Meet the Criminal Class: My friends, by Ex-lifer

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Perditus Liber Presents   the rare OCLC: 61144 book:

Meet the Criminal Class   By

  Jim Phelan   Published 1969

          MEET THE CRIMINAL CLASS

        By the same author:                    The Underworld.                    Lifer.                    Jail Journey.                    Criminals in Real Life                    etc., etc.

   

MEET THE CRIMINAL CLASS By

JIM PHELAN                             TALLIS PRESS LONDON

      © Kathleen Phelan 1969 Made and printed in Great Britain by Unwin Brothers Limited Woking and London and published by TALLIS PRESS LTD., 50 Alexandra Road, London, S.W.19.

          TO THE WIDE MEN OF THE WORLD WHO HAVE BEEN MISREPRESENTED AND VILIFIED FOR SO MANY THOUSANDS OF YEARS THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

          “See the robbers passing by. (Spruce and spry. Riding high.) See the robbers passing by— My fair lady.”

CONTENTS     Preface 11

  1 Surprise, surprise 13 2 Santa Claus in disguise 30 3 Some of the chaps 42 4 Terravian 56 5 Harry Parry from Barry 68 6 The man who could write 84 7 Pieces of seven-and-a-bit 101 8 Stone walls do not… 116 9 Diamonds—or as good as 129 10 The great dipper 141 11 Grass is poison 154 12 Roll Call 167

PREFACE     The prisons of Britain are packed with convicted criminals. The total of sentenced delinquents was never higher. Even the least nervous person might be appalled by the number of crime reports in a newspaper. Murder, incest, rape, larceny, blackmail, malicious wounding, sadism, pornography, indecent exposure, drug-peddling and espionage—these are the daily news. Every news-reader knows that the captured wrong-doers who pack the jails are professional criminals. They know that the vast horde of delinquents are the people of the underworld. They are convinced about those things—and they are completely misinformed. The vast majority of those convicted wrong-doers—97%—are not professional criminals. The wide folk, the underworld people, are only 3% of the prison population. But they are blamed for the lot! That is what this book is about. It is an introduction to the wide people, the robbers. There has never been a book by a wide man before. (For some reason, books on crime have always been written by steamers—by uninformed amateurs. One of the most famous crime-authors is an elderly maiden lady with a vicarage background!) Those millions of silly crime books are not nearly as valuable as a nursery-fable about Jack and Jill. But they do no harm to the readers; many people think tripe is delicious. Meet the Criminal Class, however, is for that other group of book-folk, those who want to know what goes on. It is a history of the wide men, the robbers. But it is 11

also a series of thumbnail biographies of underworld people, all real persons who are or were friends of the author. In some of the chapters the scene is, necessarily, the inside of a convict prison. (Alas, one cannot be lucky every time!) Thus, if the reader comes across a mention of Dartmoor or Parkhurst, or of Maidstone Convict Station, he or she will know that that too is authentic. In the words of the Western film-characters, “I wuz there.” Jim Phelan 12

CHAPTER ONE

SURPRISE, SURPRISE     One morning I was walking along a gravelled path, stepping out smartly, and slapping my hands together to keep warm. It was a circular track, about two hundred yards in circumference, and it was crowded with men in grey clothes like mine. There were about a hundred and fifty of us on the yard, circling silently and keeping four feet apart. Over a low dividing-wall one could see another yard, also crowded with grey-clad figures, who walked in silence and kept single file. It was Strangeways Jail, Manchester, and it was the first time I had ever seen a prison yard. I knew that all the hundreds of drab-dressed men were professional criminals, robbers by trade, the wide men of whom one heard and read. I knew those things, as any normal, intelligent, news-reading person would know them. Thus, it was a considerable shock to discover that there was not one wide man, not a single professional law-breaker, in either of those crowded yards. At that time there were about five hundred and fifty convicted criminals in Strangeways. But there were only three wide men in the prison, and those three did not go to exercise with the others. (One was the prison librarian. Another was the hospital cook. The third was the attendant at the Reception department.) The others, 547 of them, did their work and went to exercise, and spent most of their time telling how they 13

were wrongly convicted or too heavily sentenced. The three wide men got a decent job each and “got on with the calendar”. During the short time I was at Strangeways, only a few weeks, I picked up enough information, from the three wide men, the professional criminals, to let me know that I was on to a story in a million. I myself was not wide―quite the reverse!—but the boys trusted me. (I can explain that bit later.)

When I was moved to Liverpool Prison, after a few weeks, the same thing happened. There was not one wide man in the prison yards, among the trudging hundreds of convicted criminals. But there were a few here and there, in little safe jobs where a reliable intelligent man, who could be trusted, might “count down the calendar” without listening to a thousand silly stories about unjust convictions or too-severe sentences. (In stir,1 no steamer2 ever talks about anything except that the judge was unfair or that his sentence is inhumanly long. A tape-recorder, picking up ten thousand steamer-patters3 on a hundred stir-yards, would have fifty thousand speeches beginning with the phrase, “Now, take my case…” The wide man calls all that palaver madam.4) None of those things was clear to me, in the beginning. But I got the opportunity to learn—and I learnt fast. Most wide people are born so. Those habits of thought, and that way of life, are hereditary. It is a lineage that goes back to the earliest days of human settlement, to the very beginnings of civilization. (The patrician who boasts that his ancestors came over with the Conqueror, or the American who claims that his folks were in the Mayflower—they rank as mere parvenus.) There were wide 1 Stir = prison.

     3 Steamer = mug.

3 Patter = conversation.

     4 Madam = bullshit

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people when the Old Testament was being written, and there is no doubt whatever that many of today’s wide men are their direct descendants. Furthermore, a good many of them look like it, too! About 1500 B.G., a tribe of desert Berbers, of Hamitic stock, the Tuareg, roamed and raided the district now known as Tunisia. They were called the ouaide-kai, the outlaw people. There were ouaide-kai in Palestine, too. It should be noted carefully that there was no printed or written law at that time. The wall around each little group of huts—that was the law. Inside the law were a man’s friends and relations and his wife’s friends and relations. Outside the law were the dreaded ouaide-kai. Those groups of huts were the puny beginnings of civilization. They were the forerunners of Memphis and Babylon, of Athens and Rome and Carthage, of Paris and London and

Pittsburg and New York. That was some 3500 years ago. The Tuareg Berbers are still roaming and raiding the desert near Tunis. But their kinsmen, their descendants, are scattered all over the world, and are part of every civilized nation. Some of them are politicians and some are preachers. Others are business millionaires. But the majority still roam and raid. Old habits die hard! The Arab word kai means folk or people. Ouaide, as has been mentioned, means outlaw. The correct pronunciation of that word is “wa-eed”. In England and America we pronounce it “wide”. Thus most people take it for an English word. Thus, also, when an uninformed cartoonist wishes to depict a wide man he shows an ugly person with shoulders four feet across. (Wide, as it were!) Just as in Ancient Rome the people of the underworld—the early Christians, who hid in the catacombs—were always shown as degraded criminals, carrying the dread symbol of the executed murderer, a miniature gallows. (Hanging was not yet invented. Murderers were crucified. So the dangerous 15

people of the underworld carried the criminal sign of—a little crucifix!) Needless to say, the wide people know one another, and they keep together in a loosely-knit organization. Just as do the members of the many fraternal bodies throughout the world. There is one slight but important difference No one can buy his way into the wide people’s organization. There are no passengers on that ship. Nor are there any honorary members of the society. Anyone who is accepted as an equal by the wide people will have been tested, hard. But even then, to be accepted does not necessarily mean that the newcomer knows everyone’s secrets! Quite the reverse. They know his secrets, but he is told only what is absolutely necessary. It is a good rule, I think. I myself have been trusted by the wide folk of England and America for forty years. But I know nothing more than is known to any serious scholar at the British Museum or any experienced C.I.D. man at Scotland Yard. It is plenty, for me! I got the book of a lifetime from the wide men; naturally I am grateful. Before my time at Liverpool Jail I knew nothing about the wide people, except lies. As I have said, I was myself pretty nearly the opposite of wide. So of course I took all the lying stories for gospel. How could I help it? Both my parents were very law-abiding people, highly moral and intensely religious. Like many other decent, normal folk, they were always

very thoroughly preoccupied about doing what was right. So was I. I believed the morality stories—every word and syllable. Even at the age of eighteen I took it for granted that all judges were just, all clergymen holy, all schoolmasters scholarly and all debutantes pure. In other words, a dead steamer.1 But I learnt.   1 A dead steamer is a superlative simpleton. Rhyming slang: steamer (steam-tug) = mug.

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I learnt about life, the hard way. That was how I came to be accepted by the wide men. I was found worthy of their confidence, and that is why today I am their spokesman around the world. Briefly, I was a gun-runner, of a kind, and I was in a couple of arms-raids and a couple of hold-ups. On one occasion a mail clerk was shot dead. The police didn’t have the man who shot him, but they did have me. So it was all plain sailing. In the ordinary way of human nature, I would not want to be hanged for nothing. So I would tell about my mate, and he would be hanged, and I would go free as I had not shot anyone. All ordinary, as one might say. It did not work out quite like that. In the dock and in the witness-box I said nothing whatever. (From that day on, the newspapers called me “The silent witness”, and the phrase is still current, after all the years.) I lost my tongue, and my mate went free, and I was sentenced to death. At the last minute the authorities reprieved me, and they sent me to penal servitude for life. Then, and only then, I discovered that I was famous in the underworld as well as in the newspapers. I had not known that my mate was a big shot among the wide men. So—so now I was Jim Phelan who had “played shut-ups” (i.e., who had kept silent in a witness-box). Now I was the pal of so-and-so, who was known to be on the top levels of the wide people.1 It was like joining the Labour Party as a novice—but being known as the intimate friend of Harold Wilson. Just like that. It was brought home to me on my very first night at Liverpool Prison. Starting my life sentence, I was being moved about from prison to prison. (On my way to Maidstone, as it turned out. But of course I was not told anything like that.) I came to Liverpool at nightfall, and   1 My mate is dead. So I am not telling anyone’s secrets.

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I was put into a cell with an iron-barred gate instead of a door. Feeling rather as a lion at the Zoo must feel, I put my face up against the gate bars, and looked out. A second later a tall man in convict clothes, an old man, white-haired and with a deep, resonant voice, stood close to the gate, and called my name, and looked in. “Jim Phelan” he said, in the declamatory manner of an old-time actor. “Jim Phelan—the Silent Witness.” He paused, and drew breath, and looked from side to side. A distant voice barked something that sounded like an order. The whitehaired man waved nonchalantly. Even I, novice as I was, realised that he was showing me he could do pretty much as he liked. He turned to look in at my gate again. “Nine hundred and ninety-nine’ll hide, from the jeers and the sneers and the laughter, but the thousandth man’ll stand by your side, to the gallows foot—and after?” He declaimed the Kipling poem as if he were in a vast theatre. “Jim Phelan, sonny boy”, he wound up, “you own this jail. I’m telling you so, for the wide men. Speak up whatever you want. Eye-eye, Jim.”1 He paused, and looked at me for a second. Then he nodded shrewdly, and shook his head from side to side, smiling in obvious admiration. “Cagey!” he said, and grinned. “Don’t blame you, Jim. I’m Eddie Edmonds—Rubberface Eddie.” He spoke the name, and the nickname, as if informing me that he was Sir Laurence Olivier—Shakespeare Larry! An ancient warder came along, laughing, and he shooed Rubberface Eddie away towards his own cell. Then the warder lingered near my gate, to gossip. Gradually, imperceptibly, it began to dawn on me that   1 “Eye-eye” was at that time, the identification phrase of the wide men.

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the nonchalance of Rubberface Eddie was not an act. Up to that very moment I had believed—as I suppose most people believe—that all warders were harsh and brutal. It was quite a shock to hear this matey old fellow, grizzled and red-faced, nattering cheerfully outside my cell gate. He grinned as he hoped that

Rubberface (he used the nickname) hadn’t talked my head off already. Also he showed an inclination to swop stories himself. Slowly I began to realise that a wide man was different, in a jail as well as outside. That was my first introduction to the wide people, the robbers, as a social group. I had not known there was anything of that kind. Nor had I known that my absent friend stood so highly in those circles. Fortunately for me, no one ever dreamt of taking me for a steamer! Then presently I ceased to be a steamer, and it did not arise. The wide people in Walton Jail at that time were only about twenty in number. Out of a prison population of nearly five hundred. I began to get the facts and the figures that very evening. A bell clanged noisily, somewhere upstairs, and the old warder hurried away. As soon as he had left, his place was taken by a man in convict clothes, a tall, black-haired chap with a brown smiling face. “Eye-eye, Jim”, he said, and paused for a second. “Melbourne Jack”, he announced himself and added a word, and waited a second again. When I did not speak, he looked at me curiously, then nodded comprehension of something. “Of course”, he said, again with an understanding nod. “That condemned cell—three weeks, wasn’t it? Must be bloody awful, that day and night lark. No wonder a fellow’s suspicious of everyone.” None of it made any sense to me. I had not been unduly worried in the condemned cell. Nor was I being suspicious 19

of everyone―or of anyone. I had no idea what Melbourne Jack might mean. Later, I realised that both Melbourne Jack and Rubber-face Eddie had given me a key-word of some kind. When I had met them with a blank stare, they had set it’ down to understandable suspicion on my part. “Your mate”, said Melbourne Jack, naming him, “sent word for you to be looked after. Speak up for whatever you want.” I nodded silently, and Melbourne laughed. “No wonder they called you the bloody silent witness” he said. “You don’t say much, d’you, Jim?” “Listen, Melbourne” I told him. “I can talk for three days on end—if necessary.” To my surprise, Melbourne Jack guffawed, as if I had said something very clever. “Good, that”, he commented, grinning broadly. “Talk three days―if necessary. Play shut-ups—if necessary. Good, that.”

