Bronson 3

by Charles Bronson

  So, it is a jail that I can never forget. Parkhurst plays a big part in my character make-up today. And some of the cons I met there and fought with and against have become life-long friends and enemies. So how can a man forget? How does a war prisoner forget? You ask those who suffered in those Japanese PoW camps. The actor Peter Wyngarde who played the TV character Jason King in Department ‘S’ was a child prisoner of the Japanese. When the Japs invaded Shanghai, Peter was being looked after while his father was away in India. He spent several years in Lung-hai concentration camp and had both of his feet broken and he was put into solitary confinement.

  Well, it is the same as prison. They leave a scar.

  To me, Parkhurst has to get good marks, simply is it was my most exciting time in any jail. It was character building. A challenge. And I loved it. Even the bad times were good.

  Because, with every act of violence, you fought back with sheer madness. I spent a lot of my time in the dungeon there, battling with the screws. I cut one and I shit plenty up, and I had some good fights that they will never let me forget, but I have no real bitterness or hatred over it.

  I was a young man put to the test. Crazy but true and I would love to do it all again, but I can’t.

  I will give HM Prison Parkhurst 10/10. And I got on their roof. Nice view up there.

  LOCATION: Caledonian Road, London.

  CAPACITY: 1,100 beds.

  CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Local and Category ‘B’ – Male.

  OPENED: 1842 at a cost of £84,186 12s 2d. Notice from the aerial photo that it was designed in accordance with Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon design consisting of a central hall, with five radiating wings (one being the small centre wing), all of which are visible to staff positioned at the centre. This is still apparent in today’s layout; very little has changed.

  HISTORY: Again, look at the aerial photo of Pentonville Prison. The same four cellblocks you can see are the same ones built there over 160 years ago. Fuck all has changed, and you wonder where your taxes go when reformists say prisons have been improved!

  Believe it or not, this was the first modern prison and opened in London in 1816 – the new Millbank Prison. There were separate cells for 860 prisoners, which could deal with the rapid increase in prison numbers. This increase was due to the way certain crimes had been dropped from the capital punishment listings and the slowing down of transportation as a punishment.

  Pentonville Prison was allowed to be built after two Acts of Parliament were passed allowing for the detention of convicts sentenced to imprisonment or awaiting transportation.

  On 10 April 1840, construction started and, by 1842, the prison was ready to open. Originally, Pentonville was designed so that prisoners could have their own cell. This was mainly a punishment consideration. 520 prisoners had their own cells, which measured 13ft by 7ft and were 9ft high.

  Pentonville was to become the basic model for prisons in Britain and this prompted the building of a further fifty-four of similar design over a six-year period. Compared to Newgate Prison, conditions were vastly better and healthier.

  Life as a prisoner meant that you had to do some sort of work, such as picking coir (tarred rope) and weaving.

  I have heard that it costs about £150,000 per year to keep me securely locked up. Compare that to the cost of keeping a prisoner at Pentonville in 1842 – 15s (75p) per week.

  Until Newgate Prison closed in 1902, condemned prisoners were not housed at Pentonville Prison. The closure of Newgate meant that Pentonville had to take over the responsibility of executions. This meant that extra cells for the condemned had to be built and the gallows from Newgate were moved to Pentonville. As like the other ‘modern’ prisons of the day, the execution facilities were housed in a purpose-built shed with a typical brick-lined pit some 12ft deep.

  The most uncomfortable of walks for the condemned prisoner was when they had to walk from the prison to the hanging shed. This, again, was typical of most hanging prisons, as public hangings were abolished.

  Some prisons acted rather sooner than Pentonville in providing hanging cells. Pentonville eventually moved the hanging facilities to within the prison in the 1920s. This saved the condemned prisoner the walk to the hanging shed.

