SIDELIGHTS ON CRIME

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18446, 6 January 1922, Page 6

SIDELIGHTS ON CRIME

By Sir Basil Thomson, in the World’s Work. Convict Taste in Literature. — It used to be the fashion at Dartmoor to study languages, and the ,ipore abstruse the language the greater the demand for the grammar. Tee convict taste in literature is always interesting, because it goes by fashion. There is a very delicate gauge for it in the applications for library books. Each • man has a date, and when the library orderly goes round he finds at the door the application for a change of book, and by the “run” upon a particular author one may- watch the change of fashion. The illustrated magazine is, of course, the favourite, because a large proportion of the men are illiterate, ana to this section the pictures appeal. Pot a short period’ Shakespeare had a vogue, but that passed in favour of Charles Reade. The men did not care much for the modern favourites. Very Tew would read Kipling or Robert Louis Stevenson or! H. G. Wells. They liked melodrama and detective stories, though some of the unprofessional and unreal atmosphere of. these filled them with contempt. —"Liess Miserables.”— I. remember one man who was very angry -yvith the librarian for not supplying him with the “Les Miserables.” It took me some time before I realised that “Less Miserables’* was what he was asking for, because, as,he said, he thought from the title that it might cheer him up a bit. Sometimes the dull monotony of the prison routine was broken by a dramatic incident. There was one murderer at Dartmoor who was reputed to be in possession of £IO,OOO a year; All convicts who, are not paupers are credited; with this exact income by the warders and schoolmasters. He had iinh.eri.ted some considerable sura from his father, and he had set steadily to work to convert the interest into a liquid form and pour it down his throat. In one of his debauches he had killed his wife. His was, I think, the coldest and wickedest-hearted, miscreant in the prison. He had children, Heaven help them! and he starveO and screwed and thwarted their guardian so as to make the little wretches as uncomfortable as possible, and the tone of his dependents’ letters was always cringing, ingratiating and entreating. To all. of .them he sent brutally curt answers. > On thp eve of his release, goesip-loving Prihcetown was startled by the appearance of a diminutive stranger wearing a’ ton hat. Besides being notoriously 'insulted to Princetown weather; a tall hat is there-regarded as the badge .of the humbler followers of thfe legal profession. He was a shrinking and ingratiating little person, and perhaps it was his lack of assurance that enveloped his errand with suspicion, for when he applied at the prison gate for the exact hour when convicts are discharged, the gatekeeper paltered with the sacred truth and saidr that it was 8.30. Had the visitor taken the trouble to check the statement he would have known that the prison brake was at the gate at 7 o’clock every Tuesday to drive the happy ticket-of-leave men, in their prison-made civvies, to Tavistock Station to catch the 9.5 London express. ' Determined to be in time, he reached the gate just as the prisoners were being packed in. He made a rush, for ‘it, crying, “Oh, Mr M., surely you remember me.” His appeal had a remarkable effect upon the wealthy convict. Ho turned white and collapsed on the scat, calling out to the civil guard to protect him ahd keep the man away. The horses were whipped up, the brake rolled off, and the last seen of the little man was -a figire sprinting up the hill in pursuit. It will be sepn that this story must be true, because it has no particular beginning and no end. 1 Cleanliness, Discipline, and. Grey Granite.— Whenever I think of Dartmoor there .comes a confused picture of austere cleanliness, discipline, rfegularity, and grey granite. In summer flower beds blossom in the outer court, Mid their colour serves to make the stone greyer. For 60 years more than 1000 men have tumbled out b£ their hammocks on the stroke of the early bell; for 60 years they have lined up bn parade twice a day to march off two and two to their work in the quarries, and for 60 years, ' for lack of warders to take care of them they have been locked into their cells for the greater part of Sunday: and yet, so adaptable is the human animal, that most of the men have contrived to make some sort of a world out of their surroundings and to limit their ambitions to the things within their reach.

Even in the old days, when the discipline was reallv stem, they found relaxations. In 1904 No. 4 Prison 'was pulled down to make room for* a new block. It had been built to receive Napoleon’s prisoners of war in 1812. In 1850 they Adapted, it to convicts by building tiers of corrugated iron cubicles back to back in the. middle of the wide halls. Curious things came to light as the stones were removed: false keys fashioned out of beef-bones by the dozen, little steel knives ground to an edge half a century ago, stores of rotting’ tobacco and other unrecognisable i forbidden luxuries, little notes to be passed by one convict to another, and a real cell-tev. for which, according to the governor’s diary, the whole place had been turned upside down 30 years before and a warder had lost his job. The doors. of the cubicles finished 3in above the floor, probably for the purposes of ventilation, and friendly rats walked in and out at night to gather up the crumbs that fell from the tables. There was a human terrier in the prison at that time, a Welshman, bright-eyed, quickhanded, and alert. He_ had constituted himself rat-catcher to the ward, and' his plan was to lay a train of breadcrumbs from his door to a place beneath his hammock.

