Famous Prisoners of Wormwood Scrubs , livre ebook

Andrews UK - Stephen Wade

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95 pages

English

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Wormwood Scrubs is Britain's most 'media-soaked' prison. Its celebrity inmates have provided the tabloids with many good stories, from Rolling Stone Keith Richards - banged up for drugs offences - to notorious spy George Blake, whose escape enthralled the country. It has entertained the Master of the Queen's music, Sir Michael Tippett, socialist scrapper Fred Copeman, rebellious soul Pete Doherty, influential writer Joe Orton, lifetime litigant Lord Alfred Douglas, fraudster John Stonehouse and professional con Charles Bronson.In this book, you'll read about the forgotten, as well as the famous; the plain as well as the extraordinary. It is an enthralling gallery of rogues, liars, spies, mountebanks, lovers of courtroom strife and general, all-round villains who did anything to get rich.

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Histoire

Prison

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	05 juin 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781909183520
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0324€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Title Page
Famous Prisoners of Wormwood Scrubs
by
Stephen Wade

Publisher Information
First published in 2014 by
Chaplin Books
1 Eliza Place
Gosport PO12 4UN
www.chaplinbooks.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed in 2014 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2014 Stephen Wade
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder for which application should be addressed in the first instance to the publishers. No liability shall be attached to the author, the copyright holder or the publishers for loss or damage of any nature suffered as a result of the reliance on the reproduction of any of the contents of this publication or any errors or omissions in the contents.

Quote
The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison air;
It is only what is good in man
That wastes and withers there ...
Oscar Wilde: The Ballad of Reading Gaol
‘ You’re a writer? I’ve got a book in me.
It’s my brain what got me here in this nick.’
Prisoner in creative writing class, behind the walls of the Big House

Preface
Reasons to be Banged Up
You are taken from the meat wagon, in a gaggle of other poor cons. They might have been behind bars before, but you haven’t. You walk into reception and answer questions, then gradually you have to hand over everything in your pockets and everything you have on, all of which is bagged up and stashed in ‘property’ until you come out. Then you acquire some prison clothes and have a quick medical inspection. Not long after, still dazed and numb from the court cell and the mobile box in which you crouched after the trial, you are offered over-heated food that tastes like wet cardboard. Questions are still being fired at you. Your muscles have been aching for hours and your head is thumping, but something inside urges you to show a bit of front. Can’t be seen to be weak , a little voice deep inside tells you. Under the front, your heart is beating faster than usual. You’ve heard stories about bending down to pick up the soap, about men starved of sex for years. Then there’s the food - there are razor blades in the cabbage soup, aren’t there? Then, if you don’t do as the boss on the wing says, you’ll be weeping and peeing yourself by bedtime.
Is this 1900? Or maybe 1950? Or today? It could be any time. Truth or imagination? Either way, you’re in the Scrubs or any Victorian nick like it, and there’s that distinctive smell, a mixture of stale soup and despair. When I spent time inside, based in the prison library, there was a smell of curry and beans from the kitchens down below, and I didn’t know whether to feel hungry or sick. It was a borderline emotion.
But wait a minute - the old villains who write their memoirs of time in stir seem to let it all wash off their backs. Harry did a six, Tommy was given a ten, Tom had that rotten beak who gave him a score. No problem - there’s food, there’s no bills through the door and the missus don’t whine at you. That’s what the old lags say. That’s true crime.
Fair enough, but this book tells a different story. It’s about lives on hold, and most of the people in this book were inside for offences that had nothing to do with assaults or murders. No, they went into the Scrubs because they were born out of time, because they were wrong-headed in their slender grasp of the morals of the age. A different era might have judged them differently.
***
Life inside British prison walls has not essentially changed since the old houses of correction and local gaols were reformed and reshuffled in 1878, when the first step was taken towards setting up a national system. Today’s prisons may offer more education; they are staffed and supported by specialists in the social sciences and criminology; dedicated officers guide prisoners through their sentence planning, and of course there are ‘listeners’ - people trained by the Samaritans - to help anyone in need of a friend. But these things have not changed the basic human situation: that of the man or women deprived of liberty and placed in a small cell, either alone or with some other convict chosen at random. Hundreds of strangers surround them, each in their own small cells - and the high prison walls are the boundaries of their new existence.
The chattering classes may feel a pressing need to debate the prisoner’s right to vote or to have English lessons, yet such matters are marginal from the perspective of the daily life of a prisoner. Far more important are visits by relatives and lawyers, plentiful food, access to a phone and strategies to stave off boredom.
This book is about Wormwood Scrubs, but will inevitably be recognisable by anyone who has served time in a British prison. The profile of the place will be a heady mix of frustration, anger, fear, tedium, suppressed emotions, and a struggle to understand the ‘regime’, as life inside is termed. British prisons back in the 1870s were conceived and created by military minds: the life inside was a discipline and the regime was headed by a Governor, who was often ex-army. At HMP Northallerton, the Governor had been one of the men in the Charge of the Light Brigade. Even today, spend an hour walking around a prison and you will see more or less the same scenes that people saw a century ago: someone cleaning the floor; prisoners being moved under escort, cell doors slamming, ‘suits’ stepping purposefully towards their meeting, queues for medication, and busy nurses and in-reach staff, on the alert for medical emergencies or attempted suicides.
The Scrubs is no different. Like all our prisons, it has now has a gym as well a library, a multi-faith room as well as a chapel. It has, admittedly, had more than its share of celebrity inmates; its formidable entrance and gates have been seen in The Italian Job , The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and A Very British Coup - and it has even allowed the cameras inside the prison for a documentary. But what has remained unchanged throughout its history is the most fundamental aspect of the ‘Big House’: the prison population - who they are and why they are there.

