‘The Untameables’
Former republican prisoner Gerry O’Hare reviews the monumental study on Irish political prisoners (1848-1922) by Professor Sean McConville which covers the period of the imprisonment of O’Donovan Rossa, Tom Clarke and Roger Casement. McConville shows how punishment came to shape the nationalist consciousness and the part it played in the development of Anglo-Irish relations and the birth of the Free State/Republic of Ireland.
The Untameables – Gerry O’Hare
There has been a proliferation of books in recent time about prisoners and jails. Some of the authors are ex-prisoners which lends a certain credibility to their accounts. This book, however, is by an academic.
Professor Sean McConville, who works at the Department of Law, Queen Mary College, University of London, has produced a tome of over 800 pages dating from the ‘Young Irelanders’ to the War of Independence in 1922.
Such an effort, this reviewer felt, deserved more than a fleeting read, so time was set aside to give the author, and his work, due credit.
Firstly, who is the author? McConville is a Professor of Criminal Justice and Professorial Research Fellow. He has published widely on imprisonment and related political and legal issues, including work on Britain, Europe and the United States. He also encouraged Anna Bryson to edit and publish ‘The Insider’, the story of Eamon Boyce’s diaries in Crumlin Road Jail, 1956-1962 (reviewed here).
In an introduction, McConville tells us modern Irish nationalism took form in the years 1848-1922. Campaigns ranged from the ballot box, civil disobedience and conspiracy, to ‘terrorism’, insurrection and guerilla war.
While the punishment of ‘offenders’ presented successive governments with seemingly intractable problems, imprisoned revolutionaries discovered and exploited numerous opportunities to continue and intensify their struggles. The details of their stories makes this book probably the most comprehensive and detailed study yet of the political use of imprisonment in these years.
Drawing extensively on archives and special collections in Ireland, England, the USA and Australia, many hitherto unused, McConville shows how punishment came to shape the nationalist consciousness.
Accounts of prisoners’ experiences and official reactions are given context by matching chapters, each describing the political and organisational components of successive phases in the nationalist and republican struggle. Successive governments’ responses were conditioned by legal and constitutional factors as well as attitudes and opinions in Britain, Ireland, the USA and Australia. Through considering these, as well as British and Irish party politics, McConville tries to tell the full story of the part played by political imprisonment in the development of Anglo-Irish relations and the birth of the Irish State.
The main story is told with extensive references on each page. This reviewer eventually discovered that it was easier to read the narrative - and then to go back for a second read, using the references.
The book is broken down into sections and each could have made a book in itself.
One section that I found fascinating and distressing was that which covered those who became known as the ‘Dynamitards’. It covers a shocking period, when explosives were first used in a campaign which ended in abject failure.
In 1867, Alfred Nobel had managed to stabilise the powerful and extremely dangerous explosive, nitroglycerine, in such a fashion that it could be manufactured commercially – that is, made into dynamite.
We had read earlier that Fenianism, both in Ireland and America, was at a low ebb when in 1870 Gladstone released the Fenian leaders who were exiled to America. But there were many factions and the Fenian leaders, we learn, failed to unite the Irish in America. It was about this time that Clan na Gael came to the fore.
The Clan recognised the authority of the Irish Republican Brotherhood which was based in Ireland and Britain. It had secured its place in the leadership of militant Irish-Americans in 1876 when it brought off the rescue of six Fenians in jail in Western Australia, an operation organised by John Devoy and executed by John J. Breslin. The escape captured the admiration of Irish people at home and abroad and whetted the idea among the most militant that an operation successfully carried out half way round the world could now be replicated closer to home - in England.
But internal politics and personality problems meant it was three years before the team of volunteers actually made it to the shores of England. The campaign was a disaster and many of the team were captured and sentenced to life imprisonment. Among the prisoners was Thomas Clarke, who survived his sentence despite unbelievable treatment, whilst most of his colleagues died or went mad.
Many debates took place in the British parliament to seek amnesty before the prisoners were eventually released. The men were isolated in England and suffered the worst degradation from their jailers who we learn were ex-sailors and former British soldiers who took sadistic pleasure, approved by the governors, to break the Irish lifers.
‘Life’ in those days meant twenty years. Relatives and friends at home in Ireland only learnt of their conditions through rumour. The prisoners had to wear soiled clothes, taken from ordinary criminals. If they complained they were forced to take a cold bath and wash the dirty clothes at the same time.
Their conditions and treatment would make your blood boil.
If Clarke managed to keep his sanity by being determined to beat the system what are we to make of Michael Davitt, according to the author? It appears that despite bad treatment he appears to have been almost a model prisoner. Reading the extensive, surviving official records, public accounts and private papers dealing with Davitt’s imprisonment (there are three in all) he emerges as a person of integrity, one who would not willfully misrepresent his experiences.
