Peterhead (5 page)

Entertainment there was none. A twenty-minute visit every four months was allowed and receiving and sending a letter again every four months was permitted. It was a very hard regime.

The newspaper went on to inform its curious readers that the convicts worked in the quarry or the breakwater and that they were supervised by warders and backed up by civil guards with carbines. These officers were said to “take up a position of advantage covering the convicts.” Escape or mutiny seemed unlikely, especially since the cons worked wearing leg irons with several pounds of lead attached to their feet. This was described with considerable understatement as a “safeguard” against trouble. In a further horrifying description of the convict’s life in the nineteenth century, the writer went on to explain that if for weather or other reasons the cons could not work as normal in the quarries or breakwaters they were put on some sort of machine called “the crash” which had to be manually turned 14,500 times a day every day except Saturday when it was reduced to 10,000 turns. There were no hi-tech gyms around these days but no doubt “the crash” would keep the cons in good physical shape. The author also mentioned one other nice little touch in the prison regime – once you had served the appropriate time the moleskins could be replaced by serge.

About the same time of the Laurie escape incident it is interesting, if not surprising, to note that the punishing conditions in the jail were becoming too much for some of the convicts. Any real chance of escape was negligible and years of misery stretched ahead for most of the cons who were on long sentences, and many a mile from their homes and relatives. No TV in cells, no snooker leagues, no gym, no recreation and seriously bad food in a difficult climate. Little wonder thoughts turned to suicide. Even that was difficult, with the guards constantly watching their charges.

One man in 1893 was so desperate to end it all that he took the almost unthinkable way out of drinking red lead paint when working in the prison yard. He had been sent back into the jail on an errand for a warder and on his return he spotted a pot of the paint lying handy. Before his keepers could stop him, he grabbed it and swallowed around a quart of the fluid before the poison was snatched from him. Medical help was immediately given and a report on the incident made a point that is not too difficult to understand or to be horrified that “the large quantity of poisonous matter taken greatly helped to effect its own cure.” It would certainly have been difficult to keep such an unpleasant substance down. The desperate man survived in the prison hospital in a “weak but not dangerous” condition.

The day before this drama there had been some excitement at the quarry at Stirling Hill, where a work party had been taken on the little private train from the prison. There does not seem to have been much trouble down the years on the train itself, probably because the passengers were tightly herded into the compartments and closely watched by the guards. But out in the quarry it was a different matter, as the gangs of men were able to roam around the site getting on with their work. There was more opportunity for a sudden attack here. On this occasion a convict had leapt at a guard when he was distracted and tried to “throttle” him. But the prison staff were not pushovers and the attacked officer was able to push off his assailant and then whack him so hard with his baton that he broke his arm. The con was taken to the prison hospital, a busy place at times, and his arm was set. His impulsive reckless act earned him some more prison time. This was just one attack of many on the warders at this time. Desperate men would resort to desperate actions.

The quarry at this time was a dangerous place in other ways, as the death of convict Henry Hanley, a twenty-five-year-old Glaswegian, demonstrates. It took a fatal accident inquiry to show that at least Major Dodd, the first governor, who was ultimately in charge of the safety, was not allowing extra risks to be taken in the Admiralty quarry just because the labourers were convicted criminals. Hanley lost his life in an accident that could equally have happened in a civilian quarry. The procedures the accident inquiry found were much as those used in commercial quarries. The
modus operandi
was that experienced civilian foremen and shot firers worked with the cons. The quarry staff did not direct the cons themselves but got the warders to pass on instruction, but that did not cause the accident. Blasting the night before had left a twelve-ton lump of rock perched on the side of a steep slope. Attempts to move it with a “seam” shot placed by the expert shot firer had failed. Smaller stones wedged under the boulder were preventing it moving. To resolve the problem these stones needed to be removed.

Hanley and another con called Murray were set to the task. The young Glaswegian had a rope round his waist so that he could be pulled to safety by his colleagues if anything went wrong. At least, that was the idea. The stone moved and an attempt to haul Hanley to safety by the men holding the rope ends was made. However, the rope slipped up from Hanley’s waist to his chest and he was left dangling over a fifty-foot drop. Murray was luckier and witnesses told of seeing him leaping to safety from rock to rock as the huge boulder thundered down on him.

