Strangeways

by Neil Samworth

  We were told not to talk to each other about what had been said, but I learned later that the two lads who went up before me got similar treatment. Admittedly, I can be quite loud and bombastic, but they were both quiet and unassuming. It was a mystery. One of them was proper down, in tears. I wasn’t far off myself. Coming downstairs seemed to take forever, all sorts of things going through my head. I needed this job so, cap in hand, I went in to the classroom and apologized if I’d offended anyone with my manner, ‘I’m not sure what I’ve done, but sorry.’

  I’m a bully and a cunt and am going to fail – I had a lousy night. Were they just testing us, like they do in the SAS, pushing us to see how far we would go without breaking? Maybe, though I doubt it. I reckoned it more likely that one particular trainee had dropped me – and presumably the other two – in it. Her rude and abrupt manner was a giveaway. I cracked on, determined not to rise to the bait and be given the flick while our instructor filed a daily report.

  The only useful thing was a week’s C&R training – where you are taught to subdue prisoners in a three-officer team using basic martial arts moves. Fantastic. You don’t have to be big; it’s safe for you and, while painful, safe for them as well. We did that at Forest Bank too. Every prison officer, private or public, undergoes C&R training.

  Nothing else in training prepares you for life as a prison officer, certainly not homework. There was a lot of that, though, preparing for life in both prisons. A complete waste of time. At Forest Bank it was mainly about preparing for tests and if I told you that the tutor would leave the answers on his desk and say, ‘Right, I’m just going for a coffee now,’ I’m sure you’ll get the idea. They wanted you all to pass. At Strangeways, it was more about writing essays. I’m not a studious person, but I spent ages on mine, taking them in the next day so the others could have a look, trying to be a model citizen. I’d make half a dozen copies. One task on diversity took five hours to do, and I even shared it with the trainee I assumed had dobbed us in. Normally I’d have told her where to shove it, but I bit my lip. Yes, I’m a big gobby Yorkshire twat, but I’m all right really, and don’t mind shovelling shit. The last piece of homework ran to about ten pages.

  The next morning the trainer put it in front of me.

  ‘Is this yours?’ Yeah. Then he put down another, identical, with this other trainee’s name on it. I knew I had to be careful.

  ‘If I told you this took all night to do, and that I make copies for people who are struggling, to help them out, like, would you believe me?’ I said.

  Yes, he would, he said, and it was left at that.

  The training process was similar to the one I’d already undergone, just one week less of it. Nine weeks at Forest Bank, eight for Strangeways. (We spent that extra week practising interpersonal skills, which to be fair was quite enjoyable.) During the day, the C&R week aside, it was all hypotheticals . . . searching mock cells, putting on handcuffs, stuff like that. They showed you how to fill in paperwork, write reports and gave us those tests on prison rules, legal rights and such. Mainly, though, it was the sort of thing that means jack shit until you are hands on. Do your C&R training and spend some time in the jail, that’s what I think. A bit of training on how to react to people with mental disorders would have been handy too. I stuck at it, though, determined to prove how much I wanted the job.

  I know someone who still works in the training centre and he confirms that things haven’t much changed between 2005 and now. If anything, it’s become even more about just getting people passed and onto the shop floor. The population of this country is around 66 million and they’re only after recruiting a couple of thousand extra staff by 2018, so this is pretty embarrassing, I’d say.

  Anyway, by about week four our trainer was coming around. The good reports began to swing things my way. Even the training manager, who was also a governor, began to be won over, sending letters to compliment me on my progress.

  Bizarrely, given what had gone on, when we reached the end of the course everyone had passed, including ‘big bully’ me. We had a celebration buffet in the training centre and the PO asked for a word.

  ‘I don’t know how you managed it,’ he said. ‘I was sure you were going out on your arse, but I will be happy to have you on K Wing.’

  Staff allocations were on the basis of alphabetical order, so I was headed to K Wing regardless, but it was nice that the PO would be pleased to see me.

  Anyone who has ever swung off the M60 and down Bury New Road will recognize Strangeways – from the outside at least – as it looms ominous and tall on its desolate northern hillside. It casts a hell of a shadow too, with walls supposedly sixteen-feet thick: part red-brick Dracula’s castle, part Colditz, keeping a beady eye on the Manchester scallies, smackheads and shoppers heading off towards Deansgate below.