In the bibliography of prison writings, this is a rare quality and, being thus perceived by his contemporaries, it enhanced his moral and political stature, giving weight to his writings on prison matters.
We are told that he was “no turbulent Rossa” and his prison record shows only a handful of disciplinary reports, and those of the most trivial kind. McConville concludes that Davitt was a man who tried to survive in the convict system, keeping his mental and emotional balance, and limiting the damage which could undoubtedly arise from a long confinement.
The author’s view and opinions on Roger Casement may provoke controversy particularly on the subject of the ‘Black Diaries’. His lewd description of Casement’s alleged sexual exploits left me wondering why he had to go into such detail. Controversially, he states, and I quote, “Although arguments raged for many years after Casement’s death, there can now be no doubt that the diaries and ledgers are genuine”. The references, of course, that he used to ‘confirm’ such claims were the work of the secret services in Britain. Enough said.
There is extensive coverage of the hunger striker Terence McSweeney, Lord Mayor of Cork. As he lay dying, we learn of the skullduggery that went on between the prison authorities and medical officials - and the medical help, or lack of it, that McSweeney received. The question of force feeding is reminiscent of the treatment meted out to Thomas Ashe and four of the ‘Belfast Ten’, including Gerry Kelly, Hugh Feeney and the Price sisters.
A debate takes place over the state’s refusal to hand McSweeney’s body over to his relatives. I found this most interesting and ironical, considering that the foreword to the book is by former Taoiseach, Garret Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was a minister in the Fine Gael/Labour coalition government which in 1976 hijacked the remains of IRA hunger striker Frank Stagg, to prevent his family and his comrades giving him a republican funeral. Did Fitzgerald even blush as he wrote the foreword?
The last three sections deal with the handover of British power and the period up until 1922. Much of the detail will not be new to avid historians. However, as this book is about prisoners, it is significant that the author recalls the final campaign for the release of those caught on the northern side after the Treaty. After the signing of the Treaty, the Free State Government sought their release as part of a policy to ‘close the books’ and because clemency would be politically advantageous.
Two men in particular are named: John McCurtain, whose brother had been a commandant in the Free State Army killed by republicans in Tipperary, and John Flood , whose brother was shot dead by the British in March 1921. The British government, in the years immediately following, undertook to act as intermediaries with the North’s government to review the cases of prisoners who had been sentenced because of their part in the ‘invasion’. The North’s Prime Minister, James Craig, agreed to allow the British government to review these cases, and to accept the resultant recommendations. Thirty-three men were released on January 25, 1926.
With these releases Britain ended the part it had played in that Anglo-Irish war and its immediate aftermath. Though not of course, its involvement in Ireland and confrontation with Irish revolutionary politics.
New ‘cohorts’ had entered the system, and would have a presence there for most of the Twentieth Century.
For historians this book is a worthwhile and powerful work of diligent research. I recommend it with the proviso of a health warning for republicans who would perhaps argue with some of the polemic that underlines some of its assumptions.
Irish Political Prisoners, 1848-1922, published by Routledge Taylor and Francis
London and New York
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The Insider
The comms of Bobby Sands and others, smuggled out of the H-Blocks of Long Kesh, particularly during the hunger strike, are now world famous, writes Gerry O’Hare.
Far less well-known is that a republican prisoner, as long ago as the 1950s, had written a prison diary, entirely in Irish, which had also been smuggled out – this time from Belfast’s Crumlin Road Jail. Here, Gerry O’Hare reviews a book based on these diaries.
Eamon Boyce’s diary, written when he was incarcerated during the IRA’s 1956-62 ‘Operation Harvest’, has now been translated and edited by academic Anna Bryson - and belatedly published under the title, ‘The Insider’.
But better late than never …
Boyce’s story of daily life in The Crum’ was originally written into small diaries that inexplicably ‘by-passed’ the jail censor over many years. Always fearing the risk of discovery by the authorities, his story, as told, is remarkable. He even managed to keep his diaries secret from most of his comrades and fellow prisoners.
Anna Bryson, who edited the book, is the holder of a Ph.D. in History from Trinity College, Dublin, and was also lead researcher for Professor Sean McConville’s monumental volumes on Irish political prisoners. (The volume, 1848-1922, running to 820 pages is currently available.) McConville is a professor in the Department of Law, Queen Mary, University of London. Bryson was interviewing the former republican prisoner for McConville’s project when he unexpectedly presented Bryson with his own remarkable diaries and, with the assistance of Kathleen Rigney, they have been faithfully translated from their original Irish.
Boyce learned all his Irish whilst in prison. A Dublin-based CIE bus driver, he was the leader of a 1954 IRA attack on Omagh barracks for which he was sentenced to twelve years for Treason Felony on three counts at the Belfast Winter Assizes.