There was much wrangling at the inquiry about the type of knot used on Hanley’s rope. Some said it was a running knot, others a sailor’s knot. No matter, it ended up “round the victim’s chest and a medical examination showed that his breast bone was broken in three places. The second, third and fourth ribs on the right side were broken into fragments and the left leg broken in several places.” This it was said, in a matter-of-fact fashion, would have been enough to kill Hanley. It was a painful death. A single crushing blow from that twelve-ton boulder might have been a kinder fate than to be left dangling on a rope in bizarre fashion high over the quarry with the life being squeezed out of him agonisingly minute by minute. But at least the inquiry made clear that the death of the convict could have happened in the same way to any quarry worker in “any part of the kingdom.” Not much consolation though to Hanley or his relatives.

Peterhead has from time to time been called “Scotland’s gulag,” though to most of its inmates down the years, who had little interest in or knowledge of politics, such a description may be a tad on the esoteric side. The concerns of those removed from society and held for long years in that cold, hard fortress, seldom deviated from a desire to be free again to knife a gangland rival or rob a bank or two. They were not revolutionaries, just conscienceless criminals on the hunt for cash or bent on settling old gangland or personal scores. But, as always, there was an exception or two. Some of the Red Clydesiders served time in Barlinnie and Peterhead. These pioneer socialists had an altogether different set of concerns from the majority of the prisoners: they wanted to improve the lives of their fellow men.

Workers’ leaders in the early part of the last century faced the constant threat of arrest and trial. It might not have been Russia or Germany, but the knock on the door by a uniformed policeman was a daily fear for such as Tom Bell, John Wheatley, John Muir, John Maxton, Willie Gallacher and John Maclean. John Maclean in particular was dealt with extremely harshly by the authorities, who were angered by his passionate and constant campaigning against the slaughter of the First World War. In Glasgow he held hugely well-attended rallies in Bath Street and on his Southside patch in Shawlands. A true legend in his lifetime he had a large army of followers, pacifists and anti-war protesters. At one time they held regular meetings in the old Metropole Theatre (later the home of the Logans, the legendary show business dynasty) in Stockwell Street in the city centre on Sunday nights. In the early days of the First World War with young patriots dying in their thousands in the fight against Germany, it took courage to speak out publicly against the war. But Maclean did not lack guts. He proclaimed: “I have been enlisted in the socialist army for fifteen years. God damn all other armies. Any soldier who shoots another soldier in the war is a murderer.” This powerful and controversial public speaking on the morality of war was deemed by the authorities as likely to harm the war effort and prejudice recruiting.

It was not a problem exclusive to Scotland or the Scots. An anarchist and revolutionary called Guy Aldred, who despite being a Londoner had settled in Glasgow, was, like Maclean, arrested for his views and jailed, though he did not end up in Peterhead. In August 1916 he was ordered to be detained after an appearance at Winchester and sent to a work camp in Dyce near Aberdeen, just thirty odd miles south of Peterhead. This was almost a worse fate than spending time in one of Scotland’s regular prisons. The prisoners were held in a tented village in primitive conditions, barely surviving in a sea of mud. They were put to work on hard labour in a local quarry just like the Peterhead cons. But unlike a real prison, escape from such tented prisons was relatively easy and Aldred was among those who did a “runner,” though he was recaptured in a relatively short time and this time sent to a conventional jail in the south. There his agitation – he was ringleader in a prisoners’ strike – got him what was called “number one punishment,” a bland way of describing forty-two days in solitary with three days on bread and water and three without food, locked in a bare and unheated cell.

There were several other such work camps in Britain, their existence obscured by government secrecy that constrained the newspaper coverage of the war. Astonishingly, sixty-nine conscientious objectors died in these places that were little more than the British equivalent of the work camps of the enemy. It is interesting that writers looking at the history of the Dyce camp record that the inmates were given respect and, on some occasions, help by the locals. Perhaps the prisoners’ rebellious attitudes struck a chord with the infamously “thrawn” North-Easterners who rarely like to swim with the tide. Maybe, too, it says something about the relationship between the local folk and Peterhead jail itself, which was highlighted by the support that escapers like Gentle Johnny Ramensky generated. The story of such camps as the one at Dyce is a largely forgotten but important part of the penal history of these isles.

