secret documents on the Wakefield Control Unit despite claims by Home Secretary William Whitelaw that disclosure was ‘injurious to the public interest’. Williams was ultimately unsuccessful as it was found that the Prison Rules he alleged to have been infringed were ‘regulatory, not mandatory’.81
The Conservative orientated Times published an important feature by Home Affairs correspondent Peter Evans on 3 November 1978 which assessed the Home Secretary’s announcement of the independent inquiry into Gartree. Evans noted that the penal system was in dire need of reform:
For too long, prisons have been too low on the political agenda. Prisoners and prison officers have tended to feel that behind prison walls they are out of sight and out of mind. Part of the reason is the obsessive secrecy which has until recently surrounded the prison system. That has been broken by the increasingly articulate organisations representing prisoners’ rights and more platforms on which to pursue them. Muffled by the Official Secrets Act, the prison staffs have lost a battle for public attention.82
Evans cited Martin Luther King’s observation that ‘riots are the voice of the unheard’ in relation to the restive prison population, while warning of the danger of dismissing POA allegations regarding poor working conditions. The POA had threatened massive industrial action if their demands on back-pay and salary increases in lieu of their loss of lucrative overtime rates were not met. If, as Evans noted, penologists and psychiatrists increasingly dismissed the once inspirational mission of prisoner rehabilitation, the crude question of mere containment of supposed criminal contagion gained in importance. Evans averred that ‘in overcrowded prisons, there is little chance of doing more than trying to make the system work’. Although avoiding discussion of the punishment and deterrent functions of incarceration, by the late 1970s, years of under-funding of the Prison Department ensured that loss of income for employees imposed additional hardships on persons deprived of liberty and quality of life. This diminution of experience was adjudged permissible, and the High Court endorsement of the Home Office definition of ‘privilege’ in March 1978 lessened the unwelcome prospect of the pace and extent of penal reform being driven by the domestic legal profession.83
Prisoners’ advocates, including PROP, PAC and Sinn Féin, fully appreciated the utility of driving the agenda from within, even as international courts turned their attention to the Dispersal System. What the PAC had dramatically termed ‘a wall of silence around Irish prisoners’ was smashed by direct action in the form of hunger strikes, riots, roof occupations, passive ‘sit-downs’ and external pro-prisoner demonstrations.84 IRA and Category A prisoners were central to this ominous evolution, as evidenced by the press and media attention devoted to such egregious incidents as the Albany and Hull ‘riots’ of 1976, and the persistent unrest in Gartree in 1978. As expressly intended, visible modes of prisoner protest projected from England’s maximum-security institutions until 1980 could not be readily concealed. By November 1978 the men and women tasked with containing the once inviolate Prison Department domain, from which the glare of the popular media was hitherto excluded, had their own pressing concerns. The POA was motivated as never before to maximize its negotiating capital by stressing the widely appreciable dangers posed by the minor yet vibrant and menacing IRA cohort.85
Wormwood Scrubs, 7 October 1978
The arrest of Kenneth Gillespie of Oldcroft Road, London, on 7 October 1978 illustrated the multi-faceted nature of the IRA threat. Gillespie, a long term sentenced prisoner in Wormwood Scrubs, was on a week long pre-release parole ahead of planned emancipation in November when arrested in the vicinity of D Wing. On leaving the prison on 4 October, Gillespie was found to be in possession of addresses written on ‘scraps of paper’. These were clandestinely photocopied and replaced by staff who quickly ascertained that they related to the premises of licensed arms dealers. A surveillance operation was mounted on 7 October when, the Old Bailey heard, Gillespie drove a Ford Escort to the vicinity of D Wing and flashed his car lights. He was immediately arrested by police, who found a 130-foot rope inside the vehicle, which had been blackened with polish.86 Angela Williams of Bollo Bridge Road, Acton, was questioned shortly afterwards following the discovery of a telegram she had sent to Gillespie in his lodgings. Williams, whose brother Nicholas Smith was another long term prisoner in D Wing, admitted handing over a ‘heavy parcel’ which had arrived in her Acton home from Dublin to a man she met in a local train station. The delivery had been arranged by phone and the man she encountered claimed to have been ‘sent by her brother’. It was not proven that this was Gillespie. She gave him one of two Giro cheques which had arrived in the post from Dublin along with a registered letter containing £100. At trial in January 1980, prosecutor David Paget claimed that the sealed parcel delivered by Williams in Acton contained the modified rope, a detail of which she disclaimed all knowledge.87
Information on the incident emerged on 7 January 1980 when Gillespie was prosecuted. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to aid the escape of four men from Wormwood Scrubs. The four were named in evidence as Nicholas Smith and IRA prisoners Paddy Mulryan, James ‘Punter’ Bennett and Stevie Nordone, who were all serving sentences of twenty years and over. Following Gillespie’s conviction it was claimed that Wesley Dick had originated a plot which would have freed ‘some of the most dangerous criminals in Britain’, although the West Indian was not charged with any offence.88 Dick, a politically motivated armed robber who had adopted the name Shujaa Moshesh in prison, had also been on good terms with Ray McLaughlin, who also encountered his co-defendants in the Category A circuits.89 John McCluskey described him as ‘the most politicized black prisoner that I’ve ever met in prison. He was constantly working to politicize other black prisoners and not only black. He worked with all the white prisoners he possibly could’.90
Dick was one of the three black radicals sentenced on 30 June 1976 for a misfired armed robbery attempt in London which precipitated the five day ‘Spaghetti House’ hostage - taking siege in Knightsbridge on 28 September 1975. Dick, Frank Davies and Anthony ‘Bonsu’ Monroe claimed membership of the socialist Black Liberation Army, an independent offshoot of the USA Black Panther movement, and insisted on political motivation when in custody. While the depth of this sensational identification was debated, the men consciously emulated the contemporary IRA by refusing to recognize the court and turning their backs on Justice Griffith-Jones in the Old Bailey. Advised by ex-Army major Sir Robert Mark and Commander Ernest Bond, Griffith-Jones rejected the defendants’ assertion of political and racial inspiration and imposed terms of seventeen to twenty-one years.91 Dick had met the IRA ‘Balcombe Street’ group and ‘some’ of the Guildford Four when on remand in Brixton in 1975. On entering the Dispersal System, he had political discussions with Shane Paul O’Doherty and other assertive republicans. He acknowledged that there was ‘a whole heap I learned when I was in prison, especially from people who were more conscious than me, mainly the Irish guys’.92 According to the West Indian:
In prison I was meeting people who were giving me the Irish liberation point of view. The first thing I noticed which impressed me was their commitment to the Irish struggle. They’re not half way guys … Any kind of English hostility against black and Irish prisoners the screws will support because it’s in their interest to keep prisoners divided as well as matching their own racism. We had a lot of political discussions, were involved in protests and strikes. They proved the level of their commitment. It was a learning process; I’m sure