‘Operation Harvest’ had not started at the time of his imprisonment but began and continued while he was in jail. The book relates Boyce’s frustrations with that ultimately unsuccessful campaign as well as daily life behind prison bars, friendships, inevitable fall-outs, internal politics and eventual freedom in 1962.
It all began when, sitting in his cell at Christmas 1956, he received a parcel including a Gael Linn small diary which the censor had missed. Inspired by that good fortune, he began to plot how he could smuggle material out of the jail. One method was by stuffing written pages into the hollow interiors of crosses, made from matchsticks. Another five diaries were smuggled in for him and he began to fill their pages before they were duly smuggled out again. It was Boyce’s way of ‘doing
Time’.
He also managed to smuggle in a small radio (another precursor to the later exploits in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh during the blanket protest).
And so we come to the content of these remarkable journals. But first, a note about the book as printed. It includes a detailed annotation, notes and index putting Boyce’s diary entries and comments into the context of the time including names, events and political goings-on outside the prison. The index is a book in itself and this reviewer, after some time, decided to begin by focusing, first, on the narrative given in Boyce’s own words before re-reading the book to take in the context. The index is so detailed that it is, without doubt, one of the best I have ever come across.
The diaries are, at times, depressing and at others’ joyous as he relates the daily life he faced over his years in jail. The names flow by of past volunteers, sadly now mostly no longer with us. They include both sentenced prisoners and internees between 1956-62.
Petty incidents became huge crises for Boyce as he tried to make life as bearable as the harsh regime that existed in Crumlin Road Jail at that period would allow.
As a former Crumlin Road inhabitant, I - and others of my generation - cannot begin to realise how hard time was served back then. We had it bad, but it was infinitely worse in the 1950s.
Visits are highlighted, particular those with his mother and his brother, Sean. An example: “Saturday 5th April 1958: My mother and Sean up. She looks well enough but she has been ill. I had a short visit and I got a great Easter parcel. Mam says she’ll visit Charlie Murphy in a while.”
Visits were severely restricted and at the whim of a screw could be terminated for the simplest of petty reasons.
Boyce’s writings are geared towards his release and his frustration shows as other members on the Omagh raid are all released ahead of him. He watches with frustration the failure of the IRA campaign to make much headway. He is both delighted and disappointed at different times
with the success and failure of Sinn Fein candidates. Another example, an entry dated Friday 9th October, 1959: “Awful result in the election - Sinn Fein destroyed altogether - I can’t talk about it. A nice letter from Johnny and Florrie. They were delighted with the music box.”
The refusal of chaplains to administer the sacraments at Mass pained him. The bishops of the time decreed that those involved in the IRA were to be refused the sacraments. The Prison Chaplin then was Fr. Paddy McAllister (who later taught me when I was a pupil at St Malachy’s College, next
door to Crumlin Road Jail). He forgives Fr. Paddy, though, as he states, the priest was dictated to by the bishops.
On a happier note, a friendlier chaplain ignored the bishops’ diktats and gave absolution to any prisoner who wished it.
Escape plans are a thorny issue with Boyce as they usually brought down severe searches (and posed the danger of exposure to his diaries). In December 1960 Danny Donnelly escapes. On 2nd January, Boyce writes in his diary: “The searches are going on. I’m afraid that I’ll lose these diaries. I had to go to bed at eight o’clock with the cold. The English princess (Margaret) is in the Free State”.
As his time of release comes nearer, his frustrations mount. And his final diary note leaves one sharing his unhappiness.
Tuesday 18th September 1962: “A letter today. Thank God. My mother, Sean and Fr Livinus all right, but they are fed up waiting for me. Pearse (Doyle) is in Mungret College. Donal (Murphy) will be home on 2.10.62. but there’s no word of Joseph Doyle…
“This is the last part of my diary after seven years writing. With God’s help, there will be nothing important to write between this and freedom. I’m grateful to God that everything was okay from the day I came in here.
“Of course, I’m very disappointed about political maters. I was full of hope coming in, but now I don’t suppose that there’s any solution to the republican question. It’s too late, but we had our chance.
“It’s a pity that South, and the other men, died - as there won’t be any result from their sacrifice - but that’s life. I pray that God will give me luck and blessings in the life that is ahead of me”.
Finally in a ‘Question & Answer’ interview with the editor/author, he is asked was his jail life a worthwhile experience? His answer speaks volumes:
“In many ways yes. I kept my self respect and the people I met - mostly men - during the whole course of my involvement with the movement, it’s been privilege to know them and I’ve been a better person because of them. Now if I say that to somebody up north, they might laugh - but I would definitely say that”.
‘The Insider – The Prison Diaries of Eamonn Boyce 1956 – 1962’, edited by Anna Bryson. Published by the Lilliput Press, Dublin, 62-63 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill, Dublin 7. Price €40
Connolly Foundation Launched
The Connolly Foundation, Scotland’s Irish charity has just launched its new website: see here.