It was a wide man’s summary of what had happened at the Assize Court. Of course it was a smashing story, for the wide people, and it was being told around the exercise-yards of Liverpool Jail long before I got there. I began to learn about the criminal class that first evening, from Melbourne Jack. Melbourne began to gossip, and I had sufficient good sense to keep my mouth shut. Thus, in a very few minutes, I was both shocked and startled to realise that the wide people were—and always had been—a kind of social scapegoat. Also, and swiftly, I grasped the almost incredible corollary. I realized that there are hardly any professional criminals in the prisons. The jails are full of normal, ordinary, respectable citizens who have been caught behaving normally. It is almost incredible, I know. But it is a fact. The chap who paws your little daughter about, on her way home from school, and goes to jail if caught— 20

that isn’t a wide man. That is a steamer, an ordinary citizen, who would be horrified if anyone said that he belonged to the criminal class. The gentleman who stole your car, or the lady who abstracted your wife’s shopping-bag in the supermarket, or the trustee who decamped with your building society funds—those aren’t wide folks. They are normal ordinary people who have been unlucky. Not, most definitely not, professional criminals. In the same way, the gentleman who does things to schoolboys in public lavatories, or the swindling phoney stockbroker who took your savings, or the would-be robber who shot two girls in the corner post office, these aren’t wide folk. They are just ordinary people. Of course, if you have lost a diamond tiara, or a box containing twelve thousand five-pound notes—now that is different. That was almost certainly done by a wide man. I learnt many of those things directly from Melbourne Jack, at Liverpool Prison, in those first few days of my life sentence. Which of course was a very lucky thing for me. Briefly and bluntly, the fact that I was accepted by the wide folk saved my life and my reason. It got me through a life sentence without mental or physical injury—something very uncommon indeed. But it did more than that.

Nowadays the journalists call me a brilliant broadcaster. The bookreviewers name me as a famous author. The TV critics refer to the many small pleasant screen interviews with Jim Phelan the Television Vagabond. All those things are important. Equally significant is the knowledge that I was given then because I was acquainted with and approved by the wide people. But most important of all is the fact that I am able to write this book. No one else in all the world has completed such a work. Hardly anyone else in the world could even attempt it. 21

Thus I am proud of the boys, as they are proud of me. The things I am telling here, in this book, took me thirty years to learn and I am still learning. Melbourne Jack began to teach me, long ago, in the iron-barred corridors of Liverpool Jail, or walking round the high-walled yard. I must have been a good pupil! Melbourne himself is very easily described—he looked like the hero of a good-class Western film. Just over six feet tall, slim and square-shouldered and muscular, with jet-black hair and a sunburnt face and laughing dark eyes, Melbourne Jack could have earned an easy living in the film world. He earned an easier living, and earned more money, and enjoyed himself merely by behaving as he really was—ingenuous, trustful, good-humoured and generous. I nearly added the word “innocent” as well, but it would not have been strictly true. Not strictly! Melbourne Jack was a confidence man. But all the other terms apply—ingenuous and everything else. That is the con man’s great strength, his trump card. He is in fact a generous, friendly chap, and he is not trying to rob anyone. The other fellow is always robbing him. That is one reason why the con man is so seldom reported to the police. When you get down to bedrock, it is always the other man who has stolen the con man’s money. As one might say, the customer is always wrong! (Now there is a pleasant safe “lark”, far more rewarding than any goldmine, and with almost complete immunity from the vengeance of the law. But if any reader is thinking wistfully that the con lark sounds marvellous, I hasten to say: “Desist.” In the first place it is illegal: therefore the reader must not do it. In the second place it needs large capital and takes years of study: therefore the reader must not do it. But in the third place—

confidence men are born, not made: therefore the reader must not try to do it.) 22

Melbourne Jack told me, and I heard afterwards from others, that a con man is never arrested or charged unless the “customer” commits perjury. Which will explain something that every news-reader must have puzzled over, namely, that the evidence in confidence trick cases always sounds so clumsy and evasive. How could it be otherwise? The customer cannot call a policeman and say, “Officer, arrest this man.” He cannot explain, “I tried to steal forty thousand pounds from him—here it is in my wallet. But now I find that I stole forty thousand raffle tickets instead. Arrest him please.” He can’t very well do that, can he? Thus the con man is never arrested except on the few occasions when the decent, truthful, upright Christian businessman says—and swears—that the confidence man stole his wallet, or knocked him down and grabbed his money, or sold him Hyde Park in London for thirty thousand pounds. There is no other way to have ’justice” done on a con man. Because he is always the person who has been robbed. That is the essence of the confidence trick. Rule One, on the con lark, is that “You can’t collect from an honest mug.” (It is a deplorable sum-up of our business morality, but I fear it is only too true.) Melbourne Jack, when I met him at Liverpool, was just starting a sentence of seven years’ penal servitude. The steamer—i.e., the customer— had sworn in court that Melbourne Jack had sold him an expensive car for £8000 and had then stolen the car. Naturally I asked, as my reader might ask, if police and judges and barristers and juries and journalists didn’t see through a clumsy, flimsy, lying story like that at once. Melbourne laughed tolerantly, and waved a hand. “Waal, y’see, Jim”, he explained, “they gotta pretend 23

they believe that mug. ‘Cause he’s one of themselves. Wouldn’t you and I do the same?” In other words, it all depends which side of the wall you belong to!

Nowadays I agree with Melbourne Jack. Everything goes! But as a youngster, in those early days at Liverpool, I remember being terribly indignant, even outraged. Perjury! Seven years penal for an innocent man! Lies and injustice! While Melbourne only laughed tolerantly, and accepted it all. Dreadful! Those were my thoughts at the time. Fortunately I kept them to myself Melbourne told me about one of his exploits, and he nearly got me bread and water for guffawing on the exercise yard, where strict silence was the rule. All the Australian’s stories were excessively comical, and Melbourne had a dry, deadpan way of telling them which almost defies the written word. Melbourne Jack—tut-tut! Mr John Milburn—had come ashore at Liverpool Pier Head, from the tender of a big Australian liner. He had in fact gone out on that tender, ostensibly to meet a friend, an hour earlier, but of course there was no need to advertise that fact. As far as any observer was concerned the tall, good-looking Australian had just landed. Plainly it was his first morning in England, and he looked around him, avidly and eagerly and in high good humour. There would be approving smiles as he walked into the lounge of an expensive hotel, eyes and ears alert, drinking in all the thousand new impressions, clutching a battered suitcase and a huge manila envelope. In the hotel lounge, his eagerness, his wealthy appearance, his good looks and his laughing backwoods frankness, attracted friendly attention. One prosperous middle-aged man smiled and spoke. They gossiped a little, and they had a drink or two. The prosperous middle-aged gentleman was pleasant 24

and friendly, and he smiled a good deal as he listened to Melbourne Jack. Melbourne described that smile for me, as we sauntered round the exerciseyard at Liverpool. “Ever seen the teeth of a rat-trap, when it’s pulled wide open, waiting for the rat to step in?” The big Australian grinned and nodded. “Yep. Just like that.” “Friendly like a tiger I said laughingly. “Nope”, said Melbourne Jack. “Tiger’s a fighter. This chap was friendly like a shark. Corners of his mouth came down on each side, making a half-

circle. Chin went back into a button. Smile never passed the teeth. Eyes hard as a hangman’s. See?” I saw all right. As plainly as if he was there on the jail yard, I could see that friendly business man, and I could see the shark-smile. To my surprise, Melbourne Jack seemed to be pleased because the fellow was like that. I said words nearly to that effect. “Don’t be a steamer, Jim”, grinned Melbourne. “That sharky grabber is just right. He’s always the best customer.” I played some more shut-ups after that, for myself and I listened. After their third drink, the businessman had extracted the whole story from the unsuspecting Melbourne. He knew all about Red Dockery (“Started with eightpence forty years ago: got eighty thousand quid now; says he got it honest, haw-haw-haw!”). Also he had the inside story about Martin Martin. (Lost thirty thousand mangy starving sheep in the big drought of twentyone. Got compensated for fifty thousand good sheep. All honest of course, haw-haw-haw!”) They laughed together, about Dockery and Martin. The Australian—Mr John Milburn—hesitated about having another drink. He was really, he told his new acquaintance, trying to do a bit of business. First time in his life, but it would be okay. 25

Fortunately the new-found friend was a businessman himself, and could help. So they had the fourth drink, and Mr Milburn opened the large manila envelope he had been clutching. The other man nearly fainted. The big manila container held ten smaller envelopes, all sealed. Milburn opened one, casually, while he explained his business. Five-pound notes began to pour out on the table, and the Australian hastened to clarify. Each of the ten smaller envelopes contained 500 five-pound notes. Twenty-five thousand pounds in all. They could have put in fifty thousand, Milburn explained, half apologetically. Or more if necessary. But they reckoned not to fly too high for a start. Later, if all went well, they could run the wool import business in a big way. But for now they were only making a start. Twenty-five thousand. He, Milburn, and his mates, Martin Martin and Red Dockery, were no businessmen. But they were no mugs either, haw-haw! Any piddling crook

that tried to knock off that twenty-five thousand quid would wake up in hell wondering what hit him, haw-haw! Not businessmen, no. The cities were full of crooks. But he, Milburn, knew a man when he saw one. That was why his mates and he were doing the deal in cash. When Milburn met the right man, he’d get the wool company floated, and he’d bugger off back to Australia at once. A start. That’s all this was. Only a start. And now Milburn would be on his way. He replaced the spilled fivers in their envelope, competently enough, replaced the ten envelopes in the manila holder, and rose with outstretched hand. At that stage of the story, on our way back to our cells, Melbourne Jack paused, and spread his hands slowly, and grinned. Tyro as I was, an absolute novice, although Melbourne didn’t know it, there was no need for him to 26

explain the hand-wave and the grin. It was in the bag. I could see that shark-faced businessman, smiling affably at his newfound friend. In my mind’s eye I could see him panicking, at the sight of Milburn’s hand, outstretched in farewell. No! Mr Milburn wasn’t going? No. The new-found business friend simply had to help him, with the wool import company. That was nearly all the story, except for a few sordid details about money and guarantees and commercial trustworthiness. Mr Milburn and his business friend agreed to meet next morning. That meeting was pleasant, and brief There was no nonsense about trade status, or bankers’ references, or business security. The ingenuous Australian neither knew nor cared anything about details of that kind. Milburn and the businessman agreed that all the guarantees in the world wouldn’t be worth a curse if they didn’t trust one another. But of course they did. Not sentimentally, not just in empty talk or paper guarantees or silly daft references. The business friend had brought eight thousand pounds in notes with him. John Milburn had brought his £25,000 in fivers. So Milburn handed over the ten packets from the manila envelope. (After they had counted and tidied a bit, and packed the loose fivers back

into the envelope that had been broached.) The business friend handed over the eight thousand pounds, and rose from the hotel table. The friend was to walk round the block—five minutes, say—with the Australian’s twenty-five thousand pounds, to show that Milburn trusted him. Milburn was to sit at the saloon table, holding the £8000, to show that the business friend trusted him. They parted, and Milburn called the waiter, to order drinks in readiness for his friend’s return. 27

Of course I knew the ending of that story. Or thought I did. I was waiting for Melbourne Jack to tell, with a laugh, how quickly he got out of that hotel. To my surprise, he just laughed and shook his head. “No, Jim”, he said, and grinned widely. “No. I didn’t have to pull out. This was a real genuine dyed-in-the-wool steamer. See?” I did not see, and Melbourne had to explain. There are a thousand variations of the confidence trick, but in all except the most primitive forms there are two or three stages. Stages, that is, before the customer is separated from his bank-roll. This was one of the primitive examples, one of the cases in which the con man has to do nothing. He just sits there like the innocent man he isn’t, and holds the paltry few thousand pounds trust money. The clever businessman does all the rest. That was how it happened in the organization of Mr Milburn’s wool company. Milburn sat back to have a drink, while the businessman went away, for a short walk, with Milburn’s twenty-five thousand pounds. Then that nasty, greedy, wicked, lying, unscrupulous businessman—that loathesome person—he just hurried away with Mr Milburn’s twenty-five thousand pounds. Instead of waiting until he met the decent, honest, trustful Australian again, the wretched fat grabber hurried out to his car, and sneaked away, leaving poor Melbourne Jack with a miserable eight thousand. The selfishness and dishonesty of some people are appalling! (I know, reader. I know. You have guessed or deduced that roughly 4991 of those fivers were stage money, just nice little pictures. But that does not alter the facts, does it? That man did actually steal Melbourne’s £25,000. If a lot of it turned out to be just pretty pictures—serve him right! Okay?) 28

