Craiginches Page 3

  The prison authorities also built an entire new front entrance at Craiginches. That included the new gatehouse, an office block, a Training for Freedom unit and a muster/staffroom, where we used to eat and have our breaks. The new complex also included the main office store and visiting room, and right at the bottom was the female unit. That was the part of the jail where we were able to keep untried female prisoners. Basically, that was an area for women who had been arrested and were waiting to go to court to be sentenced.

  From 1974 Craiginches had its own stipulated female block. It was located adjacent to the administration block. It was staffed by two female officers and five Temporary Female Assistants to cover the entire shift cycle. The wing also had a large day room with Sky television, a video and pool table.

  Craiginches had various other facelifts. Around £250,000 was spent on a new gym and new kitchen facilities. The new cooking facilities were a godsend to the staff and made it easier to cater for such big numbers and also allowed them to open up their menus a lot more.

  An education centre was also added. It was well used. Teachers would come in and offer a range of subjects to the prisoners, from art to English. They would get a lesson for an hour or so a week and then we would take them back to their cells. Quite a few prisoners went to those classes. They weren’t as popular as the football or social events but the other problem for us was that we had to limit the numbers because of the size of the classrooms.

  Like most remand halls in the penal system, staff in B Hall were required to incorporate management skills with a balanced measure of control, enforcement, good humour and compassion.

  It didn’t matter what was done, the basic problem was that the demand for prison cells in Aberdeen far outweighed what Craiginches could supply. That led to the prison’s biggest problem – overcrowding.

  Having too many prisoners was always a problem, especially in the latter years of HMP Aberdeen. It didn’t help that Craiginches had to take inmates in from other areas of Scotland to a prison that was already bursting at the seams. The issue of overcrowding would always be flagged up during the Scottish Prisons Service’s annual reports in the prison’s later years.

  I have to say it wasn’t really as big an issue during my time at Craiginches – apart from the time when there were riots in Kincorth, a suburb in the south side of Aberdeen.

  If memory serves me correctly, something had kicked off in a local pub. It escalated into a mass brawl before the police had to step in to defuse the situation. I believe their presence only added more fuel to proceedings and it ended with mass arrests. More than twenty male prisoners ended up being sent up to HMP Aberdeen. Those extra bodies ended up pushing B Hall very close to the edge.

  There was also a limit to how many prisoners we could safely house. We eventually had to put some of our prisoners into A Hall to lessen the strain. They still had to be treated as untried prisoners even though they were in beside the more hardened inmates. It wasn’t normal practice but we didn’t have any other option. We were just relieved when the court reopened so we could get them transported across the city to face their charges and to help us bring some form of normality back into place.

  The problem is that the changes were only ever short-term solutions and in time that was why the Scottish Prison Service had to look for alternatives.

  Death Row

  4

  The Last Hanging in Scotland

  The 15th August 1963 might not be a date that is that well known when it comes to Scotland’s history. Yet it is one that will be forever a landmark in the country’s prison system. It was the day that the final hanging took place in Scotland and it was at Her Majesty’s Prison Aberdeen. It is something that will ensure Craiginches is always remembered.

  The final execution was of a prisoner called Henry ‘Harry’ John Burnett. He was sentenced to death at the age of just twenty-one for the murder of a merchant seaman called Thomas Guyan after they had got involved in a bizarre love triangle.

  Burnett started seeing Guyan’s wife, Margaret, after they had split. They had met while working together at John R. Stephen Fish Curers in Aberdeen. It led to the pair moving in together at Burnett’s home in Skene Terrace. Burnett, however, still had long-term doubts at the back of his own mind. He had severe trust issues and became so insecure that when he left home it was reported he would leave Margaret locked in the house because he feared she would end up leaving him.

  It was hardly a healthy relationship and not surprisingly Margaret wasn’t keen to stay put. She decided to leave Burnett to return to her husband, Guyan. She went back to Skene Terrace to collect her son, Keith, along with a family friend, Georgina Cattanagh, and told Burnett she was leaving him. Burnett went berserk and it was reported that he pulled out a knife and put it up at Margaret’s throat before he pulled her back inside the house. Minutes later he stormed out of the house leaving both women shaken but unharmed.

  Burnett went to see his brother, Frank, at his workplace to let him know what had happened. He was urged to go to the police but declined and instead headed to Frank’s Bridge of Don home where he knew he kept a shotgun. Burnett burst the lock and the case, took the gun and cartridges, and jumped on a bus to Guyan’s flat, where he forced his way in and shot him in the face. Burnett then stole a car from a petrol station but finally gave himself up after being pursued by a police car just outside of Ellon. He surrendered after Margaret agreed to marry him!

  Things looked bleak for Burnett, as it was reported that his first words in the police interview room were: ‘I gave him both barrels – he must be dead.’ The case went to trial and Burnett’s defence claimed that at the time of the crime their client was insane. However, they failed to convince the jury. It was widely predicted that Burnett would be found guilty and the expected sentence was to be life imprisonment. The case was lost but there was no leniency shown as Burnett was sentenced to death by hanging at Aberdeen High Court on 25th July 1963 after a short two-day trial.