The site offers information about Connolly and the activities and charitable purposes of The Connolly Foundation. The republican leader and political prisoner, James Connolly, was wounded during the Easter 1916 Rising and later executed by the British. Speaking of the website’s launch The Connolly Foundation Chair, Jim Slaven, said: “This website will provide valuable information for Scotland’s Irish community. As well as offering people regular updates on The Connolly Foundation’s activities it will feature regular articles and cover relevant news and events across Scotland. The website will also be a valuable educational resource offering people the most comprehensive James Connolly archive and web access to our various research projects.”
Contact details: The Connolly Foundation, The Melting Pot, 5 Rose Street, Edinburgh
EH2 2PR
‘Operation Harvest’
Lisnaskea barracks in Fermanagh (see photograph) was just one of many attacks carried out by the IRA during its 1956-62 border campaign. Veteran republican Gerry O’Hare reviews a new book about this campaign, ‘Operation Harvest’, by Belfast author Barry Flynn.
Like most young republicans born in the early forties, the border campaign of 1956-62 passed me by. We were more interested then in the rise of rock and roll, Elvis Presley, and dancing to the popular show bands of the era.
Occasionally, the ‘Irish News’ would splash a headline reporting ‘IRA activity’ somewhere on the border. It seemed a world away. We read it, tended not to take it in, and promptly moved on to the sports news (after our mothers had read the obituaries).
Jobs were plentiful then, and life seemed great.
But elsewhere in Ireland, others were plotting and planning, well away from the big city of Belfast. It took the deaths of Sean South and Fergal O’Hanlon to make our generation sit up and pay attention. Their deaths were immortalised in song and reached into nearly every home with a nationalist bent - but their “notoriety” didn’t last long and we were back again checking out where the show-bands were playing in Belfast, Ballymena or Bangor.
Now, a new book by Barry Flynn, ‘Soldiers Of Folly’, attempts to piece together the plans, characters and actions of the IRA, in what we now know as the Fifties’ Border Campaign (so-called because the IRA of that time took a decision to wage war against British forces only in the countryside and away from Belfast).
Flynn is a Belfast-based graduate of Queen’s University, the author of two books on Irish boxing and one on Tyrone football. A sports correspondent for BBC Radio Ulster, his book’s title is more pejorative than its treatment of those involved in the Border Campaign. The book brings that campaign to a wider readership in a simple and informative way. It certainly passed my own barometer test. I couldn’t put it down once I opened the first pages.
Many reasons are given for keeping Belfast ‘dry’ but the most common fear was that, in the event of a sectarian bloodbath, the IRA would be incapable of defending nationalists in the city. It is for Belfast veterans to discuss as to the wisdom of such tactics.
‘Operation Harvest’ was the codename of the campaign. Its strategy was based on the Flying Columns of earlier battles fought during the War of Independence and, surprisingly, given developments since, it was a campaign fought and planned by mostly Southerners.
Those earlier campaigns had been successful. Sadly, ‘Operation Harvest’ was to last over six years and, despite the heroism of the volunteers, and with hindsight, it was a failure.
The cause of that failure, I take from the book, was that lack of Northern involvement, along with a dearth of support from the nationalist population in the North and - ultimately - the combined efforts of the two governments to crush the campaign by trials, convictions and, of course, internment.
The author brings the main characters to the fore in chronological order, dealing with the roles they played, their successes and sadly their downfall and ultimate failure.
Names like Ruairigh O Bradaigh, Daithi O’Connell, Sean Cronin, Gerry Lawless, John Joe McGirl, J.B. O’Hagan and many, many others jump from its pages. As does that perennial problem facing Irish republicans. As Brendan Behan put it, at the start of every meeting of the IRA leadership, first on the agenda is always “the Split”.
As you contemplate the history of Irish republicanism, it is difficult not to be irritated to think of the constant bickering and jealousies that shamed those who died, or were imprisoned, both North and South. The book, unsurprisingly given subsequent history, shows how the role of Southern governments throughout was particularly traitorous. Stormont’s role was, of course, utterly predictable.
There is no official date for when the campaign began but, on Saturday June 12, 1954, the IRA successfully raided the armoury at Gough Barracks in Armagh and got away with 300 weapons including pistols, rifles, Sten and Bren guns. The raid was led by Sean Garland (later general secretary of the ‘Officials’ in several of their guises). He also played a prominent part in several other Border Campaign operations.
Later that year, another raid took place, on the night of October 16, led by Eamonn Boyce but it ended in disaster with seven volunteers arrested.
The earliest hint that a campaign was about to get underway came in a 1955 speech made by Belfast republican, Jimmy Steele, at the Easter Commemoration in Belfast’s Milltown Cemetery during which he said, “The hour of decision is at hand for all those who believe in Republican ideals.