It was my first introduction to the con lark. Over thirty-odd years I have come across a myriad variations. But that one, simple as an ancient fable, tops them all. I can still see that fat shark-faced man, hurrying furtively away in his car, clutching Melbourne’s 25,000 soap coupons! In the Western states of America, the people often refer to a goodlooking cowboy, or a good-looking range-horse, in the same terms. They call him high, wide, and handsome, and the description could apply to almost every con man, but most certainly to Melbourne Jack. For Melbourne was tall, sunburnt, smiling and very good-looking. But in addition he was as wide as they come. Maybe that was because he had a good conscience. Maybe. 29

CHAPTER TWO

SANTA CLAUS IN DISGUISE     I was only kept in Liverpool Jail for about three weeks. Then one morning I was given a suit of civilian clothes, and I was handcuffed, and I went in a taxi with two warders. That afternoon they handed me over to Winson Green Prison at Birmingham. From Winson Green, after a few days, I was transferred to Wormwood Scrubs Prison in London. “The Scrubs” was an enormous jail, even in those days, and there were three big circular exercise-yards, packed with drabdressed men, walking four feet apart, in silence. The vast majority were steamers. I was learning, a little, and already I could tell that much at a glance. But here and there, on the iron stairs or along the corridors, a man would mutter, “Eye-eye, Jim”. There were not many, though. On my second morning, I was marched out to exercise with a couple of hundred other prisoners. We trooped down the iron stairways in tens and twenties, and were assembled on the ground floor of the jail, where we were numbered and checked. Then a senior warder gave the command, “Lead on outside”, and we began to file out into the yard. Outside the door of the jail, counting the convicts as they emerged, was a tall, powerful, white-haired old warder I had already noticed once or twice. He had a grim, fierce face, which looked even more menacing under the shock of white hair. Also he spoke with a West Country burr which was almost unintelligible. I took a couple of sly peeps at him as I passed, and I realised that here was a ruthless tyrant if ever I had seen 30

one. Here was the unscrupulous warder of whom one heard and read. (Bloody fool! He was a gentle, thoughtful old fellow, one who had done a thousand kindnesses for any of the boys-who were worth it. He only looked fierce and grim because he could be like that if necessary. Just as I did and just as I could! But I only found out those things later in the day.) As I passed the old warder he said, “Get ee yairr ket, zee.” I was unable to understand his speech, and in any case I did not realize that he was speaking to me. So I kept on walking. A bellow brought me up short.

“Get ee yairr ket”, the old warder said again, in a loud voice, and I hesitated. “Come on, you bloody fool”, snarled a nearby prisoner. “Goin’ asleep or somethin’? He shook out a white sheet and pushed a small folding-chair forward as he spoke. Obviously the prison barber. I hastened to sit down. “Eye-eye, Jim”, the barber said in a low voice, as he tucked the sheet in around my neck. “Nit the rort. Gotta kid the twirls.” I nodded. “If I call you a dratsab”, the barber went on, “they know we’re bogeys. Call you Jimmyboy, they pipe and earwig. Jake?” He was “pattering the bat”, speaking the jail-language, of which I had learnt a few scraps at Manchester and Liverpool and Winson Green. Nit means cancel. Rort is abusive speech. Kid means to deceive. Twirl is a key —and also a warder! Dratsab is a bastard (written back–backwards). Bogeys means enemies. Pipe is to watch. Earwig is to listen. Jake means correct or okay. Put into ordinary English, the barber’s speech is worth a guinea a box. “Cancel the bawling out. We have to fool the warders. If I call you a bastard they think we’re enemies. But if I call you Jimmy-boy they’ll watch us and listen to us. Okay!” A lot in a little, one might say. 31

”I’m Dave Kingham”, the barber told me, and added a word, and clipped at my hair. “Been expecting you a week or more”, he added. “Speak up anything you want, Jim.” I moved to adjust the sheet around my neck, and took a glance back at the man who spoke with such authority. Kingham is easily described—he looked like a pirate in a picture. Big, powerfully built, clean-shaven, brown-faced and black-haired, he had large dark flashing brown eyes and a wide-lipped, white-toothed smile. A laughing, good-humoured fellow, one would have said at first glance. But at second glance one thought of pirates. While he clipped at my hair, Kingham “gave me the strength” which is the bat phrase for bringing one up to date with the news and gossip. I would be sent to Parkhurst or Maidstone, he told me. Not Dartmoor—the Dartmoor chain-gang was being made up in “C” Hall, on the other side of the jail. Since I was here in “B” Hall, that meant Maidstone or Parkhurst. Parkhurst he hoped—Maidstone was a killer. All the time he talked, I was forming impressions about Dave Kingham. The first feeling was of a great awareness, something not usually found

except among top-rank chess-players and top-rate boxers. But in addition to the awareness, Kingham radiated self-confidence. This chap, I reflected, while he clipped and gossiped, this chap had the self-confidence of a tiger or a wolf (Had I but known it, I was getting very near the truth. Here was one of the wide folk living in London and “pattering the bat” with a Cockney accent, but he belonged to the Tuareg as surely as if he had only that morning ridden in from the Tunisian desert. “Get your loaf weighed at tea-time”, Kingham instructed. “Got to sling you out now. Have nine chinas to pipe.” (He had to see nine friends on business.) I stood up and brushed myself Kingham waved to the 32

old warder, who waved to me, and I took my place in the line of convicts circling the yard. I had plenty to think about. In the few minutes’ talk with Kingham, as when I spoke with Melbourne Jack, I had had the sense of belonging to something, of having a buffer against the possible harshness of the world. For several weeks, before my trial for murder, and for several weeks after it, in the condemned cell, I had faced the world alone. A devastating misfortune had swept me down in disaster, and I had perforce accepted it single-handed. Now—now I was learning that, all the time, I had had powerful friends, many of them people by whom I was counted as worthy. It was a pleasant feeling, and it has stayed with me all the years, from then till now. No man really likes to confront the universe on his own. That afternoon, in my cell, I made a few (illegal) notes, on a scrap of lavatory paper, with a fragment of pencil-lead about a quarter of an inch long and a sixteenth of an inch thick. Also I drew, on a school slate which hung on my cell wall, a picture of “Get ee yairr ket”, the wicked-looking old warder. It was the beginning of the re-birth of Jim Phelan, and it had happened because I had begun to meet the criminal class in reality instead of in the pages of a newspaper. I was on my way back to life. At tea-time I asked to have my loaf weighed, as (I said) it seemed to be too light. Loaf-weighing was apparently permitted by the rules (I hadn’t known) but of course it was frowned on by the authorities. I say “of course” since it delayed the serving of suppers. Because one of the warders had to march me downstairs, loaf in hand. We proceeded to the “Front Desk”, where the Principal Warder sat in charge.

The Principal produced a pair of scales, and my loaf was weighed and it was found to be slightly under weight. 33

(Of course it was underweight! If it had been the correct weight I might have got three days’ bread and water for making “frivolous complaints” Manifestly Kingham had done a little organizing.) As the warder and I were marching back up the stairs to my cell, we passed Dave Kingham on one of the landings. Kingham was carrying his barber-gear—a pail, the folding chair, and his clippers etc., as well as the sheet that went around his customers’ necks. He knocked against me awkwardly, and dropped the empty pail. “Look where you’re going, you fucking half-wit”, he said roughly, and thrust forward as if to push me out of the way. I knew this was another “rort”, so I said nothing. Then as Kingham stooped for his bucket the warder said placatingly, “AH right, Dave. All right, Kingy.” Kingham turned away, growling, the warder and I went on up the stairs, and I went to my cell with my loaf I knew by that time that Kingham had got me downstairs for some purpose of his own. In all probability it would be something to my advantage—although it might be a demand of some kind, and I would have no objection. But I could make no guess as to what Dave might have had in mind. After I had had my supper, when the warders had gone home and the prison was quiet, I sat down at my cell table. It was my first chance to relax, and to think over the crowded events of my first day at “The Scrubs.” Easily first in my thinking was the feeling of relief and of pleasure, because Dave Kingham had decided to befriend me. At that stage I reached into my jacket pocket for a handkerchief Instead, I took out a little silver-foil packet of cheese, a letter folded small, two lumps of sugar, a piece of pigtail tobacco, a small sheet of paper and a scrap of pencil. I felt like a conjurer on a stage. 34

Apparently Kingham’s awkward stumble on the landing had been something of a technical achievement! The opposite of pocket-picking, no less! In his letter, Kingham gave me the names of two wide men at Parkhurst, and two at Dartmoor. If I went to either prison, I was to get in touch with

the people named at the earliest moment. They were “all wide men”, as Kingham put it, and he let me know that I could depend on those four, and on himself “to the limit”. It was a wonderful present, for one starting a life sentence. At Wormwood Scrubs I discovered that none of the wide men shared my views about democracy, justice, fairness, tolerance, progress, “or any of that madam”, as Kingham and the others put it. I was flabbergasted. The session with Kingham was brief and devastating. I had been airing my views about penology, and about the evils of the prison system. Certain of Kingham’s support, I held forth about social injustice and the iniquities of perverted political set-ups. Kingham halted for a second—it was on the ground floor of “B” Hall one day after exercise. Then, as he moved forward again, he made a rude farting noise, and guffawed, or came as near to guffawing as The Silent System permited. “What d’you want?” he demanded, justice, eh?” I stared. “You want fairness an’ love an’ that, yeh?” he went on. “Not me, by Christ!” He grinned, and lowered his voice. “Narkit, china”, he advised me. (In jail talk he was saying, “Drop that, mate.”) “But, Dave—” I protested. “I make a pony a hide”, Kingham interrupted. (A pony is £25. A hide is a hide-and-seek—i.e. a week.) “Do I get that from poor democratic skint bastards that has nothin’ for themselves? Do I? Listen, Jim”, he said earnestly. “There’s only one thing you’ll get for free—an’ that’s the pox.” 35

Devastating is the only word for that economic discussion. I made several attempts to find out, from Kingham and from others, the financial basis of the wide men’s lives. But it was unlike anything of which I had ever heard or read. Dave Kingham was a bandit. With two or three mates, he intercepted valuable consignments of cigarettes, drugs, expensive liqueurs—anything that was light, and easily transported, and swiftly saleable. They never used firearms—“steamer stuff” was Kingham’s scornful summing-up of the Hollywood idea of banditry. Dave earned £25 a week when he was out of prison. While he was in prison, his wife was paid £7 a week. (It should be borne in mind that Dave Kingham and I met for the first time over forty years ago. In those days, a labouring man got £2 a week, a

bank clerk £3, a highly-skilled craftsman £4, a journalist £5. Kingham, even when he was in jail, got £7 a week.) Here, obviously, was an economic system of which I knew nothing. It made all my “advanced democratic” ideas sound very foolish. Kingham explained. He made the pony a hide, sure. But most of it went in the dropsee. Wide men kept together. If one of his chinas was in stir, then Kingham would dropsee. That took three parts of the pony, see? So when Dave was in stir his mott copped for seven nicker. Now did I see?” China is mate, as the reader knows. Stir is prison. Inside means in jail. Mott is wife or girl-friend. Dropsee is to contribute and cop for is to receive. A nicker is £1. Is it any wonder that I felt pleased and proud? To have been trusted with even that much, to start with, was great praise. (Every top-rank C.I.D. man in London knows those things, and knew them forty years ago. But how many members of the public could even guess at the Bedouin-bandit system which was operating, and still operates, in 36

the heart of London? Of course I was proud to be told.) My brain was working overtime for every hour of my stay at “The Scrubs”. Because all the time, behind my “economic studies”, was the wonder and worry about where I might be sent next. I was not left much longer in doubt. One morning I went along the landing to the water-tap as usual. Dave Kingham was waiting nearby, making excuses to talk with the screw. I knew he was waiting to see me, and I guessed that it meant bad news. It did. Kingham furtively held out both hands, thumbs down, in the universal sign of defeat and disaster. At the same time he shook his head gloomily. “Slip me anything you want rid of”, he whispered. “Tip me any word you want passed on. Hard luck, Jim. You’re for the Maidstone chain-gang. They’re making it up today. Hard luck, china.” I went back to my cell in a black mood. Maidstone. The killer! This was not so good. Two hours later, instead of being allowed to go outside for exercise, I was marched to the clothing-store with ten other men. We were fitted out with civilian clothes, and we were fitted out with handcuffs. Then we were

handcuffed to a long chain, four feet apart, and we were marched outside. A Black Maria was waiting, and we were crowded into it. Half an hour later we were lined up on the platform at Victoria Station. I was for Maidstone all right. That afternoon we arrived at Maidstone, and we were marched through the public streets, in single file, four feet apart, handcuffed to the chain. I had read, a dozen times, in newspapers and magazines, that all such practices were obsolete for years. But here I was in the chain-gang, newspapers notwithstanding. More madam! 37

Maidstone Jail, from the outside, was a most attractive ancient place. Obviously dating back several hundred years, with an ivy-covered stone tower, and surrounded by a high wall of crumbling grey stone, it looked like a jail in a play or a film. But it would have been a play or a film about Dick Turpin or Robin Hood. Unfortunately I was in a play about Jim Phelan. Wherefore Maidstone Jail looked pretty bloody, that first day. I soon found out that it was a lot worse than it looked. It was a tiny, dusty, stuffy place. A high wall closed in a small square gravelled yard— this was all the “open-air” part. Instead of the granite-quarries and wide heather-lands of Dartmoor, instead of the forests and the fields of Parkhurst, there was only this little, dusty, gravelled square. I was to walk round and round on that, for life. Looking at it, and looking at the stooping, grey-faced wrecks who tottered along on the gravel track, I thought that perhaps two years would suffice to “complete” my life sentence. I had led an active existence, mostly in the open air, for twentyeight years. That dusty, stuffy little jail would finish me in two years I reckoned. Maybe less. I soon discovered that the jail was full of steamers, respectable people who had been caught. There were only three wide men in the prison, out of a total of over two hundred. The steamers had done the weirdest and most incredible things, to get themselves put “inside”. Apart from the very posh, very up-stage embezzlers and fraudulent trustees and defalcating solicitors—apart from these, the jail population resembled the cast of a pantomime played in a mad-house.

