The Pursuit of Laughter (37 page)

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)

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 answer. 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)

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.