“In no way, must there be any deviation from the objective of organising the people of Ireland in a full-scale campaign against British forces. It now remains, to put in place before the young people of Ireland, the ideal of service and to point out to them that the issue is now clearer than ever - Ireland and Ireland’s fight for freedom against England and England’s forces of occupation.”
Characteristically, not much room for ambiguity there. Steele by name …
At a commemoration in Galway, the Dublin barrister Seamus Soroghan called on young men to join the IRA and be trained in the use of arms to achieve the complete freedom of the nation.
Joe Christle, also from Dublin, told the crowd that the Republican Movement would soon be making its presence felt along the border and, in words that could not be misinterpreted, he said that the IRA “will make the six counties so hot that England won’t be able to hold them”.
In the following day’s ‘Irish Times’, there were several reports of similar statements throughout the North and South. But first there were elections to be fought, won and lost in an attempt to rally the Irish public. We learn that in 1955, Sinn Fein garnered 152,310 votes and had Philip Clarke elected in Fermanagh and South Tyrone and Tom Mitchell in Mid-Ulster. Later, of course, the seats were taken away by the British because both men were prisoners. But the impressive initial vote led the IRA to believe it had a massive endorsement for the forthcoming campaign.
Meanwhile, ‘the Split’ raised its ugly head in the presence of Liam Kelly who had formed Saor Uladh and who was waging his own campaign. Kelly was what some today describe as a dissident. His group, comprising fourteen men, attacked the RUC station in Rosslea having left a farmhouse in County Monaghan and crossed the border. The attack was thwarted and resulted in the death of Connie Green from Derry. The IRA was not happy as it was planning the start of its own campaign and criticised Kelly and Soar Uladh.
In language that has echoes to the present day, Seamus Soroghan, speaking to 2,000 supporters in Ennis, County Clare, warned young men “not to join sentimental or microscopic organisations such as those who attacked the RUC Barracks at Rosslea”. While saying he “took his hat off to these men”, he added they were only endangering the position of the true IRA in their actions.
Needless to say, while all this was going on the Catholic Church warned anybody who joined the IRA they would be excommunicated. No surprise there as the Church has always sided with governments to maintain the status quo.
Barry Flynn claims that on December 11th the word was sent to all Flying Columns that the assault on the occupied six counties would begin at midnight on December 12th. The offensive would be launched simultaneously in several places at the precise moment when the British authorities least expected, as Christmas approached.
Over 150 volunteers were involved in the first attacks which caught the RUC and B Specials totally off guard. All operations were co-ordinated from County Monaghan. The targets were wide and varied with air and radar installations, military barracks, government buildings, courthouses, roads, bridges and custom posts all coming under attack. This review cannot list all the attacks over the six year period but I chose the following to give the reader a taste.
In the early hours of December 14th, the IRA launched two separate attacks on RUC stations in the Lakeland County (Fermanagh). The police station at Lisnaskea was attacked by the Pearse Column, led by Sean Garland, fresh from the assault on Gough Barracks, and had its front porch damaged in a bomb attack, but the RUC officers held their nerve and returned fire on the raiders.
Daithi O’Connell opened up on the station with his Thompson gun but the unit’s two Sten guns failed to operate and they were badly exposed as a gun battle broke out on the main street. Immediately Garland ordered a retreat and the unit headed for the border, abandoned their lorry and eventually made it to County Monaghan by foot in the early hours.
We also read of the disastrous attack on New Years Day 1957 in which Sean South and Fergal O’Hanlon lost their lives at Brookeborough. Their deaths struck a cord in the Irish psyche which elevated both Volunteers to martyrdom. Their funerals were attended by thousands both in Monaghan and Garryowen.
Whilst sympathy was extended to the dead men’s families, North and South, the Bishop of Clogher, the Most Rev. Dr. Eugene O’Callaghan advised the faithful that it was a mortal sin to “take part in any of the occurrences that had taken place recently.”
The IRA suffered many casualties and deaths during the campaign with the greatest loss of life at Edentubber, when five Volunteers were killed in a premature explosion. It was the biggest loss suffered by the IRA since the Civil War.
History tells us that ‘Operation Harvest’ would finally drift towards eventual termination, called for by the leadership. On 26th February 1962 the IRA, through the Irish Republican Publicity Bureau, and signed by J. McGarrity, sent out the following message:
“The leadership of the resistance Movement has ordered the termination of the Campaign of Resistance to British Occupation launched on December, 1956. Instructions issued to Volunteers of the Active Service Units and of local Units in the occupied area have now been carried out.
“All arms and materials have been dumped and all full-time active volunteers have been withdrawn. Foremost among the factors motivating this course of action has been the attitude of the general public whose minds have been deliberately distracted from the supreme issue facing the Irish people - the unity and freedom of Ireland.