There were ten or twelve people who had long penal sentences for molesting little girls. One good-looking cheerful young rustic had had a love-affair with a sow. 38

Two parsons were “in” for indecent assault. Twelve or fourteen young men of the labouring class had tried to rob banks and offices, armed with knives, bludgeons, revolvers and bars of iron. They had injured property, and frightened people, and killed three bank clerks. A wild-looking man had sent a home-made bomb to the Prime Minister, and had got himself “lift”. Fourteen men had murdered their wives for the insurance money. One genial youngster had beaten an old lady to death with a wooden mallet—he had “perpetual”, imprisonment during His Majesty’s pleasure. Eight men—with no engineering knowledge—had tried to burgle eight different banks. At least twenty men had slept with their daughters, and had collected long sentences of penal. An old man with hair like a doormat had excreted in Piccadilly at midday. Two fine, tall, smart young fellows, from a cavalry regiment, had fallen in love with their mounts and had been caught consummating their love. A young man who looked and spoke like an Oxford don had tried to make threepenny pieces out of a pewter pot. Crazy it all seemed—just plain crazy. Then I remembered that there were only three professional criminals in the prison—but those three were blamed for all the crimes. It did not seem so crazy then; it began to look like a deliberate job of misrepresentation. But none of that was going to make much difference to me, I reflected. After two or three years of Maidstone Jail I would not be interested in those questions―or any others. The gloom began to take hold of me then and there. Fortunately I made a dangerous and unscrupulous enemy on my very first day at Maidstone. I say fortunately. Because there is no other word. On my first afternoon at Maidstone Prison I had a row with a cheeky little civilian, a pasty-faced chap about 39

five feet high, who stank like hell and who obviously hated my guts. (I’m just under six feet, and I look at the world as at a nice place, and I carry myself like a man. Naturally the little chap hated the sight of me. He

mocked at my cultured speech and jeered at my way of walking, and he mispronounced my name, and raised howls of sycophantic laughter—from the screws—by calling me Felon.) When I told him my name wasn’t Felon, he told me to shut up. Whereupon I told him a few neat, curt home-truths about himself Then, and only then, I realized that the little chap was the Governor of Maidstone Jail. So I had an enemy for life, a dangerous enemy, with power. Fortunately! Stinker Stephen (that was what the boys called him) was a most unscrupulous little bastard. Also he was very competent at fiddling with bureaucratic paraphernalia, with facts and figures. He got to work on me at once. Poor little Stinker! He has been dead and gone these thirty years. Let’s not kick his corpse. He did his damnedest to sink me without trace. I was a first offender, had never even been fined half-a-crown in my life. But Stinker Stephen got at the printed forms, and did his stuff He turned me―on paper—from a first offender into a hardened persistent delinquent, an old convict with many penal sentences behind me. He made me, on the printed forms, into a “recidivist”, that is, a man who has served many terms of penal servitude. Then, naturally, he had me removed from the sacred precincts of the first offender prison at Maidstone. As was now legal, he had me sent to the more degraded environment of the “recidivist” convict station, at Dartmoor. On faked-up evidence, he turned me into a hardened criminal, a longterm convict with many penal sentences, 40

and he had me sent to Dartmoor. By which act he gave me two novels―one of which sold for twenty-eight years. He also gave me two top-rank fact books, four film scripts, eighty feature articles, thirty-seven short stories, seven television talks and sixty radio broadcasts. Thanking you, Stinker. I mean Stephen. I mean Santa Claus. 41

CHAPTER THREE

SOME OF THE CHAPS     Dartmoor Convict Station is very picturesque, extremely attractive in a wild and savage fashion. There is no hollow veneer of culture, no empty prattle of prison reform, at the Moor. This is a place where the convict gangs are held at forced labour, under the musket and cutlass and club. On the Moor, it might still be the eighteenth century. There is no window-dressing, nor is there any pretence at “fairness”, or democracy, or similar madam. No nonsense—that is rule one. Mile after mile of grass and heather, stark black tors thrusting up to the sky, forest and swamp, bog and morass, and the grim grey fortress in the middle of it all—that was the Moor as I saw it first, and as I see it now. I had not arrived in a chain-gang, had only two warders for company on the journey from Maidstone. So I was already being regarded as “kinda special” by convicts and warders alike. The general idea was that I had tried to start a mutiny at Maidstone―which meant of course that I was pretty tough. (I hadn’t dreamt of anything like that—it was only Stinker Stephen’s madam.) But the reputation did me no harm, either with the lags or the twirls. The change from the mean, small, false stuffiness of Maidstone was startling. This place was tough—tough till it hurt. But at least the warders and officials didn’t pretend that it was some sort of training-school or a course in civics. There wuz bullets in them guns. I myself was very fortunate in being sent to Dartmoor, for three reasons. First was the question of health—I 42

would have died of etiolation, forty years ago, at Maidstone. Second was the fact that at Dartmoor I managed to find my way through that dangerous maze, the Penal Code. I kept my mental and physical health, and I found my way out from the jail—I would never have done that at Maidstone. But third, and vitally important—third was the fact that, for the first time, in any numbers, I met the criminal class, the wide people, at

Dartmoor. That was precisely like being born again, into a world of real people instead of empty shams. When I went to the Moor there were about 620 convicts held there, with penal sentences ranging from three years to twenty. Of those 620 about no were wide men. That is, the wide men were only about one in six. But of course they knew one another, and they kept together. That gave them a vast advantage, as against the “mug” convicts, the steamers, each of whom stood alone. Also the wide men’s grouping helped them to cope with the twirls, who like sensible men stirred up no hornets’ nests. I was very fortunate to be accepted by the wide people without question. The two contacts at the Moor, whose names had been given to me by Dave Kingham, took my word, and said their word, and I was in. It was great good luck. Another pleasant surprise was that I was on good terms with the Governor, the doctors, the librarian, and the other officials. So I had an easy passage. As far as I was concerned, Stinker Stephen had indeed acted like Santa Claus. One of the men whose names had been given me at Wormwood Scrubs was Dick Rohan. Kingham had told me that Rohan was “a screwsman off the line mob”. Meaning that he was a burglar from the North country. 43

I had been expecting someone rather like a Liverpool-Irish heavyweight boxer, or a Sunderland-Irish all-in wrestler. Instead, a big man who looked like a detective in a film halted at my work-place. “Eye-eye, Jim”, he said. “So you got Stinker Stephen six-and-eight!” Six-and-eight, in the bat, means straight. (I.e. crooked! In other words, bribable.) Rohan was pretending to believe that I had bribed Stinker Stephen to fiddle the printed forms! That is convict humour. If the reader can grasp the implications of it, then he or she will have acquired a valuable psychological tool. Because all really funny things are macabre. And jail humour is the most extreme form of this. Dick Rohan was a very unusual person. There, at our first meeting, he packed a lifetime of experience, and a profound knowledge of my personal affairs, into a joke about the Governor of Maidstone Jail.

But also—also, will the reader please note—Rohan was telling me how damn lucky I was. All I knew was that the little bastard at Maidstone had falsified documents and signed lying reports, in order to have me “degraded” to Dartmoor. Dick was saying that it would have been worth my while to bribe Stinker Stephen to do just that. How right he was! I did not realize it at that time, but I know it now. How right Dick Rohan was. Again, as in my meeting Dave Kingham, this encounter with Dick Rohan was a piece of great fortune for me. I am glad to say that in the many years I knew him and worked with him, Dick always treated me as his equal. I know no higher accolade. Dick had a sentence of ten years’ penal servitude for a burglary at Durham. He himself admitted that he was lucky not to have fourteen years, or a life sentence. His mate had thrown a caretaker down a flight of stairs. 44

The man had been killed, but Dick’s mate had got away. Rohan, of course, had been blamed and sentenced for everything— rightly so, as he agreed. So the ten years might have been doubled. At the same time, Dick had only served about a year of his sentence, and he was then thirty-one. It was no picnic. Then and there, I began to understand something of the difference between Dick Rohan and most of the people I knew. Rohan was completely incapable of self-deception. That is very unusual. Very. He was the son, and the grandson, of Cumberland farmers. But I felt certain that some earlier Rohan had come from Provence, or farther east, or farther south. Dick was a big, powerful man, just over six feet, and he seemed to be in perfect physical condition, as were most of the wide men on the Moor. (They nearly all worked out on the bogs, or in the granite quarries, leaving the “sit-down jobs” to the more civilized types, the steamers.) Somewhere and somehow, Rohan had acquired a first-class education. Also he had personal courage, which is one of the marks of the wide men, in very considerable degree. But above all he was frank and outspoken, using no tricks of speech or thought, and hiding no facts from himself That type of mind, as every psychiatrist knows, is very unusual. For most people, self-deception of one kind or another is quite normal. Indeed, in many persons the rate of self-deception is close to a hundred per cent!

Read the “crime” columns of any newspaper. Look at the “comic” section of any journal. Consider the leading article in any decent periodical. Best of all―or worst of all―listen to any average political broadcast. It would be terrifying, if it were not so screamingly funny, to read and hear the flimsy fables with which normal decent people fool themselves, day in and day out. 45

No wonder the wide men call all our newspapers and books “just madam”! In a convict prison, the steamers, the mugs, keep on with their thoughthabits from the outside world. So they catch it in the neck from both the wide men and the twirls. That happens because the severity of the prison rules, and the harshness of the prison treatment, make it unsafe to waste time and life in pretty phrases. Just as the severity of desert life, and the harshness of an outlaw’s existence, make the desert Arabs face up to the facts of life. Thus, while a person in civilization has no incentive, and little opportunity, to avoid self-deception, the Tuareg in the desert or the wide man in Dartmoor learns otherwise. In a tough jail there is very little “kidstakes”. (Kid-stakes is the wide man’s unflattering name for normal thought!) But, even in a tough jail, hundred per cent sincerity and hundred per cent self-knowledge are still rare. Dick Rohan had both. There will be no need for me to record the fact that Rohan was the accepted leader of the wide men on the Moor. Around the coke-ovens at night, “Dick says” was accepted as practically the word of God. This from people who do not take kindly to any rule, not even to that of naked force. The type of mind that is found among the wide people is very uncommon in ordinary life. Except, strangely enough, among such persons as have been psychoanalysed. They, like the professional criminals, do not go in for self-deception much. For the rest of us, “Courtesy is the lubricant which oils the wheels of social intercourse”. Also, as many will recall, “a soft answer turns away wrath”, There is the further belief that “Politeness costs nothing”, as well as the injunction “not to cross-examine yourself too much”. 46

Those and similar phrases count as thought, for most people. For the wide man they are the kid-stakes, just madam, cheap falsehood. Dick Rohan did not try to fool anyone else. And he took care not to fool himself either. Meeting with Dick, at that particular time, was an epoch-making experience for me. I had known, from my first day at Liverpool, that these robber-types were different. Gradually I had come to realize that these were real people, that they were pretty nearly the last of the live, active, conscious, courageous folks about whom one used to read in the old romances of long ago. Somehow, a mean, smelly, cowardly type had come to be in control everywhere, a lying, cheating breed like Stinker Stephen, who even fooled themselves. But these wide people were men. Even the Dartmoor warders—grim, fierce and completely unscrupulous as many of them were—even they made a distinction between “the boys” and “the softies”, which was their way of separating the wide men from the steamers. Dick Rohan was popular with everyone—convicts, warders, and officials alike. This, anyone may readily understand, was most unusual. (As a matter of fact, and amusingly enough, I myself was the only person who came even remotely near Rohan’s level in this respect.) It was the same out on the bogs, and in the farm work, and in the village of Princetown. Sometimes, at hay harvest for instance, the farm gangs went miles away from the prison, to work in the hay fields. They took their food and other supplies with them, and stayed away for long spells. It was back-breaking labour—paid at a penny a day—but of course the boys loved it. True, they worked under the gun and club, as ever. But those things were forgotten at such times. Furthermore, there was a rigorous selection of the men who 47

went to such work. Any trouble-maker, any whining or neurotic or brawling type, was excluded from “labour away”. The warders would take their chance on holding the others, with gun and club and field telephones and outriders. Mostly it was just a picnic. With lots of hard work, but a picnic just the same. Somehow or other, accidentally, there was always a crowd of kids—

warders’ kids of course—around the hayfields, as in meadows everywhere. Sometimes—not often—a girl or two showed up for a while, on the paths in the bracken. Always the sun shone, and everyone laughed a lot. The kids adored Dick Rohan. No matter how grim and fierce the old warder in charge might be, no matter how terrified the young warders might show themselves, the kids climbed and tumbled all over Dick Rohan as if he were their Dutch uncle. At that time I thought, and I think now, that it was a lovely certificate of character. It is not easy to fool a young child—they haven’t yet been beaten into the technique of self-deception. When one reads of those civilized people, those respectable citizens, who do dreadful things to young children, those children have always been trapped by fear and force, never by thinking that the wrong-doer was a friend. All this business about the bogs and the meadows was only hearsay for me, at first. In fact I was only allowed to go out on the “labour away” as a medical concession! In other words, when I went there it was on the doctor’s orders. Because fresh air and sunshine were essential, in the case of Convict Number One Hundred and Ten. That was I. The point was that I was a lifer and a recidivist and a mutineer and other nasty things. (On paper.) Therefore I was not allowed outside the prison walls. However, as 48

I may have pointed out, it is not easy to keep a good man down. (Or in!) The doctor wrote the magic words, on the correct printed form, and I was let out on the Moor, for a while. But, before that, I had been kept most strictly inside the jail walls. This was a very grim affair. “Labour inside” was a stuffy, lazy, sedentary life, for most of the convicts of the “inside parties”. The wide men did not tolerate it except under duress, but most of the steamers, the more “civilized” types, preferred the easy life of a sit-down job in the tailor’s shop, or the mailbag shop, or the bootshop—rather than the tough wild life of the moors and quarries. For me, a job in one of the dusty stuffy workshops would have been as bad as Maidstone—a killer. But there did not seem to be any great demand for short stories, poems, novels, or feature articles, and, although I had been

an actor, there seemed to be no future in that either. Fortunately I remembered that I was also a master-blacksmith. They hadn’t had a master-blacksmith in Dartmoor for over forty years! So a grim and sceptical old blacksmith-warder put me through a trade test. In roughly a quarter of an hour he told me, in effect, that I owned the Moor. I was in. That was how I came to meet Alec Robb, another wide man whose name had been given me at Wormwood Scrubs. Robb might well have been called Dick Rohan’s second-in-command although the two men were complete opposites in almost everything. Especially in size. Rohan was over six feet tall. Robb was barely five feet, on tiptoe. A pintsized dynamo. One of the jobs I used to do was the banding of wheels. (They were wheels for horse-drawn-carts. No motors on the Moor. No horses even—the carts were drawn by ten or twelve harnessed men.) 49

The wheels were made in the carpenter’s shop, about a quarter of a mile from my work place, but still inside the wall. When ready, they were brought round to the jail blacksmith’s shop, to me, for “banding”. One morning, when I had been about a week in the smithy, a cart-and-haul gang pulled up outside my workshop door. The “horses” were unharnessed, and set about unloading four large, new, unbanded wheels. Well, some of them helped the unloading—those would be the steamers. Naturally the few wide men scattered to fiddle a bit of tobacco or a few fag-ends or whatever the blacksmith’s shop might yield up. The unloading and manhandling of the unbanded wheels, getting them from the cart outside the workshop to my particular workplace, was a tricky job, needing a good deal of care and direction. Naturally that supervision was supposed to be the task of the warder in charge of the haul gang. Supposed to be. (In fact, if the twirl—especially if he was a “wrong ‘un”—had attempted to supervise or direct, those four delicate and valuable wheels would have been in a hundred bits inside of three minutes, and no one would be to blame. Some young twirls—especially wrong ’uns—do not know things like that. But all the old twirls knew their job.) So, when I came to the smithy door, to see the wheels being unloaded, I found the haul gang being supervised, and spoken to, by a diminutive

convict. After the first few words I realized that he was a wide man, and after a very few more I knew I had to deal with a cultured man and a powerful personality. “Eye-eye, Jim. Want them in or out?” he asked. “In” was about fifty yards away, at my forge, where I would make the new tyres. “Out” was a place near the smithy door, a flat iron plate with place for a wood fire, where I would put the tyres on the wooden wheels. 50

The little man’s question told me that he understood the technique. It also told me that he knew who I was, although I had never seen him before. He was tiny, as I have said, five feet at most. Clean-shaven, with fair hair brushed back from his forehead, he had a good firm chin and a wide smiling mouth. He radiated the intense awareness of all the wide men, and he had their air of certainty and courage, but over and above those things, the small man at the smithy door was alive, explosive—potent was the only word. Every nerve and muscle of his tiny body seemed to be poised ready for motion, for planned and considered action. I told him I would have two of the wheels inside, and two outside. Also I showed him which two, and I noticed from his nod of agreement that he understood a black-smith’s planning as well as a wheelwright’s. He turned away to his warder, to tell him what was required. (One of the ludicrous shams of the Penal Code is that a convict is illiterate and incompetent, while a warder is cultured and a skilled technician! So if a convict, the captain of a fire brigade in civil life, wished to order ten men to direct a stream of water in a certain direction on a burning building, the correct procedure was for the convict to approach the warder and state the problem about which he required information. The warder would then tell the ten men to direct the stream of water on to the place where the burning building had been, ten minutes earlier. That’s penology, that was.) Thus, while the warder told the cart-haul gang where he thought they should put the wheels, the little man and I had a chance to size one another up. I knew this must be Alec Robb, although I had not heard anything about his being a carpenter or a wheelwright. He confirmed my guess even while I made it. “I’m Alec Robb”, he said, and added a word. “Dick Rohan told me to chat you.” I told him that Kingham at

51

the Scrubs had given me his name a long time ago, and I answered several briefly-worded questions about Maidstone Prison. By that time the twirl had the haul-gang together, and was getting the wheels along to where Robb, and I, wanted them. As Alec and I drifted along behind the gang, we talked fast in the “chat-swop” which is so important a feature of convict life. To my surprise, Robb seemed to be more interested in my early life before my prison days, than in the chat-swop proper—which is, of course, a kind of daily news-bulletin. We were in the middle of a staccato dialogue about Maidstone Jail, when Robb stopped suddenly. He jumped forward, about nine feet, gracefully and without any apparent effort. That landed him beside the four convicts who were man-handling the two big wheels. “Look out for that post—sir”, he shouted, at the top of his voice. The first words told the wheel-handling gang what Robb wanted them to do. The last word made the order legal—i.e., Robb was talking to the warder, not to the convicts. Promptly the warder echoed Robb’s words, and waved ahead as Alec was doing. A long, heavy, wooden gatepost was lying flat on the ground, directly in the path of the two big wheels. The point was that an unbanded wheel, although very heavy and powerful, is really a delicate and vulnerable mechanism. That is what the heavy iron wheel-band is for—to hold the wheel together. Without it, the wheel might collapse like a house of cards. Robb’s wheels were as yet unbanded, so they needed handling as carefully as a new-born baby. The big wooden post was a death-trap. But―one of the wheel-handlers, a burly, grinning, mischievous-looking chap, seemed determined to run the unshod wheel straight at the obstacle, so as to have an “accident”. 52

When Robb called out, and when the twirl echoed his order, the big fellow only grinned. Then he pushed the wheel forward, plainly intent on destruction, and he grinned again. That was his last grin for some months. “Grab that wheel, Jim”, Robb ordered, almost in a breath. Then, like a projectile from a field-gun, he shot through the air. His head hit the big fellow first, on the nose, but his fists caught the man right and left almost in

the same second. Then Robb kicked the other chap twice, in the middle, long before he reached the ground. In my hard-way passage around the world I had seen plenty of roughhouse fighting, had witnessed much assorted mayhem. But I had never seen anything so fast, so timeless and devastating, as this. One moment the burly convict was leering at the diminutive Robb. The next moment—before the wheel had fallen to the ground—he was gasping and choking and streaming blood, on the floor of the blacksmith’s shop. The junior twirl, of the two with the cart-haul gang, reached one hand to his club and moved uncertainly towards Alec Robb. Meanwhile he glanced at the other twirl, his senior, for a lead. The older warder likewise dropped a hand to his club. But he stayed where he was. Also, he gave an infinitesimal headshake to his assistant. At that moment Ephraim Duckham, my boss, the old warder in charge of the smith-works, came hurrying down the workshop. He took in the situation at a glance. But he looked first at the unbanded wheel, which I had grabbed just before it struck the obstacle. Then he turned his eyes to the bloodstained steamer lying on the ground. I nearly howled with laughter at what happened next. Old Duckham spoke to me first, with another glance at the big wheel. “Ari raight, Jim?” he inquired, and I held up one 53

thumb. Duckham turned to Alec Robb, and smiled, like a Sunday-school teacher praising a well-behaved pupil. “Saved he, Aaleck”, he said, in a congratulatory tone. “Saved he just in taime, boy.” Robb too held up one thumb and said nothing. Duckham moved another pace forward, and nodded to the senior twirl of the cart-haul gang. “Good for ‘ee, Tom”, he said heartily. “They big wheels takes main careful handlin’, until they be banded. Good for ‘ee.” Then, seemingly almost as an afterthought, he turned to the big steamer, who was coming up slowly from the ground. The man’s nose was a bloody mush, and he had the beginnings of two black eyes. He was bleeding from the mouth, and he held both hands to his middle region. Duckham looked at him with interest and sympathy. “Fell down, son?” he inquired.

The convict spat blood, and glared, and began to speak. Then he stopped, and looked at the grim old blacksmith-warder. From Duckham he glanced at the senior twirl of his own gang, and at the assistant. Both of them, like Duckham, and Alec Robb, and I, seemed to have seen him fall down. He looked at the ground. “Yes, sir”, he muttered. “Fell over that post.” “Post—tha’s raight”, said the senior twirl, and reached for his notebook. “Lessee, what’s your number?”, he went on. “Eight-one.” He wrote a line in the book, and turned to his junior. “Fell over that there post”, he explained, as if his colleague were deaf “Take he over t’hospittle”, he instructed. “Them’ll fix he arl raight.” The wounded man went slowly towards the smithy door with the young warder. Robb and the other convicts passed the unshod wheels on down to my forge, handling them like delicate pieces of porcelain. Twice, for some 54

reason, the old warder cautioned prisoners to be careful not to fall down. It was my first meeting with Alec Robb, and I have never forgotten it. At Wormwood Scrubs, and at Maidstone, I had heard a dozen amazing stories about this tiny gentle, gifted craftsman. But this one seemed to be the best story of them all. Especially the gentleness part! 55

CHAPTER FOUR

TERRAVIAN     At the head of this chapter there is a word which will be new to many readers, even the most cultured, although everyone will know what it means. Indeed, I am not certain whether that word is in the dictionaries yet. But if not it ought to be. I myself was using it fifty years ago, and Jack London had used it several years earlier. Also a vagabond writer called Bart Kennedy had availed himself of the word once or twice. But I had never heard anyone use it in matter-of-fact fashion, to describe himself until I met Alec Robb. Quite early in our acquaintanceship Alec told me that “of course” he was a socialist, a Terravian. This was most unusual; the wide people are not socialistic as a rule. Tout au contraire! Robb also told me, brusquely, that I was a bloody fool, standing for the madam like any steamer. That was when I tried to justify my own position, and had attempted to explain the things in which I believed. Because I was at that time a member of the Irish Republican Army. (It is all over and done with now. The Irish Republic is a prosaic fact. The forces of the Irish Republic are in the United Nations command, in many parts of the world. But, when I met Alec Robb, the Irish Republican Army was a secret society, and a member thereof could get himself hanged, or acquire a life sentence of penal servitude, without the slightest trouble.) As far as Alec Robb was concerned, any man who risked his life and his liberty on that lark was a bloody fool. Yet Robb’s own political ideas were far more sweeping. 56

He was a socialist, as I have said—a real socialist, not merely a prattler of phrases. I have not met many, of Robb’s calibre or courage. Alec Robb believed in the United Nations! He believed in it, and was willing to fight for it, thirty years before the phrase was in general use, twenty-five years before the formation of the madam-factory which is called the United Nations today. Robb was prepared to fight and die for an International Socialist State— the republic of the world. That was why he called himself a Terravian. In

other words, Alec Robb wanted the things about which Lord Tennyson and others were writing long before Robb was born. I looked into the future, far as human eye could see; Saw the wonder of the world, and all the glory that would be; Saw the heavens filled with commerce—argosies of mighty sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales; Heard the heavens filled with fighting, and there rained a ghastly dew From the nations’ aery navies, grappling in the central blue, Till the war-drums throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled, In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.

Of course it is marvellous poetry, and a fine ideal. Almost certainly it will become a fact, too, some time in the future, if there is no atom-bomb clearance first. That world federation seems to be the logical development from all our sociological plans and theories. But— But Alec Robb could never understand that it was all right for Lord Tennyson and suchlike folks to talk and write about the Parliament of Man. Because of course 57

everyone knew they didn’t really mean anything rude or nasty. Whereas if Alec Robb were to set about the same things as Tennyson and the rest—then there might be a lot of people with bloodied noses, and gravestones, and suchlike unpleasant things. But there would be a federation of the world. Then who would give Dave Kingham his pony a hide? What would become of the wide folk, the robbers? Who would pay millions for divebombers and nuclear bombs and napalm burn-ups, in a world given over to song-singing and physical jerks? What would happen to the political planners, the industrial tycoons, the screwsmen and con men and bandits? I often asked Alec Robb those questions, as a leg-pull. But he always proved his terravian argument, with unanswerable logic. It was funny really—but of course Alec knew nothing about that! (In the nineteen-fifties there was one chap—only!—who called himself a citizen of the world, and who was kicked from pillar to post in many countries. He was a smashing type, one just after Alec Robb’s heart—Alec, who was preaching and practising the “Terravian lark” thirty years earlier.)

Robb, like myself had come into the ranks of the wide folk by chance. As in my own case, Alec had no connection with the ouaide-kai through either of his parents. His father was a marine engineer, in the upper bracket of his profession. He had been a senior Chief Engineer with a big transatlantic shipping company, and had been hoping that young Alec might do even better than that. Robb’s mother had been the headmistress of a fashionable girls’ school, and she too had great hopes for her brilliant young son. At a very early age, young Robb had shown a liking for, and a proficiency in, mathematics and precision drawing and engineering principles. His 58

delighted parents had given him every opportunity at school. Presumably they were still more delighted when Alec swept everything before him at school and college. As far as I could gather, Robb just ate up the lore that other students sweat over. Then his father sent him to work at a big shipyard in Scotland, to get some practical experience before he would go to sea. Alec Robb had a funny, old-fashioned, pedantic, donnish kind of humour. At that stage in his story, he looked at me, nodded gravely, and spread his hands. “Yes, yes”, he said, in an affected voice. “Practical experience. One certainly acquired that, in Glasgow.” Then he went on to tell me how, with three other apprentices from the same firm, he had burgled the central offices of the shipping company. Apparently it was more of a joke than anything else, a trial of their skill at making tools! Until, about four in the morning, Alec and his mates practically collapsed, sweating and exhausted, round the office safe. Completely impregnable, it had defied all their efforts. Then, just when they were about to leave, defeated, Robb and one of the other boys had the same idea at the same time. The safe was, for the time being, unbreakable. But it was small. If they had it somewhere else— Without more ado, they ripped the safe from the wall, loaded it into their van, and departed unchallenged. Thereafter, every Saturday and Sunday for a month, in a stable on the outskirts of Glasgow, the four apprentices wrestled with the safe, almost as a religious duty.

At long last, after a hundred disappointments, and after the invention and trial of a hundred safe-breaking implements, they got the door open. By that time, as Robb told it, the affair had almost developed into a duel between them and the safe. The money had come to be a secondary consideration. 59

But when they took nearly nine thousand pounds from the safe—then, as Robb used to put it, four lovely steamers were lost in the wash. Not one of the four ever worked for an employer again. Alec had travelled a good deal “on the screwing lark”, but had kept to English-speaking countries. Canada, Australia and South Africa had all furnished peters and parlours (safes and strong-rooms). Robb had been lucky—he had never “fallen” except in England or Scotland. At the time I met him in Dartmoor smithy, Alec Robb was serving his third term of imprisonment. He had had two years in Durham Jail about ten years before I knew him. Then he had been sentenced to three years’ penal servitude, and had “done” it at Dartmoor. Robb had done his three years in the blacksmith’s shop where Z was now the Number One! He had been the leading engineer in Duckham’s workshop, had also done a good deal of smith-work for the old chap. The reason why he was not allowed to work in an engineering shop or a blacksmith’s shop any more was, I suppose, flattering! The “Heads” were afraid of him. They suspected that Robb might turn a dishonest pound or two or tobacco by making twirls (keys). Of course the authorities were right. As a matter of fact they got Robb out of the blacksmith’s shop just in time! Robb and I took an instant liking to one another, and we met to talk every time it was possible. Alec taught me a thousand things about the wide people, and about steamers, and about screws—things which have stood me in very good stead, for many years. It was not merely that he told me about the wide folk—he taught me about life in the raw. One thing I learnt, about Robb himself came from others of the wide men. I soon came to know that Alec was pretty close to being “tops of the screwing lark”, i.e., England’s number one burglar. 60

The police of several cities in southern England could recognize the trademark of Alec Robb on many a splintered safe and devastated strongroom. They knew Robb’s “signature” on a burgled bank as well as they knew the “signature” of the late Corey Moggs, on the shattered plate glass window of a jeweller’s shop.1 Naturally, with a few items like that to go on, I wanted to know how it all worked out. How did being “tops of the screwing lark” add up, in home life, and in living conditions, and in money? Robb was married, and had two children, a boy aged twelve and a girl aged ten. The youngsters were at a good private school, and knew nothing about their father except that he was a wonderful athlete. Also that he was a civil engineer, and had to travel a good deal. (All of which was, of course, perfectly true! Except perhaps that word “civil”!) I saw Robb’s wife once, during a visit to the Moor (which as far as I know was official.) Also, later, I had three letters from her at various times. But I never met her or spoke to her. She must have been a very extraordinary person. (Of course she must! Who else could have married that pint-sized prodigy, the “little man with hard grey eyes”).2 To begin with, all her background and training loaded the dice against Alec to start with. Her father was a country parson, and she herself had never shed any of the vicarage prejudices—until she shed them all at once. Robb had not attempted to prevaricate or evade. He had told her that he was a burglar—one of the best burglars in the world!—and had then asked her to marry him. (It must have been a wonderful moment! I cannot imagine any line of dialogue, in any musical comedy, to equal it.) She agreed at once, and they had been happy from the first moment.   1 See The Underworld.               2 See Lifer.

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At that stage, whenever I got Robb in confidential mood, I applied the suction-pump—in other words I asked as many questions as I dared. Robb told me that his wife, in the fifteen years of their marriage, had never once suggested that Alec should change his mode of existence. One in a million. Like Robb himself Thus, as regarded Robb’s home life, the answer was a very definite plus. That made me more keen than ever to know about the money side of

screwing. From the day that his engineering apprenticeship had ended so suddenly until the time that Alec and I met on the Moor about twenty-two years had elapsed. In that period, Robb had travelled over forty thousand miles, and he had acquired about sixty thousand pounds. (That was thirty years ago. Those sixty thousand would be worth roughly a hundred and twenty-five thousand at the time of writing.) It should be remembered that, in those twenty-two years, Robb had served two prison sentences and was now finishing a third. His first prison sentence was one of two years’ hard labour, which of course he served in a local jail. On that sentence he had six months’ remission, making it eighteen months “net”. Some years later he had a penal sentence of three years. That time he had eight months’ remission, so his actual time in prison was two years and four months. Then, at the time I met him, he was finishing another term of three years, on which he got nine months’ remission. So that in all during the twenty-two years, Robb had spent just over six years in prison. Sixteen years of liberty. Six years of prison. Sixty thousand pounds. There, in less than a dozen words, is the economic analysis of the screwing lark (except that nowadays the money would have to be multiplied by two and a twelfth at least). 62

Robb would have been the first to point out that he could have done just as well, or even better, as a “steamer”, a straight mug. That is, given Robb’s engineering qualifications, which were very high. Many men of Robb’s calibre would have made far more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds in twenty-two years of legal engineering. Purely from the financial point of view, being a screwsman was not vastly preferable. Apart from the risks! There was no doubt whatever that Alec Robb could have got the same amount of money without breaking the law. But—. I laughed each time Robb came to that point, and hesitated. Robb was the least modest person on the Moor, with the possible exception of—(I know, reader, I know! I was just about to mention my own name). It was wonderful to see him blushing as he pointed out that life as a law-abiding steamer would not have been so good.

Because he would not then have been Alec Robb, the wide man, the doer of things, Dick Rohan’s right-hand man, as well as a master-type on his own. Twenty-two years of respectability does not produce that. It produces “retired people” by the hundred thousand, living in little box houses, which they have saved, all their lives, to possess. “Elderly persons, a prey to both worry and fear. Glancing neither forward nor back. Ashamed of the past and afraid of the future. These are the best, the most favoured of industrial civilization. I would not like to be one of those.” That was Alec Robb’s devastating summing-up of steamer-life, of respectability. Of course he was prejudiced, and perhaps he was incompletely informed. The retired people may have other things than those Alec Robb listed. I mean—they must! These are the winners in the struggle 63

for existence! These are the one per cent who have made it, who have held on for thirty years, or for thirty-five years, looking always to the day when they would retire, and own their own house and be happy. Thousands and millions have fallen by the wayside. But these have survived. These are the winners. So they must have other things besides a nausea for the present and a terror of the future. I have known a couple of hundred thousand retired people myself and I never noticed any other things. But then I myself am prejudiced like Alec Robb. It is one reason why I want the reader to see these friends of mine with their coats off. The present people, of France and Spain and Italy, all say it is a good thing to see a man in his shirt-sleeves. My first meeting with Alec Robb, as anyone will agree, was sufficiently “unconventional” to make a kind of bond between us… Apart from the fact that I liked the diminutive giant-killer at sight. Dave Kingham and Melbourne Jack were types, compelling interest. Dick Rohan was a legion in himself But Alec Robb was one alone. Burning —seething—with enthusiasm, with the joy of life, Robb radiated energy and hope. He taught me things which I could never have learnt anywhere else in all the world. I think if it had not been for Alec Robb, and for his clear logical exposition of the facts of life, I would never have survived the terrible down-pull of a life sentence in an English prison.

Sydney Box, the famous film producer, was writing me one day about a script I might do for a film he was making. “Write about prisons”, Sydney told me. “Remember that you’re unique: no one before you has ever gone through a life sentence without forfeiting his mental and physical strength. You did. Now tell us why.” I did not write that particular film-script. Because it would not have been easy, or even possible, to “tell why” 64

on an English or American screen. But one of the reasons why I came through the mincing-machine of the prison reformers, but still managed to stay Jim Phelan―one of the reasons is that I met Alec Robb. Alec had two tremendous handicaps—that is, handicaps for an English convict. To begin with, Robb was intensely logical. He simply refused to tolerate any shams or pretences or self-deception. As the world is about ninety per cent self-deception, that meant that Alec would have a bad time. But as the prison service is roughly one hundred per cent sham and pretence, Robb’s addiction to logic was as bad as a death sentence. Add the fact that Alec had an absolute gift for witty repartee, with an utter absence of fear, and such a man would be better dead than in an English prison. I often tried, later, to get Alec to subdue himself a little. But he made no compromise, and he was afraid of nothing and no one. That, of course, meant disaster. “This rustic Machiavelli”, ran one of his petitions to the Home Office, about a lying twirl, “this rustic Machiavelli, intoxicated with the pride of his own intellectual achievements—for has he not learnt to write his name?— swept blissfully away on the wings of unchallengeable security—for has he not thirty-four relatives in the Prison Service, each as cultured and lawabiding as himself, thirty-four ready to swear that Machiavelli has not done what he did?” And so on. Involved and fantastic logic. True every word of it—but what did that matter? I often wonder why Alec did it. My own theory was that the logical argument activity was Robb’s only possible self-expression. In an English jail, to escape the down-drag of the myriad repressions and frustrations, a man has need of some escape-valve. If he is not to die, or go mad, he must have what the psychologists call a sublimation. 65

Some few find that sublimation in a milk-and-water kind of religion. Some find it in physical fighting with the screws. A few risk bread and water to express themselves in (illegal) writing or (illegal) painting. Some go in for homosexuality and some for tobacco-hoarding. But every man has a sublimation, or he goes down. Alec Robb was not interested in homosexuality. He could not find selfexpression in a story or a picture. He was not allowed to do engineering drawing, the only kind in which he was interested. (Naturally the authorities took it for granted that Alec would be designing keys and other escape implements.) So the only escape-valve open to Robb was invective and repartee. That could be the explanation. But—but it was not a safety-valve. Not that one… Because on an English convict station the three most severe handicaps, the three chief dangers to survival, are honesty of thought, candour in discussion, and frankness of speech. Any man who hopes to survive a long sentence in an English jail needs the courage of a lion and the patience of a saint. But he also needs the cunning of a serpent. Alec Robb had courage in plenty, and he had all the patience of a mastercraftsman. But he had no cunning, was quite incapable of dissimulation. Like the old hero in the Bible, his yea was yea and his nay was nay. Anyone of that kind, in an English jail, is headed for disaster. When I was sent from Dartmoor to Parkhurst, Alec said he would try to “make the island” too. Later, over a period of two years, I had notes and message from him, whenever there was a chain-gang between the jails. He always told me he was trying to get to Parkhurst. Then one day he did. But not as he or I had intended it. There was a mutiny at the Moor. Or someone said there was. (The reader will remember Stinker Stephen, and the 66

