failures’ were given combinations of Mogadon, Tranxene, Lentizol and Valium. Numbers were transferred to the Parkhurst Prison Hospital where six medically fit persons were injected after ‘a lot of persuasion’ with the anti-schizophrenia drug Dexipol.15 The precise purpose of this procedure was open to question and it was noted that the Danish pharmaceutical was ‘not a tranquiliser’.16 The Home Office was exceptionally well situated to shield itself from unwanted investigation, it was not until October 1983 that Dr. John L Kilgour, formerly of the Royal Army Medical Corps, Parachute Field Ambulance and World Health Organization, became the first Director of Prison Medical Services appointed from outside the body.17
Although more general prisoner concerns were clearly in play, the Gartree riot was sparked by fears for the welfare of 22-year-old Michael Blake who, on 5 October 1978, was forcibly given tranquilizing drugs before being
taken to the prison infirmary. Three prisoners were granted access to check on his condition and it was later claimed that trouble flared ‘during or shortly after that visit’.18 When Martin Brady saw Blake: ‘He was bouncing off the walls … he was full of drugs and he was only a young kid – doing six years or something. That was what the riot was over – the abuse of drugs’.19 Ronnie McCartney concurred that Blake had been ‘drugged up by the doctor’.20 John McCluskey was approached just after being unlocked by a prisoner who claimed his friend had been ‘taken to the hospital and he’s been drugged’. Several concerned prisoners then congregated outside the ground floor office on A Wing to request a meeting with the Governor. The Principal Officer made repeated phone contact with the Governor at ten to fifteen minute intervals and inaccurately reported his imminent arrival at least twice. An exasperated black prisoner intervened with a threat: ‘We’ll give you another ten minutes and then if something doesn’t happen we’ve got to take some action’.21 Republicans regarded what happened next in hindsight as ‘a good bit of solidarity with the blacks’.22 McCluskey noted:
The ten minutes passed by and the riot just started and the prisoners started smashing up. Of course there was nothing else they could do. Everything was smashed up. The screws in the office ran out and left all their mates behind. So the screws on the landing were barricaded in. They were very frightened. Some time later we decided that as the protest wasn’t against the screws we’d have to take part of the barricade down and get the screws out, which we did. None of them were harmed in any way. The funny thing was that while the riot was going on they released Blake out of the hospital. If only the screws had done this at
6 p.m. or even at 7 p.m. there wouldn’t have been a riot. We held the wing and kept the screws out.23
Official accounts were less explicit. A and D wings were seized by prisoners at 7.30 p.m. who then blocked the entranceways to the sector with makeshift barricades to hinder their reoccupation by the staff. Rioters gained control of B wing where the audible commotion and word of its causation had been relayed. Heavy cell doors were levered off their hinges, plumbing mangled and the expensive heating system totally destroyed.24 By 9.25 only C Wing was under staff control and the future of Gartree within the Dispersal System was in doubt.25 Eddie O’Neill, heavily guarded due to his ‘E List’ classification, lamented: ‘We could only get five people that would do anything on that wing’.26 Records seized from offices, including the ‘Incident Book’, furnished prisoners with information that aggravated the situation. Notes regarding the importance of destroying his relationship with his fiancée incensed McCartney. He found it necessary to protect a Loyalist prisoner from retribution from Liverpool men who disapproved of incriminating details which came to light.27
Serious fighting between approximately eighty-six prisoners and a reinforced complement of staff were brought in. It proved impossible to access the roof where structural levels of damage could have been achieved. Yet, prison officers wearing protective riot gear were attacked with hot water and petrol bombs. Their visible garb probably encouraged attacks by volatile cliques who did not seriously intend to main or kill. Paul Hill recalled: ‘We toss the petrol bombs at them. Their shields catch fire and they flee in panic. They bring armed men into the prison. I see one of them carrying a pistol’.28 Staff claimed, in a bid to explain their embarrassingly unsuccessful counterattack, that ‘rioting prisoners fended off prison officers with the aid of homemade spears, cans of boiling water and hot-plates used as barriers’.29 IRA prisoners demonstrated how to make effective incendiaries using turpentine and showed the best techniques for prising heavy cell doors from their mountings.30
Surprisingly, given the potential lethality of such improvised defences, only one prison officer was hurt. His misfortune probably owed much to the actual failure of the specially trained and equipped counterattacking riot squad to penetrate the obstacles being fiercely defended by prisoners.31 In retrospect it was revealed that the men deployed comprised one of the new and still officially secret Prison Department ‘Minimum Use of Force Tactical Intervention’ (MUFTI) squads formed on 20 February 1978 to address problems of riot control exposed in Hull in August/ September 1976.32 Their performance in Gartree was less than impressive; a factor which may have had bearing on the extremity of their actions during the subsequent Wormwood Scrubs ‘riot’ in August 1979.33 The Home Office account of the ‘serious disturbance in Gartree’, published as required by statute in July 1979, omitted reference to the MUFTI and misleadingly attributed counter-riot efforts to ‘off duty staff’ being called in to augment those already at work.34 This account, although required by law in England and Wales, was patently untrue. McCluskey et al, however, were well aware that their opponents were strangers:
These weren’t just the Gartree screws. These were specially selected riot squads from other prisons. We didn’t recognise them because of the uniforms they were wearing. They had all the protective gear on worn by any riot squad, and over that they had brown overalls, and they carried long sticks which looked more than anything like a pickaxe handle. We could see them coming in, in bunches of ten or fifteen. They kept coming in. They would run from the gate to the back of the wing. This kept going for about an hour … From my experience at Albany I knew how serious this was … I told them that we had to defend the barricade because if these people came in on top of us they’d probably kill some of us. They tried twice to come through the barricade of tables, chairs, any furniture we could find. They couldn’t pass the barricade.35
Believing that the protest had ‘achieved our objective’, prisoners told staff via a cell window that they would dismantle the barrier at 10.00 a.m. on 6 October 1978. This was achieved by 11.00 a.m. Armed police were sighted moving inside the prison buildings and in the garden outside, but no attempt was made to overpower the prisoners.36