“The Irish resistance movement renews its pledge of eternal hostility to the British Forces of Occupation in Ireland. It calls on the Irish people for increased support and looks forward with confidence - in co-operation with the other branches of the Republican Movement - to a period of consolidation, expansion and preparation for the final and victorious phase of the struggle for the full freedom of Ireland”.
It was an end that would lead to recriminations and another seemingly inevitable split of the kind that has dogged the Republic Movement since its inception.
I recommend this book.
‘Soldiers of Folly’
By Barry Flynn
Published by The Collins Press
Gerry O’Hare did time, both as an internee and a sentenced prisoner. He was held in Crumlin Road Jail in 197, and, later, in Mountjoy Jail and Portlaoise Jail. He became a journalist with the Irish Press Group, rising to become its Deputy News Desk Editor.He is currently Managing Editor of Ireland’s largest travel newspaper, ‘Travel Extra.
Bobby In The Wire
Bobby Sands
Edinburgh-based singer songwriter David Heavenor has written a song about Bobby Sands on his new CD. Heavenor says: “Sometimes ideas and subjects for songs seem to come from nowhere. I’d always had this idea about ‘Bobby in the Wire, Bobby in the War’ and it turned into a song about the Irish Republican Bobby Sands who died after a hunger strike lasting sixty six days in 1981 in the Maze prison. I finished it after hearing a story on The Moral Maze on Radio 4 about a loyalist who had given up his campaign after being affected by the sacrificial manner of his death.”
For more information on David Heavenor click on his website here.
‘The Crum’
Veteran republican Gerry O’Hare did time, both as an internee and a sentenced prisoner, in Crumlin Road Jail between 1971 and 1973. He also served sentences in Long Kesh, Mountjoy Jail and Portlaoise Jail. Here he reviews ‘The Crum’ by Patrick Greg.
I have never read a book before written from the perspective of a prison officer/screw (choose your own term) so, confronted with ‘The Crum’ I was instantly interested.
Having being a reluctant guest of the Queen on two occasions, as an internee and a sentenced prisoner, I already had some experience of the inside of HMP Crumlin Road, including both its inhabitants and the people whose function it was to see it was run in an ‘orderly’ manner.
I confess, however, for the life of me, I could never understand the mentality of anybody who joined the prison service. Somebody has to do it I can hear you say but there have got to be better ways of earning a crust …
But I decided to temporarily conquer my obvious dislike for screws and tried to imagine if I could, if it was at all possible, to see inside the mind of the author.
First, though, some words about the author, to set the scene of this particular screw’s background and mindset.
Patrick Greg first set foot inside Crumlin Road in July 1985. It was where all recruits were sent for a two-week stint as part of their training.
“From the moment I stepped inside the main prison, with its highly polished floors, and myriad of iron gates, I was captivated”, he writes – with a somewhat unfortunate turn of phrase.
“The noise, the smells, the organised confusion. It was seven-thirty in the morning, and the tension emanating from the wings was almost palpable as I entered the large circle area where the day staff were paraded.
“There was a constant stream of officers milling around, some with obvious purpose, and others grudgingly heading to take up a post somewhere in the bowels of the jail.
“Chains were clanking and keys jangling, a cacophony of metal on metal, deeply unsympathetic to the ear at such an early day” (so far, so ‘Porridge’).
And so he sets the scene for a screw’s day.
Meanwhile others truly captivated, the prisoners, are of course waiting to be unlocked for slop-outs, a wash and breakfast before being sent off to their daily chores.
Over the years their work included the wood yard, the tailoring shops, shoemaking, metal works and craft shops. Prisoners were also involved in gardening, bricklaying and general repairs in the kitchens and cleaning out the landings.
Many considered the work demeaning, likening it to slave labour whilst others considered it the perfect way to get through their time.
A historical note here. By July 1985, all convicted political prisoners had been moved from the Crum to Long Kesh and Maghaberry, so Greg did not experience interned or sentenced republican or loyalist prisoners but political remands.
However, he goes out of his way to make up for this shortcoming by interviewing, amongst others, Gusty Spence and Martin Meehan, to try and grasp the importance of Crumlin Road’s role in the seventies. Greg, however, is unable to write about the earlier hunger strikes for political status, led by Billy McKee, which is a pity as an interview with Billy would have been enlightening.
The author is speaking about his own direct experiences when, after two weeks there, he states: “Every day of the two weeks launched me on a steep learning curve into the many aspects of the cat and mouse game played out by screws and cons.
“And every post within the jail was continually being tried and tested, poked and prodded, in an attempt to find the chink. When you came to realise that, your senses were sharpened and you began to think like a con, which was the most valuable lesson of all.”
