Bronson 3

by Charles Bronson

Another one where they got it all wrong! As you know, I’m not a convicted killer and they got my name wrong, too!

  To survive a murderous attack from a lunatic, one has to live that nightmare for ever.

  There was the mad, fat lunatic who had a knife stabbed into his ear, it penetrated his brain. Cabbaged, or in his case, double cabbaged, as he wasn’t the full bottle of lager to start with. Or what about the lunatic who got raped with a broken bottle by a psychosexual madman. Not nice. But what do you expect? Fruitcake and coffee? Or the religious freak who stabbed the Jew in the neck with a pair of scissors. Why a Jew? Who knows? Ask him why!

  Broadmoor has got stories that would turn your hair white overnight. And for once, I will say that those screws – er … nurses – have got their jobs cut out. They have got to have eyes in the back of their nut. Because at any time, anything can happen. There is no place like it on earth. If so, tell me where. It is hell on earth.

  It makes Parkhurst seem like a Wendy House. Ask Sutcliffe, the Ripper. He walks around bumping into things. One eye ripped out, the other one almost. Sad, really … should have been both!

  And what about the time David Francis was taken hostage by Bob Maudsley and John Cheeseman. Guess what? They cut his bollocks off and caved his skull in. All in a day’s work, I guess.

  That is Broadmoor in a nutshell. Dangerous. You can’t afford to drift off to sleep in the day room … or you may not wake up again.

  The food was excellent, but it is a quarter-of-a-century since I ate there. I am sort of only in the past. Not in the future or the present. So it could be like Butlin’s now. But I doubt it.

  How can it change with mad axemen walking about? Serial rapists and child sex killers.

  That evil bastard Erskine is there, too … who? That evil slag who killed and raped all those old people in London. Some were old men. How can it be safe with monsters like him prowling about? I bet the old lunatic hasn’t dared have a shower since he has been there.

  But I must say, there were some lovely old mad men there, too. Old boys who had spent forty years there. Some who had sat in the death cell waiting to be hanged, only to be reprieved and sent to Broadmoor. I met them all there. The good, bad and crazy mad! But think about all the pain and misery, all the violence and madness.

  I am giving Broadmoor 10/10. Why? Simply as it is the Number One Mad House on this planet. And I gave five years of my life to Broadmoor and I am proud of that.

  And not forgetting the beautiful grounds and flowers and trees. And all the lovely Berkshire countryside, even though I only saw that from up on the roof.

  LOCATION: Bicester, Oxfordshire.

  CAPACITY: 900 beds.

  CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Dispersal, Local and Remand – Male.

  OPENED: 1992.

  HISTORY: One of the so-called ‘new breeds’ of prisons. Now also acts as a training prison.

  I landed here for the first time in 1993, I was only held in the seg block while one of my many trials went on at Luton Crown Court on 6 September 1993, with Patrick Felix, my co-accused. We were up for robbery.

  And I have got to say, it was a nice stay at Bullingdon! Clean and humane. As you can see by the aerial shot, it’s a nice, neat and compact place – no messy wings spread about the place making it look like an octopus ready to take off.

  The food was good, and lots of it. And I can’t think of even one bad thing. Only I fucked it up.

  I went on a legal visit and wrapped my lawyer up; I tied him up and barricaded the visiting room!

  It was just one of those insane days. Like a train out of control, no brakes. It has got to crash. But it was not the jail. It was me.

  I am giving HM Prison Bullingdon 9/10. Why should I blame Bullingdon for my own madness? Even my lawyer sacked me! It is bloody terrible not to be wanted. When a lawyer sacks you, you are in trouble.

  LOCATION: Newport, Isle of Wight – get there by ferry or hovercraft.

  CAPACITY: 550 beds.

  CATEGORY AT PRESENT: ‘C’ Training Prison – Male.

  OPENED: 1912 by Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary of the day.

  HISTORY: This prison was originally a Detention Centre, adjoining HM Prison Parkhurst. Eventually it became a Borstal, then back to a prison, then a Borstal again, and then a corrective training regime kicked in, but was soon slung out and it became what it is today, a Category ‘C’ prison.

