Authors: Robert Jeffrey
In telling me of his welcome Walter reminisced and painted an intriguing picture of life in Peterhead around half a century ago. He was still able to be a manipulative figure in the prison society, helping to organise football leagues and other sports. This, and long sweaty hours in the gym or on the football field, was his way of easing the pain of confinement. Others in his prison circle indulged themselves in a hobby, painting or writing. He remembered a night when the infamous Walter Scott Ellis sent a message for Norval to call in to his cell when allowed by what the cons called the “screws.” Scott Ellis, a Glasgow criminal legend, had a particular hatred for the police, not feelings Norval completely shared. Indeed in his early days as a criminal he had some sort of friendship with the cops who were always on his tail. This was a different attitude to that of Scott Ellis and his cohorts such as John “Bat” Neeson and John McIntyre (aka Mac the Knife) who had all been caged, as the Glasgow tabloids like to say, for bank robbery. They HATED the “bluebottles,” as Walter called the cops. Incidentally Neeson’s nickname had nothing to do with skills with a baseball bat, as you might expect from his background, but was a comment on his eyesight.
The one commodity the prisoner has in spades is time. We all remember visits to dusty museums in our youth to look in wonder at ships in bottles and examine walrus tusks engraved with full-rigged ships and the like. Prisons show that true art can emerge when raw talent and endless time are given full reign. The therapeutic effects of painting, sculpture and poetry and short story writing came to full fruition in Scotland in that famous penal experiment that briefly and brightly flourished in Barlinnie and was known worldwide as the Special Unit. There, inmates like Jimmy Boyle and Hugh Collins made names for themselves in the art world. The art discussed by Scott Ellis and Walter that night in Peterhead over a cup of tea was not the grand stuff of such as Boyle with his Edinburgh Festival exhibitions. It was much less fashionable.
Scott Ellis had a hobby once immensely popular but now largely forgotten, marquetry, where inlayed and carefully cut and shaped pieces of wood varnished in various colours produced an image – a sort of painting in wood. Ellis enjoyed it and over the years had become highly skilled. The reason for this particular visit to Norval’s cell was because he was intent on making a piece of marquetry work for his friend “Wattie.” Walter was given the honour of choosing the subject and he requested a scene from Dickens, the Old Curiosity Shop. Ellis, time no object, toiled for months to produce two versions. Walter sent one to someone on the outside as a gift, the other he kept. That was back in 1977 and Walter Norval proudly shows it to anyone interested who drops by to this day. The complexity of the piece is remarkable. A shop window is filled with pottery and gifts and an old man, dressed in top hat and Victorian clothes, stands outside gazing in. It is not an easy subject but it is beautifully executed.
Scott Ellis was infamous in the Glasgow crime scene but he was far from the only hard man with an interest in art who found himself caged. As mentioned, Jimmy Boyle’s talent for sculpture is legendary, as was the ability of Hugh Collins to translate his gangland experiences into book form. But these two were exceptional – fawned on by some in the art world who revelled in a connection with men who had swum in dirty violent waters far removed from the warm white wine and canapés of the normal art gallery. Other prisoners unknown to the general public scribbled poetry or made sketches of their surroundings often in stark black and white.
Norval made me a present of an interesting piece of work as a souvenir of our time writing his life story – a splendid model of a full-rigged galleon made by Billy Manson, a jailbird friend. This product of many hours’ work carries its name proudly on its wooden stand and, in a classic example of prison humour, the legend reads
. . . HMS Injustice
. Aye, that’ll be right, as they say in Glasgow.
The Barlinnie Special Unit was of course the most significant of what some think of as the “reform through art movement.” In time the authorities turned against it as just too much of a soft touch for violent criminals and closed the unit down, though some of its pioneering ideas continued in a diluted form in other prisons. And in 2013 an organisation called Theatre Nemo, founded by a remarkable woman called Isobel McCue, is doing sterling work in Scottish prisons using music, dance, drumming and drawing to encourage prisoners who have never been exposed to such matters to engage with the arts while inside and follow up that interest when released. In particular the organisation tries to help those with mental problems while behind bars. The pioneers of the Special Unit would have greatly approved of Isobel and her friends and co-workers. Some of the best stuff Theatre Nemo students have produced is in the form of visual novels and “comic book” magazines. The stark images – and the humour – of prison life is brilliantly demonstrated in their occasional exhibitions held in places such as Barlinnie.