The author gives us a detailed and important early history of the Crum and tells us that the architect was Sir Charles Lanyon, a railway and civil engineer hailing from Eastbourne in Sussex.
Among his other major projects was the building of the Larne to Portrush Coast Road and the Belfast-Ballymena and Belfast-Bangor railway lines. He is better known, though, for building Belfast’s Custom House, Queen’s University, Queen’s Bridge and the Ormeau Bridge.
It must have been a new and exciting experience to be asked to build a prison in Belfast.
He drew heavily on the plans for Pentonville Jail built in 1842 in London. Its main architect was Colonel Joshua Jebb who had, in turn, taken the concept of a ‘panopticon’ from Jeremy Bentham.
Bentham, an English philosopher, had conceived the concept of a prison allowing an observer to watch (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched.
The devilish idea was to give prisoners what one architect has called the “sentiment of an invisible omniscience”. Bentham himself described the panopticon as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind”.
It consisted of a central hall with five radiating wings (the Crum has only four) and was copied by a further 54 future jails over the next six years where the theory was put into practice of a perfect round-the-clock surveillance machine so to induce a state of discipline in the prisoner through mental uncertainty.
Not much changed over the 150 years of the Crum’s history. Greg says the only way to see such changes there were is by walking round the outside of A-wing where you can see the contrasting blocks and bricks showing the later extensions.
“At its best”, we are told, the Crum housed some 640 cells. Victorian reformers believed in strictly one person per cell, in adherence to solitary confinement.
The cost of keeping a prisoner in jail for one calendar year in the early 1930s was £67.70 and in 1931 there were 2,356 prisoners. That shows the ‘one person per cell’ policy had been well and truly binned.
Earliest records for births and deaths date back to 1867. The first recording of a death is for Mary J. Long, a 31-year-old housekeeper. She had eight records on her sheet, a prison number, date and place of death, sex, condition (whether married, bachelor or widow), age, profession and details of inquest. She was described as a ‘lunatic’.
Such descriptions were commonplace and showed the authorities arrogance and laziness. “One can only imagine that these were people who were either criminally insane on entry to prison, or had suffered insanity as a consequence of incarceration”, writes Greg.
He says the daily routine of a screw is usually predictable and mostly boring, admitting to a pet hate. The evening shift was the most anti-social, he says. Particularly Sunday, when activity in the Crum “was at a bare minimum and the day seemed to drag by, making it an almost constant struggle to stay awake”.
A particular duty he found scary was checking out the condemned cell in C-wing at night-time. We learn that there were 17 executions in all at the Crum since 1854, the last being in 1961.
Five were hung from various scaffold-type gallows and the rest in the condemned cell in C-wing. All were buried in what was known as the ‘Lime Pit’ just beyond the hospital and between A and B wings.
The first to be hanged was a soldier, Robert O’Neill, who had murdered another soldier. The execution took place in May 1854. The last to be hung was Samuel McGladdery, who was found guilty in 1961 of the murder of Pearl Gamble from Newry.
He lists all the executions and gives us a detailed description of the condemned men’s last days waiting for he hangman. Not pretty reading but there you go.
On a recent visit to the Crum I was shown the restoration work at the double ‘hanging’ cell in C-wing. Some in our group happily posed beside the noose.
Greg speaks of the grisly tools of the ‘Hangman’s Box’ and its contents and we see a graphic picture of the hangman’s list which reads:
EXECUTION- BOX – NO. 2
CONTENTS:
ROPES x 2
BLOCK FALL x 1
STRAPS x 2
SANDBAG x 1
MEASURING ROD x 1
PIECE OF CHALK x 1
PACK, THREAD x 1
COPPER WIRE x 1 PIECE
CAP x 1
TOTAL = 11
A second photo shows us, in detail, the actual No. 2 box with its deadly tools.
Immediately after execution the body was quickly brought to the grave and buried with only a mark on the jail wall and a number to indicate where.
The last days of the condemned man are described along with the duties of the screw’s details for the ‘Death watch’. And, of course, the most famous hangman of them all gets an airing.
Albert Pierrepoint, who hailed from Clayton in Bradford, Yorkshire, dispatched over 400 victims. Unbelievably, we read, the bold Albert trained like an athlete for the task and boasted a time of just seven seconds between grasping the condemned man’s hand, leading him to the gallows and sending him to his maker.
For a day job, Pierrepoint ran a pub called ‘The Poor Struggler’. Ho. Ho.
Only two men who were hanged in the Crum were removed from their prison graves by relatives and buried elsewhere. Tom Williams’ body was re-interred in Milltown Cemetery after a sustained campaign by his former colleagues in the Republican Movement, as is well-documented.
However, the remains of Michael Pratley, hanged in May 1924, were also claimed by his family. Identifying him was assisted by the fact he had a wooden leg.