There he would lie for hours together on . his stomach, with a hand poised motionless over each side of the canvas. The rat would come browsing in until he reached the spot, when he was caught between an iron finger and thumb just behind the neck. The human terrier would then bite the rat’s head and throw the body on to his shelf as a trophy. On one occasion he caught two in this way, one in each hand, and handed them over alive to the warder in the morning, with the words, “Two prisoners for you, sir.” I need hardly add that in private life ho was an expert pickpocket. Napoleonic Prisoners. — >

I think that only one of the old Flrench prison buildings is now left standing. It ■was in this famous hall that the Romans, as they used to be called, flourished. No other nation could have produced such people. Their childhood had been spent under the Terror. They had fought in Napoleon’s Peninsular campaign. Their own passion was gambling, and when they had gambled their rations away they gambled their clothes and their blankets. Thereafter they lived like the beasts, prowling naked by night about. the garbage heaps for any kind of offal that they could eat. They were banished by the other prisoners to tile cock-loft in this hall, and they got their name because the cock-loft was called the “Capitole.” The Romans had a captain elected by themselves, apparently because he had rather more than their own. allowance of impudence and push, but they became so great a scandal tnat at last the Government removed them to the hulks, where they were not allowed to gamble nor to get’ rid of their rations and clothes. For the rest, these sombre exerciseyards were a riot of rags and noise and colour. The country people held a market every week-day, where the prisoners could chaffer for . provisions under the bayonets of the sentries. In one part of the yard you would find a play in full rehearsal, at another the hush_ of the gambling-table, of which nothing was heard but the chanting voice of the croupier; in another men were learning to read and write; and, driven off into the furthest corner, you would find men practising on wind, instruments. There were also the industrious people yho spent their thus in carving models

of ships, and selling them for something far below their yalne 'in the market.' You will find them in almost every private house near Plymouth, and the curiosity shops are full of them. They were built to a perfect scale out of beet-bones or slips of oak, riveted with copper wire and rigged with fine thread, and the tools that went to their making were, generally a knife and a miniature brad* awl.

A Prisoner's Statuettes in Bread.- * There is not much scope in the modem , convict prison for the artist, or perhaps it is our nation which, except in ram instances, is lacking in the artistic temperament. , I remember one man who made statuettes in' chewed bread, cun-i. ningly coloured wtih litnewash and, blacki ing. His portraits were quite recognisable, but they were unintentional caricatures. His favourite subject was the chapel, because blacking was unstinted and the other colours were harder to get. His , handiwork was in great request and was used as currency in the purchase of field* mice.

The British convict discovered long ago that the ordinary house mouse is untamable, whereas the.field-mouse that you pick up in hay-making can be taught to do tricks. During the summer most of the men seemed to have these pets. When they were out at work the mouse was put to sleep under an inverted .basin, and the evening hours were devoted to teaching it to sit up on its hind legs and drill with a jockey-stick, the jockey-stick being a'small piece of wood used to tack off a piece o£ bread to a loaf which was a little underweight. A trained mouse was far more valuable than the raw material, and' this particular trainer used to take contracts for the education of new captures.’ In private life he was a housebreaker, with three terms of penal ■ servitude behind him. \ \