“mutiny” I myself was supposed to have started at Maidstone.) There was some hard swearing, in the subsequent trials, at the Assize Courts, near Dartmoor. (The convicts at Parkhurst, where I then was, used to say that only ex-warders were allowed to do jury duty at such times! But of course that was ridiculously false. Everyone knows that.) Other lags used to tell about “the sorting out” after the mutiny. In jail talk, sorting out is a conspiracy to persecute. (Ever since the Old Testament days of the Assyrian and Egyptian and Persian prisons, the idea of the “sort

out” has been familiar.) Robb, needless to say, was in the hard swearing and in the sorting-out as well. So he came to Parkhurst after all. He came in chains, and under special guard. There had been trials, and evidence. (Truthful evidence, of course. No warder would commit perjury, would he?) So—Alec had a year for this, and two years for that, and five years for the other, and so on. He had sentences for crimes of which I had never heard, and had never even read about. (But I found them all in the law books, later. It was all legal―or as good as.) They gave Alec seventeen years’ penal servitude, and they put him in solitary confinement, on bread and water and under special watch. I never heard any more. I do not know to this day whether Alec Robb died there in solitary, or whether he went mad. The former I hope. And that’ll larn him to call decent people rustic Machiavellis! I said earlier that I hoped to remember some of the stories about Alec Robb. I have told a few of them here. But that one, the last one, I should like to forget. I am afraid I shan’t though. 67

CHAPTER FIVE

HARRY PARRY FROM BARRY     I had been sent to Parkhurst some time before the “Dartmoor Mutiny”, as the result of a little scheming and chicanery. (Not on the part of any rustic Machiavelli; the scheming and chicanery were done by me.) Briefly, I had used the prison system for my own advantage. Of course a casuist would say that was what a system was for! Here was a great undertaking with a code of rules: what could be more law-abiding than to make use of them? Earlier, with a little help from one or two people whose names I forget, I had tried to make my escape from the Moor. But, because of what we would nowadays call a “security leak”, I scored a blank. In fact I was very lucky not to score about two years’ bread and water. So I started in to wangle a transfer to the easier convict station on the Isle of Wight. This was very difficult to fix, for the simple reason that everyone else on the Moor also wanted to “wangle a shift to the island”. However, I had a few bits of luck and I made a few good guesses. Thus one morning I was given a suit of civilian clothes, fitted for handcuffs, and locked into a chain-gang with five other men. I was on the move again. We travelled across the Moor in a motor-brake, then on a train to Southampton, then on a ferry-steamer to Cowes, and on by taxi to Parkhurst. Naturally I had messages to deliver here and there on the Island. It is one of the duties of a chain-gang man. He must carry word-of-mouth messages for any number of people from three to twenty—according to his opportunities, 68

his patience, and his mental ability. I am one of those mugs who think they’re clever. Two or three spells in a chain-gang nearly cured all that nonsense. I got enough memory work to set up a whole Pelman Institute for myself. One of my viva-voce messages to Parkhurst was for a man called Harry Parry. Dick Rohan and others had sent him “word” (i.e., small items of

important information) but two other men had sent long messages, and one of them was both long and intricate. So of course that one went to the great intellectual, the man with the wonderful brain, that marvellous genius Phelan. (It frightened the wind out of me, when I saw the nine sheets of lavatory paper, packed on both sides with tiny writing, and realized that I was supposed to memorize all that— and to get it right. From that day onwards I was a moron unashamed. But that particular message had to be got through.) Partly as a mnemonic, and partly for amusement, I turned the saga from Dartmoor to Parkhurst into a poem. In the period before I left the Moor, when checking up with the sender to make sure that I had everything right, I had great fun. It was like the viva-voce part of an exam in English Literature, to stalk around the exercise yard behind my man, declaiming iambic pentameters in the husky whisper that counted as (legitimate) silence. Yes—an oral examination. Except that the invigilators had clubs and guns. My man had told the story round, too, and we may well have started a fashion in chain-gang grapevine technique. So I was quite wound up by the time I got to the Island, and found an opportunity to unload my cargo of saga. The man at Dartmoor who had sent the message was what we called a “Letter A” man, that is, a person with several penal servitude terms behind him. In the poem for Parry, which I had memorized, there were several 69

references to former jobs, so I was not expecting Harry Parry to be a youngster. But I had a shock just the same. When at last I had an opportunity to circle on the particular exercise-yard I wanted, and when I had fallen in behind a convict and he had given his name as Harry Parry, I was flabbergasted. His mate at the Moor had been fifty or sixty years of age. This brown-faced smiling ancient looked to be a hundred. Maybe two hundred. Then I remembered that Harry Parry was a con man. Confidence men, practitioners of the “honesty lark”, live to a great age as a rule. That may be partly due to the fact that con men travel a great deal, in the most pleasant and healthy parts of the world.

Less fortunate, or less honest, people may spend their lives in the smoke of Wigan or the fumes of Pittsburg or the fogs of Birmingham (Eng.) or Birmingham (Ala.) The con man goes to the French Riviera, to Monte Carlo, Florida, Bermuda—these are the places where the wealthy people, and those who live on them, spend their time. Living to a ripe old age is almost an occupational perquisite, on the con lark. But I like to think that another reason for the longevity is the fact that the con man has an easy conscience. Conscious of his own rectitude, knowing that the wealthy businessman always tries to swindle the poor honest con man, knowing, in short, that the customer is always wrong, the confidence man lives on towards his century, deploring the wickedness of the world. Borneo Barney, a famous con man of the early twentieth century, was ninety-one when he died. Dingo Denny Delaney was ninety-three when he was killed in a car accident. Bill the Prince drank himself to death, but he must have been very close indeed to a hundred years old when that happened. Rubberface Eddie Edmonds was an old, old man when I met him in 1923; he was still calling me sonny boy in 1960, and he only died in 70

the very hard winter of a couple of years later. As I was saying, con men stay alive a long time. Also, they are the least worried, the best-humoured people I have ever met, wide or steamer. It may be due to my early training in a monastic school, but I still feel certain that the peace of mind and the pleasant manner are always traceable to the con man’s knowledge that he has never tried to rob anyone—first. Harry Parry was no exception. His black hair was almost certainly dyed, but his brown face and the flashing dark eyes were his own. Harry Parry looked like a desert Arab—here was another of the ouaide-kai, looking as if time had stood still for 3500 years. Add in the fact that Harry had a friendly, understanding smile, and one immediately felt that he had only that morning strayed on to a prison-yard for the first time. (Accidentally of course!) In simple matter of record, Harry Parry had served a three-year penal sentence at Parkhurst more than fifty years before we met! I reckoned his age to be at least ninety-four. But he smiled and nodded and strode along, around the exercise-yard at Parkhurst, like a two-year-old. It took me several sessions, five or six at least as far as I can remember, to convey the whole of my pentameter doggerel (Harry had not my

memory. But the stuff was important. So Harry had to write, and hide, bits of the saga as we went along). At last we had the “mission completed”, and I set about a few questions on my own account. Parry was only too pleased—all con men love talking —and I hardly got a word in edgeways for the next six weeks. Both in jail and outside, people had always called him Harry Parry from Barry. It had been a joke against him in his youth, and, characteristically, he had kept it and used it. 71

He did in fact come from Barry Dock, near Cardiff in South Wales. But he had emigrated to Cape Breton Island, to what was then a wild part of Canada, back at the end of the nineteenth century. Harry Parry was an ordinary hard-working longshoreman and placerminer at first. He told me, with a laugh, that he had always wanted to be a confidence man, but had never done anything about it, was perfectly happy with the ups and downs of the free-lance gold-mining which was called placer work at that time. Then, like so many of the world’s most successful confidence men, Harry Parry from Barry had had the wealth of the world practically forced on him. He told me the story, with no foolish evasions or lies, and with none of the schoolboy cheating, about “right” and “wrong” which takes up such a large part of the average man’s daily thought. (Three-quarters of the people I know spend three-quarters of their time proving that the things they do, or want to do, are “right” and “fair” and “good”. Most of the proofs put forward would not suffice to cheat a blind baby out of its rattle. The wide man does not waste his time or his life on that kind of madam. Of course it gives him an immense advantage, in the quest for an honest pound―or a pound anyway!) Harry Parry had come back to England with a Canadian-Scottish contingent of rough-riding cavalry, come to take part in some minor war which never developed. In London a businessman tried to cheat him out of some information he possessed, about a small placer gold-mine. That experience terminated Harry’s career as a working gold-miner. Parry, like so many others of the adventurer type, had gone in for “a bit of placer-mining” in Canada. In practice, it meant that he was a kind of oneman free-lance mining concern, with fifteen or twenty little 72

“registrations” here and there. The free-lance miner did a few weeks’ work, in a fishery or transport job, at high wages. That was in order to get some money for food and tools. As soon as he had a few hundred dollars in hand, he went off to visit his mining claims. A certain amount of work had to be done on each claim, or the registration would “lapse”. The lapsed registration is worthless—the free-lance does not own that claim any longer. Of course he is always hoping for “the big strike” before his claim lapses, so that he can move in and concentrate on that particular digging. There are thousands of those placer-miner types in Canada even today. But in Harry Parry’s heyday there were hundreds of thousands. Gold was news at that time—big news. It should be borne in mind that Harry Parry’s introduction to the realm of big business took place at the end of the nineteenth century. The California gold rush was over, the Klondyke gold shower was just starting. Placer-miners were not only picturesque figures— they could become wealthy men, vastly wealthy, overnight. Some people killed to get hold of a placer-mine. But the businessman only stole Harry Parry’s. He stole it by a crude swindle, a cheap confidence trick that would have shamed a village card-sharper stealing sixpences from farmers’ wives. Harry Parry’s placer-mine was worth a good deal of money as it stood. With any luck, it might be worth a hundred thousand pounds in the near future. There were the samples. There was the certificate from the Government assayer. They were good samples, high gold content. Parry and the businessman were agreed about all that part. But―the businessman could not pay the hundred thousand pounds for at least five weeks. Harry Parry could not wait five weeks. He was going back to Canada, 73

and he wanted money, to work his other claims. So he was willing to sell for thirty thousand pounds, cash down. It would be a severe financial loss—but it would get him back to work his other claims, having gained five weeks and having ample funds. Thirty thousand. So it was agreed. With one amendment. The businessman would not pay the whole thirty thousand then and there. Not immediately. But he would give Harry Parry five thousand pounds, in five-pound notes, now.

He threw a long green parchment envelope on the table at which they sat. The envelope was opened, and the thousand fivers were shown, and counted, and replaced. There, said the businessman. That would show whether he trusted Harry Parry or not. Because Harry Parry could take that £5000 and go for a walk with it, now, this minute. Only a few minutes’ walk if he liked, but long enough to show what the businessman thought of his Canadian friend. Then, when Harry returned, he could let his business friend have the £5000 back for the time being. He could let the business friend have the little moose-hide satchel, with the gold samples, and the map of the placermine, and the registration form which proved that Harry Parry owned it. The businessman in turn would take a walk, to show that Harry. Parry trusted him. Then, when he came back, Harry would have the £30,000, and the business friend would have the moose-hide satchel, and they would have a drink and hope the placer yielded a million. At that stage of the story, walking round the exercise-yard at Parkhurst, Harry Parry from Barry, striding along ahead of me, turned to look back over his shoulder. He shook his head slowly, and grinned. “Ay”, he said, in his American-Welsh-Canadian speech. “He sounded exactly like Rubberface Eddie or 74

Borneo Barney. But he wasn’t anything like that. He was a genuine steamer —same as I was, until that morning! So I took the walk, with the five grand. Of course I dived into a toilet right away and—He laughed, and looked at me quizzically, and shook his head again. “Nothing of the sort!” he said virtuously. “That’s only your evil mind, see! Course I didn’t dive in the toilet an’ snatch out those thousand fivers an’ take a taxi outa town. Ain’t I told you I was a steamer then? Or as good as”, he added, with another grin, before I got the chance to say it first. “I see”, I put in, carelessly. “You just looked at the money! Was that it?” “Kinda”, said Harry Parry. “What I did was to take out my moose-hide bag, with the placer nugget, an’ the papers in, see. So I got the registration paper—the Guvverment form as located the place an’ proved I owned it.” I must have been showing my puzzlement, for Harry Parry laughed again. “Who did that gawdam fat sonofabitch think he was, anyway?” he demanded. “Takin’ me on with a phoney cheap con lark as wouldn’t fool a

wide girl’s two-year-old kid!” He sneered, virtuously, and I began to get the drift of the operation. “So you left the money intact?” I prompted. “Kinda”, said Harry Parry again. “I took the registration form, an’ I put in one as near as dammit the same. ‘Cept that it was a lapsed one”, he added quietly. “But surely”, I protested, “surely your man would never fail to notice a thing like that? The registration form would be the first thing he’d dive for.” “Yep”, agreed the Canadian Welshman. “Yep. Looked near enough the same”, he repeated. “But it wouldn’t have stood a second glance, in the ordin’ry way. ‘Cept that I slipped in a gaw-damn big nugget as didn’t belong. Wrapped it up in the registration form. 75

