Britain's Most Notorious Prisoners

by Stephen Wade

  What about Charlie Kray? He died in HMP Parkhurst on 4 April 2000. Reg was given compassionate prison leave to join relatives at the funeral. Charlie, aged seventy-three, was in jail for running a cocaine-smuggling operation. He was serving twelve years. At the funeral, Reg was handcuffed to a female prison officer at the service, which was held in Bethnal Green, at St Matthew’s Church. The BBC reported: ‘Inside the church Reg moved up the aisle smiling and shaking hands with some of the 250-strong congregation, including old friends and underworld associates like ‘‘Mad’’ Frankie Fraser. The funeral was a much more low-key affair than that of Reggie’s twin brother, Ronnie, who died in 1995. After the service, Charlie’s coffin, carried by six pallbearers, was given a guard of honour by a group of Hell’s Angels.’

  Charlie was the first son of Charlie and Violet Kray. He joined the navy, then later retired from boxing as he was ill, and managed the careers of the twins, who were also originally destined to be boxers. He was always the brother in the shadow: the detective who arrested Ron, Nipper Read, said, ‘When the twins were in trouble, Charlie was the first person they would turn to.’

  The Kray story, even when they were locked up and when they died, has been one of ambiguity and mixed responses. It has to be, given that the twins were convicted of murder and that they instilled fear into so many people around them at their height of activity. But in prison, they were like all others inside: bored, in need of constant vigilance, and existing in the usual routine. Their myth will go on, as more films will be made and more books written, and maybe the truth about them will slip away.

  To illustrate just how far they have permeated our iconography of the sub-culture of crime, the photographer, David Bailey, took their picture and created the classic shot of the three brothers, suited and smart, gazing in different directions, faces almost seemingly carved in stone, which appeared in his book, Box of Pin-Ups. He recalled, in The Times in March 2010: ‘I didn’t know Charlie very well, he was a bit of a pussy cat, but Reg and I were great friends. I used to go to his clubs with him and to the pub. He used to tell me too much about what they were up to and I used to say, “I don’t want to know.” And he would say, “Dave, I wish we’d done it legit like you.” ’

  In Bailey’s words, I don’t want to know, we have the fascination and the paradox: we do want to know but also we don’t want to know. After all, those men in their smart suits and well-oiled sleek hair killed, intimidated and ruled a part of London with fear. We should detest and revile them. Many people take the view that in prison the point is to ‘put them in a dark hole and piss on them’ as I have heard said many a time. Yet many of us want to know more. It’s a matter of sheer human curiosity. There but for the grace of God go I …

  The Kray story involves so many hooks into other areas of life. They are now just as prominent in London history as standard social historical subjects in the heritage and oral history memory. They may never have planned the notoriety, but others certainly saw them as money spinners in their image as well as in their actual crimes.

  Conclusions

  Notorious prisoners are destined to be in the ‘shock horror’ books on the shelves, and they will almost certainly exist in the public imagination somewhere between myth and a twisted celebrity glamour. The foregoing biographical profiles demonstrate, I hope, that prison lives are far from glamorous. The most tough-minded and resolute old lags become shadows of the human beings they once were. Charles Bronson wrote: ‘The first thing that hits you when you’re banged up with long-term prisoners is the dead eyes.’

  In my own prison work, I noticed how potent the True Crime books in the library were: they were popular and people could never have enough of works about the Krays, gangland and autobiographies of known villains. I once started a reading group in one jail, and I wanted it to be like any other reading group – works selected across the range of fiction, biography and maybe other genres. I asked men to suggest titles, and after a few conversations the general feeling was that we should have a reading group devoted entirely to True Crime. I thought that such a group was better than no group at all, and I selected the first two books. We started with a memoir by one of the Great Train Robbers. It was in small print and it included a great deal of detailed biography.

  At the first meeting of the group, it was clear that nobody had read it. One man said, ‘I read the first three pages, then dropped off to sleep.’ That was the feeling of all members, so I moved on to the Tony Martin case and a book written about that. It was a huge success, because it raised an issue that mattered to them. Some of them did burglaries and robberies of course, and they felt that the law should protect them when they went onto another person’s property to steal. Being shot in the back as Martin’s victim was, did not seem right at all. Our debate lasted for an hour.

  That experience sums up the nature of prison thinking and criminals’ interests. Prison is circumscribed thinking: it creates obsession and mindsets that run around on a loop. Press a button and rant number one begins; press another and rant number two follows. But I also have to say that in any random group of people inside, there are some really original and fascinating imaginations at work, and a jail is a buzz of creativity. The insides of prison walls teem with stories. Compelling stores are generated every day. As I arrived at each prison car park, I felt that thrill of the unexpected every time. Anything could happen in a prison day, and a ‘normal’ one was hard to find.

  ‘Notorious’ prisoners exist in a world fabricated by the media. Inside the walls, the staff have to cope with them; every day brings moans, complaints, petty irritations. One little event at home can disrupt the day. In my drama groups and writing groups, I could always tell when someone had received some bad news. It could be a phone call from a mother or a wife, about debt, or illness or the kids at school. At its worse, the change of mood could be after a court hearing and a ‘knock back’ in the sentencing. Sometimes it was a falling out with a wife or girlfriend. I always had to guess, and then ask questions if necessary later.