  The hanging cells were, as I’ve already said, on one of the upper floors. This was to allow the body of the condemned to drop the seven or so feet and then to account for the height of the body. So if the person being hanged was, say, 6ft tall and then the drop of the rope was 7ft, then that would be a fair old distance from the neck height of where the condemned was standing. This meant that two or three cells from the ground floor upwards were part of the hanging chamber, comprising a stack of three rooms in the middle of one of the wings. The topmost cell would house the beam from which the rope was suspended from a chain. This rope then hung down through floor hatches.

  One of the cells below this cell housed the lever that opened the trap doors and the ground-floor room acted as the pit into which the prisoner was launched. All apart from HM Prison Durham used this type of hanging system.

  Would you believe that people actually applied for the job as hangman? The course to be a hangman lasted for one week. Can you see your local college advertising such courses – ‘Hangman, a two-day taster course’ or ‘DIY Hangman for Beginners’?

  At Pentonville Prison you could become a qualified hangman. They were taught how to calculate and set the drop, pinion the prisoner and carry out an execution with speed and efficiency using a dummy in place of the prisoner. As mentioned already, one of the most prolific hangmen to ever live was Albert Pierrepoint.

  The dummy used by these trainee hangmen was called ‘Old Bill’. The trainees practised hooding and noosing Old Bill, getting the eyelet of the noose in the right place and learning the system of what was supposedly humane hanging.

  The only humane part of the hanging was when the white cap was drawn over the head of the condemned. What else is humane about hanging someone? After attending the course, the trainees were given a test and that was it – a degree in hanging.

  There were 120 hangings carried out in Pentonville Prison from 1902 to 1961. The first to be hanged on the 30 September 1902 was John Macdonald, who was convicted of murder. The infamous Dr Crippen was hanged at Pentonville on 23 November 1911.

  During World War II, six spies were hanged at Pentonville under the provisions of Section 1 of the Treachery Act 1940. They were Carl Meier, Jose Waldeburg, Charles Albert Van Der Kieboom, Oswald John Job, Pierre Richard Charles Neukermans and Joseph Jan Van Hove. Hangman Albert Pierrepoint dispatched Waldeburg and Meier on 10 December 1940 and Kieboom a week later on the 17 December by Stanley Cross, having had his appeal dismissed.

  The address of 10 Rillington Place sounds familiar, and so it should be. This was the start of multiple murders, which led, first, to Timothy John Evans (9 March 1950) and then, some years later, John Reginald Halliday Christie (15 July 1953) being hanged in Pentonville Prison by Albert Pierrpoint.

  The last man to be hanged at Pentonville Prison was Edwin Albert Arthur Bush, aged 21, on 6 July 1961, when he was executed for the murder of shop assistant Elsie Batten.

  It was 1976 when I popped in there, well after the last hanging had taken place. I was on my way to Wandsworth from Parkhurst and the van got a call to direct me there. I never knew why; probably a security thing to do with Wandsworth.

  Pentonville only kept me three days and moved me on to Wandsworth. So my three days there is a bit short to assess the place, the food and the routine, but the previous hanging history is awesome! Bring back the birch; let’s have a whip round.

  The seg block was like all the other old blocks in any jail, dark and gloomy with an eerie smell of decay and death. This place is now 162 years old. It looks it, too. The food was pig swill, even the water tasted old.

  The screws were typical old school – peaked caps, shiny boots, starched collars, the military swagger. Half the prats never got past the rank of private in the
forces. The odd one or two sweated it up to the rank of corporal. But that was only for grassing on their pals. The very few élite may have made it into the SAS. These were the best type of screws. Proper men. They never fucked about with silly psychological games.

  The mattress was one of the old straw-filled ones, lumpy, and even the pillow was filled with straw.

  Do you know, all these years later, I still can’t get used to sleeping on prison mattresses. The very thought of hundreds, even thousands of men being on it before me, wanking, coughing and farting. I still can’t face up to that.

  I will give HM Prison Pentonville 4/10. Fuck knows why, but I have got to give it something.