But Norval’s chats in PHead with other cons were not always on matters artistic. Old memories of criminal ploys were recalled time after time. Walter Norval and Scott Ellis had much experience of criminal life in Glasgow. One cop they shared some antagonism over was a Glasgow detective called Norman Walker, who was said to have told some dubious tales about Scott Ellis that had resulted in a conviction and a long sentence. Walker said he was on a day off in a district where a bank robbery had just happened and he chanced into the vicinity to see three men leaving a car and taking off. The men he said he saw were Scott Ellis, Bat Neeson and Mac the Knife. Walker said he was in the area to buy a sheet of glass to repair a window at his house. It might have seemed dodgy and too much of a coincidence but the jury swallowed it.
The long nights as the cold North-East winds swirled round the prison walls, and often the Boddam Coo growled mournfully in the background, were ideal for sharing old memories. Norval remembers one night in the jail and a tale of guns – an area where he had interest and expertise as an armed robber – that made him laugh. The story was of a Glasgow gangster, “tooled up,” as they say, being pursued through one of the city’s many fine parks by a couple of determined young cops. The cops were faster over the ground than the bad guy and he realised he had to get rid of his gun before they nabbed him. He figured out it was no use just tossing it into the bushes or a nearby stream – metal detectors would soon find it. Instead he climbed to the top of the tallest tree he could see and taped the weapon to the uppermost branch. When the area of the chase was later swept by the cops using the detectors, they strolled past the tree without a clue of what its branches, high above them, hid!
Back in the North-East, facing around a decade behind bars for attempted murder, Walter Norval met up with old acquaintances from the other side of prison life – the warders. Norval’s transfer to Peterhead this time after an initial spell in Barlinnie gives a flavour of prison life in that era. The van transferring him from Barlinnie halted at Craiginches in Aberdeen, where he was held in one of the “dog boxes” – cells not much bigger than a broom cupboard. He had hoped that Craiginches would be his final destination since the regime there was considered less arduous than in Peterhead. He sat in the darkness and eventually he heard the bolt drawn. At the other side of the door was a well-kent face, Mr James Frazer. Known as “Jim’ll Fix It,” Mr Frazer was something of a Peterhead legend and had, over the years, won the respect of his charges and was regarded as fair, helpful and humane. (The nickname came from the now disgraced and reviled TV star Jimmy Savile and his TV programme.) Frazer gave Walter the unwanted news that Peterhead was his final destination. He was also able to tell Walter a further piece of bad news. His old police adversary from the “High Road” days in Glasgow, detective Joe Beattie, was in hospital. James Frazer was in touch with him regularly by mail and Walter asked that his respects should be passed on to the famous policeman. Norval and Beattie were on different sides of the law, but respected each other. To Norval, Beattie was a fair man doing his job, who did not resort to the fit-up tactics of some dodgy Glasgow cops, one of whom once told me with a straight face that he had never fitted-up anyone who was not guilty. Norval’s attitude to Beattie and their degree of mutual respect is not the norm in these more complex days!
Another Peterhead con Walter ran into back in Peterhead was one Joe “The Meek” Meechan who had served time in Polmont Borstal with him. Over a cup of tea they also swapped old stories. There is a strange effect of long-term imprisonment that warps time. When “inside,” the monotony and similarity of each day burns the slightest deviation from the norm into the memory. Things that happened years ago are recalled just as if they had happened yesterday. Walter had once given The Meek a jacket and long forgotten the gift. To the old lag it seemed only a short time had passed and he thanked Walter for the kindness. It had apparently been a good quality gift. And the pair of them had a laugh at Joe’s disappointment that during his infrequent spells on the outside fate had failed to make him rich, something that Joe had considered inevitable because, as he put it: The Bible makes it clear that The Meek shall inherit the earth!