  Despite being only a stroll from Manchester Arena, the neighbourhood ain’t pretty. Along the main road is a row of shops you might take for derelict, shuttered mostly, that flog swag. Police and customs officers raid their back alleys and basements. People loiter on corners. It’s your standard den of iniquity, very rundown. Then you drive up Southall Street towards a glass-fronted entrance.

  Before the riots, you entered Strangeways via old gates and a turreted gatehouse that still stand. In the 1990s a new reception was added for extra security, although visitors still smuggle all sorts in. The prison’s central ‘watchtower’ isn’t the lookout point people think; it’s there for ventilation. But it quite definitely adds to the gloomy Gothic menace, especially when it rains.

  If those bricks could speak, they’d tell a blood-curdling story or two, without doubt. During my decade, I saw stuff that gave me nightmares by the end. And the atmosphere . . . Every hour of every day, misery, violence and fear envelop the place, but then so do boredom, frustration and dark humour. Which is just as well if you value your sanity.

  I’m no history student, but since I’m writing about the joint I thought it best to dig up some background info to go with what I know from my own time inside. Hours of in-depth research – cheers, Wikipedia – reveal that the name itself comes from the site the prison was built on, Strangeways Park and Gardens, and the ancient village it’s in. The jail opened in 1868, replacing the New Bailey, long since demolished, in Salford. The online Surname Database reckons the name is pre-tenth century: ‘the elements of the word being from “Strang”, which probably means “Strong”, and “Gewaesc” – an overflow of water, so a fast-flowing waterfall is the likely explanation.’ These days it’s officially known as HMP Manchester, and the bosses would rather you called it that. But for most of us it’s Strangeways and always will be.

  Now a Grade II listed building, Strangeways was one of the first British prisons to erect permanent gallows. Hangings were common before the abolition of capital punishment in 1964, which is roughly when the jail went all male. I was interested to read that it holds the record for the world’s fastest hanging. James Inglis took the drop in 1951, twenty-nine, for strangling Alice Morgan, a fifty-year-old prostitute, in Hull. Seven seconds.

  Strangeways has long had a reputation for housing some of this country’s worst criminals. All sorts of notorious characters were locked up there down the years, evil bastards like Harold Shipman awaiting trial, Ian Brady, in for theft before the Moors murders, the one-eyed killer Dale Cregan and the horrendous Mark Bridger, who I had a run-in with myself. Other well-known inmates include suffragettes Christabel Pankhurst and Emily Davison (who sued the jail for turning a water cannon on her – don’t tell Riley), antique TV presenter David Dickinson (fraud), footballer Joey Barton (assault), Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown (‘air rage’) and the Irish playwright Brendan Behan, who was imprisoned there in 1947 for trying to spring an IRA terrorist.

  More recently, Strangeways has had its critics, not least for a higher than average suicide rate in a city that’s a national black spot for that generally. It also became infamous for the riots that kicked off on April Fool’s Day 19
90, when 147 staff and 47 prisoners were injured, one con lost his life and an officer died from heart failure. It was then that Strangeways had its rebrand as HMP Manchester, part of a repair and modernization programme that cost over £80 million. For all that, it’s still a place you’d look at and say, ‘Fuck me, I wouldn’t want to be in there.’

  A lot of prisoners wear those riots like a badge of honour. They were Britain’s longest ever: twenty-five days. One officer I worked with admitted that the first couple of days were terrifying; then they just began counting the overtime. Two days was how long it took to get on top of the situation, but then an order came from London to retire to the gate, basically surrendering the jail to the cons. Poll tax riots had erupted down south at the same time, and the conspiracy theory goes that the government wanted media attention diverted north. The screws were in disbelief at it all, certain they’d have got the jail back within the first week otherwise.