  PS – I never did go back! Thank fuck.

  LOCATION: Retford, Nottingham.

  CAPACITY: 437 beds.

  CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Special Secure Hospital – Male and Female.

  OPENED: 1910.

  HISTORY: Opened as England’s first State institution for mentally defective people considered dangerous.

  Do you know that the now deceased former Prime Minister of England, Winston Churchill, when he was Home Secretary, held views that were no different to those of Germany’s World War II Chancellor, Adolf Hitler?

  Churchill, like Hitler, was a strong supporter of sterilisation. The extreme views of Churchill were that 100,000 moral degenerates should be given forcible sterilisation! These views were considered so sensitive that they were kept secret until 1992.

  Here is what Churchill said:

  ‘The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded classes, coupled with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitute a race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. I feel that the sources from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.’

  (Winston Churchill to Prime Minister Asquith, 1910, quoted by Clive Ponting in the Guardian Outlook 20/6/1992)

  Rampton Hospital is a high-secure unit with a developing occupational therapy service which aims to provide individual treatment and group work for learning disabilities, mental health, women’s services and personality disorder service users. Clients are seen as in-patients on the wards and in day centres.

  The occupational therapists facilitate group work in clinical dayservice settings. This is proven to be the most appropriate method of meeting a wide range of patients’ clinical needs given the finite occupational therapy resource. Staff devise and implement specifically selected and appropriately structured groups in response to the identified needs of the patients.

  It was December 1978 when I landed in this funny farm and, believe me, I did not know that any such places existed.

  I had just been certified criminally insane over two violent attacks at Parkhurst. One on a con and the other on a screw and it was at Newport Crown Court, on the Isle of Wight, where I was given an indefinite life section, or ‘sectioned off’. Such is life.

  So there I was at Rampton secure asylum in a world of madness. What an understatement! Total fucking insanity beyond anything I have ever known. Rampton at this time was a brutal establishment.

  OK, you are going to say, ‘How come? Why is it?’ Well, I will tell you. Because it was a place where serious liberties could take place. After all, we were classified as being insane. Who would believe a madman compared to the high rollers from the establishment?

  I cannot count on my fingers or toes how many times I was beaten up, but it wasn’t the beatings that were the biggest fear, it was something far more sinister than you could imagine … it was the psychotropic drugs they forced me to take. If I refused to take them orally, I would be attacked and be given these drugs by injection.

  The screws in Rampton are, in fact, psychiatric nurses. Now you tell me what sort of nurse wears size 10 boots and a prison officer’s uniform? Those nurses are not the sort of nurses you would want looking after you when you’re feeling poorly.

  But they all got kicked back in the face, as a massive police inquiry took place over the brutality there and many were sacked over it. Had the lunatics dreamed that as well?

  Rampton, at this time, was no different from a strict detention centre, or a Borstal. It was run on fear – ‘Do as we tell you, or you will be sorry!’

  I spent eleven months on Drake Ward, which was the intensive care unit for the disruptive element and, believe me, we got it every day – cold baths, wet towel treatment, kickings, psychological torture, our whole day was made a misery.

  We had to scrub floors, wash walls. We were like a load of slaves. There were only twelve of us on the ward. The screws outnumbered us.

  At 8.00pm, it was bedtime. We had just a bed and piss pot. We were not even allowed a book to read. Bed was for sleep. At 6.00am, we would be up, slopping our piss pots out, marching about like lunatics.

  But do ‘patients’ do this? So nurses make you do this? To me, Rampton was a hellhole. No wonder the police were brought in. After the police inquiry, and court cases, and sackings, the place cooled down.

  Like the Scrubs inquiry, it all cooled down. But in time, they all slip back into hell. Rampton holds a lot of nightmares in the way it treated its inmates. Remember, this is a place that has been around for a good ninety-four years.

  It is a gloomy-looking, red-brick institution, where madmen were probably sent to die. I met some old boys there who had been there for forty years and more. They had dead eyes, faces of stone.