  The news sent shockwaves around the city, as it was the first hanging to take place in the Granite City. They had been commonplace in most other major cities in the United Kingdom but to the main fishing port in the North-east it was something of a culture shock.

  Yet Burnett wasn’t actually the first man to be sentenced to hanging in Aberdeen. On 1st February 1956 a prisoner named Robert James Boyle was also sentenced to the same fate. He was due to be hung on 10th March 1956. Special orders were even drawn up and executioner Stephen Wade was given the order but Boyle on appeal was given a late reprieve. His sentence was reduced to life imprisonment.

  Burnett wasn’t to be as fortunate. He returned to Craiginches, where he was held in the condemned cell while he awaited his fate. The cell was the prison’s old B Hall until 1962, when the new condemned cell/execution chamber was built. It also included new workshops and an education unit.

  There was no appeal from Burnett and at just before 8 a.m. on Thursday 15th August he was summoned to the newest gallows in Britain at that point. A prison officer confirmed Burnett was in a state of shock as he sat in his cell in his final few minutes and waited pensively for the call to make that final journey of his life. He was also offered a stimulant around 7.30 a.m.

  The prisoner was said to have got on well with the prison guards and on his way he even identified to his escorts and prison officer the joints in the skirting board revealing the doors where he thought he would take his last steps to the hangman’s noose.

  Executioner Harry Allen, an Englishman, and his assistant Samuel Plant performed the execution, like they did for the majority of prison hangings between 1941 and 1964. He was the chief executioner at twenty-nine hangings and assisted at fifty-three others. Allen, who wore a bow tie as a mark of respect to his victims, had also performed the last execution in Northern Ireland when he hanged Robert McGladdery at Crumlin Road Prison in Belfast two years earlier. He was also involved in the second to last hanging in England at Strangeways, where Gwynne Ow
en Evans died in 1964.

  Allen’s eye for detail ahead of his executions was notorious. He would take note of the prisoner’s age, weight and height so he could calculate precisely how long the rope had to be to ensure a swift death.

  The day of Burnett’s execution was one that caused outrage outside of the prison. More than 200 people protested at Craiginches’ gates to try and get the authorities to change their minds. That was always unlikely as Burnett’s family, along with that of Guyan’s, had already tried in vain to get a reprieve and their loved one’s death sentence downgraded. It also left the prison service and authorities on edge. They had to double the staff they had on the gates, with protesters shouting ‘Murderers!’and other forms of abuse to guards and staff behind the gates.

  His former lover, Margaret Guyan, visited Burnett the day before his execution to say her farewells. He was also given all his clothing the night before, everything but his shirt and tie – for obvious reasons.

  The layout of Craiginches meant that on the day of the hanging all the prisoners located in the east side of A Hall had to be moved, as their cells were adjacent to the condemned cell. This was so none of them could see the hangman or any of the witnesses to the death. The death schedule for that day ordered all prisoners to be locked up in their cells by 7.30 a.m. and they were scheduled to remain there until 9.30 a.m.

  It wasn’t until Allen and Plant had arrived to start their preparations that they realised there was a major issue. The drop platform and hooks on the roof had been put up facing the wrong way. By that time, it was too late to make alterations and Burnett had to be walked round on to the platform rather than straight on to it. His hands and feet were then bound and then the hangman placed the noose and hood in place and made his final preparations.

  The sentence was witnessed by the prison governor, the chaplain, chief officer, engineer officer, a nurse and the two prison guards.

  At just after 8 a.m. Burnett was declared dead as the watching magistrates witnessed his execution. The prison chaplain said a few words of prayer and by 8.05 a.m. the prison was ready to get back to normal service.

  Burnett’s body was then buried in an unmarked grave, which had been dug out the previous day within the prison walls. It was also normal practice for details of any execution to be put up on the door of the prison, but such was the ill-feeling around the prison that no notice was ever displayed.

  By 10.30 a.m. all the prisoners were back at their work.

  The Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act in 1965 then suspended the death penalty for the next five years. Campaigners finally got their wish when the death penalty was finally abolished in 1969. ‘Judicial hanging’ has never appeared on a death certificate in Scotland again.

  Burnett had become infamous through his death. He was one of thirty-four people hanged in Scotland in the twentieth century. One hanging was carried out in Aberdeen and Inverness, three in Perth and the rest were shared between the capital, Edinburgh, and Glasgow.

  Clearly, hangman Harry Allen knew the writing was on the wall for those in his profession. He was one of a dying breed. He told one of the prison officers that day at HMP Aberdeen he felt there would be a softening of the law and a move to imprisonment and away from the death sentence and capital punishment.

  Burnett’s family was given some closure when in 2014 they were allowed to exhume his body from the grounds of Craiginches before it closed. The then Scottish government confirmed the move in a short statement, which read: ‘The remains were recovered from the prison grounds and a private ceremony was held at Aberdeen Crematorium on August 7, 2014.’