  Along with prisoners remanded into custody from courts in the local area, Strangeways holds the sort of high-security Category A cons you would not want over your garden fence. Mobile communication devices of any kind are forbidden. Prison officers and operational support grade staff (OSG) run reception, the latter working hard on low pay despite often being called on for support in dodgy situations. A key area is ECR, the electronic control room, which sends radio messages and controls the electronic gates. It’s supervised by an SO and the rest of the staff in there are OSGs. When an incident explodes, they organize the troops. Nobody watches all the CCTV cameras constantly – they are everywhere but inside the cells, as we’ve seen, on the landings, outside the prison walls, in the yards – but everything is recorded. When an incident needs to be wound back to and viewed, it is Security who do that. At the last count, Strangeways held over 1,200 prisoners and a prison officer count of around 400 and falling. Not many of those enjoy being there either. Going in, your heart sinks.

  I remember my first day there in April 2005 well, partly because it was like walking into a maze. Structurally, Strangeways is sliced in two. There’s a top jail, so called because it’s up the hill, where I began on the infamous K Wing, and a bottom jail with passages, stairs and gates that it took me years to work out.

  In each of the two jails, the wings run away from the round centre like petals on a flower, four storeys high. Each has a ground floor, the ‘ones’, and usually three landings above known as the ‘twos’, ‘threes’ and ‘fours’. The bottom jail houses A, B, C, D and E Wings, all of which are residential, and F Wing, with the library and education rooms. Bottom jail is quite a building, architecturally dramatic and forbidding. Think Porridge, Norman Stanley Fletcher and all that. The top jail has five wings, each four storeys high: G, H1, H2, I and K. There’s no J Wing for some reason – I don’t know why.

  After the riots some lord decided that the kitchens should be set apart, otherwise the convicts could dig in for as long as their tins of beans held out.

  K Wing, where I was headed, was the biggest in the North West – 200 prisoners over three landings. And policing it we had two members of staff on each. Not good odds, are they?

  As soon as I entered the building, the stink hit me. Prison smells like nowhere else. Not bad exactly, not obnoxious, but just as hospitals have their own distinctive aroma, jails do too. Six hundred teenagers’ bedrooms comes close to it, perhaps, another ingredient in the general mood of doom. Being an old Victorian building, Strangeways also has a musty smell and little natural light to brighten a dreary colour scheme of grey, dark blue and magnolia. Another trip online tells me the architect was Alfred Waterhouse, who also designed Manchester Town Hall. He must have done this joint on an off day. Forest Bank wasn’t exactly cheerful, but at least it was new. The only modern thing here was the plastic light stripping that gave it the feel of one of those drab and gloomy inner-city underpasses you warn kids not to go down. Strangeways wasn’t in the doldrums, it was the doldrums.

  None of this exactly helped with my first-day nerves, of course, and the first person I bumped into looked me up and down, unimpressed.

  ‘I’ve heard about you, Samworth. You’re a bully . . .’

  As greetings go, it isn’t the warmest, especially when your accuser is your SO.

  Bertie Bassett was six foot two, had a good three stone on me, and lungs to match. He might only have been a year or two older than I was, in which case he must have had a harder life. He was a heavy-set fella with a moustache and gentle face, jowly as a bulldog, topped off by a Friar Tuck hairdo, grey, what there was of it. He was a big man and big personality. To say he was loud is an understatement. He didn’t talk so much as boom, like a parade ground sergeant major. If he thought you were a twat, he’d stick his barrel chest out and call you a twat. He boomed at inmates. He boomed at staff. He boomed at everyone. I’ve no doubt he boomed at his grandma. And didn’t we love him for it.

  Bertie was as straight as it comes and could also be quite jolly – everything you want in a manager, especially in prison. In public he’d support you, then get you in the office and call you a fucking idiot. We had proper slanging matches that were instantly forgotten. If you helped him, he’d help you. No holding grudges.

  As for this bully business, I’d like to think that once the rest of the staff got to know me, very few held on to that initial impression. Bertie would soon know better. Big Sam is what I became – even officers taller than me called me that. They certainly couldn’t knock my work ethic. I always did my bit and a little more if needed. I made a point of arriving early, half six every morning without fail. I’d go through the metal detector, collect my keys, head out into a courtyard and up the sloping main drag to top jail. This bit is a sterile area: as at Forest Bank, prisoners never access it, unless they are cuffed in a secure vehicle. Thanks to high fences and a wall, you can’t see much of anything outside before you pass another creepy structure, healthcare.

