The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  Since the riots and publicity of recent times people are probably fairly familiar with the degraded vileness of prison life, but in those days the public knew nothing. The grimy filth was incredible, since prisons dispose of plentiful slave labour. The lavatories, the kitchen and eating utensils coated with grease, were indescribably disgusting. The cold, even in summer, was piercing; no ray of sun could penetrate the small heavily barred windows encrusted with London soot. The lights, turned out in air raids, were too dim to read by.

  Churchill at first was all for 18B and pretended to think in the event of defeat Mosley might head a puppet government, a grotesque notion. Quite apart from Mosley’s patriotism, no ambitious politician aged 43 would accept a position which at a stroke would earn him the hatred and contempt of all his countrymen.

  However, as time went on Churchill began to wonder if 18B were not incompatible with his role of democrat fighting totalitarianism, and when, after three and a half years, we were released, he called the regulation ‘in the highest degree odious’ and asked for it to be abolished. By then, the Home Secretary had become addicted to the power he enjoyed and he paid no attention. For some time previously Churchill had ensured better conditions, and we now went on to house arrest.

  Professor Simpson has done a thorough job, though impeded by the death of most of the prisoners and the shredding of papers he wished to see, also finding some still ‘closed’. The secret service, with its lies and fantasies, keeps its secrets to itself

  He is witty and sarcastic about jailers and jailed alike, and his conclusion, no doubt the right one, is that the war was entirely unaffected by 18B. All the misery, the suffering, the vast expense, not to speak of the permanent dent in any British justice, was for nothing. Fifty years on, his scholarly book is in the highest degree welcome.

  18B, in the Highest Degree Odious: Detention without Trial in Wartime Britain, Simpson, A.W.B. Evening Standard (1992)

  Reforming Prison

  Only the most devoted fans of books about prisons will wish to fork out £3.50 for Mr Caird’s little effort. It tells a great deal about Mr Caird himself, and everything he can remember about Wormwood Scrubs, where he spent seven weeks, and Coldingley, where he was incarcerated for the remaining forty five weeks of his sentence. A twenty-page pamphlet would have provided ample space for the information he imparts, and, allowing another twenty for himself and his feelings about being sentenced and going to prison, it still only adds up to forty pages. Whoever heard of a book of forty pages? The padding is shameless, the repetitions inexorable.

  Strangely enough, the thrilling chapter he might have written about his crowded hour of glorious life at the Garden House Hotel in Cambridge is nowhere to be found. It would have relieved the monotony, but for some reason he decided barely to mention it.

  Coldingley, a relatively pleasant prison where he worked as a clerk, and where there are facilities for reading and other pleasures, was only less hateful to him than Wormwood Scrubs, and the reason is that the worst thing about prison, in England at any rate, is the loss of liberty. Conditions in the cage come second. Nevertheless they do count, and he had a clean cell to himself, was allowed several books at a time, got fairly decent food, fresh air, cinema, wireless and television, and could listen to the Beatles on a record player. The work he had to do, even if less amusing than writing for the Sunday Times and the Morning Star (as the blurb says he has done since) was at least better paid and less boring than sewing mail bags. Mr Callaghan, when he opened Coldingley, said it was a leap into the future of penal reform.

  Wormwood Scrubs is one of those disgusting old prisons where three prisoners are crowded into a cell built for one, and where the lavatories are revolting in themselves and completely inadequate for the hugely swollen number of men using them. The dirt and degradation are a disgrace, but when there are so many institutions competing for money—hospitals, homes for the aged—and because the rate of criminality is high, the idea of razing the foul old prisons to the ground is hardly practical. What could be done at once is to redesign the ‘recesses’ as they are called, and have at least eight modern lavatories with WCs and basins to each landing.

  Mr Caird is interested in the Soviet Union; he repeatedly mentions having read six volumes on the subject. He even heads a chapter ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back’, although it does not fit the context, which is the gradual relaxing of rules that irked him. If he has also read Solzhenitsyn’s novels he will have found a first-hand description of prison life in Russia. Since he considered himself a political prisoner, this will have given him a yardstick against which to measure his own experience.