  This is the one of three jails on the Island. It is directly at the back of Parkhurst Prison. Unlike Parkhurst and Albany, it is not a jail for long-term prisoners, but their seg block was being used to take us at times of trouble. I was one they took. It was in the mid-1970s just before I was ‘nutted off’ and sent to Rampton Asylum.

  The van drove me out of Parkhurst; I was in a straightjacket and ankle straps with half-a-dozen screws on top of me. But I still managed to bite one on the leg.

  Once in Camp Hill Prison seg unit, they took it out on me and left me in their strip cell. Strangely, the next day I was moved back to Parkhurst the same way I had left it. That was the only time I landed in Camp Hill.

  So, it is really impossible for me to give the place a run-down, as the bastards never even gave me a cup of tea, and my breakfast was thrown on to the floor. So much for hospitality!

  The bunch who thought they were hard men for taking it out on me while I was defenceless can look back on that and praise themselves for being ‘real’ men.

  I am giving HM Prison Camp Hill 2/10, and that is only for getting rid of me the next day – they were probably scared in case I bashed any of them. I am not a nasty, embittered, evil man, but good fucking riddance to Camp Hill.

  LOCATION: Old Elvet, Durham City.

  CAPACITY: 1,000 male and 120 female beds.

  CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Dispersal, ‘B’ local, Close Supervision Centre – Male and Female (High-Security for those females serving 4 years+).

  OPENED: 1819 during the reign of King William and the same year Queen Victoria was born – this place is old!

  HISTORY: Talk about a history! You can see Durham Cathedral from its exercise yard. You used to be able to hear the mixture of chatter, banter and brass bands coming from Durham Miners’ Gala when it was on. The big clock in the town centre would rattle off the hours, every hour.

  In 1810, Durham Prison’s construction started at Elvet when the prison was designed to replace the jail in the Great North Gate. The simple reason for this was to help alleviate serious traffic congestion. A pledge of £2,000 towards the construction was made by Bishop Shute Barrington.

  On the 31 July 1809, Sir Henry Vane Tempest laid the foundation stone. The second architect to take over died during the construction, the former architect being dismissed. Finally, Ignatius Bonomi completed the construction. Durham Prison, when it opened in 1819, had 600 cells.

  Not surprisingly, Durham was a hanging prison and, in total, 92 men and 2 women were executed by being hanged at Durham between 1800 and 1958. Only 14 of these executions were public. Prior to the prison opening and up to 1816, hangings took place in the grounds of what is now the nearby Dryburn Hospital.

  Fast-forward in time, and the moonlight glints off the razor-sharp knife that Laurena holds in her hand. She steps closer to the bed, where her husband sleeps unsuspectingly. Slowly and deliberately, she pulls the covers away from his naked, unprotected body … exposing his penis. He lies still, not knowing the damage about to be inflicted upon his body. She raises the knife and brings it down …

  It was the story that shocked the world. Overnight, John Wayne Bobbitt was the man everyone was talking about, but who no one wanted to be. It was a story that sent fear into the hearts and groins of men everywhere. That was a modern-day crime, but there was an original Laurena Bobbitt.

  The last person to be hanged at the old Dryburn hanging site was Ann Crampton. She had also been found guilty of cutting off her husband’s penis while he slept. She suspected him of having an affair. On 25 August 1814, Ann was executed. At this time, society was m
ale dominated; cutting off his John Thomas was the equivalent of destroying his manhood.

  In 1816, a new courthouse was built and this included a new style of gallows known as ‘drop style’. The gallows were erected on the steps outside the new courthouse, which was right next to the prison. The first execution to take place outside the courthouse was when John Grieg was hanged on 17 August 1816 for the murder of Elizabeth Stonehouse.

  The last public execution outside the courthouse took place on 16 March 1865 when Matthew Atkinson was executed for the murder of his wife at Spen, near Winlaton, Tyne and Wear. When the trapdoor bolt was drawn, Atkinson dropped downwards and the rope broke. They got him on the second attempt.