  As time went by, the nerves at starting a new job settled, but those early days were pretty daunting. For one thing, with Forest Bank fresh in my mind I was determined to impress, and that training allegation hadn’t helped. And for another, there was just the suffocating aura of the place. No bright natural light here. It felt like you had gone back to the days of Jack the Ripper, which of course you had in a sense, only unlike all these gargoyles and gangsters and legions of other dodgy bastards you could go home for your tea. I felt the weight of authority very strongly, and was keen not to put a foot wrong. Certain other people, not so much.

  One day the officer who I’d suspected began this ‘bully’ business came into our office, on overtime. There was only Bertie and myself in there, and of course she gave me her finest scowl.

  ‘And can you tell me who you are?’ Bertie asked her, since he hadn’t seen her on any of our landings before.

  ‘First, you tell me who you are,’ she replied.

  Well, that was a mistake.

  ‘I’ll give you a clue,’ he boomed. ‘I’m the SO here, and I’m asking you for your fucking name.’ So she told him. ‘Right. You’re on threes with officer so-and-so. You’ll need to get India Nine.’

  ‘What’s India Nine?’

  ‘It’s a radio. At ten o’clock you’re doing exercise.’

  Her hand shot up, all sassy, ‘I don’t do radios.’

  ‘You fucking what?’

  ‘You heard. I don’t do fucking radios.’

  ‘If you don’t do fucking radios,’ he boomed, ‘I’ll take you down the disciplinary route.’

  Off she stomped to file a grievance, not that Bertie was fussed. Before long that officer left completely, having been in the job twelve months, nine of those off sick. During that time she must have filed twenty-five grievances. Even then the prison service tried its best to hang on to her. In any other walk of life, if you can’t do the job, you won’t stay in it. That’s not the case in jail – far from it. Attracting new staff is hard enough, so those they have they do their best to hold. The prison service is
not in the habit of getting rid of folk.

  The flip side, though, is that when officers do have genuine issues they get little or no sympathy. It’s that macho thing, you see, even among women. You mustn’t show any weakness or feeling. Prison can be a very judgmental environment. HMP Manchester had a reputation for being rammed with hard nuts. Not just among the prison population, but screws as well. Pretty soon, though, I realized most of my colleagues weren’t physically tough at all. Sometimes I wondered what had made them want the job. Did they think it would be like being a schoolteacher?

  Whenever I lost my temper, it was because officers weren’t supporting their mates or were taking shortcuts. It wasn’t so much the dead bodies, self-harmers and other terrors that got through my defences – though some did – it was how people were badly treated. Given time that would be the thing that got to me most of all: the inhumanity of it.

  5. Prison Song

  When I arrived at Strangeways in 2005, I’d already met a few of the prisoners because some of them had been at Forest Bank. Where you’re arrested in Greater Manchester dictates the prison you go to. Manchester or Salford – you’re off to Strangeways, public sector. If it’s Bolton or Oldham or Wigan, you get Forest Bank, private sector. So the cons could and did swap about.

  Five of us were brand new from the training centre. We looked very official in our uniform – black trousers, white shirt and numbered epaulettes, so that when a prisoner is identifying you he doesn’t have to say, ‘That six foot seventeen stone bald twat.’ MR837 is friendlier. At one point, the entire service got to vote on a new epaulette, like anyone gave a fuck, and I became MR444. We no longer wore caps, but did have a black clip-on tie you could ditch in summer under a ‘short sleeve order’.

  We also had a £60 boot allowance for Doc Martens or similar, something sturdy and comfortable that would last. You were on your feet a long time. Much later, they decided that was too costly, so gave us plastic ankle boots once a year instead. They had a non-slip sole, their saving grace, but otherwise were shite and cost about £6 a pair. One of my mates was diabetic and developed a foot ulcer, which can be naughty. He went to a podiatrist who asked to see his footwear. Both boots said size eleven, but one was eleven and half, the other ten and half. He was off work for a good few months. You had to wear them though: if you didn’t you weren’t insured.