BRISTOL TIMES
PRISON DIARIES
AQUOTE at the start of Andy Griffin’s history of Bristol prisons took me on a notso-nostalgic trip back to some of the long, aimless walks I took in lockdown through mostly silent and deserted back streets, some of them around Horfield:
“Prison. A silent world, shrouded, so far as the public are concerned, in almost complete darkness.”
His new history of incarceration and punishment in Bristol from earliest times up to the Covid era, Bristol’s Prisons Unlocked, is a real eye-opener, as it does what it says on the cover, making you realise how little you know about what goes on behind those four walls, and all the other walls like it around the country.
Some of what’s in the earlier chapters will be familiar to anyone who fancies themselves as a hardcore local historian, but there are still some surprises. And it really comes into its own when he starts delving into the detail of life (and death) in the New Gaol and at Horfield from the 19th century onwards.
There’s much here that’s new for all of us as the author has picked through loads of sources, including local newspaper articles and memoirs, but also old prison records as well.
Andy Griffin joined the prison service at the age of 30 in 1972 after doing a vast range of different jobs, including a spell as a (very young) pub licensee. He was working for the Prudential and fed up when “a mate of mine who had joined the prison service said to me ‘why don’t you think about that?’ and so I did.
“With overtime, it was quite good money in those days and I ended up staying for 30 years, including two stints in Northern Ireland, which was, shall we say, interesting.”
The terms of the job meant that he had to serve wherever he was sent, but, being Bristol born and bred, 22 years of his career was at Horfield.
It was Horfield’s centenary in 1983, and a press release to the local media, that turned him into its unofficial historian.
“I had a phone call on the wing, and they said the Western Daily Press want to come in, and the Evening Post. We know nothing about the prison, so as you seem to be the only one who’s ever taken any interest in it, could you go down and let them have a walkround and then drop ‘em off at the Governor’s officer afterwards?”
Having always been interested in history he had started looking through old prison records in his spare time, some of this in a store room which had once been the hangman’s drop, the place where the lifeless bodies of executed felons dangled before being taken down for burial in unmarked graves in a corner of the yard.
“I was lucky because all the old journals, day books, registers and so on were stored in the prison and nobody else bothered with them, and they were in this muniments room which I could use at my leisure. The Governor was more than happy for me do it.”
From showing the press around, his second career flourished. “I was doing PR, I suppose you could call it. We were often asked to give talks for various organisations, and these were quite popular because as we were a government department we didn’t charge a fee.
“And for me, well, it was a couple of hours out of the nick.”
“I did talks for the Rotarians, the Women’s Institute, you name it … I had a call from a lady from the National Housewives’ Register and I said ‘I’ve never come across your organisation. Could you fill me in?’ and she said, ‘We’re like the WI, only with A Levels.’”
In retirement, Andy spent some years working on his self-published book, which takes us from the middle ages right up to the present. Aside from being packed with intriguing information and anecdotes (did you know that Bristol pioneered halfway houses for released prisoners in the 1950s?), it also makes you realise that with prisons you are dealing with closed, parallel world with aspects you never thought about.
How about the Blitz and Horfield Prison, for instance? Of this he tells us:
“Behaviour of prisoners, considering their unenviable position, during air raids was remarkably good … It was found that apart from the top floors, the cells made excellent air raid shelters and were the safest places to be.
“There was some debate as to whether cell doors should be locked or left open, bearing in mind the mental anguish which inmates would endure if locked in. It was decided that prisoners would be locked in at night. The landings would be one of the first things to go if the buildings were hit and if prisoners rushed from their cells in the dark there would be no walkways.”
Given its age, it’s unsurprising that Horfield is reputedly haunted. What is now D Wing was many years ago a wing for female prisoners, where there was an infirmary and “maternity cells”. The wing is supposedly walked at night by the spirit of some poor woman searching her child, a story that may or may not be based on some real-life case of a female inmate who had lost a baby.
As Andy observes, sightings are few because everyone’s locked away at night, adding that the several night shifts he worked there were disappointingly ghost-free.
A fellow-officer did, however, believe that he had had an encounter with the restless spirit.
“I had a call when I was orderly officer in charge of the prison on nights, asked to go down to D Wing immediately.
“This officer was frozen halfway down the stairs. I asked him, ‘what’s up?’ He said something cold and clammy touched him on the back of his neck as he was going down the stairs and he froze.”
“What he didn’t realise was that there was a water leak above, and a drip from this leak caught him right on the back of his neck.”
What’s also striking is the extent to which the prison regime has changed in line with the changes in wider society. When Andy became a prison officer there were no televisions in cells, just a radio which inmates could listen to during association periods. In former times, the prison service recruited extensively from ex-service(wo) men, which was perhaps one reason why the regime was so predictable and orderly. It’s less so now.
Andy is not sure if things are any better or worse now. They’re just different.
In his experience, prison seems to have done little to turn convicts into useful members of society.
“Having worked in different places, I did go to an open young offenders institution at Guy’s Marsh. The training there was unbelievable, though most of them were quite good kids, because to be selected for it in the first place they had to be.
“But with any other prison, really there was nothing to do with rehabilitation. The judge might as well
have said to them, ‘I sentence you to two years’ boredom.’
“But then again, all the inmates were gainfully employed, there was a reasonable regime, and you couldn’t beat the system – and that applied to the inmates and the staff.”
There were those who tried to challenge the system, but they usually failed. Andy tells the tale of a young hippy type inside in the 1980s. He was on a special diet as he was a vegan, which was pretty unusual at a time when even vegetarians were in a small minority.
At tea-time one day he tried to get past a formidably-built prison officer to make sure he got his vegan sustenance.
“You just wait,” says the officer. “But …”
“Just. F**kin.’ Wait.” (Repeat this exchange several times with minor variations.)
“You just don’t understand. I need my special vegan diet. I don’t suppose you even know what a vegan is, do you?”
“’Course I do. I never miss a f**kin’ episode of Star Trek!”
» Bristol’s Prisons Unlocked by Andy Griffin is available from Amazon in Kindle or paperback formats. See https://tinyurl.com/u5hfsvnm