  5

  Suicide Watch and Death

  Suicide watch is common in prison life, especially amongst first-time inmates. It can be a real shock to their system. People don’t know what to expect and I suspect that nothing can help you prepare for life inside – apart from maybe past stints inside. For some people it is a way of life going in and out of jail. For others it can feel like the end of the world.

  Even now prisons have moved on. They are full of mod cons and the latest technology but when I started out at Craiginches it was a hundred thousand miles away from that. It was a massive Victorian building with no proper heating and no real sanitation with prisoners having to slop out. For many prisoners it can be too much and it was viewed as hell on earth.

  When prisoners were admitted to HMP Aberdeen they would come into the reception and would have their details taken. They would then be checked out medically by the prison nurse. He would assess their physical and mental health and if he thought they were a risk to themselves then he would put them on suicide watch. This meant being housed on a wing of cells which were kept under constant supervision so individuals couldn’t do any harm to themselves. Within a few days most of the prisoners got accustomed to their new surroundings and you could slowly break them in to the ways of prison life.

  There were also other inmates who maybe felt down and had tried to take their lives after they had been inside for a period of time. It had maybe become too much for them.

  It is bizarre because when I started work at Craiginches it would have been so easy for prisoners to take their own lives.

  They used to get a fresh razor blade every Sunday for shaving purposes. That was long before the disposable razor. When the prisoners handed in their old blade they were given a new one for the next seven days. So if people wanted to self-harm they didn’t have to look too far. Imagine prisoners being given open razor blades in prison today. Some prisons would be turned into bloodbaths!

  DEATH

  Death is also a harsh reality in prison. When inmates are sentenced to life then at times that is exactly what it can mean.

  Prisoners can obviously die of natural causes but there have been times when they have taken their own lives. We had a handful of prisoners who committed suicide in my time at Craiginches. Most of the time prisoners had taken their bed sheets and hung themselves.

  I remember one morning I had to open up. The senior officer was otherwise engaged and basically I had to do a head count to make sure the numbers from the previous night remained the same. That meant getting the prisoners up and out of their cells.

  When I went to a well-known prisoner’s cell I couldn’t see him lying in bed so I opened the door to check and there he was lying on the floor. He was a really great guy and I just saw his bed unmade. He was lying on a blanket on the floor with one foot still up on the bed.

  I went up to him and I knew right away he was stone dead. He had passed away during the night.

  I immediately shouted to the other officers to get the prisoners back in their cells. Right away they knew something was wrong. I then had to call for the on-duty nurse. He came down and checked the prisoner and confirmed my worst fears that he had passed away.

  These days you would probably get grief counselling to deal with situations like that. Back then you just had to put a brave face on it and get on with things.

  It was just part of prison life, especially when you have so many inmates in for longer sentences or life.

  The next of kin then had to be contacted and informed before the body was signed over to the authorities and taken to the mortuary. Then they went on for their final journey, whether that be a burial or cremation or whatever path they were going to take.

  A Hall - Prison Wing

  6

  A Day in Craiginches

  I will give you a bit of an insight into the daily process at HMP Aberdeen and to what a prisoner would have faced after they had been sent down to Craiginches.

  The inmate would have been escorted from the court and transported across the city to the prison reception, where duty officers would have been waiting to do the paperwork and finalise the transfer into the care of the Scottish Prison Service.

  The prisoner would then be taken through the reception and into a nearby room where they would be examined by the duty nurse. This was to make sure they were physically and ment
ally fit and well. After the new recruit was assessed, and if everything was okay, they would be assigned to a cell in A Hall, which housed our convicted criminals. The cell they were put in would depend on their crime or crimes and the length of sentence.

  If the prisoner was in for a longer stretch, then they would be likely to be given a cell of their own, and if it was a so-called lesser sentence then they would go into a communal cell, which they might have to share with other inmates.

  The morning opening up allowed the prisoners to go and get washed, shaved and cleaned up. In the early days they would also have had to clean their toilet pots but that was no longer the case after slopping out became a thing of the past. Any prisoner who was on medication would also be administered this at that point.

  At this stage, the prisoner could report to the officer-in-charge and request a meeting with the governor if they felt they had a personal matter or issue they wanted to discuss or talk about. The gallery officer would deal with more mundane requests like sorting out visiting orders or any letters that were to be sent out by a new arrival. Remember this was something new, especially for a prisoner who was in for the first time.

  Beyond this point, the prisoner was pretty much submerged into everyday prison life. If there were any who were perhaps struggling to adjust or looked vulnerable, then we would keep a close eye on them – it was a massive culture shock for them, with the exception of maybe the more hardened criminals.

  Craiginches, like every other institution within the Scottish Prison Service, was very regimented as to the structure of the day. That way everybody knew what they were doing and it added a bit of discipline to the lives of the occupants. At times that was all some people needed to get them back on an even keel.