Peterhead (14 page)

This incident carries a curious echo with an incident reported away back in the early years of the prison in 1896. No shots were fired in this case, which was reported under the heading of “OUTBREAK AT PETERHEAD CONVICT PRISON – Mutinous Attack On Warders.” The news had just leaked out, said the paper, and it said: “It appears that over half a dozen prisoners had been employed in a cement shed shovelling material when one of them rebelled against the orders of a warder. The dissatisfaction spread to the whole gang and it is asserted that shovels were flung freely by the convicts, a warder being severely hurt on his ankles and one of his feet. Thereupon the warders drew their swords – one of them a six-foot retired Life Guardsman having his sword at ‘the draw’ stating very placidly, but firmly, that if the convicts did not recommence work at once he would assuredly cut down the first one he got at. One of the convicts was then handcuffed with his hands behind his back and in the presence of Mr McGhee, the head warder, inclined to be obstreperous when the officer knocked him flat on his back. The convict kicked out with his feet but was ultimately quietened and work resumed.” All in a day’s work in Peterhead!

All prison officers have anecdotes of such incidents, happenings that they will never forget. They may not get talked about much in public, as those in the prison service tend to be discreet, but they are always there, deep in the psyche. A veteran prison officer, Bert Whyte, an Aberdeenshire man now in his late seventies, ended up as an executive at the women’s prison Cornton Vale near Stirling. His early days were a bit more exciting and dangerous than that particular spell of duty. He tells an intriguing story of the night he could have been kidnapped or even murdered.

Bert first came to Peterhead after working as an electrical engineer in the RAF. A man with his skills is always in demand in a prison – keeping the alarms, floodlights, and telecommunications instruments and suchlike in order is similar to maintaining the Forth Rail Bridge – no sooner is one snag fixed than another comes along demanding attention. Particularly in a place like Peterhead, built in the 1880s and altered and brought up to modern standards over the years, or as near as possible given the design of the place. The North Sea wind and sea air also took a heavy toll on electrical equipment.

After Bert has spent some time working in the prison as an outside contractor his wife, Ellen, still an elegant and alert woman, thought that it might be a good idea for her husband to have a chat with her uncle. This gentleman was in the prison service and he was persuasive when he explained to his young relative why a job in the service might be worthwhile. There was job security, a decent wage, a house, a chance to still use some of his engineering skills and to put something back into society helping rehabilitate some who had gone astray. That is if the prisoner had the will to reform. If rehabilitation was out of the question, as was often the case with the hard tickets selected to do their time in Peterhead, the prison service was still of great value to the public making sure villains could do no more harm.

That protection of the public was, and is, a vital aim of the service. Ellen Whyte herself knew this well, as she remembered the feeling of fear and apprehension she felt as a teenager when the good folk of Peterhead heard the warning sound of the prison bell ringing out loudly announcing someone or other had absconded or escaped. The local radio, too, would cover any breakout in some depth, warning of the danger from desperate men on the run. She told me what it was like when one of the “connies,” as she and her young pals called them, was on the loose outside the grim walls. On nights like that there were no trips into town for an hour or two at the dancing or the cinema and every moving shadow or echoing footstep was a worry.

Peterhead’s young girls could develop a crick in the neck. So she knew well the dangers the officers faced. But, of course, you got on with life. A highlight of their early married life was when Bert bought his first car – a second-hand Ford Consul that he was immensely proud to own. He kept it in wooden huts near the prison in the Admiralty yard, a once bustling place but by then used mainly for storage. As a concession some of the officers were allowed to garage their cars there. So one wintry night Bert found himself listening to howling wind and rain but was happy working on his Ford in the shelter of the shed. Cars in these days seemed covered in acres of unnecessary chrome. Owners bought tubes of chrome cleaner by the dozen and spent hours with yellow polishing clothes getting the car to gleam and removing flecks of rust. One night he was enjoying himself at this task under the light of a lamp rigged up using the car battery, after all he was an electrical engineer, when he for no clear reason felt there was someone else nearby. He stopped and took a look, uneasy but not sure why. He heard banging noises but saw nothing, so he finished the polishing and decided to head back to the prison, stopping on the way for a pint with mates in a little recreation club for officers.