Michael Hordern outside the gates of the Scrubs, in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)
New offences arrive on the statute books year by year, but the reasons for incarceration remain basically the same. There are no poachers in the pads now, but in general terms, the list of prisoners for 1881 compares closely with that of today. In 1881 they came from all corners of the land and some from abroad; some were doing a short stretch for small thefts or drunken assaults; some were facing long years of hard labour and some were destined for convict prisons as the population was dispersed. In earlier centuries, some of them would have been hanged, drawn and quartered for high treason. They’d all transgressed: fallen short, or cross the line; gone too far or not done enough. They were criminals because they were feckless or they’d had bad luck, or they had deliberately harmed someone or wrecked something - anything from a marriage to a building. The nature of transgression is just the same today. Does evil enter into things? Prisons have their fair share of murderers and rapists, but ‘evil’ is something best left to the true crime books and sensational films.
Wormwood Scrubs is London’s most media-soaked prison. Its famous and infamous inmates have provided the tabloids with many good stories, from musicians like Rolling Stone Keith Richards - banged up for drugs offences in 1967 - to notorious spies like George Blake, whose escape from the prison in 1966 enthralled the country. It has entertained the Master of the Queen’s Music, Sir Michael Tippett, socialist scrapper Fred Copeman, rebellious souls like Pete Doherty and Charles Bronson, and influential writers like Joe Orton. Many former inmates have written books about their prison experiences and the time they spent on its wings is often recalled with something approaching affection - no doubt because they were rubbing shoulders with so many celebrities.
The stories in this book deal with the forgotten, as well as the famous; the plain as well as the extraordinary. It is a gallery of rogues, liars, spies, mountebanks, lovers of courtroom strife and general, all-round shit-stirrers who did anything to get rich. Their stories are never dull and sometimes (as is the case with Peter Wildeblood who faced a humiliating trial at a time when homosexuals were reviled and abused in public) they are shocking. All the inmates featured, incidentally, are men: after 1902, there were no more women prisoners at the Scrubs.
All the London prisons have attracted great media interest. Back in 1860, the great documentary writer Henry Mayhew, with his mate John Binnie, got to work on a huge compendium telling the reader everything they could possibly want to know about every prison in London. Wormwood Scrubs is absent from the book, not having opened until 1891, and its absence has always made it seem curiously modern.

An illustration from Mayhew and Binnie’s 1862 book on London prisons, showing the chapel at Pentonville Prison during a service
Today, there is an ever-growing literature about prisons, and the sociologists and social historians are hard at work looking into the archives. But the prisoner is not really interested in the wider picture: just that their liberty has been taken away. Everything else is a survival game. One prisoner who knew the insides of many British jails once told me that he had three selves: