He listened to me and then said: ‘So why are you still with the SPS? You have been here a long time.’ He then said: ‘I am sure you would be able to retire if you wanted to.’ Before he left he signed off by saying: ‘Leave this with me.’
He was true to his word. He looked into my circumstances and then came back to me. He said: ‘You are at the maximum for your pension and all your benefits. You can stay on and work until you are fifty-five but it wouldn’t make any difference to your pension or anything else.’ He said: ‘If I was you I would retire.’ Maybe that was his way of politely saying go before you are pushed but I think he was genuinely looking out for me.
By that time I had just turned fifty-three and in terms of the prison service I was very much in the twilight years of my career. I took time and discussed things with the family and then had a long hard think about things. I then made my decision that I was going to retire. It was a no brainer, if I am being honest. It wasn’t a hard decision in the end. I could have stayed on for another couple of years but what was the point? I could still live comfortably on my pension and I had devoted a lot of time and effort to the Scottish Prison Service. It was also the chance for me to spend a lot more time with my family. That was the biggest influence on my decision. I had put a lot of hours in at Craiginches both on shifts and into their extra-curricular activities, like the fund-raisers and projects we had worked on. My family had been supportive throughout but it was time for me to give back to them and to give them my full attention. I also thought it might give me time to improve my bowling and to do a bit more gardening.
I felt I had made a positive contribution to Craiginches. I honestly felt I couldn’t top what I had done. I knew I could leave with my head held high and look back on what everyone had achieved in our time together at HMP Aberdeen with great pride.
The ironic thing was that when I finally did say farewell to the Scottish Prison Service I still wasn’t back at Craiginches. I was still seconded at the training college. So my final shift with the prison service when I retired in 1996 was in Polmont. I, obviously, had to go back to Craiginches to clear my locker and to pick up my belongings but that was pretty much it. I said my goodbyes and everything was pretty low key. There was no retirement or farewell party.
The governor, Bill Rattray, gave all his departing officers a pint glass to mark our service at Craiginches. He said his thank yous and after that it was pretty much all over. Twenty odds years and suddenly it was finished.
There were, in fairness, a few of us who had retired at Craiginches at the same time. So there was also a sort of changing of the guard, with the older officers heading for the exit. It was sad to be saying farewell but I knew in my heart of hearts I had made the right decision. I also received some nice farewell cards and letters from people I had helped and got close to through the years.
This was one of them:
Dear Bryan,
On behalf of the staff and patients of Ward 19 at Woodend and myself I would like to say thank you for all the work you did fund-raising and organising social activities for all the patients through the Community Links Committee.
It involved a tremendous amount of work and effort from you and the team and it really has been much appreciated.
Best wishes from all of us for a long and happy retirement from the Scottish Prison Service.
Fiona Thomson
City Hospital
Urquhart Road
Aberdeen
It was good when you got feedback like that because, for me, my time with the Scottish Prison Service was all about helping others. I think and I hope that others feel the same about their work in the service now.
I often think back to my time at Craiginches and all the colleagues I worked alongside. I also worked under a few governors who had their own individual ways of keeping the prison and prisoners in line. Here they are:
Mr Duncan McIvor
A good governor to work for and he kept good discipline.
Mr Swanson
Mr Dan Robertson
A good governor who got a lot of respect from his staff.
Mr Mike Milne
I enjoyed working with him. He was a good governor. I also worked with him at the Scottish Prison Service College at Polmont when I was down on detached duty.
Mr Scott Oglivie
When I returned from my initial training course at Polmont I worked with him on the 2nd floor in A Hall never thinking he would end up being my governor. It was with him that we really got started on our outside projects with the prisoners. He gave me his full backing on the projects and I enjoyed working with him.
Mr Leslie McBain
My programme with the outside projects and the visiting entertainment was in full swing by this time and he always gave the committee his full backing with what we wanted to organise. He also oversaw the centenary celebrations event at Craiginches. He was an excellent governor to work for and during his period we had the best staff training programmes in the Scottish Prison Service.
Mr William Rattray
The projects were still in full swing during this period. He also encouraged us to continue organising the Burns Suppers and Christmas parties. He would bring along his guitar and do his bit of entertaining the visitors and I enjoyed working with him. It was during his time we had a visit from the Princess Royal.
Every governor along with every member of their staff did their bit to make Craiginches the success it was. We can all look back on our time there with a great sense of pride. I am now happily retired but I would say that I am even busier now. I just don’t know how I managed to fit in my day job and everything else we did when Craiginches was in its prime.
41
Craiginches No More
It was announced on 8th June 2008 that Her Majesty’s Prison Aberdeen was to close. It wasn’t even the headline news. Okay, it maybe wasn’t a surprise. Everybody who had worked and been involved at Craiginches knew this day was coming but it was buried under the announcement of a new super-jail for the north-east of Scotland.
