Authors: Robert Jeffrey
The scared con knew he had to act fast and had with typical cunning prepared well. He melted the head of a toothbrush and inserted a razor blade into it, making a dangerous little weapon. He had got himself all psyched up to use it and when one morning the gov stepped in with his usual “any complaints” routine, he bound forward and lashed out with his makeshift blade, nicking his visitor in the face. The handmade chib dropped to the floor and according to legend, “Square Go” picked it up and replied in kind, drawing blood from his attacker in his anger. The nick on the governor’s face was trivial and only required a touch of sticking plaster. It is not mentioned how badly the attacker was injured but the supposition is that it, too, was trivial. This was no Glasgow razor slashing involving much flow of blood and stitching of disfiguring wounds. But any attack on a prisoner could have serious consequences if reported. The escorts of the governor did not put in “a paper” which would have triggered an inquiry, instead a swift deal to water down the whole incident was agreed all round. Mr Gallagher’s attacker was soon afterwards on his way to Barlinnie, out of reach of the cons he feared, and the governor gained a new nickname, one that would earn respect in any prison. It also provided an amusing moment for the press when during the infamous Barlinnie siege early in 1987 a banner saying “SLASHER MUST GO” was displayed from the rooftop as slates were hurled down at the warders below. “Who is this guy ‘Slasher’ and what is he in for?” asked one young newspaperman of a more experienced colleague. He was taken aback to be told that the man in question was not a prisoner but the governor!
Not long after this historic siege ended – it lasted longer than any other in Scottish prison history – there was another amusing incident involving “Slasher.” When things had got back to relative normality and the urge for violence no longer flowed so furiously in the blood of the convicts there was a little concert in the prison church hall. Governor Gallagher was present. Every eye in the audience was on him as in one comedy skit a convict/actor appeared thinly disguised as “Slasher.” What would be his reaction? The wise old governor broke into a laugh and within seconds the audience joined in! It was a reminder how volatile and changeable emotions in a prison can be.
Two of the most turbulent years in the prison’s history were 1986 and 1987. Violent riots both involving the taking of a prison officer hostage occurred one after another, and the story of the second and most infamous of these incidents proved that not all of the problems exposed earlier when the rioters were taken to court had been sorted out. Both riots were milestones in Scottish prison history, events of huge significance and public concern. The fact that such violence had broken out again so soon after the shocking violence of the first riot made the second of the two events even more significant. Who would have thought after the first riot had finally been quelled that not too many months later there would be another violent incident and that for the first time in Scotland the army would be called in to deal with it.
Ask almost anyone of a certain age in Britain what they know about the SAS (Special Air Service) and they will recall some of the most dramatic pictures ever seen on live television – the storming of the Iranian embassy in London in 1980. No one who saw them will ever forget the scenes in broad daylight on a day in May at Princes Gate in South Kensington. The bullets were real, the deaths were real, the billowing black smoke and the flames were real. But it all looked like a scene from a Bruce Willis action movie. Suddenly the SAS was front-page news. It did not please the regiment which until then could easily have been tagged the Secret Air Service. This elite squad had been dragged reluctantly into the public eye. Since their formation during the Second World War this regiment, formed by the legendary Colonel David Stirling to penetrate enemy lines and use small teams of highly-trained men to strike against enemy airfields and supply lines, had conducted many successful operations unknown to the man in the street or indeed to many politicians and other soldiers.
The London embassy siege was a messy affair. Different factions involved in Iranian politics were at war with each other inside the building, resulting in revolutionaries taking hostages, killing one of them and threatening to spill even more blood. All this on the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s doorstep, watched on TV news bulletins for several days by millions round the world. The Iron Lady needed to stop it. So she turned to the SAS. And in seventeen dramatic and violent minutes they ended it. Codenamed “Operation Nimrod,” the attack by the SAS on the embassy was broadcast live on prime-time TV on a bank holiday Monday evening. It did wonders for Thatcher’s reputation as a decisive politician unafraid to take violent action if there was no other alternative.
Incidentally, being at the scene did no harm either to the careers of several journalists, in particular Kate Aidie, who was a BBC duty reporter at the time of the attack and went on to become a top war-zone correspondent, often reporting direct to camera in the front line as bullets flew.