Right away he knew something was wrong and as they sipped their beers his pals told him that three bad ’uns were on the run. Apparently a farm gate that was opened to let a prison van into the Admiralty yard had been accidently left open and the cons had purloined another van and driven into the yard. Hence the banging noises! Bert was summoned to the governor’s office, where the boss told him what had happened, but in the darkness Bert had seen nothing useful to help the hunt for the cons who were in any case soon recaptured. But that led to an interesting confrontation in the prison some time later. One of the escapers that night was John “Gypsy” Winning, a notorious Glasgow low-lifer who was involved in the Paddy Meehan saga told elsewhere in this book. Another player in this tale of wrongful conviction was the infamous Glasgow criminal William “Tank” McGuiness, who was himself murdered in a street brawl.

The last person to see him alive was Winning, who was charged with his murder but the case collapsed because of insufficient evidence. Clearly Winning was not a man to be tangled with lightly. Not long after his recapture on this occasion he ran into Bert Whyte in the prison. Winning said to Bert, “You are a very lucky man,” as he could have caught the escapers in a shed near the one where he garaged his car. Bert said he thought he was never near the escapers but Winning told him that he had been within a few yards of them and they had decided if he had spotted them to thump him and then tape him up and throw him into the van they were using to get away from the prison. This van was eventually found deep down at the bottom of a quarry at Inverurie. Bert has ever since wondered if he had challenged the escapers would he have been found dead inside that abandoned van? Would the men on the run have taken the trouble to free him before driving the van into the deep hole to hide it? The record of John “Gypsy” Winning indicates that it was unlikely. Bert had indeed a lucky escape.

Winning also features in another nasty story of life in Peterhead told by Bert Whyte. It might have been called the Cat Man of Peterhead, a sort of reversal of the Bird Man of Alcatraz. Ironically such a title would have been more accurate than the famous film was – for Robert Stroud, the bird man of the title, kept his birds in Leavenworth Penitentiary not Alcatraz. When he moved to the famous island in San Francisco Bay he was not allowed to keep pets. But Hollywood, like many a newspaper man, did not like letting the facts spoil a good story.

Winning did not have official approval to keep pets but he had somehow made friends with a local feral cat who accessed his cell via a window and spent time with the con. Cats, it seems, take people as they find them and are no respecters of reputations. Winning was not popular with prison officers or most of his fellow cons. Perhaps his only real friend in life was that cat.

Some of the cons decided to wreak revenge on Winning. He was part of a little group who had access to boiling water to make their own tea and sandwiches. One evening when Winning was returned to his cell after being in a work party his mates asked if he fancied a plate of soup. The cons watched this evil man sup it with some keen interest. Afterwards they asked if he had enjoyed it. The answer was in the affirmative. They then told him the main ingredient had been his cat. “Gypsy” Winning went berserk at the news and had to be restrained. Indeed it was weeks before his fearful anger against his fellow cons subsided. Life in a prison can take bizarre and unpleasant turns and most cons take care that no one urinates in their tea or other similar nastiness. But cat soup – that was a notch above anything even the most suspicious would expect.

The prison population in Scotland is constantly shifting as villains are shuffled from one place of incarceration to another. Repeat offenders tend to be familiar with all the old jails, in particular Saughton, Barlinnie, Peterhead and Perth. And in each they tend to renew old friendships made during long spells inside. One such was John “Mad Dog” Duggan who had an infamous reputation in Peterhead after making something of a name for himself as an escaper or potential escaper in the ’60s and ’70s. The main break that made his name among the cons and put him on to the tabloid front pages was from Barlinnie not Peterhead. But it is worth recounting in order to illustrate the daring and ingenuity of the men who managed to get over the walls of Scotland’s prisons.

