Ces’s gang was still loosely intact and operational in 1948 and Ces was welcomed as a tactician, strategist and ringleader, but a life of stealing was not getting any easier. Ces related the story of his second-last crime, a spot of B & E, oddly reminiscent of the early events in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
My cellmate informant, Stevie Thomas, told me the owner of a big house in Cheshire had been evading tax and stored his money in a big blanket trunk under the staircase. My plan was that we’d go there, knock, and when one of the residents opened up we’d rush in, tie the family up, grab the money and run.
On the night of the robbery Bill, Kenny and I met outside the property at a prearranged time. We were joined by Tony and one of his associates, John Duggan, a villain with ginger hair and a thick moustache. Tony and John had done many jobs together and shared time in prison as a consequence. Tony assured us John would be an asset, because of his calm controlled nature.
It was a clear warm night and we were all fidgety with nervous excitement, except John who silently stood in the background. When I gave the word, we stealthily approached the house. Tony stood on one side of the front door, Bill the other, while the rest of the gang assembled in the shadows further away. Being the ringleader, it was my responsibility to knock. I was going to ask the resident if I could have some water for my car radiator which had boiled over. Such a simple and effective plan.
As I walked towards the front door, fearful thoughts raced through my mind. I wondered if one of my gang might get hurt or even killed. Would a family member do something silly and put up a struggle?
An incident sprang to mind and I shuddered. Some time before, six friends of mine had robbed a house in Liverpool. The wealthy family was out, but my friends didn’t realise their 10-year-old son had stayed home and was playing in another part of the house. While my friends were attending to a safe in one downstairs room, the little boy found a rope and began to play cowboys. He tied one end of the rope to a high object, made a noose and then slipped his head through it. Then, through some accidental mistiming, the rope pulled taut on his throat and he strangled himself. When the family arrived home they not only found the place robbed but also their little boy dead. My six friends were apprehended and charged with murder; the penalty the gallows. Fortunately, the truth came out at a later stage and the charge was reduced to robbery.
I was thinking of this on the doorstep. I just hoped nothing would go wrong. With all the bravado I could muster up, I knocked.
When the owner came to the door, he switched a light on and illuminated the landing. As there were large glass doors on either side, he could clearly see everybody. We all felt right burks, standing in the pool of light. For a few beats the owner just stood there, sizing up the situation. Then he shouted at the top of his voice, ‘Help, help, fetch the police Mary, fetch the police!’ I felt sick with fear as I frantically tried to weigh up the two options available. I first considered smashing the door down. It was a thick heavy church-shaped door and by the time we could have done it, his wife would have finished on the blower. There was just one option. I gave the nod and there was a scattering of crooks. We scrambled back in the car and tore away to Stockport on the outskirts of Manchester. Then we split up and went our various ways.
A couple of days later we met up again. We were still feeling a bit deflated, so I persuaded the gang that we should rob another place. Stevie Thomas had mentioned Mr Swift had been buying stolen jewellery for a long time and also evading income tax.
Tony, John, Kenny and I drove to Swift’s shop and parked around the corner. We rehearsed our plan for the final time. We were all hyped up, except for the introverted John who listened in tense silence. Tony drew from his jacket an automatic revolver. I promptly took the clip of bullets out, telling him I didn’t mind him flashing a gun at people provided it wasn’t loaded. I knew how hot-headed he was. Then I gave Tony a stolen solid silver fruit bowl to take into the shop for a valuation and possible sale. We needed some valid reason for Tony’s continuing presence in there in case we had to wait for other customers to leave.
We passed the shop several times to make sure it was empty before we entered. Then we walked in two at a time, John and I first so it wouldn’t seem like there was an army entering. Mr Swift, an elderly gentleman, stood behind the counter. I asked to see a selection of engagement rings. I noticed my voice had turned husky, my mouth dry as dust. My heart was pounding wildly. Mr Swift tilted the tray of glittering contents under the glass case. He was wise to The Snatch and wasn’t taking any chances by putting it on top of the counter.
