‘Miscellaneous correspondence’ to the Mountbatten inquiry on prison security in the 1960s now kept as file HO 278/19 at the National Archives at Kew in west London gathered varied papers from businesses and individuals who took it upon themselves to give their views.
A sales manager, Ronald Hughes, wrote that he was ‘responsible for installing secret security devices in the top security prisons throughout the country …. We also have a very live research department which is producing new and sophisticated equipment, much of it far ahead of its time’. Hughes was for 12 years until 1962 a senior officer of the Army special investigations branch.
A Mr Cooling of Brighton wrote to ‘your lordship’, ‘as an old soldier who served on the western front in 1914-18 war like thousands of others, I found barbed wire a real impediment and got held up on it many a time. I have so often wondered why the prison authorities do not use it say on the walls of prisons …. It would at least DELAY an escape’.
A William Sergeant of Newton Abbot wrote in December 1966 after a prisoner escaped from an outside working party: “Why don’t you make it obligatory for prisoners who are liable to escape to wear a small transmitter (battery operated) which would send a signal to a receiving set in the prison?’ About the size of a wrist-watch, Sergeant went on, and worn on the wrist, ‘rather like a single handcuff’. He had also sent a copy of his idea to the Home Secretary.
Some letters were from sensible public figures such as Birmingham City Police assistant chief constable George Blackborrow, who passed on photo-electric equipment by GEC in Birmingham. A projector, that looked like a camera, with a receiver, projected an invisible ray. When the ray that could cover a length of wall was broken, an alarm went off and either floodlights would switch on, or lights could flash, or bells ring.
The Labour MP Tom Driberg sent a chatty letter on House of Commons notepaper, suggesting that open prisons, apart from the maximum security precautions clearly necessary for ‘criminal psychopaths’ and other dangerous offenders and spies. Driberg also asked ‘how far they have got with that [tv] series of your life’.
A Mr Perry of Weston super Mare, having read about prison escapes in the Daily Mirror, sent a technical drawing ‘of an idea I had some months ago for a prison from which it would be impossible to escape. The crime reporter [presumably on the Mirror] suggested I send the plans to you for your perusal.’ Mr Perry duly got a letter of thanks from the Mountbatten’s staff.
Mr Brandon, a retired man in Exmouth, who had already corresponded with the prime minister on prison security, forwarded an article in the Daily Telegraph that Wormwood Scrubs (the west London prison that the convicted spy George Blake had embarrassingly escaped from) was fitting floodlights; and that CCTV and ‘electronic devices’ would follow.
A Glamorgan county council senior childcare officer wrote in November 1966 with the good point that anyone posing convincingly as a probation officer could interview a prisoner, because such officers did not carry any standard ID. The writer had been a probation officer in Leeds. Cards of appointment (to work in probation, that is) did not carry his photograph, signature or fingerprint. And the man still had his Leeds card from when he worked in the West Riding. He wasn’t asked to destroy it, either. “On more than one occasion,” the man continued, “I have got into closed prisons without showing my card of appointment at all.” At Armley, because he was known on sight. At Lancaster, he wasn’t asked to show any proof of his identity; someone of his name was going to call.
A major living at Lancaster Gate in London W2 wrote about a Barcelona prison that he was in, in spring 1943. A retired (’84 years young’) brigadier general from Argyll enclosed a booklet on crime, its costs and cures. On retiring in 1930, he had become a missionary in India and was ‘still doing evangelistic work among drug addicts and others’. George Bagshaw of Leeds asked ‘would it not be possible to employ the expert advice of some of those senior officers in the services who have had charge of prisoner of war camps and have devised methods of protecting the outer perimeter’ with barbed wire.
The Daily Mail forwarded a typed copy of an article from a prisoner in Wormwood Scrubs, that complained of ‘malaise’. And a Swanage man began his letter helpfully: “This is not a letter from a crank.”