The Scottish Prison Service had confirmed ambitious plans to build a new jail in Peterhead. It was to be called HMP Grampian and would hold around 500 inmates. It was confirmed that HMP Grampian would replace HMP Aberdeen and Peterhead. Both were to close once the new facility was up and running. HMP Grampian was also planned to be built on the existing site of HMP Peterhead so that meant there was no longer going to be a prison in Aberdeen. It had been clear that was always going to be the case. Most of the sites they had considered had been in and around Peterhead. I don’t know if that was down to the fact that buying land would be cheaper than in Aberdeen or not, but it was a shame to see the city no longer having its prison.
The £90 million plans were unveiled by Mike Ewart, Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service.
He confirmed this in a statement, which read: ‘This exercise has now been completed and we have concluded that the preferred site for HMP Grampian is on the site of the existing HMP Peterhead.
‘SPS will seek planning permission from Aberdeenshire Council for the proposed development.
‘Subject to receipt of planning consent, SPS will award a contract for the construction of the proposed HMP Grampian which will be run by the Scottish Prison Service.’
I remember the Scottish Government at the time had pledged to build a ‘world class’ facility and in fairness when you saw the plans that was to prove the case.
They certainly didn’t disappoint. I was amazed when I saw everything that HMP Grampian was going to offer. There was to be accommodation for adults, females and young offenders. There were education facilities, and a community reintegration building, which was designed for helping prisoners to get ready for life after their release.
I’d had my suspicions for some time. HMP Aberdeen was becoming more and more antiquated because it was such an old building, despite all the money spent on it and the modernisation the Scottish Prison had done.
I
then had read in the newspapers that the Scottish Prison Service were looking at early plans for the ‘super-jail’ in the North-east, before their plans for HMP Grampian were announced. I knew then the writing was pretty much on the wall for Craiginches. There was no way they were going to build a new jail and keep both the prisons in Aberdeen and Peterhead open. That was never going to happen.
Prison chiefs had also started to build these new ‘super jails’ around the United Kingdom and normally it meant merging one or two prisons. There is a new facility, HMP Berwyn, in Wales. The new prison has been built and as a result four English prisons in Reading, Dorchester, Blundeston and Northallerton were all closed. In Scotland we have also seen the new HMP Addiewell Prison built in West Lothian.
The government has made it clear they are looking to build several new modern, state-of-the-art prisons. I remember reading a statement from the then Chancellor George Osborne recently about prison modernisation. It read: ‘This spending review is about reform as much as it is about making savings.
‘One important step will be to modernise the prison estate. So many of our jails are relics from Victorian times on prime real estate in our inner cities.
‘So we are going to reform the infrastructure of our prison system, building new institutions which are modern, suitable and rehabilitative. And we will close old, outdated prisons in city centres, and sell the sites to build thousands of much-needed new homes.’ The preference was always to build new modern facilities that I suppose to an extent were more prisoner-friendly. In fairness the new super-jail at Peterhead was one of the first of its time. I knew once they had the plans drawn up and were given the green light for the funding of the build then Craiginches was always going to be on borrowed time.
However, I have to admit to being disappointed when I first heard the news. I had spent a large chunk of my life there, albeit on the right side of the bars. I had made so many friends, had such good times and more importantly had done so many positive things in the name of HM Prison Aberdeen that it was a blow to hear that it was to be demolished and left as nothing more than a pile of rubble.
There was opposition to the move to close Craiginches. The then MP for Aberdeen South, Anne Begg, put up a rather staunch defence. Begg, speaking in the wake of the announcement, said: ‘While I am supportive of the new prison in Peterhead, I still believe there is a need for Aberdeen to have a prison of its own in order to retain the prison place capacity and for the short-term holding of remand prisoners close to their court appearances.’ Support for that particular cause continued to grow and that led to several members of the Scottish Parliament getting together to put pressure on the government to keep smaller community prisons open. It was worth the fight but I think everyone connected with Craiginches, in their heart of hearts, knew that it was a decision that was never going to be reversed.
So, personally, I was disappointed but the basic fact was that it was the right decision by the Scottish Prison Service. Craiginches was tired and dated when I retired so twenty years on I could only imagine that it had become even more antiquated. To me, Craiginches was no longer fit for purpose. It was time for the prison to be mothballed.
You always have to remember that the prison service did spend a lot of money trying to bring Craiginches into the twenty-first century but everything they did proved a costly affair. Everything was a huge, huge ask because of the age of the building and because it was such a solid building. Peterhead was along the same lines and offered similar headaches.
I saw what a huge task it was to put in the heating and toilet facilities. It was massive and it really improved the prison but were the improvements appreciated by the prisoners? I don’t think they were by a lot of them.
