Lord Longford's legacy: what he did to help prisoners like Ian Brady
As Home Office files reveal more about the murderer Ian Brady, Rachel Billington recalls how her father tried to help
My father, Frank Longford, visited prisons for 75 of his 95 years. He began in Oxford Prison, now a hotel with champagne offered in your cell. He never learnt to drive and, in his nineties, would catch a train or often many trains to visit a prisoner. Even on Boxing Day, at his Sussex home, he would leave family celebrations to walk to the station, where he’d find some unlikely train to take him to a lonely man in HMP Wandsworth, HMP Lewis or HMP Birmingham.
His aim was always to help the prisoners practically – although his attitude arose from the Christian precept ‘Hate the sin and love the sinner’, backed up with Christ’s words ‘I was in prison and you came to visit me… Whatever you did for the least of these brothers, you did for me.’
My father was not there to dispense easy sympathy, but to offer practical advice and practical help. As a politician and former Labour cabinet minister, he was good at making things happen.
Towards the end of his life, I accompanied him on some of these visits. I was impressed at how fearlessly outspoken he was, sometimes telling prisoners what they didn’t want to hear and ticking off the officers or governors for their behaviour. To him, truly all men were equal and had equal human rights. He did not discriminate between those who had committed the most horrendous offences and those who had hidden their company’s money under the mattress. As far as he was concerned, each one deserved help. He believed that, after love, repentance and forgiveness are the most importance hallmarks of the Christian church.
Myra Hindley and Ian Brady were just two of the thousands of prisoners he visited over the decades, the vast majority unknown to the general public. He offered these two what he offered all the others: a helping hand. In Brady’s case, he concluded early on that the best
place for him was a secure mental hospital. Over 14 years, including the period when Brady was in Wormwood Scrubs, my father tried to convince the prison service and the government (as Home Office files have confirmed) that this was the sensible course of action because of the risk Brady posed to others.
In 1985, Brady was finally sent to Ashworth Secure Hospital and, shortly afterwards, he declined to see my father, describing him as the Home Office’s lackey.
After my father’s death, family and friends set up the Longford Trust to commemorate and continue his work. We early on established an annual lecture on social or penal reform – with speakers ranging from Desmond Tutu to Will Self. We give prizes for work inside prisons. In 2005, remembering my father’s focus on the individual – the root of all his prison visiting – we began a programme for ex-prisoners who want to pursue higher education.
As a former don, my father would have loved this. He would have liked the mixture of subjects our 300 Longford Scholars have taken up, including sports of various kinds. We currently have 57 students doing degrees – and we can boast a Cambridge first and an artist in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. Just as important as the money we hand out is the mentoring support that extends to men or women starting a degree inside prison.
My own involvement with prison arose out of my writing as a novelist. A character in my novel Bodily Harm went to prison. I therefore went into a prison, HMP Bristol, where I talked to a kind man (I never knew his crime) about his life behind bars. The event stuck with me. When I was invited to write for the free newspaper for prisoners, Inside Time, I accepted.
This was after the 1990 Strangeways riot in HMP Manchester and Lord Woolf’s report – sadly, never acted on. Inside Time was founded as a result, also in 1990, by Eric Mcgraw, who was determined to give the prisoner an independent voice. This was a revolutionary idea and we were frequently banned for overstepping the bounds of what the prison service deemed acceptable. Now, still independent, we are relied on and respected, including in government circles, as a conduit between prisoner and the outside world and vice versa.
In the course of my prison work, I meet people who have faced multiple problems from an early age. Very seldom do they use this as an excuse for breaking the law (so often now linked to drug use). All of them look for hope in a better future and search for a way to find it.
At Inside Time, I choose the poetry. In 1998, I published this poem as a foreword to my novel Tiger Sky. The author was 17 when he murdered his girlfriend. He served 18 years. The poem opened:
Rachel you gave me one sheet of paper a task and a pen to write about something I knew nothing about I chose hope.
My father understood about that.