Prisoners Kind to Animals.— In all the many thousands of criminals with whom I have had to do I remember only one case of cruelty to an animaL Peary haps it is the seclusion of prision life which makes convicts such admirable grooms and milkers. The farm party at Dartmoor attracted all the men, though they had to get up earlier and work harder than many of the men employed on more sedentary * work. They view with one another as carters .in taming out their hordes. They would ask to sit up lata with the cows at calving tune, and every* one knows that the “Dartmoor Shepherd” used to walk in front of his sheep, as in the Scriptures. They took quite as much interest in the pony-breeding in the prison, firm as the gardens did, and'their great regret was that the rules prevented them from riding. There had been an epidemic of escapes when I reached the place. Escapes from a convict prison—generally, of course, by an innocent man—are the stock-in-trade of the novelist, but in sober fact they ara an indication of the real state of discipline in the prison. Escapes always mean slack discipline and: consequent discontent. The men like to know where they are. As soon as. discipline is relaxed and punishment becomes uncertain the spirit of rule-breaking grows very rapidly. The epidemic had reached the point that no lees than 17 men broke away from the farm parties in the same afternoon a week before my arrival. In those days there was no system for re-taking an escaped convict. Lonely dwellers' on the moor were in terror because, obviously, the first thing a man’ had to do was to break into a house and obtain' a change of clothes. On the highest point above the prison, quarry there was a semaphore. .The civil guards posted round the working-parties, having failed to stop their man by firing at him,, would signal the escape. The arms of the semaphore would be-set awry,-the , prison hell would ring and all parties be ; marched in. IAs each warder handed over his charges 1 he would run for a pony, a cart or, a ■ bicycle and go off in pursuit, but by the time he reached a bridge at some,,.vital spot. on the moor the convict would bo halfway to Plymouth. All this had to be remedied at once. Some of the guard* had to be mounted on ponies, and a system of field telephones was established which would enable the Governor to throw a cordon round the prison at a distance of several miles. .

When this was done escapes became unfashionable; there was only one ; ’ in- -a period of five years. In an earlier day .1 had seen some escaped convicts on their way back under escort, wet through and chilled to the bone. They were always glad to get back after their experiences in that bitter climate. f ' “His Majesty’s Convicts.”— In an earlier page it was said that there was no snch thing as a criminal class, and on the whole this is true of criminals inside as well as outside prisons. They work as individuals or, temporarily, as a gang, but they are pore individualists and they seldom show any solidarity of opinion, I remember one exception to this: it was on the occasion of a visit to Dartmoor by the Prince of Wales, now, King George. As we , did not want any 'demonstrations on the 1 parade ground, which was inconveniently crowded, the .King watched tha ( men march past from a. window a "few feet away. - :. Writing to his friends on the following letter day, a young convict complained or this arrangement. “The. Prince ought to have come out among ns. I suppose he did not know that he has no more loyal body of men in the country than EEs Majesty’s convicts." The convicts’ letters on this occasion were very interesting. They all expressed much the same sentiment, apdi their behaviour was unexceptionable. Another page was added to the history of Dartmoor during the War when it 1 became a “Work Centre” for Conscientious Objectors. It is difficult to understand why these conscientious gentlemen should hay a left such an atmosphere of contempt and loathing behind them on the Moor. The inhabitants of Princetown, mostly tenants of the Dnchy of Cornwall, are naturally conservative, though they do not know it. They have grown up for years under the well-ordered discipline of warders and convicts who knew the demeanour proper to their respective estates, “and to see,” ■, as one of them expressed it, “a k>t_ of young chaps in knickerbockers, with shirts open'down to their waists, and long hair streaming over their shoulders, walking down the "street with their arms round each other’s necks was more than any decent man could stand.” This may have been the grossest slander, but, according to the residents, it is the fact that the air seemed purer and the moors sweater when the “Conchies” left and the convict returned to his own domain. The Response to Confidence.— Prison reformers, especially in America, look forward to the day when prisons shall be no more. They do not waste much time upon plans for regenerating free humanity. They think that it would he enough to * create self-governing institutions among prisoners, who will then go out and sin no more. In one respect they are curiously right. The one thing to which most criminals respond is confidence, probably, because it is such a very novel experience. At Dartmoor I often to- wonder what would happen if the warders withdrew in a body and the convicts ware put on their honour to govern themselves. It used to be said of The Times that ifPrinting House Square were burned to the ground the paper would continue to come out for three or four days by its own momentum. Before Dartmoor broke into pandemonium and the weaker, convicts were seen fleeing over the Moor for their lives, life would' continue very much as it is now for quite an appreciable period. There would be no religious services, unless choir practice, can be so termed. Chapel would be used as a Parliament House, and when the members ventured to express their real feelings about the persons who disagreed with them, they would step out into Chapel yard to settle their differences in the ring. ■ The quiet men. who number quite half the prison, would betake themselves to the farm and to the gardens, and you would find quite an appreciable number locking one another into their cells to keep out of trouble until the bine uniform came back. There would not be many murders nor many thefts, because the thieves would have : left for more congenial surroundings and the murderers v would be busy acting as police.