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    Famous Prisoners of Wormwood Scrubs
    Famous Prisoners of Wormwood Scrubs
    Famous Prisoners of Wormwood Scrubs
    Ebook185 pages11 hours

    Famous Prisoners of Wormwood Scrubs

    By Stephen Wade

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    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChaplin Books
    Release dateJun 5, 2014
    ISBN9781909183520
    Famous Prisoners of Wormwood Scrubs
    Author

    Stephen Wade

    Stephen Wade is a biographer and social historian, usually associated with crime and law, but here he turns his attention to a place he has known for forty years, as he has lived and worked in Scunthorpe all that time. His most recent books have been "Going to Extremes", "The Justice Women" and three volumes in the "Your Town in the Great War" series (all Pen & Sword), and :No More Soldiering" (Amberley).

    Read more from Stephen Wade

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      Book preview

      Famous Prisoners of Wormwood Scrubs - Stephen Wade

      2014

      Chapter 1

      The Scrubs: A Short History

      On Bacon’s map of London, printed in 1902, when Wormwood Scrubs was completed and fully operational - a great prison house at the hub of the nation and empire - it is placed between Kensal Green cemetery and the Hammersmith infirmary and workhouse. The line of the Great Western railway runs to the north of the site, and recreation grounds are all around the walls.

      Today, the site - one of the great landmarks of East Acton - is flanked by the Commonwealth Building of Imperial College to the east, and the A40 just a little way south. What does remain, as a reminder of its Victorian roots, is Du Cane Road, named after the military man who reformed the prison system in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

      Wormwood Scrubs: the first name suggests a poison - something tart, acerbic, leading to vomiting. In fact, the land was named for the wormwood herb growing there long before the prison arrived. Poet Ken Smith, who had a residency at the Scrubs in the mid-80s, pointed out that wormwood has another name - green ginger - and that it is used in the manufacture of absinthe. ‘Scrubs’ hints at an unloved piece of wasteland. Put the two together and it’s a name that, even seen on the map is likely to create aversion, revulsion. But put that also in the context of a great city and the associations of the name escalate into danger, the peril of meeting that particular sickness engendered by a place where a metropolis sweeps away the unwanted and the deviant.

      In 1874, the year the first stones were put down for the Scrubs, there was a growing belief that a prison really could be, in the words of the modern American system, ‘correctional.’ To begin with, it was no more than a shed for the warders and a corrugated iron building for the inmates. In fact, the fine old tradition of having prisoners involved in the construction of prison buildings (and indeed in the business of hangman) applied here: a group of prisoners, immediately after their sentences ended, were employed to enlarge the establishment. When, a year later, work had progressed so that a proper brick prison was envisaged, the place was in step with the greatest innovation in the British penal system - the nationalisation and streamlining of the whole network of prisons across the land.

      We have a good idea what the prison looked like in its first years, because Arthur Griffiths, a prominent writer on prison life, was working at the Scrubs in the 1870s, and in his book, Secrets of the Prison-House (1894), he provides a drawing made in 1874 showing a very long block with an entrance and gatehouse in the centre, and another parallel smaller block. All around is a wasteland, bare of all growth except a few tree stumps, and there are pools of - no doubt - brackish water around the landscape.

      Desolate wasteland surrounds the Scrubs in this drawing from Arthur Griffiths’ book, showing the prison in 1874

      Griffiths said: ‘This, perhaps the finest of modern prisons, of the most vast dimensions, and the most perfectly appropriate architecture, was then in process of construction. It was an interesting scene: the busiest activity prevailed everywhere. Some were digging the foundations of a new block of buildings; others in regular procession were wheeling in and depositing barrows full of newly prepared concrete; others more distant were engaged in the multifarious business of brick-making.’ The brick-making involved machines producing moist bricks, which were then taken to large stacks where they were ‘ skintled’ - trimmed - and then dried.

      The hard labour of the time also included moving the great, weighty wooden beams used in the building: a cranking wheel was used to drag and lift lengths of timber resembling railway sleepers.

      Prisoners working a winch at Wormwood Scrubs

      Previously, there had been local prisons and houses of correction - the latter (also known as bridewells) went back to the mid sixteenth century - and there had been ‘houses of industry’ housing debtors as well as convicts from the assize trials.

      It is something of a paradox that it was Disraeli’s Conservatives who passed the 1877 Prisons Act and brought about centralisation. Such policies were not entrenched in their manifesto, but it was an age of pragmatism in politics and sensible arguments were applied in the debate. It was the Home Secretary, Asheton Cross, who introduced the bill for its first reading. His main contentions were that the prisons were expensive to manage and that the system was outdated, with too many small prisons in the provinces. Behind the move was a basic political fact: the Conservatives had promised to reduce local rates and centralising the prisons was one way to do that. There were opponents, of course; the main argument against was the same one that had been applied when other services, such as factories and education, were centralised. The voices against the move said that there would be incompetence, huge rises in running costs and that it was just not right to interfere with the principle of local government.

