Bronson 3

by Charles Bronson

  I burnt nonces with lighters and fags. I cut them. I stabbed them. I jumped on their legs ’til I heard a crack, laughing as I did it. If you live in a hate factory then you become it.

  Fortunately, all the scum I ever attacked were either sex cases or grasses, and all the screws I attacked were bullyboys. So I have no regrets. I did to them what ten would do to me, but I did it on my own! And did I do it from behind? No! I came at them face to face. How I enjoy it!

  It was in the gym; I felt I had lost my way. I’d got 150lb on the bar for a bench press. I saw this fat nonce come in the gym; he had been in all the papers for raping an old lady. So I thought, ‘Yeah, he can have some.’

  I called him over and told him to have a go at the bar. As he lay on the bench, I dropped it towards his neck. Somehow, he moved in that split second. He would have died instantly and I would have died with him on a life sentence. I had to get a grip of myself before Risley buried me away with all the dead souls it created.

  For a young lad, I was a tortured wreck on a mission to hell. It was years later in 1985 when I almost died in Risley.

  But to me, this place was the start of my madness, it scars the brain, warps the mind. I have not really any nice things to say about the place. Only for the smashing pals I met there – Tommy Tedstone, Snowy, Andy Vassal, Sonny Carroll, Johnny Owen, Dominick Gallagher, Chrissy Hendrix, Barry Davis and his brother Ernie. Men I have grown up with. For that I am grateful to have been a part of it all.

  A lot of people are not friends. They will leave you in the shit. Even watch you die. A true friend stands with you in times of trouble. My true pals have stood and fought with me against terrible odds. And I love them all for it!

  The ones who ran – or stood and watched – I have no bad feelings towards, but they’re cowards. It’s for them to face themselves. Risley, sadly, broke many. But it couldn’t break me.

  One of the more bizarre times at Risley Prison was when Keith Hull was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment for offences relating to her/his shop that was selling items of a sexual nature. Oh, and she got a £6,000 fine on top of the sentence!

  Keith had become Stephanie and had truly changed into a female, but she was the only woman on the female wing who hadn’t been born a woman. Although she only spent three nights in Risley, it was three nights of hell, sleeping on a mattress on the floor and with nothing but a pot to piss in. After three nights, she was transferred to an open prison.

  After three months, she won her appeal due to the sentence being too harsh. Good job she wasn’t put on the male wing!

  I see Risley is another prison that now mixes sex offenders with normal cons. Many prisons keep sex offenders in separate wings but Risley, which is Britain’s largest Cat ‘C’ prison, integrates them. This has led to the sex cases avoiding other cons by segregating themselves. This is the mentality of prison governors for you, but all the more nonces to get beaten up … lovely!

  I will give HM Prison Risley 3/10 for trying to break me.

  LOCATION: Southall Street, Manchester.

  CAPACITY: 1,200 beds.

  CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Core – Male (includes Category ‘A’ prisoners).

  OPENED: 1868.

  HISTORY: April Fool’s Day 1990 saw the start of the Strangeways Riot, which ended on 25 April 1990. An event in Strangeway’s history that is forever marked by the way it revealed systematic abuse of prisoners and their rights. This riot holds the record as being the longest in British penal history.

  Strangeways Prison in Southall Street, Manchester, was built to replace New Bailey Prison in Salford that closed in 1868. Originally opened as ‘Salford Prison’ in 1868, it housed both males and females in separate units.

  In 1963, the females were moved out to HM Prison Styal and the unit that housed the women became a Borstal allocation and remand facility. In 1965, the Remand Centre closed and the remand prisoners were moved to Risley Remand Centre. But by 1980, the prison system was full to the gunwales and prisoners were jam-packed like sardines (four to a cell) and the prison, again, took in remand prisoners.

  The prison riot of 1990 caused a sharp improvement to the outdated facilities and much of the prison was substantially rebuilt. The old design was another one of the prisons using the panopticon (radial) concept that was being employed all over Britain at the time. Designed by Alfred Waterhouse in 1861, Waterhouse was assisted by Joshua Jebb, the Surveyor General of Prisons, who had also been involved with the design of London’s Pentonville Prison, as previously mentioned.