  Not that there is any but the most tenuous resemblance, because Mr Caird was locked up not for his opinions but for a violent demonstration against a group of people who were dining at the Garden House Hotel in Cambridge. The purpose of the dinner was to promote tourism in Greece. Mr Caird did not think anyone should be a tourist in Greece; he disapproved of the Greek régime. Nobody suggested forcing him to visit the most beautiful country on earth, but in England people can travel as they please. It is breaking the law to demonstrate violently, even against someone planning a Greek holiday.

  A mob of between three and four hundred assembled at the front and the back of the Garden House Hotel ‘intent on wrecking a non-political dinner.’ They banged on the doors, the windows and the roof, rushed in and ‘once in the dining room they used typical hooligan methods, overturning tables and smashing crockery.… Before long a really threatening situation developed. It needed eighty police to restore order…. The shambles had been achieved.’ Mr Caird was convicted of ‘causing a riot, unlawful assembly, assaulting a policeman, and carrying an offensive weapon’ and Mr Justice Melford Stevenson sentenced him and several of his friends to prison; he was given eighteen months. On appeal, Lord Justice Sachs said: ‘When there is wanton and vicious violence of a gross degree the Court is not concerned whether it comes from gang rivalry or from political motivations. It is the degree of mob violence that matters and the extent to which public peace was broken.’ Most of the sentences were confirmed, including Mr Caird’s.

  These stirring events are not described in this book. Mr Caird, in a couple of pages, contents himself with saying that he did not mean to be violent, and that a dinner guest ‘wielded a chair with great effect’. Probably the dinner guest had arrived unarmed and defended himself with what came to hand. The description of the riot given above comes from the judges as reported in The Times (7 April 1970) and the Daily Express (20 August 1970).

  The author appears to think all the security, the counting of heads, the searching of prisoners for offensive weapons and so forth was completely unnecessary. He should put himself in the warders’ shoes. Although in his photograph he looks harmless enough they were probably terrified of him. Supposing it had got about on the prison grape-vine that one of them planned a holiday on, say, the Soviet shore of the Black Sea? Mr Caird might have felt irresistibly impelled to beat him up. He has doubtless heard tell of thousands held in Russian prison camps and obviously feels indignant about their harsh treatment. One can picture the scene in the fevered imagination of the warden: Mr Caird (THINKS): Here is this disgraceful warden taking himself and his family to a country where the prison régime is unacceptable to ME! to MR CAIRD! It won’t do. Perhaps if I give him a good thump he will go to the Isle of Man instead. No! What am I thinking? Not the Isle of Man, where I’ve heard there’s birching. Certainly not a holiday at home, where the prisons are so nasty; where CAN I send the warder for his holiday? The Scillies?

  The warder might look readier to deal with such an attack than men and women dining at a Cambridge hotel, but Mr Caird’s feelings could have got the better of him. It was not long, however, before the Wormwood Scrubbers realised he was a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and he was sent off to graze at Coldingley.

  Mr Caird is interested in penal reform. Do prisons ‘reform’ the prisoner? Hardly ever, is probably the right answ
er. All the same, the odds are that Mr Caird will now think twice before he behaves as he did at the Garden House Hotel. This, only time will show. Is prison a deterrent? There again, not as a rule; but Cambridge undergraduates have not smashed up any hotels since Mr Caird and his friends went to gaol. It may be a coincidence, but on the other hand it may not.

  The ‘good and useful life’ of the book’s title is what prison is ostensibly designed to encourage ex-prisoners to lead. Very possibly Mr Caird will be a model the prison commissioners can point to, busying himself with demonstrations of the old Aldermaston variety and writing about them afterwards for the Morning Star. Yet it is difficult not to agree with him that a better way of reforming people might be found than the expense of spirit and waste of time and money which is prison.