      But the thought that at last a great deal of power would be taken from local magistrates pleased many: magistrates were totally autonomous, and such power was always going to be open to abuse. The Act would place the Home Secretary in control and naturally, he was a part of the functioning of parliament. There were objections from the provinces - a petition from Nottingham was presented, and a complaint from Oxford City Council who said they had only recently spent a very large sum of money on their establishment, and if it were to change, then that would have been wasted. But after a debate on 12 July, the bill became law.

      The Secretary of State was now in command of the prison service. It was he who would appoint staff and assume the powers previously in the hands of the justices - those powers applied to acts, common law and charters. Justices were no longer to have any direct influence on prisons; visiting justices were to be in place, something that prefigured the later boards of visitors.

      The new organisation at the centre was the Prison Commission, with five Commissioners, the first of whom was Sir Edmund Du Cane. It has been said about the man that he could boast that he could look at his watch at any time of the day and know exactly what any one of the prisoners in England would be doing. Du Cane was a product of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich; he became a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers when he was only eighteen, and retired with the rank of major-general in 1887. He had worked in convict prisons in Western Australia, and his interest in the prison system grew in part from his friendship with Sir Edward Henderson, Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. In 1863 Du Cane was appointed Director of Convict Prisons and Inspector of Military Prisons. He was knighted in 1877 when he took the job as Commissioner in the new prison system.

      Du Cane believed that a criminal tendency is the basis of all mankind, and saw ‘career criminals’ as fools who were too weak ever to look into themselves and change. He rejected the religion-based attitudes of previous years, believing in reformation of the character, but considering this to be achievable through hard discipline and solitary reflection. The task ahead in 1877 was to make prisons cost-effective and to ensure that they were places so formidable that they would be a deterrent. Du Cane came up with a four-stage regime for the prisoner:

      Stage 1 (nine months) Held in absolute separation, with 6-10 hours of hard labour each day. No mattress for the first two weeks of the sentence and allowed only religious books.

      Stage 2 Less severe work; allowed limited association and one library book per week.

      Stage 3 A small release gratuity and more books available.

      Stage 4 Now eligible for special employment and an increased release gratuity.

      As with all cost-cutting enterprises, places and people were dispensed with across the land: by the time Du Cane retired in 1895, the number of local prisons had been reduced from 113 to 59. Yet within the new prisons and the reformed ones, the tough regimes went on: penal servitude had been implemented in 1853 as an alternative to transportation, whereby convicts were sent to the distant colonies as a way of ridding the country of the criminal underclass. This created sentences ranging from three years to life, and was not abolished until 1948.

      In this may be seen the germ of our present system of a prisoner working through stages of a sentence by being moved through different categories of prison. But what was once hard labour is now more commonly working at a sewing machine to make T-shirts or in a workshop making football nets.

      The Scrubs emerged at the heart of this new prison system, being a local prison, as opposed to a national penitentiary; this meant that they took all types of convicts and then dispersal to other jails followed where necessary, while local prisoners remained. Edmund Du Cane had designed the Scrubs himself in the early 1870s, when he was Director of Convict Prisons. By 1885, it had a new gatehouse evoking a medieval castle, with two towers and a Norman arch at the centre. This edifice - which still exists today - uses distinctive patterned stone which, from a distance, looks as if the towers are sporting a cluster of white Roman numerals. It was built purposefully to suggest the same kind of doom-laden thoughts as Dante’s lines on Hell: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’ The other essential ingredient of a Victorian jail - the chapel - was added by 1889. The prison itself was made up of four parallel blocks with a linking corridor, rather than being in the common castle-like structure with a central tower and radiating wings. Around all this was the obligatory high brick wall, completed in 1883.

      A medallion in the centre of each tower of the gatehouse commemorates a penal reformer: Elizabeth Fry’s portrait is seen above; John Howard is depicted on the other tower. The gatehouse is now Grade II Listed

      Writing in 1891, George Millin provided an account for The Star, giving a very good impression of the prison as it had developed by then: ‘Since 1875, this vast pile, with its one thousand three hundred odd cells, chapel, workshops, kitchens, bath house, and hospital, has been slowly rising and it now seems to be the ne plus ultra of the art of sanitary construction. Dismal a place as it necessarily is, Wormwood Scrubs is probably the healthiest abode in the entire kingdom.’

      Yet it was not all a matter of punishment and repression; from the early years there was a concern for education and rehabilitation. In 1899 the London School Board wrote to the Home Secretary, offering to give a course of lectures to the prisoners at the Scrubs. This was welcomed, with a stipulation as to what might be given: ‘The Home Secretary added that if the Board were prepared to arrange for a system of lectures to young offenders under 24 on commercial, scientific or other subjects of the kind given by Miss Honnor Morten, he was of the opinion that such an experiment might well be made...’ The woman in question was a journalist, educationist and Suffragette who had given lessons on hygiene and first aid to the women prisoners in Holloway. As one paper noted of her: ‘Thus she was able to break down the prison rule of silence, bringing in a human interest into the women’s awful existence.’ In fact, the Scrubs was, from around the Edwardian years, very progressive in its educational provision, although lectures (particularly by women) did not take place until the 1930s.

      What would be the most typical type of prisoner in the 1890s when everything was running smoothly and all building work was finished? Perhaps it would be someone like Thomas Abberley. His prison profile in the official records includes this information:

      Place of birth: London

      Place where last

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