  When construction was completed in 1869, the cost stood at £170,000. Originally, where the prison now stands was Strangeways Park and Gardens, hence the name ‘Strangeways’. You can’t miss Strangeways with its imposing watchtower and two large gatehouses.

  Another one of the execution prisons, Strangeways became the setting for executions for the area after the closure of the original Salford Prison. Like all of the hanging prisons, this prison had the same basic set-up.

  When executions were moved inside the prison, it was to be B Wing that housed the killing area. In total, there were 100 hangings carried out within its walls, a nice round figure to end on … how many of them were innocent?

  The first woman to be executed by hanging at Strangeways was Mary Ann Britland, 38, on 9 August 1886.

  Remember when I told you about Charlie Peace being hanged at Armley Prison? Well, our Mr Peace had an admirer in the form of John Jackson. The hanging of Peace set Jackson on a whirlwind life of crime that was to end in him being hanged for murder at Strangeways Prison, an execution that was carried out by James Berry on 7 August 1888.

  One of only four females to be hanged at Strangeways was that of a namesake of the hangman Harry Allen. Margaret Allen was a butch dyke lesbian who dressed in men’s clothes and insisted on being called by a male name, namely ‘Bill’.

  The execution (for murdering a woman who had come to borrow a cup of sugar) of Allen, 42, was performed by Albert Pierrepoint on 12 January 1949.

  Probably the fastest hanging in history took place here when, on 8 May 1951, when James Inglis, convicted of murdering a prostitute, bolted for the gallows from his condemned cell and his escorts had to run alongside him. Executioner Albert Pierrepoint completed the hanging in just seven seconds! This was the nearest thing to a DIY hanging that you could get; Inglis even assisted Pierrepoint in pinioning his arms in the condemned cell … some people have a death wish!

  The last of four women to be executed at Strangeways was Louisa May Merrifield, 46, who had been convicted of poisoning a seventy-nine-year-old, bed-ridden widow who lived in Blackpool.

  On the morning of Friday, 18 September 1953, several hundred people wanting to see the death notices displayed besieged the prison. At this time, there was an unwritten rule in the Home Office that poisoners should always hang.

  One of the last two hangings to take place in England and the UK was that of John Robson Walby (also known as Gwynne Owen Evans) and took place in Strangeways Prison on 13 August 1964. The hangman was called Harry Allen.

  In a bizarre twist, while this was going on, simultaneously in Walton Prison, the second of the two last hangings in the UK was taking place and the name of the man being hanged was Peter Anthony Allen.

  Rebuilding work and a change of name hasn’t changed the prison’s demeanour … it still looks a gruesome place. Although they renamed the place ‘Her Majesty’s Prison Manchester’, everyone still calls it by the old name.

  I can’t believe that it is an amazing decade-and-a-half since the most famous riot took place, and I fucking missed it! I was actually in the seg unit in Parkhurst Prison when it all exploded at Strangeways. That was one riot I truly would have loved to have been involved in, but it wasn’t to be. Don’t life suck!

  I first hit Strangeways in the 1970s, again in the ’80s and again in the ’90s. It is a tough hard jail. It is Manchester’s answer, with a vengeance, to Wandsworth Prison in London … cold and cruel.

 
; Screws in the 1970s and ’80s where a brutal, cold-hearted bunch; they ran Strangeways with a rod of iron.

  When you hit their seg block, you bounced off the walls. You left your blues behind. Men have begged and cried in that hellhole. Governors and doctors turned a blind eye to it all.

  My good pal Tommy Flanagan’s head was used as a football; how he survived is a miracle – he was a right fucking mess.

  It is no good. There are mugs who say it didn’t go on, or it can’t go on. The proof is for all to see. Strangeways was a brutal regime, run by evil scum. Basically, the word is ‘cowards’. Ten men punching and kicking one defenceless man can’t be anything but cowardly, can it?

  There was a white line painted on the floor in their seg unit, and the rule was, ‘you walk around it … not on it, or over it’. If you did, they jumped you.

  My first spell there, I said, ‘Bollocks to your line,’ and I can put my hand on my heart and say I never did walk around it nor ever would. Simply because the bullies don’t frighten me. I said, ‘You can beat the shit out of me, but the first opportunity I get … I will have one of you snakes.’ That has always been my way of life. So fuck their silly white line. And if everybody said ‘Fuck it’ then there would never be a white line, would there? You are not sent to prison to be humiliated; you are sent there to be punished. A silly white line is a made up thing to degrade you.

  Strangeways pushed and pushed and pushed too far. Cons got sick of it. The screws were a disgrace to the prison service, and when it went off, what did the screws do? They shit it and legged it! They evacuated like the cowards they are. That just about sums it up.

  The riot opened a big can of maggots; a lot of truths came out, but it cost the ringleaders years of their lives, especially Alan Lord. Alan had already served ten years of a life sentence. Now it is over twenty-four years on and he is still a Category ‘A’ man and still no chance of getting out. Others copped ten years and eight years and so on. But what did the cowardly screws get for all their violence? Fuck all!

  Years and years of torturing cons. The food there was filth; the whole jail was a hate factory. A warehouse full of hatred, all boxed up in little stinking cells, it pumped in hate and spurted out bitterness.

  I went back there in the mid-nineties, only for a month, just passing through on a tour of the jails. I must say, the seg unit was clean and the food was brilliant, and the screws were decent to me. It was a completely different place to what it had been.

  The cons up there have a lot to thank the rioters for, because they lost everything to make it a better place. But it is sad to have to say it. A good majority of cons today are only shitheads, anyway. Filthy smackheads. They’re mugging old grannies to get their next fix. To me, they should be in a dungeon with fuck all. Because they are scum. They give Christians a bad name. What is the code of honour, the morals, the self-respect? The scum would have crawled around that white line and licked the screw’s arse for a gram of smack. And Alan Lord lost his freedom for you maggots! It really does sicken me, but that is how it is.

  Strangeways to me will always be what it was. It is only a matter of time ’til it falls back into the hole of evil. And with today’s cons, it is all it deserves.

  As the van rolled out of the gate I thought, ‘Why, God? Why did I miss that riot? Am I destined to be unlucky?’

  I will give HM Prison Strangeways 3/10, just because it robbed me of the riot!

  LOCATION: Wakefield, West Yorkshire.

  CAPACITY: 700 beds.

  CATEGORY AT PRESENT: High-Security – Male.

  OPENED: 1849.

  HISTORY: Housed local heroes until 1945 when it became a training prison. All that changed when, in 1975, it became a high-security dispersal prison. The majority of prisoners are lifers, some of who have committed the gravest of sexual crimes. Look at the aerial photo and you’ll see that there are four wings, one of which houses an assessment centre for the ‘Sex Offender Treatment Programme’. I mean, they honestly think that they can cure a sex offender! And Bronson can fly! A cured sex offender is a dead sex offender.

  I first hit here, ‘Monster Mansion’, back in 1974. Since then, I have been back a dozen times, if not more, and every time to their F Block. I last visited there in 2003 and, as I write the finishing touches to this book, I am still here. No doubt, though, I’ll be off on my tours once again, so don’t go writing to me here until you’ve checked my address out on my official website, mentioned at the end of this book.

  Let me first describe their cage. It is a cell with two doors, first one door and 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. Shoes are kept outside the door. We wear a green-and-yellow boiler suit, called a ‘Canary Suit’ for obvious reasons. Our life is spent, twenty-three hours a day, caged up. You come out for your one hour in the yard, alone. Never less than eight screws wait for the unlocking of the inner door. Some days there are more than eight screws and some days there’s a dog, too.

  It is the end of the world. You can’t go in deeper. This is the belly of the beast! The bowels of hell. This is living in hell. I don’t mean that the screws beat you up ’cos this lot in here at the time of writing seem to have left old Bronco alone; can’t understand why.

  Just because you’re not being beaten up doesn’t mean that it is a cushy place, you’ve also got mental cruelty. You look around for things to occupy your mind. You might find a loose button and start to flick it in the air with your thumb, you count how long it stays up for and catch it, but when I’ve done this in the past, the screws soon cotton on and stamp on it, smashing it to pieces. Anything to stop you using your mind is a bonus to some of them, but you still get the odd gentleman screw, they know who they are.

  I spent my time being as mentally creative as possible, anything to keep my mind active. I would train spiders and cockroaches. Now, a spider is a real predator, go to poke them and watch the brave ones rear up to defend themselves. You learn a lot from these things.

  You wouldn’t think that spiders and insects could learn things; you wouldn’t believe that they could be taught, but with time and patience they can be taught many things. I had the time to teach them new things and to keep them occupied, which in turn fed my need to be kept mentally active.

  An insect’s reflective and inbuilt behaviour can be learned and then used to train them. The secret is this; don’t try to teach them to think like a human, you have to think like them. Think like a spider. Think like a cockroach. You have to think ‘survival’ and think small. In such surroundings, a spider can become a great friend. I had a special one which I called Harry, naturally. Have you ever seen a spider stranded in a bath? He can’t climb out ’cos the surface is too slippery. I’ve heard that people actually buy ‘spider ladders’ so that the stranded spider can climb out of the bath … great thinking.

  Well, if you use the fact that a spider avoids shiny surfaces, then you can determine where he/she will walk or climb. Now you are starting to think like a spider, see. A spider will not ‘web down’ on a full stomach, but it will in the evening. So you can start to build on this knowledge.

  I had Harry trained to go into his little hideaway when I tapped twice. When I heard the cell door being opened, I would tap on the floor or wall next to him and he’d be off scurrying in to his hole. It took a little while; I’d first set out by tapping and then pushing him in the direction of the hole. The pushing made him fear for his safety so he would be off and, eventually, to avoid being pushed, he would be off as soon as he heard those two taps.

  I even trained cockroaches to follow a pre-defined path I’d marked out. The secret is to know how a cockroach thinks. He thinks in terms of safety; he knows that if he’s on a light-coloured surface that he’s going to be found, so he stays on the dark-coloured surface, whenever he can. So if you mark out a dark-coloured road for him on a shiny surfa
ce then he sticks to the dark road. I’d create a dark road by dragging the heal of my boot over the ground, causing a black, dull trail. At mealtimes, I’d put morsels of food down at the end of the black trail and watch them follow the leader to the food. I guess that’s enough spider and cockroach training – just because it helped keep me sane, I don’t expect you to do it.

  Wakefield Prison holds 700 lifers, and it is heaving full to the rafters with sex cases and killers of kids. So, in a sense, it is good I am in a cage and no part of that place. You know when you were a child and, maybe, you believed that monsters existed and lurked about waiting to jump out of the dark and get you, well … monsters do exist. As they live in Monster Mansion.

  The mansion houses the likes of Robert Black, Michael Stone (not the former UFF hitman from Ireland), Howard Hughes (you all remember that bastard with the little girl in Rhyl, he took her out of a tent and killed her), and Duffy the Railway Rapist killer. They are all up there, you can smell the beasts, it reeks of monsters.

  Serial sex attackers, old lady rapists and child-killers, they are all there. All under one evil roof. Victor Miller. This piece of shit raped and killed a boy and sexually assaulted twenty-eight others. He has got a colour remote-control TV in his cell. Oh yes, only the best for the worst.

  I get a piss pot, and they get spoilt silly. Wakefield is always known as a Monsters’ Paradise. Hundreds of them. The prison is also giving out condoms to homosexuals. Can you make this shit up? It is for health and safety, to stop the spread of AIDS. When I took Phil Danielson hostage in Hull Prison, he had previously criticised my art as targeting gays. Well, if that is to be taken in context, then maybe Phil should have a word with Wakefield Prison bosses over this, as they are perpetuating the fact that gays are spreading AIDS. I’ve got nothing against gays, but when they try and force me to be part of their world then they had better watch out. Just as if a man forces himself on to a woman then he, too, should watch out.