At this point Tony and Kenny walked in. Tony was holding the fruit bowl and trying to look casual, however I could tell from that wild glint in his eyes and the beading perspiration on his forehead that he was on knife-edge. Tony struck up a conversation with Mr Swift and then suddenly whipped out his gun. In England, in those days, armed robberies were very unusual. Mr Swift said, ‘Oh come on lads, stop joking around, get on with what you’ve come for.’ Tony squeezed the trigger and there were two muffled ‘shots’. Had I not taken the clip out of the gun, we’d have all been on the trapdoor. Swift shouted and Tony struck him on the head with the gun; he slumped to the floor, bleeding.
Mr Swift’s son came running from the back of the shop. He received one on the chops and down he went. We started to rifle the cases in the window, stuffing our pockets with jewels, watches, rings and lots of Ronson cigarette lighters, anything we could lay our hands on. It was more like a Charlie Chaplin film than a quiet efficient robbery. Even John, usually so calm and controlled, was fumbling and dropping things in nervous excitement.
Tony and Kenny hurried out the back where there was a safe containing the contraband, several thousand pounds worth. John and I were still cramming our pockets in the shop. We had our eyes on the son, obediently staying put on the floor. We were not aware that Mr Swift was conscious and waiting for the right moment. I left via the front of the shop with my pockets bulging. Trying to look casual, I walked back towards the car, parked around the corner.
Suddenly, all hell broke loose. Mr Swift had managed to dodge John and escape from the shop. Shaking with fear he locked the shop door from the outside and ran screaming down the street, bleeding and distraught. Tony and Kenny charged out the back door, leaving poor John trapped inside. In desperation he smashed his way out through the glass entrance.
I was strolling along when John, splashed with blood and in full flight, flashed past me, whoosh! When I saw him running. I began to speed up too. Tony and Kenny caught up to us and we leapt in the car. John clutched his wounded wrist, blood seeping through onto his clothing and car upholstery. There were sparkling pieces of jewellery and wads of £5 notes spilling out of Tony’s pockets. The car was a Flying Standard; when we turned the key the damn thing wouldn’t start. So I yelled, ‘Get out! Get out!’ Everyone tumbled out of the car and pushed it. I started it in second gear and we roared off.
We turned left because traffic prevented us going right. This took us back in the direction of the jewellery shop. ‘There they are!’ People ran onto the road, yelling and trying to catch the car. One bloke jumped in a car and began to follow us. We screeched round a few side streets at a hell-for-leather speed and eventually managed to lose him. I drove the gang straight to Janie’s place. While she bandaged up John’s wrist, we related to her what had happened and her face went ashen. Later it was on the radio and we read about it in the Manchester Guardian:
ATTEMPTED HOLD-UP AT CITY SHOP
Tony and I were insulted. ‘Attempted’ hold-up? One might therefore assume that nothing was taken. Mr Swift had obviously lied to the journalists and police because most of the stuff we took was stolen. We were pleased when Janie read out to us that Mr Swift and his son reported only three robbers. However, this error would soon be rectified by the many witnesses who saw us making our getaway.
The seriousness of the offence was not what we stole but how we stole it. This must have
been one of the first armed robberies in Manchester. Everyone in my gang had panicked, thank goodness no-one was killed. Mr Swift had suffered a cut on the head and the shop assistant had been more shocked than hurt. The hold-up squad was really on our tail now and hunted us like insects. While the heat was on, we decided we’d better leave Manchester for a while. First, we had to obtain more money so we went on a breaking-in spree to try and up the funds.
The week after the robbery was filled with exciting experiences: fights with the police, warehouse robberies and car stealing. The whole experience had been a series of bad mistakes and we were having problems getting rid of the jewellery. More and more people were getting to know we had it. The description of it had been in the newspapers, and some of our fences were getting nervous. We were concerned they might dob us in to get sweet with the police.
It became dangerous to remain at home so I started moving around. I went to stay several nights with my Uncle Freddy and Auntie Florie in Salford. Freddy was a short broad man with a kindly demeanour; an ex-army sergeant who’d lost all ambition and now preferred the quiet life and plenty of booze. I told him I was on the run. He knew I was always up to something so he wasn’t too surprised by what I’d done. Indeed, he seemed to genuinely care about my plight. Each night before retiring, I put some cinders from the fire all around the front and back door so that they’d make a sound if someone approached.
About 2 am on the third morning, I heard scrunching at both doors. When I looked I saw shadowy shapes of policemen moving in the garden below, and a large black car parked up the road. Through the back, more police. Next I heard a banging and a policeman called out: ‘We know you’re in there, Ces!’ For Uncle Fred and Auntie Florie’s sake, I just went quietly.