Early arrests of Maclean had been made under the catch-all of breach of the peace charges, which were brought after his well-attended anti-war meetings in the city of Glasgow. Now the more powerful Defence of the Realm Act was sending him to jail. At one stage the firebrand found himself held in Edinburgh Castle as a “prisoner of war” and given the choice of a court martial or appearing in the civil High Court. On this occasion he opted for his day in court but was rewarded with a three-year jail sentence. It is interesting that his fellow citizens of Glasgow, despite their general patriotism and support of the boys dying in the trenches, could muster a huge rally of 100,000 in Glasgow Green to demand his release. The good folk of the city recognised his socialist sincerity and passionately-held beliefs. Even if they disagreed with him. He was a truly remarkable man, but in Peterhead he found himself surrounded by common criminals rather than political agitators and intellectuals. Hunger strikes were a regular weapon for such caged dissidents as himself and he damaged his health in prison and endured the disgusting procedure of force-feeding.

Maclean is still, long after his death in 1923, a revered figure in British left-wing politics. His legacy spawned many books, poems and songs. Hugh MacDiarmid wrote: “Of all Maclean’s foes not one was his peer.” And in another poem he described him as “both beautiful and red.” No wonder Maclean is still being written about in the age of the World Wide Web and socialists in many countries still delve into his story. In a Scottish Republican Socialist Movement document there is a remarkable picture of life in Peterhead which first appeared in the publication
The Red Dawn
in March 1919. This account of his time in the North-East was rediscovered by Jim Clayton, the author of
John MacLean and the
Conspiracies
.

Maclean’s own story of his experiences “up north,” as the Glasgow cons say, is fascinating. He contrasted life in what he called a Glasgow “local” prison, Duke Street, with the daily “scientific torture” of what he rather oddly described in a piece of tautology “a convict prison.” He told his readers how your hair is cropped short and cut once a fortnight to keep it that way. However, a thick knitted cap was provided and it “kept the head quite warm.” Hygiene was rather different in those far-off days and it will come as a surprise to today’s readers that underclothing was kept “clean and sanitary” by being washed once a fortnight! The political prisoner felt that the inadequate clothing supplied to those working outside the prison in quarries or at the harbour was an official ploy to damage their health by causing colds, flu and other illnesses. His cell was of the regular dimensions of the time – about four-feet broad, eight-feet long and seven-feet high. But in 1918 two cells were knocked together for English prisoners brought north, though why they should get special privileges is not clear. The authorities were obviously still keen on the idea of prisoners using their time to good effect and the English cons were there to construct a little aerodrome near Peterhead harbour.

Maclean described how the glass in his cell was twisted so badly that little light entered the tiny space and you could not see out at all. The idea he wrote, perhaps with a touch of paranoia, was to make prisoners brood and fret, and he highlighted the Sunday misery of fellow prisoners who could not even read to help pass the time on the day of rest. The heating system was primitive and inadequate and furthermore the prisoners were not allowed, by decree of the governor, to wrap their blankets round themselves when not in bed. Strange that even that little kindness was denied to those serving time in such a miserable place.

The daily routine was horrendous. A bell was rung at 5am and prisoners had to get up and wash and make their beds until about 5.30, when orderlies served porridge and skimmed milk. At 7 the cell doors were opened and prisoners headed out, guarded by warders, to the yard in designated groups and then proceeded “to work, formerly in the quarry, but latterly to the Admiralty yard.” Before leaving the prison they were searched. At 11.30 the prisoners were re-formed into parties and searched again before “dinner,” which was broth, beef, bread and potatoes, or sometimes cheese. It was back to work from 1pm till 5.30 and then back to the prison where 14oz of dry bread and a pint of coffee was given out. Prisoners were then free to read if they could or otherwise entertain themselves until 8.30pm.