  After the Act of 1868, all executions had to take place within the prison walls. The abolition of public hangings resulted in the gallows being set up in one of the prison yards; this was set over a brick-lined pit. This was replaced when an ‘execution shed’ was built.

  The first of these executions in Durham Prison’s grounds was a double hanging that took place on 22 March 1869, when John Donlan, 37, and John McConville, 23, were executed for unrelated murders.

  Although Rose West is housed in Durham Prison’s ‘She’ wing, she was not the earliest of prolific female serial killers. This distinction falls to the mass murderer Mary Ann Cotton (1833–73); her count of 15 killings – although some twenty people connected with her died mysteriously over a period of twenty years – remained unrivalled until the 1980s.

  After a series of mystery deaths, bodies were exhumed and it was found that arsenic was the cause of these deaths. After a short trial, Mary was found guilty on one specimen charge of murder.

  On 24 March 1873, Mary’s body fell the 18in drop when the trapdoor was released. It is reported that she began to struggle violently for three minutes before dying an agonising death. Her ghost is still supposed to haunt her old home in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. After this, the ‘long drop’ method was used for hanging executions, which was a relief to all those watching.

  There was even a triple hanging on 5 January 1874, when three murderers were convicted of unrelated crimes: Charles Dawson, Edward Gough and William Thompson. This was all to do with saving money.

  On 2 August 1875, Elizabeth Pearson, 28 – the second of only two women ever to be executed at Durham Prison – was hanged after being found guilty of poisoning her uncle in the hope that she would be left something in his will. The hanging was a triple execution; all three were simultaneously launched into oblivion. Alongside Mary were two male murderers. Both executed women are buried next to each other.

  The last person to be executed at Durham Prison was dispatched with on 17 December 1958. The execution was carried out on Brian Chandler, 20, for the murder of an 83-year-old woman, whom he had robbed.

  In the 1900s, Durham retained a permanent gallows; it was one of only a handful of prisons to do so. At that time, the execution block was on the ground floor of one of the wings near, it is said, to D Wing. Remember, when executions took place, they needed to allow room beneath the gallows for the body to drop; therefore, the gallows were usually on an upper or raised floor. In this case, the body of the condemned fell into a basement area below the trap in Durham Prison. The execution block still remains to this day, but the adjoining execution chamber and the trap doors have long been removed and the drop pit covered over. The room is still there, but is better off being used for its current purpose … storage!

  The prison has a special ‘She’ wing that was opened in 1974 for females serving four years or over; this is H Wing and housed the likes of Myra Hindley, and currently houses Rose West. At its height, the prison held 1,700 prisoners.

  Would you believe that this prison was successful in attaining the 1998 Butler Trust Award for ‘Outstanding Contribution to the Quality of Prisoner Care’? I hear they now mix nonces with ordinary cons; strange way of working, isn’t it?

  This place fascinated me. It is built in such a beautiful, picturesque place, by the river and cathedral, all so very heavenly, but behind its walls it is hell.

  I first landed here in the mid 1970s and I’ve been back to this prison, the second most northerly in England, several times. In fact, quite recently, I was caged there for eight months in their special secure unit on G Wing. But for me, I am kept in a special cage. Total isolation. They had two wings (G and I) for special cases like me, each holding nine prisoners.

  Durham Prison is a very old jail, over 200 years old, but it is a strange place as it’s one of the few jails that caters for male and female cons, all segregated, of course.

  The infamous, now deceased, Myra Hindley spent many years on their female wing. As I’ve already mentioned, Rose ‘Dog’ West is on the wing. It seems that old Rose is trying out the lesbian scene; I was told by one screw that the search team found a huge vibrator in Rose’s cell. I asked how huge.

  ‘Awesome, Charlie.’

  ‘How fucking awesome?’ I asked. When he told me, I could not believe it.

  ‘Inhuman.’

  She is just a sicko. A sexually perverted monster. Mind you, four women prisoners committed suicide in the space of a nine-month period here in 2002. Doesn’t that tell you something about the regime? An ‘open’ verdict was given by the Coroner’s Court in September 2003 for one of the four suicides, during which time the female population at the prison increased by 150 per cent.

