A 'Lifer' Tells A Tale

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 177, 27 July 1940, Page 6 (Supplement)

A 'Lifer' Tells A Tale

JIM PHELAN shot a man. He J was sentenced to be hanged. Respited five weeks later, he swapped sudden death for slow extinction—penal servitude for life. For 13 years he fought against the character-killing grind of prison life. His keen Irish mind, and a body strong as a peasant's, won the battle. Scarred but free, Phelan told recently the raw story of life in Maidstone, Dartmoor, Parklmrst. Only the professional thief has "sufficient mental alertness ami resource to avoid the cumbrous clutchings and crushings of the English gaol-machine," he says. "It was a full twelve months before I could palm a note or a piece of tobacco with confidence, or point foolishly in one direction to distract a warder's attention while I slipped something in the opposite direction, or behave suspiciously to attract surveil- [ lance while a friend worxed elsewhere, j or lip-read one warder's instructions to another, or lie convincingly." He Learned In Time Soon he learned how to strike a light with a razor-blade and a piece of stone, throwing the spark on to a scrap of burnt rag. He mastered how to steal a pat of butter, by dropping his porridge plate at a warder's feet, flicking the butter into his shirt while the man's eyes automatically followed the rolling plate. After intense practice he could smell a warder outside his cell door, even if he had sneaked up noiselessly. He could even sebnt a piece of meat in a mail's cell, a fag-end in his pocket.

Tobacco was money and the dope which saved men's reason. Two puffs was a treat, the smoke being blown, after long retention, into the ventilator.

So precious was 'baccy that for weeks Phelan planned to steal the pet jackdaw of a fellow-prisoner. With tiny cylindrical scraps of suet he had traftie'd it to pick up cigarettes. "Every morning, sometimes a dozen or 20 times, it

flew out into the streets of Maidstone, to return for its due reward with a small cylindrical object. The story went that it even knew which kind of faj-ends to fetch." For years Phelan stated that he was not human until lie liail a cup of tea and a cigarette in the morning. Gaol changed all that—but he learned to change it back. Making Tea In Gaol "Little stoves, made and smuggled by the tin-men. were in those days fairly common in gaols. A small tin bowl like a coffee cup had a little slot for a wick, and a crude adjustment lever. The wick was hospital bandage, rubbed in mutton fat and rolled tightly to enclose bits of fat." Water was boiled on them, and tea made. And as cells were likely to be searched at any time, all the gear had to be easily concealed. "Other articles in fairly common use were telescopes (made of a lens stuck into a lavatory paper tube, the whole cemented with porridge), home-made fountain pens, briar pipes, rabbit skin slippers, tools for carving bone, tiny sets of chessmen, brushes and bits of canvas for painting, bracelets and rings of carved bone, pocket knives (worth their weight in tobacco), little noteltooks and chips o' ccdar (pencils)." It was a great iTay when they gave Phelan a notebook and pencil. "So one ever had such a thrill out of a new motor car or a string of pearls." As a man who had already earned his living once or twice by writing, Phelan was soon collecting material in this diary. It was liable to inspection, but he wrote in shorthand in alternating lines of French, Gaelic and Latin. Early entries were: — "Blank licks his lips, twice, very quickly, just before he reports & man and has him punished." "Black thinking, the depression thought stream, becomes very severe every six days. If oftener, trouble . . "Grasses, that is convicts who give information to the warders about the other convicts, are all very short, very fat men."

"Fights on parade, or struggles with warders, seem to be timed, period regulated, by sex-starvation."

By infinite guile Phelan managed to get into the working parties which went out on to Dartmoor, did jobbing gardening, or worked in the kitchens and forge. a six-foot craftsman who could turn his hand to nearly anything, he was always in demand. Illness or crimes were used as .i means of getting transferred from one prison to another - —always in the endeavour to dodge the blankness that descended on other hopeless lifers.

After 12 years, just when he was finally giving up hope, slumping down and letting go of everything. Phelan was released. His years of striving to keep himself fit mentally and physically had not been wasted. But prison had left its ineradicable ni?rk.

Completing his diary, he wrote: "I cannot close a door, throw away a cigar-ette-end, write creatively in daylight. I cannot write shorthand without concealing the paper. If I see a policeman or other person in uniform, I lipread every word he says, attentively— and quite automatically."