The TV coverage also led to a huge number of applications from soldiers wanting to join the SAS. One insider remarked that some of the would-be members “were convinced that a balaclava and a Heckler and Koch sub-machine gun would be handed to them over the counter” and they could go off right away and get down to the business of breaking up embassy-style sieges on a regular basis!
Terrorists inside the building were captured and killed by the soldiers. This led to a couple of SAS men being accused of unnecessarily killing two men in the embassy but they were later cleared and the killings deemed legal. All the resulting publicity and debate about whether or not the government’s actions had been appropriate meant that however much they did not want it, the regiment had been forced into the public arena and earned a fearsome reputation for speedy action and military efficiency. Days of deadlock had ended in minutes and that ruthless speed of action was to become an SAS hallmark.
In one of those odd coincidences that can mark a life, a man who went on to become a controversial Chief Inspector of Prisons in Scotland – and a critic of conditions in Peterhead and other Scottish prisons – was involved in the London action as a soldier earlier in his career. Clive Fairweather was in the SAS at the time and he was second in command of the hostage rescue operation. From the regiment’s headquarters in Herefordshire he coordinated support for the operation and played a major role in its success. He was one of the top brass in the army unhappy about the action playing out on TV in real time. He was of the opinion that the army should have taken the media into its confidence by revealing the plans in return for a temporary news blackout. He and others in the regiment wanted their operations to continue to be secret and not turn soldiers into celebrities of any kind.
An unusual man, Fairweather, the son of a policeman, was no respecter of rules, a trait that emerged early in his life when he was “asked” to leave George Heriot’s school allegedly for the “sake of the staff and pupils.” But his streak of “bolshiness” did no harm to his army career, which was highly successful. In 1987 he took over command of the 1st KOSB based in West Berlin, where he dealt with a bullying scandal involving sadistic initiation rites. In his final army days he was a colonel in the Scottish division based in Edinburgh Castle. A year later he accepted an invitation from Scottish Secretary Ian Lang to become Chief Inspector of Prisons. Perhaps the Tory politician had taken account of his success in Berlin.
Fairweather did not mess about in his new job and produced a damning series of reports on Scottish prisons. Politicians and prison governors did not like what they read. He was an early critic of slopping out and was not in favour of any privatisation. In particular, later in his career he opposed moves to close Peterhead with its then groundbreaking sex offenders unit. In the army and in the prison service this remarkable man made many headlines. His prison career ended in a paper storm of black type headlines in tabloids and broadsheets alike when it emerged that when his contract ran out in 2002 he was not to be reappointed. Too honest a man for the politicians, it would seem.
There can be little doubt that the success of the London action emboldened the Iron Lady to authorise another similar SAS hit seven years later in Peterhead Prison. No cameras or TV commentary this time and the mission to end a prison riot took only around six minutes. Unlike the action in London, there were no deaths or serious injury. This time the public were not allowed to watch from the comfort of their armchairs and the full story took years to emerge. Sometimes it was even denied the SAS were involved. It was a classic example of using minimum force and no firearms to save the life of a prison officer who had been taken hostage by violent cons, something that is a daily nightmare scenario for anyone in the prison service.
1987 had been a bad year in Scotland’s prisons. There had been serious unrest in establishments all over the country. It was as if some sinister troublemaking virus was spreading from one jail to another. Peterhead, in the midst of a long-running violent war between inmates and staff, was an obvious location for an outbreak. It was not called The Hate Factory for nothing. Years of violence and counter-violence had destroyed morale and any relationship between detained and detainers. On occasion a cliché is an accurate way to describe something and the words “ticking” and “time bomb” and “pressure” and “pot” fit the bill here. Prisoners have plenty of time to follow in the press or on the radio or TV what is going on in other prisons and the hard men “up north” were well aware of riotous happenings in Barlinnie earlier in the year and figured that a similar spectacular protest would highlight what they felt were the bad conditions in their jail at that time.
Peterhead had been nicknamed The Hate Factory for years. Some even called it Scotland’s gulag, a prison of no hope. The nicknames were a minor issue compared to what was to come. In a reality check for the prison service and the country in general, suddenly mayhem broke out. The real hatred from both sides became physical. There was not one trigger issue that started it. It was like a collective attack of what the police often call “going bersi.” Berserk it was.