  A Good and Useful Life: Imprisonment in Britain Today, Caird, R. Books and Bookmen (1974)

  Each in His Prison

  English prisons are in the news. Cells in Hull prison were allegedly found to be spattered with blood after the warders beat up the prisoners. Warders elsewhere have been ‘going slow’. They protest that their work has become impossible, there are too many prisoners. The gaols are overflowing, they have become even more disgusting than formerly because of desperate over-crowding. They are disgusting for the warders as well as for the convicts; hence the protests of prison officers. Yet crime, violent crime, increases year by year; there is unlikely to be a reduction in the numbers of unfortunate wretches packed three to a cell built for one. When warders ‘go slow’ the prisoners are locked in for twenty three hours of the twenty four. They are seldom beaten up, but it is not necessary to look exclusively abroad for the horrors of captivity. They are here, now, in our own country.

  England is hardly mentioned in Elizabeth Basset’s anthology. She concentrates on three great villains: Russia, Germany and Japan. Englishmen are seen as victims, never as aggressors. Yet most of the Commonwealth heads of state, notabilities and prime ministers of the past fifty years have been gaoled by the English: Mahatma Gandhi in India, Kenyatta in the infamous Hola camp, the list is long. De Valera staged a brilliant escape from Lincoln prison, but most of them languished for years. These events are passed over in deafening silence. Perhaps none of the prisoners wrote inspiring words in their cages. Pandit Nehru is the only one quoted: ‘Must the State always be based on force and violence?’ He knew the answer, but it is the sort of rhetorical question that sounds well. The unfortunate Nehru spent, in all, sixteen years in British prisons in India. Sixteen years. It does not bear thinking of.

  This anthology is highly selective, it produces no uncomfortable surprises or controversial contributors. Solzhenitsyn puts everyone else in the shade; many strive too hard for effect, others are mawkish. There are tortures for the sadistic or masochistic reader, but they can be skipped. The last war and the unspeakable miseries it engendered take up most of the book, but since there are also quotations from many centuries ago, for example from the Bible (spoiled by the banality of a modern translation), space could have been found for Socrates’ prison dialogue with his disciples. If, as a non-Christian, he is ineligible, other inspired prisoners come to mind, Sir Thomas More, John Bunyan, and many a victim (in a purely Christian context) of the Reformation and Counter-reformation. Perhaps it was just as well to stick mainly to the three villains listed above. Even if they are over-familiar, custom does not appear to stale them. If Arthur Koestler’s account (Scum of the Earth) of his experiences in a French concentration camp at the very beginning of the war had shown that brutal and bullying camp guards are not exclusively Russian, German and Japanese, it might have confused the reader.

  The choice of what to put in and what to leave out in a melancholy book of this kind is so vast that a central idea must govern it. There are moving passages, and beautiful ones, but what does the whole add up to? ‘Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage?’ Although it is true that man’s indomitable spirit, his courage, his nobility, his love of beauty, can rise triumphantly above sordid and terrifying circumstances, it should be pointed out that Lovelace’s comfortable little poem does not correspond with the facts. It was bound to be quoted here, and it is a great favourite with people unfamiliar with the insides of gaols. In truth, however, stone walls and iron bars do make a prison, and prison is a very terrible place. As Oscar Wilde wrote:

  All that we know who lie in gaol

  Is that the wall is strong;

  And that each day is like a year,

  A year whose days are long.

  Each in His Prison, Basset, E. Books and Bookmen (1979)

  Inhumanity

  This is a perfectly ghastly book, not commended for holiday reading. The depressing thing about it is that appalling cruelty and torture are practised just about everywhere on earth, man’s inhumanity to man is universal.

  The palm for the refinement of disgusting cruelty must go to the Chinese, keeping their victim alive while cutting bits off him here and there, to prolong his suffering. Yet though widespread, everyone who thinks about torture identifies with the sufferer. Few people would imagine they could possibly find themselves in the role of torturer, but, in fact, there are legions of them.

