – Ashworth East and Ashworth North. Ashworth East has six refurbished wards, two newly built wards and the Wordsworth Ward, a new sixteen-bedded ward. Ashworth’s female patients are located on the East Site, as well as a large number of mentally ill men. A high wire wall provides physical security. Ashworth North has seventeen wards with a total capacity of approximately 370 patients.
CATEGORY PRESENT: AT Special High-Security Hospital.
OPENED: In 1878, it was sold to the overseers of the Liverpool Workhouse – Liverpool Select Vestry, who used the large house as a convalescent home for children from Liverpool workhouses. Eventually, in 1911, construction began on a new hospital to be used as an epileptic colony.
HISTORY: In 1914, the ‘Lunacy Board of Control’ bought the whole estate, including a large unfinished hospital. Before it could be pressed into use as a State institution, however, the hospital was taken over for the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers from the Great War.
In 1920, the Ministry of Pensions took the hospital over and it was not until 1933 that the hospital became a State institution.
In 1948, the hospital became part of the new National Health Service and, in 1959, the Ministry of Health took over responsibility for running the Special Hospitals.
In the 1970s, further enlargement came when the decision was taken to build a fourth Special Hospital to relieve overcrowding at Broadmoor. There was still land available from the original estate in Maghull and 50 acres of land were made available for the new Park Lane Hospital.
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