Relations between prisoners and their guards are extremely varied and in any prison they range from the attitude that Walter adopted – keep your head down and just do the time – to the violent antagonism of others to their captors. Later in this book we will delve into the seriously nasty relationships that soured life in the prison in the 1970s and ’80s. But the less desperate incidents of the quieter days of the 1960s and early ’70s live on in the memories of such as Willie Leitch, famed as The Saughton Harrier after he ran away from the Edinburgh nick surrounded by marathon runners who were passing the prison. He had popped on a prepared running vest and fake numbered bib, jumped the fence of the governor’s garden and joined the athletes.
Walter had been a Category A prisoner in Barlinnie, a man deemed to be more desperate, indeed a menace to society, than the run-of-the-mill con. After his status was reviewed in Peterhead he was assigned to the tailors’ shop. Here he was, yet again in a long prison career, in the company of the Saughton Harrier. When these two old lags meet today they still have a good laugh at the prison officer who was visited in the jail by the cops checking out leads in Glasgow’s still unsolved 1968 and 1969 Bible John murders. The separate murders of three innocent young women who had gone to Glasgow’s famous east end ballroom, Barrowland, which was situated on top of the equally famous Barrows street market, made headlines for almost a year in the Glasgow papers, the douce
Herald
devoting as much space to the search for the killer as the tabloids.
A feature of the case was an early example of the use of identikit posters in the murder hunt. No one who was in Glasgow at the time can forget the striking artist’s impression of the killer. It was everywhere on billboards and in the newspapers themselves. The trouble was that the close-cropped red hair and the angular features of the man in the drawing sparked hundreds of comments from the good folk of the city who felt they could recognise the man. He was a Glasgow “type,” if there is such a thing. The cops dutifully followed up every lead. Even a totally innocent colleague of mine was stopped at a suburban railway station on his way into work. For days his travelling companions had remarked on his likeness to the poster and eventually made their suspicions known to the police. It was true to say that my newspaper friend did look a
little
like the man in the wanted poster.
His embarrassment was a little less than that of a uniformed Peterhead prison officer interviewed in his own jail by the top brass of Glasgow CID. Boy did that give the Peterhead cons something to talk about over those endless cups of tea. However, the fact is that the officer who was in charge of laundry at that time did, like my colleague, look
a little
like the poster. Do not bet against the notion that the similarity had been pointed out by someone behind bars, maybe even the con who had nicknamed the “screw” Bible John as soon as the papers carrying the Identikit started to appear. Convicts with time on their hands know how to stir things up!
Walter was a serial wrongdoer and a general scourge on society, but he is an intelligent man and his observations of how he ended up back in PH in the 1970s is interesting. A decade earlier he had spent many years there as a result of a typical knife-wielding Glasgow back-court brawl in which he used a chib to such effect that his opponent, one Big Mick Gibson, who had shown a reckless desire to move into Walter’s patch, would have died but for some clever work by the guys who use medical scalpels rather than implements that Jim Bowie would have been proud to own. Walter did the crime and did the time, as he says with gangsterish pride. But the confinement, deprivation and general misery he endured on his first visit up north, which lasted for many years, had no beneficial effect on his way of life nor had it installed any fear of a return to the prison fortress in the North-East. On release he went on his usual way – plotting bank robberies one after another. And enjoying spending the proceeds on gambling, good food and drink and holidays in the Spanish sunshine with his attractive blonde mistress, Jean McKinnon. Like many of the robber bankers of today he enjoyed the high life to the full on what might be called ill-gotten gains.
His new one-man crime wave after his release from Peterhead led to a dramatic series of trials in the High Court in Glasgow in the late 1970s. This was a many-faceted affair, Walter and his connections became known, as the XYY gang since the press, when reporting an interlocking series of crimes had, because of legal problems, been instructed not to identify the several accused till all the trials were over. Instead the symbols X or Y were used by the papers, and only after proceedings were complete were all the names revealed and a legal jigsaw completed. No matter, the sensation that the series of trials caused – the imposing structure of the High Court in Glasgow itself was firebombed in a failed attempt to destroy evidence – left Norval in Barlinnie again in 1977, a Category A prisoner. Officially a “menace to society.”