  Why resort to torture? Algeria is a typical example; there was guerrilla war and Arabs were tortured to get information without which the French army would be in danger. There was an outcry in France, and General Massu had himself tortured (electric shocks) to see how much it hurt. But, of course, half the agony is the prisoner’s utter helplessness surrounded by cruel enemies, while the General only had to say ‘Hold! Enough!’ to get up and go home.

  Terrorists are very cruel. When the oppressed revolt they become oppressors, and are not noticeably more merciful. How can people, ‘of all races’ as they say, be so wonderfully brave under torture? Apparently, it is because their rage against the tormentor makes the adrenaline flow. Nobody feels anger against his dentist, or because he has a painful corn. These ills must be borne, but when somebody deliberately hurts, it infuriates.

  Kate Millett has bravely read through the records of unspeakable horrors. Her book, though well written, is repetitive and much too long. She is preaching to the converted, it is highly unlikely that she will be read by police anywhere on the globe.

  Can nothing be done? Possibly an energetic government might catch and punish those who have tortured in its name. But what am I saying? ‘Punish’? What a frightful idea. The only hope is to change human nature; a vast programme.

  The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment, Millett, K. Evening Standard (1994)

  Charlotte Despard

  Because Charlotte Despard lived to be 95 she is always thought of as old, an old rebel, an old saint. As Charlotte French, one of a large family of fairly rich orphans, she married Max Despard, and her real life began when he died and left her a widow of fifty with a good deal of money. She had energy, imagination and courage.

  One of a group of ladies who took country flowers to the London slums to brighten the lives of the poor, she found her vocation. She realised that charity could hardly alleviate the misery she found, it was not only not enough, it did not even dent the surface of the appalling poverty and injustice she saw. Her aim was to change society radically and permanently.

  In order to help them she decided she must live among the poor, and she bought a house in Nine Elms, a noisy, dirty neighbourhood with an all-pervading smell of coal-dust. Her house became a club, a clinic, a soup kitchen, and headquarters of her fight against the conditions in which her neighbours lived, with rotten houses, starvation wages and the threat of the workhouse always hanging over them. Mrs Despard became a socialist, a Marxist. She believed that if Liberals and Conservatives could be defeated the world would completely change; misery, and with it crime, would disappear. Life in the workhouse, particularly for old women with no hope of getting work, was cruel. They were harried, insulted, ‘bullied and half starved’. Their diet was ‘stringy,
half-cooked meat, thin gruel and black rotten potatoes’. One towel was provided for twenty four women; they were made to wear coarse, ill-fitting clothes and hard boots; the wards were not ventilated and smelt. When Mrs Despard asked the women why they did not complain to the Guardians she was told that if they did the Master put them on a bread-and-water diet as a punishment. She became a Guardian herself and worked from inside the system to change it.

  Mrs Despard joined the suffragettes; she was convinced that once women were enfranchised there would be no more wars, justice for all, and slums would vanish.

  Like many another saint, Charlotte Despard was hard upon those near her. She worked a willing helper, Rosalie Mansell, almost to death, and the unfortunate woman took to injecting herself with laudanum to obtain relief and had to go away and be cured of her addiction. In an account of her own childhood Charlotte boasts of her rebelliousness, but when in an impulse of generosity she adopted a little girl, who grew to be ‘mischievous and emotionally insecure’, she found herself lecturing the child on proper behaviour in exactly the same way as her governesses had lectured her.

  During the Boer War Charlotte was a pacifist; it was the war in which her only brother, John French, made his reputation as a cavalry general. Her fondness for him was such that she managed to overlook their differences of opinion.

  As a suffragette in and out of prison Mrs Despard was as courageous and uncompromising as she had been in her fight against the Poor Law. When the Great War came she was shocked by Christabel Pankhurst’s pro-government and conformist attitude. She herself was the target for many a rotten egg when she spoke in favour of a negotiated peace. After the war, women were given the vote, and although she once stood for parliament, the idea of being a back-bench MP would have seemed like a death sentence of boredom to her fiery nature.