Duggan was in the untried prisoner section when he made his plans. But not everyone sharing porridge with him was a friend. A fellow prisoner tipped the word of the imminent escape attempt to Les Brown, a legendary detective who rose to the top of the CID in Glasgow and a man with possibly the best contact book of informers in gangland then or now. Les was a tall, powerful figure but his ear was metaphorically always on the ground. Little happened in the underworld that he did not hear about. Tipped off on Mad Dog’s intentions he naturally told the then Bar-L governor, but Mr Mackenzie, a generally respected and efficient boss of the tough establishment who had also ruled Peterhead for some years, had more faith in his prison’s security than Duggan and took no action. The tip-off was noted but Mackenzie was not losing sleep over it. Not much later it was Les Brown who had his sleep disturbed by a 3am phone call asking him to contact the prison. It transpired that Duggan had somehow removed the bars from his cell window and climbed out onto the roof. His next move was to swing hand over hand on telephone wires to get on to the gatehouse roof. He had “booked” a getaway car to meet him. But on jumping onto the ground outside the prison he got a shock. He was on his own in the dark. No prison warders at his heels, no screaming alarm bells in his ears. But no getaway car either. His erstwhile helper had given him, as they say in Glasgow, a “dizzy.” There was nothing to do but leg it away into the silent streets surrounding the prison. Mr Mackenzie may not have heeded the tip-off but now he wanted Les Brown’s help in getting his guest back.

After a week when Duggan lay low in Possilpark, as much a prisoner as he had been in the Bar-L, freedom seemed a less attractive proposition and he got his wife to phone big Les, who promptly turned up in the Duggan home with a colleague, detective sergeant Jim Montgomery. All three tucked into bacon and eggs before setting out to take the escaper back to Barlinnie. But that was only temporary – Duggan duly went to court and was convicted and soon on his way to Peterhead for a longer stay.

Les forgot about Duggan till much later when he got an amusing reminder of him from reports in the tabloids. Peterhead was by then the focus of numerous riots, rooftop protests and all sorts of mayhem. Les almost choked on a chocolate digestive when he saw a picture of the latest protest – there was Mad Dog Duggan on the roof of Peterhead holding a placard reading: FUCK NELSON MANDELA – FREE ME.

There might have been a touch of unconscious humour here, for Les still laughs when he recalls some high jinks when Duggan was originally arrested. He had used a tad too much “jelly” in a raid on the Scottish Gas office in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, and the target safe was blown out onto the street. When the cops arrived they were told that the safe-blower had been seen on the roof of the nearby Apollo Theatre – now gone, but then a legendary venue for pop and rock shows. The building was surrounded and searched but that night it had been booked for an Asian community film show. The audience were mostly in turbans and in a vain attempt to hide himself, Duggan had tried to make one from his T-shirt. The bright spark asked the cops who collared him, “How did you recognise me?” Les and his fellow boys in blue were too busy laughing to explain. Duggan, it seems, also had a sense of humour when in Peterhead. Even on the rooftop!

The antics of such as Walter Norval and Mad Dog Duggan in displaying a sense of humour behind bars are not unique. Prisoners with time on their hands and a lively brain can find ways to inject a laugh or two into the bleak days of prison routine. And no one could do it better than one long-time inhabitant of Peterhead, James Crosbie, inevitably nicknamed Bing by his pals, but in his day known to the tabloids as “Britain’s most wanted man.” Some years ago he published his amusing story of his years in Peterhead.

In 1974 Crosbie was a successful businessman with an enviable lifestyle. But he was bored and turned to armed robbery. A somewhat dramatic cure for something we all suffer from from time to time. He was so bored indeed that he relieved one bank of around £70,000 without taking the trouble to exchange a few pleasantries with a teller or write a withdrawal slip. This resulted in a different sort of boredom. Prison boredom required to be fought with a maximum sense of humour and making the most of any chance for a laugh. Crosbie’s memoir
Peterhead Porridge
is extremely funny but also tinged with some significant sadness and it gives an insight into day-to-day prison life in a way few other books have. Well worth a read.

And in amongst the laughs he makes some serious and sometimes surprising observations. He will tell you that prisoners facing long sentences can sometimes come to terms with doing the time easier than those “only” in for a year or so. The reason is that the guy on the shorter tariff counts every day, almost every hour. If you are facing a decade or so behind bars that sort of thinking is pointless. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, only darkness stretching far into the future. In such circumstances counting the days only ratchets up the pain of confinement – instead you take each day as it comes, any future outside of the bars is virtually non-existent. So you try not to let it trouble you.