Special Category. Ruán O’Donnell

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 They did not resist the re-entry of prison officers. Bob Booth, Deputy Regional Director of the Prison Service, claimed that no concessions had been made, but his insistence that nothing improper had occurred with Blake was simply discounted.37 Hill, a veteran of the brutal post riot assaults in Hull, had an unnerving ‘sense of déjà vu’. Letters of assured good conduct distributed by the Assistant Governor were on this occasion honoured in full.38 Although the Board of Visitors gave promises that personal possessions would be forwarded to those moved to other locations, it transpired that many, including McCluskey, did not receive belongings listed in Gartree.39

The direct agency of Dr. Peter Smith in treating Blake troubled ordinary prisoners in Gartree. Smith was an ex-employee of Broadmoor and was reputed to have ‘sectioned’ or ‘nutted-off’ more inmates than any other to secure psychiatric institutions.40 The term derived from the authority of Section 72 of the Mental Health Act (1959), which enabled doctors to commit persons they regarded as violent or potentially so to a mental institution such as Rampton Special Hospital.41 Prisoners referred to Smith as ‘Doctor Death’, as was highlighted in a Leveller special, although the alliterative sobriquet was otherwise used in relation to Dr. Cooper on the Isle of Wight. According to Ray McLaughlin, ‘the prisoners felt they had to make a protest to protect themselves from being subjected to a similar fate’ to that of Blake in Gartree. It was alleged that militant prisoners had been drugged against their will in Gartree to demonstrate the capacity of the medical staff to apply pressure.42 The Home Office insisted that drugs were ‘only’ administered on the basis of ‘clinical judgement’ by qualified persons ‘for the restoration of health or the relief of symptoms’.43 Largactil, one of the most potent and feared pharmaceuticals dispensed in England, had been widely consumed in the prisons since 1958.44 Prisoners placed no reliance in official statements averring appropriate dispensation. The concern of Gartree’s wider jail population was by no means allayed by the refusal of Rees to publish the relevant report furnished to the Home Office by the governor.45

Dr. Smith went on record in May 1979 in opposition to the key strategic Dispersal System concept of ‘human containment within secure perimeters’. He severely criticized the supposedly liberal approach, delineated by Tory icon Lord Mountbatten in 1966, as lacking ‘commonsense’. When recalling events of Gartree’s ‘long night’, a term redolent of deep negative subjectivity, Dr. Smith deflected plausible accusations of administrative culpability within his office for what had transpired with references to prison staff grappling with ‘the explosive psychopathic mixture which we have watched and listened to’. His trenchant views elicited praise from the POA and their leader, Bob Brown, who claimed during their annual conference in Margate on 24 May 1979 that ‘the people who are being punished are the staff and their families’. Brown, following Dr. Smith, implied that the psychiatric rehabilitative function of the English prisons, insofar as it really existed, was unimportant. He claimed, in order to counter allegations of inappropriate dosages being supplied to prisoners, that many fellow officers were taking proscribed medication ‘simply to get them into work the next day’.46 Access to subsidized alcohol by staff was a perk of the prison service noted by their singularly deprived captives. Owing to denial of eyewitness status, they could form no cogent opinion as to whether the palpable frisson within their locked-down wing community, arising from heavy drug utilization, was in any way mirrored in the ranks of those paid to keep them under lock and key.

On 1 November 1978 the POA branch in Gartree circulated its own fifteen-page document which, in addition to promoting service demands, ‘urged the removal of mentally ill prisoners’.47 They were reported as claiming that at least twenty of seventy-five disturbed and psychopathic prisoners in Gartree at the time of the riot ‘should have been in Rampton or Broadmoor’.48 Inmate behaviour and treatment were clearly major issues for staff in the Leicestershire prison, although Home Office Minister Lord Harris had declared himself to be ‘totally satisfied with the medical regime at Gartree and throughout the prison service’ on 6 October. This indicated confidence in the colourful Dr. Smith, who when questioned that day by journalists as he left the prison held aloft a green customs sticker while saying ‘nothing to declare’.49 Requests from Birmingham - based psychiatrist