  Obviously, nowadays, it has all changed. They can’t get away with such atrocities.

  Did you know that epilepsy was once regarded as a mental illness? And people were locked up for it. Did you know young girls having babies were also locked up in asylums? Our asylums are a disgrace. What they did to people from the 1920s to the 1980s was shameful. Lobotomies, leucotomies, electric shock treatment (without anaesthetic). Please believe it, they are a bloody disgrace. An insult to humanity.

  This country should hang its head in shame for the human misery we have caused. But for me, it was the drug abuse. The liquid cosh. What right has anybody got to inject drugs into another human being? Animal rights activists fight for animals. Well, what about the lunatics? Do we not matter?

  I have very few, if any, good memories of Rampton. Ask anyone who spent time in Auschwitz if they had any good times. They will spit in your face.

  That is how I feel about Rampton. More so, as it was a hospital. So it should not have been like that.

  Nowadays, I read, it is a nice place. With sickos there like Beverly Allitt. Discos! Bingo! Gym! TV! Films! Well, I never had any of that, I can assure you.

  I will give Special Secure Hospital Rampton 0/10. Sorry, but I would be a madman to give it any more.

  LOCATION: Warrington, Cheshire.

  CAPACITY: 1,000 beds.

  CATEGORY AT PRESENT: ‘C’ – Male.

  OPENED: 1965.

  HISTORY: Originally opened as a Remand Centre. Always suffering setbacks due to those nasty prisoners committing suicide and always overcrowded. Suffered riots and uprisings as well as poor reports by prison inspectors, this resulted in the prison becoming a training prison. Had a female wing, but this closed in 1999 and became a detox centre for female prisoners … it soon closed down after a few months. Operates a sex offender treatment programme. I didn’t know they had gas chambers there? How come sex offenders are considered more worthy than female prisoners?

  I first landed in Grisly Risley, a shit-hole, in 1969 and I returned there six times afterwards; I must have liked it or something. I could write a book on this place alone. It really was a hellhole. It stunk of death. Suicides. It was a brutal place for youngsters. Some just cracked and topped themselves.

  I actually witnessed my first suicide at Risley. And, believe me, it is not a nice sight. I was only a boy myself, seventeen years old, when I saw the lad hanging in his cell. It really had a bad affect on me. Nightmares. It really is not a nice experience. But what is really sick in jail is t
hat once the body is taken out, the next day just goes on as if fuck all has happened.

  Screws shouted their fat mouths off. With their big fat arses and beer bellies. I used to watch them and wonder, do they go home and start on and brutalise their own kids like that? Or bash their wives up … as many are divorced and like a drink?

  I changed my whole character just by being in Risley. It all became a game to me. If I could get one over on the pigs … I would. And I met lads who became life-long ‘brothers’.

  It’s in those places that real criminals are created. We come in naughty boys … we go out dangerous bastards. It’s a fact. That first bit of porridge sticks to you like glue. Does shit stick to a blanket? Does prison stick to a kid?

  It sets like rock inside your guts. And you turn to concrete. You become as relentless and ruthless as the screws.

  I could not count on my fingers and toes how many times I was beaten up by those pigs. But the reason for that was because I would not stay down, I came back worse. In the end, I think that they gave up and gave me a bit of space.

  The cells were tiny. No air. Stuffy. The visits were in closed cubicles behind glass. On one visit, I butted out the glass in frustration. The food was shit. Risley had its fair share of riots. But considering it was a newish jail, built in the mid-1960s, it was a fucking disgrace.

  There were rats there as big as cats! One night, I was looking out of my cell window when a guard dog caught one and tore it to shreds. The shriek of that rat went into my soul. It was then that I knew I was in hell.

  Another time, I lost the plot and stabbed a guy straight through his eye. That just wasn’t me. I could never dream of doing such a nasty thing. But that’s what a place like that turns you into.