  Even the most high-profile prisoners share those same concerns. The career criminals who have never done anything truly nasty and violent rub shoulders with the ones who have a transient glamour, the ones whose names might be in the papers. That encounter has to be made normal. In a jail, everything must be contained for the common good – and that includes the brimming anger and rage of the individual who is frustrated and takes it out on the nearest person to him.

  As my chapters have shown, even the prisoners whose names have reached the level of iconic status – Brady, Sutcliffe, Bronson, Krays – have to live lives in prison on a par with the mundane and routine we all have to cope with. They have to eat, sleep, defecate, indulge in small talk, play chess and attend classes or workshops. In that context, ‘notorious’ seems to lose its impact.

  In many ways, the literature of prison life has been either written by major figures such as Nelson Mandela or Antonio Gramsci, or it has been in the genre of the shocking memoir. What has been marginal is the documentary. Although television is now making up for this omission in series broadcast on the Crime and Investigation Channel in particular, there is still very little known by the general public about the experience of prison. The people in my chapters illustrate both ends of the spectrum: the sensational and the mundane. One conclusion has to be that publishers rarely see the documentary narrative as being commercial. They lust for celebrity.

  I know this from personal experience. At one time I was working with a prisoner on his autobiography. The story was a compelling tale of childhood deprivation, followed by many years inside and sentences for attempted murder. The man had taken it on himself to play the role of avenger and attack supposed paedophiles, to do what the law had not done: rub them out. I knew that this could not be published while he was doing time, but I approached a publisher simply to test out the ground as to what interest would be aroused.

  The publisher was interested and I met them in London. I exp
lained that this book was something the man would like to publish when he was released, and that he would need an editor to work with him. I explained that the Writers in Prison Network, with whom I was working, have a mentoring scheme for people such as this man. This was all very interesting, the publisher said, but wasn’t Jeffrey Archer once in that prison? If so, did I have any stories about him? I was told that if I did, they would ‘publish it tomorrow’.

  That says everything about the dilemma of the public being informed about the real experience of jail. Some years ago, the government experimented with schemes to bring young offenders (or potential offenders) into prisons to be frightened. Prisoners would volunteer to act out typical scenes from prison life and the kids would be suitably terrified. I spoke to one man who had taken part in this. He talked about how much he enjoyed the acting and that he felt a great sense of satisfaction in having done something to try to stop young kids getting into trouble with the law. Even Charles Bronson has expressed similar thoughts.

  What are we not doing then, to increase awareness? We are believing the stereotypes and seeing such programmes as Bad Girls and Prison Break because there is an attraction in prison tales – but only in those tales that perpetuate the stereotypes.

  Criminologists as well as politicians would probably agree that to spend time giving attention to prison deeds and misdeeds is not advisable. I can appreciate the argument that to ignore the negative in life is to stop it from being seen and exaggerated. There is no doubt that young cons are impressionable and will soon perceive their lives to be ‘us against the system’ but massive amounts of money and all kinds of professionalism are aimed at rehabilitation, in the belief that such an outcome is possible. The key question, teasing every politician who might have a new manifesto and a master plan, is ‘Does prison work?’

  It only works for those who change radically and open up themselves to change. When I first worked in a prison, several professionals in the service said that there was a pattern: that in the mid thirties lots of villains changed and lost the fascination of the buzz that risky crime gives you. These people open up to new things; they are often where the highs of prison life is found – they try new things and their resolve to change leads them to look for outlets in which their skills and experience may find expression. This is too optimistic a picture of course, because there are also many who reach that stage and atrophy. They merely become slobs and close up, shut off any hint of change. But when you meet a man or woman who has become receptive to that transmutation in which they find a new self, the feeling is immensely satisfying.

  However, there are some stories from inside which remind us of the sheer boredom, depression and limbo that come with prison. A person inside has to find ways to cope and exist or they run into trouble from all quarters – mostly from inside themselves.

  On one occasion I worked with a young man who was self-harming. He had so many cuts on both arms that he looked as though there had been a massive tattooing job on him that had gone wrong. He told me that from his pad window he could see his own house, just beyond the prison walls. ‘It was where my little baby died,’ he said. That is one of thousands of human stories generated behind the stereotypes of ‘typical prisoners’. I hope this book has helped to dispel some myths.

  In spite of all these thoughts concerning the reality of prison, the media still want us to take an interest in those who are notorious in the sense that there are highly dangerous or evil convicts amongst us and that their lives and exploits will always be of interest. That story will run as long as there are tabloid papers who insist on applying the term ‘evil’ to prisoners, grouping all the people inside together as if evil goes with every offence. In an anonymous True Crime classic, A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the most Notorious Highwaymen, published in 1719, we have these words: ‘Newgate is a dismal place … a place of calamity, a habitation of misery, a confused chaos, a bottomless pit of violence, a Tower of Babel where all are speakers and none hearers.’ Yet, in spite of that description, the villains and unfortunates of the following century were mostly placed in the stories in the best-selling Newgate Calendar, the classic collection of crime stories published mainly in the 1820s. The eighteenth century and Regency period were the times in which the gaolers at Newgate (called ordinaries) earned good money taking down the criminal biographies of those about to die on the scaffold.