PCs Rose and Cunningham, enemies from street fights, and six others took Ces into a private room to force a confession. He claimed he was beaten with ebony rulers and rubber hoses, stabbed in the stomach with pencils and hung out the window 16 metres above the pavement. They threw him in a cell with a crim whose red hair they’d pulled out. In court next day the magistrate asked Ces if he had any objection to a seven-day remand. Ces threw off his jacket to expose his shirtless back, marks plain to see, and said he’d been beaten. The public gallery cried ‘Shame’ and newspapers ran the story. He was remanded at Strangeways instead of the police lock-up..
The publicity had an unexpected result: dad visited me. He and I sat in the same booth before the same mesh as we had when I was nine. Dad said he’d asked a counsellor to look into the police brutality but the counsellor wouldn’t touch it. it was a strain and nothing was resolved, but I was left with the rather pleasant feeling my father cared a little.
Ces, John and Kenny were found guilty, and Ces got five years for armed robbery and a total of 10 with five other offences to be served concurrently, effectively five years behind bars. The next day the Manchester Guardian reported the case, adding: ‘Waters is said to have stated the third man who entered the shop was his half-brother, Tony Monaghan, aged 36.’ Tony was not impressed when he was caught not long after, and blamed Ces for grassing him. Ces maintained he’d never dob in family or friend. The police ‘set him up’.
Britain was experimenting with not hanging felons for three months, to see if it made any difference to the crime rate, so prisons were crowded and cells shared. A warder brought news of a transfer: ‘Right, you’ve been allocated Dartmoor. Best of British luck.’ I shouted: ‘I’m off to the Moor!’ A voice: ‘You might as well kill yourself and save yourself a lot of trouble.’ Even the Home Secretary called Dartmoor `the cesspit of humanity’. Built to hold French POWs during the Napoleonic Wars, it had been England’s main confinement centre for serious offenders since 1850. Campaigns to close it all failed. The bus that took us from the train station in Devon to Dartmoor crossed empty heather-scattered moors punctuated by weathered rock outcrops, though it had been a royal forest in Saxon times. Long Roman walls bordered the narrow road. We rode in depressed silence. The police were to blame, they brought me here. At this stage, I wasn’t willing to accept any responsibility for getting my life into such a mess.
Ces figured his Strangeways reputation and blood ties with known heavies Bill and Tony would be assets. But his first sights of Dartmoor—quarry guards with guns, the granite blocks of the gate, the Latin motto Parcere subjectis (`spare the humbled’ one inmate thought, but ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here’ reckoned another), horseback warders with long truncheons—were depressing. The staircase rails gleamed from the prisoners’ emery paper, the granite floors from their black wax. It smelled ‘like a poor man’s Buckingham Palace … a mixture of disinfectant and the mustiness of age’. The interior was ‘remarkably cold, like a butcher’s refrigerator’. In the cells the walls were ‘so thick I could hear nothing’. Number 202, as stitched on his grey jacket’s shoulder, got little sleep the first night.
Eventually, Ces worked in the mailbag shop, then transferring to the quarry, cleaning, bog, and garden parties later. Garden party was best—a little stolen raw carrot or turnip enlivened the jaded palate. He was transferred to a permanent cell. If he balanced on the back of his chair he could open a small high window and admit the cold damp moor air. No electric light, just gas mantles in the corridor throwing weak flickering light, making eerie patterns on the whitewashed walls. His nightshirt and two blankets provided little warmth, so, like most prisoners, he slept in work overalls and socks. Men who tried to abscond went on the A list and had to put their day gear out after daily searches, suffering terribly from cold nights, listening to the wind whistling, the occasional whinny of a Dartmoor pony, or the tapping of prisoners communicating through the water pipes. The granite floors attracted water and icy pools formed at night. The stench from his slop-out area exuded into his cell for hours afterwards. A cob of bread and a small serve of porridge flecked with mouse droppings for breakfast; insipid soup and vegetable mash with more bread for lunch; bread and butter with cheese or jam—the latter spreads recently added as a reform—for the evening meal; hot cup of cocoa—`a good energy source’—for supper. Set menu, Dartmoor 1950s.