There were also increasing problems at Craiginches long after I retired. Overcrowding was a major factor. The prison was originally designed for around 150 but at times there were more than 250 prisoners in Craiginches. I read a lot of stuff in the media about overcrowding and staff shortages.
There was also the change in society itself. Drugs had become an even bigger problem than they ever were in my day.
I read a report back in 2009 from Andrew McLellan, the former chief inspector of the prisons, who said that a large majority of inmates could be tested positive for illegal drugs due to the flourishing narcotics trade in the prison. When you looked more closely behind the scenes then it was clear for all to see that HMP Aberdeen or Craiginches was no longer fit for purpose.
What did disappoint me were the plans for the famous old site at Craiginches.
It was a shame, to me, that the prison was to be knocked down and then affordable flats and houses built on that site. HMP Aberdeen was always an imposing, grand building. It was a landmark in Aberdeen and I just thought they could have used it and modernised it by keeping the wall and some of the frontage for modern flats, like they do now. But the decision was to demolish it and all that history was gone. I am sure some of the prisoners who served time there would have been celebrating and glad to see the back of it.
You can understand why a developer would want the site because it is 5.6 hectares and housed twelve buildings when the jail was still standing. You could build a fair number of houses on it.
It was just such a waste. Even the granite from Craiginches couldn’t be reused. I remember I asked one of the workmen when they started the demolition and he told me the granite was being taken away and he had no idea if it was going to be reused.
Craiginches closed its gate for the final time in January 2014 after 124 years. Over the previous weeks Aberdeen’s final prisoners, more than 200 of them, had been transferred to alternative facilities at Perth and Barlinnie.
They remained there until HMP Grampian was officially opened two months later in March 2014.
The old site remained dormant until the demolishers started work to clear Craiginches of all its history.
I made several trips down to the site to see the gradual progress that was made in the clearing operation. Myself and Ernie Christie spoke to the site foreman who told us there would, at least, be a reminder of Craiginches on the site. There is a wall going up at the front of it and the centenary brick is going into that. I think there has been some halfway house agreement, as there is going to be a frontage to the new houses and the original prison bell is going into that. At least there will always be a constant reminder of what was HMP Aberdeen, or Craiginches.
42
Reunion
I thought that with Craiginches set to be met with the wrecking ball and the demolition team it would be as good a time as any to have a prison reunion. I thought it would be a good idea to get together with some old faces and to reminisce and to remember some of the good times connected with our time together at the prison.
So I contacted Ernie Christie and Allan MacKinnon, who were also retired, but who I’d kept in touch with, to get their thoughts. They were both pretty positive about the idea and so we arranged to meet up to see if we could make it happen.
We had the meeting and the general feeling was that we should give it a go. We had a colleague, John Watt, who wanted to come and help us. John had close links with Craiginches in our glory years and so we got him involved. It was, like we always said with the Links Committee, the more hands the merrier.
We laid down our basic plans of what we hoped to do to organise the evening. It wasn’t an easy project to plan and we didn’t have any finances behind us. We also didn’t have a record of all the staff who had worked at Craiginches or contact details for how to get in touch with them.
It was a case of trying to get word out about the reunion but we also needed to get a bit of sponsorship behind us for printing posters and tickets.
Allan and I spent a bit of time going through the options and visiting restaurants and hotels in the city to find a suitable venue. We knew we needed to find somewhere that was accessible for parking, trains, buses and whatever other means of transport our former colleagues were going to u
se. We eventually decided on the Balmoral suite of the Carmelite Bar & Grill in the city centre of Aberdeen as our chosen venue. The restaurant staff told us it could hold eighty people easily and we thought that was a more than reasonable figure to aim for.
We got everything organised and set up and we thought we were well on our way until our plans took a major setback. We were hit the hammer-blow news that John Watt, one of our committee, had passed away. That set us back big time. John was a close friend and it was hard for us to take in the news. He had been heavily involved in the early stages and a major driving force in things. It came as such a shock. It took a bit of time for us all to get over. We even thought about cancelling things because we weren’t sure it was right to push ahead with our plans in the circumstances. We left things for a few weeks and we also had to pay our respects to John and his family. We let John’s funeral pass to give his family and all his friends, myself included, time to get over his death. I remember his funeral at Aberdeen Crematorium. It was absolutely full, with people having to stand at the sides and the back. That showed how popular John was.
I canvassed the views of Ernie and Allan to see if there was still a will and a want to go ahead with the event. The general feeling was that John thought the reunion was a worthwhile event – that was why he had decided to get involved in the organising committee in the first instance. So we decided to push ahead with our plans – although John would be sadly missed.
We decided the date would be 11th April 2015 and the venue, as mentioned, the Carmelite Restaurant in Aberdeen. It was later than we had initially planned and so it really had to be full steam ahead to get everything organised and in place for the big night.
Craiginches Page 18