  Civilised society still wants its sordid and dramatic tales of law-breakers; ‘notorious’ criminals will always have stories to tell that will compel attention. In spite of all the serious reflections I have made, the fact is that there is excitement and some kind of anticipatory buzz in prison stories. Before I enter a prison, ready to work on some writing project or listen to a life story, I have that little flutter of apprehension. The professionals tell you that you are safer inside the jail walls than out walking the streets doing the shopping. That is true, but still, when we are put in a confined space several hundred people who know that others have the keys and that they cannot leave to buy a paper or have a drink at the pub, we should expect the frustrations to boil over from time to time. Riots and mutinies are rare but when they happen they are terrifying for all concerned. In a prison riot, the mainstream cons go looking for the sex offenders, the ‘nonces’ as they are called. There is a potential for murder there. Every day the men inside for violent crime, white collar crime or various drug offences, have to watch the ‘nonces’ being moved, to a workshop or to the exercise yard. In each movement there is a tenseness. When prisoners queue for food at the canteen hatch, there is potential violence. The trays are weapons and the opportunity, outside the protection of the pad, for attack, is too hard to resist for those bearing grudges.

  Some prisoners cope very well with jail and they need the time inside. Once in a prison library book I found these words scrawled inside: ‘Browny, C Wing. Doing three and luvvin’ it.’ Others dread each sunrise and wake to find that the dreams of home are just dreams, and they are actually still in their pad, with the smells and the often unwelcome company of the pad mate and his bad habits and noise.

  Being notorious is very difficult; being just another con is easy. So we have the literature of prison and the tales of bold and dangerous crime. As John McVicar memorably said, ‘Being a thief is a terrific life, but the trouble is, they put you in the nick for it.’

  An Afterword

  This is a short essay attempting to make the link between the notorious and the more routine, perfunctory prison lives. There is a link, and it is about the distortions of prison life in the public mind, and also about the inescapable fact that the readership for notorious crime stories will always be there.

  Many of the men in the stories in this book have been creative while doing time. Time inside for many is time ‘turned in’ – with no escape from the self you have to carry around. Creative writing is a valuable part of this introspection, but as the cases of Nilsen, Sutcliffe, Smith and Bronson have shown, the activity is riddled with difficulties and legal issues. Many prisoners can’t wait for the next edition of the paper, Inside Time, to turn up in the library. It has grown over the last few years into a substantial collection of letters from prisoners, legal information and, most recently, a poetry supplement.

  In my time as a writer in residence in various prisons, I worked with hundreds of offenders who wanted to see their name in print or on a stage, but their aim was not necessarily to become rich. Yes, if the writing revels in the narrative of their offence and includes an account of their victim, then the very idea is morally unsound. Yet when I was asked if I would help a prisoner write their autobiography, the glint in their eye when I agreed was rarely to do with cash machines: more often I found that it was a cathartic wish.

  Of course, the glamour of true crime biographies is always there, but I would argue that the dreams of being the next Charles Bronson is limited to the young and feckless.

  More seasoned offenders generally feel drawn to the profound
need to communicate, to make the world aware of what their trajectory has been from crime to prison, with the mess of shattered relationships that litter their path. One of my clients had written several plays which had been staged or broadcast and all profits had been given to charity. As a writer in prison, working for the Writers in Prison Network, I was always aware that prisoners must not write for cash while under the domain of the Governor and the prison service. Yet the paradox of a case such as Razor Smith and his life as a best-seller writer worries anyone working in the arts inside prison walls. Recently, he told Inside Times that he was being investigated with the profit motive in mind, yet he had been encouraged to write while in his cell. After all, the isolation of life in a pad is ideal for creative writing; we have to ask what happens after the enticement to write creatively, to express oneself, to examine a life of drama and extreme emotion?

  The answer must be that for many inside, as for those writers outside the prison walls, the writing becomes enjoyable, fulfilling and indeed may potentially become a source of income. If we talk of rehabilitation, then what is wrong with that? Some of my clients inside have had excellent writing published, and made no money at all, but on the other hand, an anthology I edited of women’s writing from HMP Morton Hall, The Emotional Ride, has just won the Platinum Award in the Koestler Foundation Awards. The four writers will receive £25 each. None of the material in that book is about their victims or indeed about their crimes, in any explicit way.

  Encouraging offenders to write will initially be a boost to their self-esteem, but for some it will be a revelation: they may have missed school and books may never have come their way, then suddenly they are assured that they have ability with words and they may see a future involving such activity. By all means let’s suppress the kind of unhealthy wallowing in crimes that a minority of prisoners wish to do, but we should also encourage and liberate that creativity nurtured by the love of language that people such as Razor Smith wish to do. He has openly said that his books are to warn incipient gangsters of the folly and danger involved in handling guns and relishing violence.