He met ‘colourful characters’ there. ‘They were a mixed bunch: violent, desperate, sensitive, screwball, intellectual … One thing they all had in common, they wanted to get out …’ He met Paddy Braidy who would always fight for a bet, but he smoked heavily and wasted away with lung cancer before release. Adolf quietly absorbed all his free time making a £1 note, then pretended to try to bribe an incorruptible warder who took it to ‘the prison governor. Adolf was charged and claimed the whole thing was a joke. The Bank of England’s official adjudicated and decided it was a near-perfect forgery, even the delicate watermark made with margarine. Peter Martin Jenkins, in for stealing thousands in diamonds from Cartiers, knew the governor; they’d been to Harrow together and the governor cordially hated Peter for it. Of delicate nature, Peter was more foolish than criminal and never really adjusted to ‘doing bird’, cried a lot and wrote about Dartmoor in a manuscript Ces and mates smuggled out for him. He had to be carried by stronger workers in the quarry as he couldn’t lift the sledgehammer or shovel the broken rock, so was in constant danger of being sent to solitary. So it was handy Dooker worked with Ces and Peter, showing them how to expertly and easily break rock with a natural easy fall of the hammer along, not across or athwart, the rock’s grain. After years inside Dooker was released, took up work in a quarry and was killed three weeks later in an industrial accident.
`Doctor’ Stott was so-named because he was always going to the doctor after swallowing forks, spoons, rocks, anything really. Lots of prisoners swallowed things for a brief respite in hospital or to escape problematic creditors over gambling or sexual debts, but Stott got depressed and morose and did it over and over. ‘You’d better have my snout,’ he said, and passed Ces his tobacco tin, a beautiful tin with a photograph of a half-naked woman, rare sight. ‘You been given special release?’ ‘Kind. of,’ he said. Ces knew the
doctors had told him another fork would be fatal. Ces told the chief screw, Ces told the Welsh chaplain, neither acted. Stott was found dead the next morning.
Swallowing was one way out. Striking a warder was another. The policy was that, although the sentence would be increased, it would not be further served in Dartmoor—to protect prisoners from officers seeking revenge.
A German called Jones even confessed to a murder he’d committed when he was in the German army many years before. He figured the authorities would send him back to Germany for trial and punishment, but they tried him at the Old Bailey and he was hanged.
Some people coped well, well enough to help others. Old Tom, a greybeard, was doing seven years for arson. Respected by all, he shared the fruits of his education and memory. A brilliant reader, he held prisoners spellbound reciting Shakespeare’s verse or Shaw’s plays; helped illiterate prisoners read and write letters; incessantly urged prisoners `to make better human beings of themselves’. He encouraged Ces to learn to read and write. Ces painfully read War with the Irish—about how the Black and Tans put a priest in a sealed bag and threw him in the river. The illiterate of yesterday developed a voracious appetite for reading which never left him.
No-one impressed Ces as much as Harry Roy Webb, known as Rubberbones. He had a big A (Absconder, not Adulterer) on the back of his shirt, and was searched all the time. Roy had a mischievous happy-go-lucky personality and was well-mannered—‘nothing rough or coarse about him’. Roy’d left the army smarting at some legal injustice he’d experienced there, and got into some petty crime. Eventually he hit a jeweller with a gun butt, and his reputation as an escape artist began. He prised window bars loose, impersonated a sergeant, duplicated a set of keys he’d memorised from a warder’s belt and fashioned a set in Bakelite, an outmoded early plastic. He’d even slipped the cuffs on the train on the way to Dartmoor and bolted. He was found two days later, exhausted, cold and hungry on the moors. His next attempt was tough, patient and ingenious. He carefully quarried out mortar in his cell with a bag needle, eight of them eventually, for months, through two cell walls, using mock plaster made of toothpaste, and rigged up pulleys to wiggle his dummy in bed which he did when a warder appeared at the Judas hole to ask him if he was OK. He hit the blacksmith’s shop one pouring morning and dressed in galoshes, raincoat and broad-brimmed hat, grabbed an extension ladder, climbed over Dartmoor’s walls and walked the moors to a railway station. He was caught wandering about in London within weeks, and returned. Ces adored him.
Hellbent: Ces Waters & Me Page 16