The only two inscriptions on the grave wall carry the initials ‘S. McL.’ (for Samuel McLaughlin), marked 1961, and ‘H.C.’, marked in 1933 for a Harold Courtney.
The screws’ lot was not easy during the Troubles. In all 29 were killed by both loyalists and republicans between 1974 into the late nineties.
Surprisingly, we don’t get a list of his dead colleagues, but he does describe the inherent dangers of living on the outside and coming into contact with loyalist ex –prisoners.
Offered a drink by a leading loyalist he refused on his own and his wife’s behalf. The next time he went on duty, loyalist prisoners shouted out his personal details, including his car registration, from the landings.
Already unhappy with his lot, it gets worse when he comes face to face with Michael Stone, describing Stone’s murderous acts at the Milltown Cemetery funeral of the Gibraltar 3, Mairead Farrell, Sean Savage and Dan McCann.
Stone was isolated from other prisoners for fear they would kill him and placed in the annex in D-wing. Greg describes arriving for night duty, along with other vetted screws, and being sent to the annex.
Stone struck up a conversation with the author, and was keen to know if he had seen the television clips and how close he got to Gerry Adams.
“With nothing to lose”, writes Greg, “he remained unpredictable. I found that disconcerting in many ways and can safely say I was unnerved when in his company.
“Even though we would have short conversations which bordered on the mundane, I never lost sight of the fact that he was a dangerous and calculating sociopath”.
He later watched Stone, interviewed on television after his first release, on the ‘Facing The Truth’ programme (when he was confronted by the family of one of his victims).
Stone, writes Greg, stood apart from other interviewees in the same series, portraying all the signs of a person with serious mental health issues.
Has Stone any regrets, Greg asked him once? Stone’s response was chilling. He told Greg he was only sorry that a cap he liked, and which he had bought in the days before the Milltown Massacre, had blown off as he ran towards the M1 trying to escape those who were running after him.
One can sense Greg’s disillusionment with his job but it was another four years before he quit.
There is more to ‘The Crum’ than just the history and stories about ‘HMP’ Belfast.
The author expands on life within other prisons where he served, but for the purposes of this review I have stuck to just ‘The Crum.’
In other chapters, we hear about his life outside his job, his views political and non-political. He dwells briefly on other infamous prisoners, such as Ian Paisley and Ken Maginnis from the Unionist side of the divide and gives the reader an account of a very entertaining interview with Martin Meehan, who describes his own escape and times in the jail.
Did I like the book? Grudgingly, I admit I did. Ex-prisoners will find it a good read. How his fellow screws will feel, I don’t know. I read it twice and it gives the reader a good sense of the prison’s role in the history of Belfast.
In his opening Greg quotes George Bernard Shaw: “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
I prefer a quote from Oscar Wilde from his ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’:
“I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.”
The Crum: Inside the Crumlin Road Prison. By Patrick Greg, Gill & Macmillan. Illustrated. Paperback. Gerry O’Hare did time, both as an internee and a sentenced prisoner, in Crumlin Road Jail between 1971 and 1973. He also served sentences in Long Kesh, Mountjoy Jail and Portlaoise Jail. He later lived in Dublin, becoming a journalist with the Irish Press Group and rising to become its Deputy News Desk Editor. He is currently Managing Editor of Ireland’s largest travel newspaper, ‘Travel Extra.
Soldat Louis – Bobby Sands
Here are two further songs about Bobby Sands. The first, ‘Bobby Sands’ by French Rock group Soldat Louis who mix traditional Breton music with rock can be listened to here.
The second song is by Cork singer/songwriter Bébhinn Hurley whose single ‘Bobby’ went to number 1 in the Irish download music charts when it was issued last July.
It can be heard here. For more information about this single click here
‘Chronicles of Long Kesh’
Martin Lynch’s play, ‘The Chronicles of Long Kesh’, has gone down a storm at the Edinburgh Fringe and negotiations are taking place for further productions of the drama which covers life in the notorious prison from the time it opened in September 1971, through to its failed renaming by the British as ‘The Maze’, the hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981, and the eventual release of the political prisoners under the Belfast [Good Friday] Agreement. See ‘Belfast Telegraph’ story…
Anniversary of Micky Devine
Today, August 20th, is the twenty-eighth anniversary of the death on hunger strike of Micky Devine from Derry. Twenty-seven-year-old Micky Devine, from the Creggan, was the third INLA Volunteer to join the H-Block hunger strike to the death.
Micky took over as O/C of the INLA blanket men in March 1981 when the then O/C, Patsy O’Hara, joined the hunger strike but he retained this leadership post when he joined the hunger strike himself.
Known as ‘Red Micky’, his nickname stemmed from his ginger hair rather than his political complexion, although he was most definitely a republican socialist. For more read on…
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