The last time I saw my dad, we were looking through old photographs. In one sits a small, dark-haired boy staring gleefully at the camera. His smile is cheeky and wide, his little hands folded neatly over one another. Four years after this photo was captured, in 1973, my dad was taken from his parents and siblings and forced to live in a dark, stark building near the banks of the River Medway.
This is where his institutional career would begin: Rochester Borstal, the original children’s detention centre in Britain, where borstals themselves would later acquire their name. Opened in 1902 beside the Kentish village of Borstal, now swallowed up by the town of Rochester, it’s the sort of place you’d expect Miss Trunchbull to be nutting about in, terrorising the kids with maniacal joy. Heading the experimental scheme was the prison commissioner, Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, who was seeking an alternative to the usual treatment of putting children directly into adult prisons.
Ruggles-Brise introduced borstal as a place of moral reform. He had travelled to America in 1897 to study their system, visiting the Elmira Reformatory School in upstate New York. ‘I was impressed by all that I saw… the elaborate system of moral, physical and industrial training of these prisoners… a human effort was being made for the rehabilitation of the youthful criminal.’ Ruggles-Brise was inspired. And upon his return, he got the go-ahead from the Home Secretary, Viscount Ridley, to create the first borstal. Ruggles needed inmates, so he carefully selected prisoners aged 16–21 from Rochester adult prison for the experiment. Ruggles-Brise himself had attended Eton, and his new prisons mirrored the Victorian boarding school system – early rises, physical drills and strict classroom education. Eton boys would go on to become bankers and prime ministers, whereas borstal boys, having been brutalised by a comparable system, would enter into a professional life of crime.
I have only one photo of me and my parents together. It was taken at the hospital moments after I was born. I look like a furious fat judge in a jet-black wig. You can see the zest for life in my dad’s deep brown eyes. My mum looks beautiful, though exhausted after giving birth to a giant baby. At first glance, it is the perfect family portrait.
Three months later, my dad would be arrested and then sentenced to 17 years for an armed robbery of a Post Office van. Armed robberies are considered to be among the most serious of criminal offences in the UK, which led to my dad receiving a ten-year sentence at Her Majesty’s pleasure. I have a hazy memory, aged three, of standing outside one of Her Majesty’s prisons. I remember the building, scary and intimidating, almost as if the jail itself was a character shouting ‘Hello, you feral little scumbag.’
During the First World War, borstal boys were conscripted in exchange for a reduced sentence. In 1916, Ruggles-Brise reported: ‘Since the outbreak of war, about 1,000 borstal lads are known to have joined the Forces.’ The majority of borstal boys fought in the war and many lost their lives, but they all seem to have been written out of the public narrative that otherwise celebrates wartime bravery on behalf of the nation. When the war ended, crime rates rose again. The authorities continued to see child criminals as immoral, and reasoned that if they could be broken down and built back up again, they could be turned into upstanding citizens. In The English Prison System, written by Ruggles-Brise in 1921, he refers to borstal boys as ‘the lads’ again. The whole thing feels like it was written by a chirpy old cove: ‘Many of these lads are total strangers to the most elementary refinements of civilised life; and so we inculcate the principle that by working hard and behaving well, a reward which brings comfort and pleasure upon the effort made. Here then we lay the first brick in building up character.’
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My grandad was born in 1939 to a working-class family in Bermondsey. He was sent to borstal for stealing, aged 14. In the real world, he was nicknamed ‘Snake Hips’ for being the best dancer in south London. Quick and smart, he was one of the funniest people I have ever met. During my teenage years I would regularly prank call my grandad with my friends. I think he always knew it was me, but he’d play along even when the calls took a dark turn. Once I put on a deep nasty voice and told him, ‘I’m in your garden and I’m off me nut and I’m COMIN’ TO GET YA’. I would know from his tone that he was smiling, and he’d respond as if he was in fear for his life – ‘Who is this? Jackie? Is this you, you bastard?’