Without warning, the prisoners started tearing the place apart en masse. One of the leading figures in the violence was Sammy “The Bear” Ralston, an armed robber and a troublemaker over the years in many a Scottish prison. His part in the Peterhead affair cost him an extra seven years on an already lengthy sentence, but he had twice before been convicted of mobbing and rioting in prison. Recently he gave the
Scottish Sun
some insight on how he and others felt at the start of this particular riot: “I needed to get all my anger out so I smashed a few windows. That made me feel a bit better.” The prisoners had made makeshift balaclavas out of bandages and rags, and on the rampage they were a fearsome crew.
Around fifty dangerous prisoners, murderers and rapists among them, facing long, long sentences had nothing to lose. They seized control of D Block and worked out their hatred of the place and their jailors in an orgy of destruction. Initially there was some hope that they could be calmed down after they had got the violence out of their systems. Remarkably most of the fifty did indeed surrender to their captors after the initial flow of the adrenalin that was pumping through their blood eased. This was not an option for a hard core of around five prisoners – Ralston, Douglas Mathewson, and Malcolm Leggat among them – lifers incarcerated for violent crimes, desperate men who had in the past taken all the discipline the prison service could throw at them. And maybe also suffered some violence against them that was not what you might call legal.
In the 1980s Peterhead had tough men in the cells and tough men in uniform. The hard core of rioters resisted any call to join the mass surrender and they had a strong card to play – they had taken a prison officer hostage. They retreated to an area high in the roof space of the old prison and created all sorts of barricades and booby traps that prevented the authorities getting anywhere near them for five days. That is a long time in a riot. Using burning bedding, bedpans and anything else they could find, they kept the guards away from them. Their lair was like a medieval castle under siege with a wall of debris and wreckage acting as the moat. All sorts of debris, slates and anything else that could be got to hand were hurled down on the prison officers trying to break the riot.
Their unfortunate hostage was a veteran prison officer, at fifty-six no doubt looking forward to a pleasant retirement in rural Aberdeenshire. The guard, Jackie Stuart, was snatched as the cons fled to their rooftop eyrie. He had gone to the aid of a fellow officer who was under attack and was snatched by the ringleaders as they fled to the attic. It was an unfortunate choice by the rioters, for Jackie had only one kidney and needed daily medical attention and drugs to keep him healthy. This was an extra inducement for the authorities to get him to safety ASAP. It was a complication that helped make Mrs Thatcher in faraway London take the decisive step of calling in the SAS after days when the riot dominated the news in print and on TV, days that Ralston and Co kept the authorities at bay. The prison officers simply could not get to them. And the protestors had even cruelly dragged Jackie Stuart up out of their attic rat’s nest to parade him on the rooftop to taunt and enrage his helpless colleagues down on the ground. It is a testament to the sort of character Jackie was that in retirement in 2012, long years after his ordeal, he could appear in a television interview and with a wry smile recall the horrors of that day. The BBC had footage of Jackie being hauled out of the attic on to the rooftop, where a hooded prisoner swung a weapon at his head. There was no doubt that the troublemakers meant business. It could have cost a life.
Scottish politicians and the men at the top of the Scottish prison service were goaded by public opinion to bring this outrage to an end and to ensure there were no deaths. But they faced a dilemma. The use of the army in a civilian matter was not at all usual. And, as is always the case, there were conflicting opinions. The hardliners wanted to turn to London for help immediately, as they feared for Jackie Stuart’s life. Others were wary of the implication of ending the riot by bringing in the army. In the end they did turn to London and a prime minister who all Britain knew was not the sort of person to pussyfoot around. Mrs Thatcher, Malcolm Rifkind and Douglas Hurd gave the go-ahead for the SAS to intervene. A factor in Thatcher’s decision was that this defiance of law and order was taking place on the eve of the Tory party conference. The Premier liked to wrap herself in the approval of public opinion and it did not look good that lawlessness was at large in one of Her Majesty’s prisons. As in the London embassy siege, she wanted a solution and wanted it quickly.