  Some women cons actually have affairs with women screws. I recall an incident when a female con fell for a woman warder. Sharon Miller, 45, had fallen for the warder while on remand at Gloucester’s Eastwood Park Jail.

  It all got lemon, though; the two became lovers after Francesca Westcott left the prison service, but she called off their six-year affair late in 2001. Miller just couldn’t take it and she began to bombard her with telephone calls and even assaulted her. Eventually, Miller travelled to Bigyn Road in Llanelli from her home in Somerset armed with gallons of petrol. Two houses had petrol poured through their letterboxes and two families had lucky escapes. These dykes, they just go mad! Miller got ten years.

  Durham is run by the militant POA (Prison Officers’ Association) union. They have a stronghold up there (always have had) and I have always felt that the governors up there are too respectful of the POA. So they’re never really bold enough to make on-the-spot decisions. That is my own personal opinion based on my time spent there.

  I remember a young con hanged himself there in the eighties and I pulled one of the many different grades of prisoner governor at my cell door as he was doing his morning rounds.

  I asked him, ‘Can we organise a bit of a whip round for some flowers? If all the cons in the jail put in 50p each, we could have a nice few bob and give it to the lad’s family.’ The bastards never wanted to know. I believe it was the screws who were against it. If it was, then they are fucking scumbags.

  They also had some of the most bigoted screws in the country; they hate blacks, and despise Cockneys or any southerners. So if you are unfortunate enough to fall into one of these categories, be warned!

  They seem to be very tight-knit lot up there and very jealous of anybody who’s done well for themselves. The jail is mostly full of junkies or burglars, or out-and-out thugs.

  These are a hard breed of men – love a drink, love a fight. A lot of violence up that way. Even the prison officers get involved in fights on the pub and club scene in the town centre, which is predominantly frequented by the many students who attend the university and its many annexes.

  There is no real organised crime to speak of up there (more the spur-of-the-moment or drunken-stupor crime), more pot luck. They have a serious drug problem; the jail is full of drug crime, a lot of smackheads, mugging people for their next fix. They brought in special sniffer dogs and random drug-testing on cons. All that did was make cons drop the soft drug of cannabis (that stays in the system for twenty-eight days) and move on to drugs like smack that can be washed out of the urinary system within twenty-four hours.
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br />   Food? They do a lovely curry up there and there are some top screws. There is a brilliant dentist there, a woman! She also does Frankland High-Security Jail, too.

  A good education department. But the jail reeks of despair. Something very eerie about Durham, probably all the ghosts of the condemned cons they hanged there. Big crows sat on the wall looking at us as we walk around the yards. I always said, ‘I bet they are cons who were hanged and have come back to haunt the place.’

  Many screws have had them crows shit on them as they fly over. But I have never known a con being hit by them. So I could be right. Spirits … back as birds.

  Every hour, you will hear the bells of the Cathedral, and on a Sunday it is bloody murder with those church bells! Clang, clang, clang! One evening a week they do it, too. I am sure it is just to wind us cons up. I have been told that you can go up into the Cathedral’s tower and look down on the exercise yard of the prison … any ex-cons nostalgic enough might go and do it, but not me.

  Near to the prison there is a fish and chip shop, near the wall; on some nights, we could smell the aroma drifting over the wall. That winds me up, too, because I love fish and chips. You can also hear the drunks on their pub-crawls every Friday and Saturday night.

  I actually changed my name from ‘Bronson’ to ‘Ahmed’ up in Durham by deed poll. I did it out of respect for my wife’s late father.

  The cage they kept me in up there is a 12ft by 8ft cell with a steel cage door behind the solid steel door. So in the cell there are two doors keeping me locked in. They also have a cage on my window. My furniture is made up of compressed cardboard; even the chair is made from this horrible stuff, and you can see your furniture fall to bits before your very eyes and around your very body! You can be sitting on your chair one minute writing a letter and suddenly, the next minute, the chair buckles beneath you and you’re on the floor. Well, I am 16st.