Dairy-take. See? See?” In his excitement, the hard American drawl and the soft Canadian burr and the lilting high-pitched musical speech of South Wales were all mixed up, and came tumbling out together, as Harry Parry repeated, “The registration was worth nix, but that nugget sure was a dandy. See, Jim”? I most certainly did not see. But I took care not to say so. I made vaguely admiring noises, and Harry Parry went on with his story. When he got back to the hotel, the businessman welcomed him with a smile and a back-slap. Then he took back the green parchment envelope, and he took Harry Parry’s moose-hide holder, with the samples and the registration papers, and he went for his walk. “Five minutes maybe. Or less.” He went away, and he never came back. That was all. Forty years later, there on that exercise-yard at Parkhurst, Harry Parry swore that it was all pure accident. It was not until he had stopped cursing the defalcating businessman that he found the chap’s five thousand pounds. While Harry was in the gent’s toilet, looking at the five thousand pounds, he had apparently put the cover back on the wrong lot of papers. As soon as he realized what had happened, Harry shot out of that pub and got himself out of London. His military service seems to have terminated at about that time. He took nearly four years to spend the five thousand pounds. The minute he was broke, he went searching in opulent pub-lounges and expensive hotels until he found another greedy businessman who would steal his placer-mine. By that time the Yukon and Klondyke news had broken, and

the world was gold-mad. Harry Parry told me, and I believed him, that he could often have been “took on” (oh lovely phrase!) a dozen times in a day! The number of dishonest people there are—it is staggering. To think that a poor honest con man, with his 76

few nuggets of genuine gold, and his genuine moose-hide pouch, and his genuine claim registration, and his genuine secret map of the little placer— to think that in one day twelve wealthy men would try to steal that mine of his! It certainly shakes one’s faith in human nature. All Harry Parry’s stories were of the same kind——screamingly funny, and ridiculous in the extreme. Halfway through any of his stories, one just didn’t believe a word of it. It was just a con man slinging a yarn to pass the time around the exercise-yard. Then one remembered that Harry did in fact have the Rolls-Royce of which he had been speaking. A moment later one recalled having seen Harry’s photo in a shiny magazine, with the late Aga Khan and one of the Dolly Sisters. Thereafter one (meaning me) just listened. But the longer I listened the more I was amazed, at the credulity, the vulgarity, the colossal ignorance and blinding greed of the wealthy people who had “took on” Harry Parry from Barry. Let me cut in short. When I was four years old, I was far better educated than Harry Parry was at ninety. Harry would not have qualified for employment as a junior bank clerk! Furthermore, that fact was evident and obvious, as soon as Harry spoke, in a cheerful, jesting, bantering palaver, with a mixed American and Canadian speech, but with the basic Welsh accent coming through now and then. I could only think then, and I think now, that a man who is accustomed to amassing very large sums of money must be completely blinded by his own greed. Also, I think that a preoccupation with the amassing of very large sums of money must automatically preclude all question of either intellectual development or ethical sense. There seems to be no other explanation for the fact that again and again, in every country in the world, 77

wealthy businessmen “take on” the con men. They soft-soap the stranger, they argue with him, and finally they get him to see their side of the discussion. Then they take the huge roll of money, and they dash away home with it. That happens every day, in every capital city, in every country. No one is going to tell me that wealthy businessmen are ordinary people. The few that I have met (not many, alas! not many)—they all came up to the standard of Harry Parry’s man. Any sensible person may ask, in bewilderment, how the wealthy businessman could be such a fool. Even allowing for the fact that the fellow is blinded by his own greed—avarice—even then, there must be some other factor, an interference of some kind. As a matter of fact, there is. In every fraud, every swindle, every robbery, there is one very important element called the “dairy-take”. The strange, archaic term speaks for itself—here is another scrap of outlaw lore which has come right down the centuries unchanged. The dairy-take. One of the best examples of its use was among the gypsies. All over Europe, from Holyhead to Hamburg and from Marseilles to Malmö, the small-time swindlers among the gypsies have used the dairy-take in direct stealing. That stealing always looked like magic, both to the victim and to any outsider. But really it was very sound science. The gypsies would steal a guinea or a few marks or a handful of francs or whatever it might be, from a shopkeeper or a merchant, by diverting his attention at the crucial moment. Two women would be chattering with a shopkeeper, about the purchase of one or other of several articles, of jewellery, of dress, or of ornament. First one thing and then 78

another and then a third would be taken up, and put down, and priced, and argued about. Argued about by only one of the women. The other, the better-looking of the pair, would be more concerned about the merchant or shopkeeper himself. Eye-flashing, lip-licking, sighing and smiling, with her hands never still, she seemed hardly to hear or heed her companion’s rating of values and prices.

The money for one article was produced, a gold piece of whatever country it was. The change was handed over, and the gold piece was handed over, was handed over—was—was—? The handsome one of the two women had got herself into some minor, amusing but embarrassing, difficulties at that moment. The wide scarf, across her breast, had come loose. While she was re-tying it, one shapely breast had—popped out. Of course the modest shopkeeper looked away. He looked back at the till into which he had been about to drop the gold coin when his eyes, of their own accord apparently, had gone straying to scarves and breasts. The remaining articles of jewellery or clothing or ornament might fall, inside the counter, at that moment. Presently the customers would leave, with a final smile and eye-flash from the owner of the scarf. Later, the merchant might blame the two women, when he found that the gold piece was not in the till. He might blame them if he found that one of the smaller pieces of jewellery or ornament was missing. Or—more likely —he might blame something or someone else. He would not blame that shapely breast and his own eyes. That, briefly, is the technique of all robbery, other than direct robbery by force. It is also the technique of all jugglery and conjuring. It is furthermore the basis of much political oratory and religious exposition. Life 79

is very simple really. That particular piece of robbery technique is still called the dairy-take.1 In every case the subjects attention is taken away at the correct second. It may be taken away by a girl’s breast or a flash of light, or a boy’s bottom or a donkey’s vagina, or a nugget of gold, or a harp and halo—whatever the person is interested in. He looks at the tit or the bot or the nugget or the halo because he cannot help it. One second later—a tenth of a second later—he is all alertness again, and his attention is back. But by that time his money has gone or he has signed the paper or said Hallelujah or whatever the other chap wanted. Nowadays, since about 1900, there has been much progress and an advance of civilization, in these and similar matters. Two travelling girls will no longer show a breast, accidentally, to a jeweller in Piccadilly or Fifth Avenue or the rue de la Paix.

(But it is very amusing to see the old method cropping up in the newspapers, day after day, just the same.) Today we are more sophisticated. The bewitching blonde who is after the secret documents may spend a few hundred pounds or dollars or francs on perfumes and other necessities for the boudoir. Other necessities. The modern spy-girl, or thief, may find it necessary to acquire a knowledge of books and pictures and people. Furthermore, she must have acquaintances in good circles and she must be able to talk. So that today the wide girl, or the spy-girl, has to spend much money on shoes and hair-do’s and scarves. But really her chief weapon and instrument is the old reliable one, the accidental glimpse, at the psychological second, of that attractive breast. The wealthy, blasé, ultra-modern capitalist, who takes the almost-aswealthy and nearly-modern capitalist out   1 A dairy is a woman’s breast. What the dairy takes is the mug’s attention.

80

for an evening, while they discuss a deal, may take him—. Well, well! Who would ever have guessed it? He may take him to a striptease show. Strip-tease shows are in the most expensive parts of the big cities, not in the back-streets or the suburbs. Verb sap. Nothing is changed. Except that it is legal now. Also the girl doesn’t show just her bosom. But every other factor is the same, and most certainly the principle has not varied. The mug’s attention is taken away at the vital second, and the deal is over. Every swindle in the world is based on that same principle. The taking away of attention. We humans are very simple people really. That diversion of notice is at work in the con lark too, although few people realize it, except the con men. Thousands of times, again and again, at the turning-point of a confidence trick, the mug has said something, just a few words, but enough to show that he knows he is going to lose his money. It is almost a sine qua non, in the con lark, that the mug should say something like “I do hope this isn’t a swindle!” Then why does he continue? Why does he carry on? Why go through the routine of “trusting” one another, and of taking the con man’s wad of

banknotes, or sheaf of gilt-edged securities, or the map of his placer-mine? Why does he “stand for the broads”? That last is a wide man’s phrase which has been “shopped”, and is fairly well known nowadays among racing people and theatrical folks and so on. It expresses the extreme of contempt for the extreme of credulity. When one wide man wants to call another, in joke, the biggest mug on earth, he says, “Why, you’d stand for the broads!” It means, in English, “Good God—you’re so simple that you’d sign a contract while you were looking at a girl’s tits!” 81

In the civilized world, the steamer world, nearly everyone stands for the broads. That is why the wealthy businessman, who is just going to fleece the innocent con man, does not get up and walk away at the psychological moment. His mind is on something else! All conjuring, all histrionics, all oratory and revivalist ranting, all slick business and every fraud swindle and confidence swindle—they all depend on the fact that, maybe only for a split second, the subject attends to something else instead of the business in hand. It might be the sight of a girl’s tit or it might be the feel of a gold nugget in a placer-miner’s pouch. Something else, to make the steamer stand for the broads. Nothing would ever convince me that Harry Parry was as innocent as he made out, on that first con lark of his. (He told it so well, and with such obvious sincerity and good humour and deprecation, that no one alive could disbelieve him. Unless they remembered that Harry Parry from Barry was at the top of his profession.) I always felt that Harry, looking at the five thousand pounds in the toilet, deliberately switched the cover, which the mug would recognise, from the money to a dollop of worthless papers of the same bulk. It may have been done in mischief and probably was. When the businessman came back with the map and details of Parry’s placer-mine, Harry Parry would laugh like hell and give him back his money. Something like that, the man from Cape Breton Island may have planned. Then, when the businessman stole his placer-mine—Harry Parry laughed just the same. Fantastically enough, many confidence men start in that way. I think that is why the con men are absolutely irresistible—they’re really innocent

people, at rock bottom, just as they say they are. God help the poor fat greedy wealthy businessman— 82

what chance has he? The con man has him coming and going! Of course I was wild with curiosity about Harry Parry’s personal affairs. Had he a wife? How much money did he make? Didn’t the police watch out for him? How many times had he been in jail? Things like that. Harry Parry made about three thousand a year for—I don’t know, say sixty years. He was not married. Had enjoyed life for something like ninety years. The merchant did not look at his till, and the wealthy man did not stand up and walk out. Well, that gypsy girl nearly always had a very beautiful breast. Generally the merchant’s wife wouldn’t have anything like that. In any case she wouldn’t have shown hers—! And so on. Nothing has changed. The dairy-take still operates, as it operated in Tyre and Sidon. The mug lets himself be blinded, for only a split second, by the glimpse of that breast, or by the feel of that huge roll of notes, or by the sight and thought of that lovely placer-nugget. One second later he’s back. He’s back and right on the job, alert again. But by that time the gypsy girl—or Harry Parry from Barry as the case may be—has gone. 83

CHAPTER SIX

THE MAN WHO COULD WRITE     At Parkhurst they put me out to work in the forest, cutting and hauling timber. It was back-breaking work, but I loved it. So did all the other longtimers: there was a wide, clean breathing-space that the officials called Parkhurst Forest but the convicts might have called paradise or something of that kind. Certainly there was no punishment, for any sensible man, in slaving his guts out at felling and stacking the clean aromatic pines. Penal servitude in Parkhurst Forest was a lot better than “freedom” in the back-streets—or the front-streets—of London or Birmingham. There was no wall around Parkhurst in those days—the forest lands, and the farm lands, covered a very large area, in an almost unpopulated region of Wight Island. Only a village or two, and a hamlet or two, and an occasional game-keeper’s cottage, broke the pleasant monotony. The rest was farm and forest. Of course I enjoyed every minute of it, and forgot about the life sentence, and forgot about Stinker Stephen, who had “punished” me by sending me away from Maidstone. I wrote, and I made a few (illegal) small pictures, and I talked my head off. Because—I nearly forgot to mention it—I owned the Island, just as I had owned the Moor. For a long time I could do no wrong. That is not to say that life at Parkhurst was easy, or that the island was an easy prison. Quite the reverse. At the time I arrived there, Parkhurst was the toughest jail in Ireland, England or Scotland, as the boys used to say. (Apparently because there was one notoriously 84

tough prison in Ireland, called—ironically enough—Mount Joy!) The Governor at Parkhurst, Colonel Hales, seemed to be the biggest bloody fool outside the pages of Bulldog Drummond. In our opinion he was a sadist—who didn’t know how to do the sadism. Also Hales was a reactionary—but hadn’t the faintest idea of what he was reacting about. Most amusing of all, he was reputed to drink a bottle of whisky a day.

A bottle a day! Some of the screwsmen and con men would have drunk a bottle of whisky a day while they were on the water wagon! I myself used whisky, day in and day out, during much of my penal servitude, and I am practically a teetotaller. My father, not exactly a life-long abstainer but one who did not know what it was like to be intoxicated—went to his grave without ever knowing that there was any bottle of whisky smaller than a quart. In the Southern states of America, and in parts of Denmark, the same thing applies to many temperate and sensible citizens. The trouble was that Hales believed it all. He strode around Parkhurst, like Ajax defying the lightning, knowing that the vile, terrible murderers and burglars were quailing as he passed, knowing that they were only restrained from raping the servant-girls on Parkhurst main road, and from murdering the errand-boys on Rookwood Avenue—because he, Hales, was there to hold the desperate monsters down. Hales even carried a sword-stick, believe it or not! On the slightest provocation—or lack of provocation—he pressed the button at the top, and confronted the desperate murderer with a long flashing steel blade. He used to look like D’Artagnan, in the illustrations to the older editions of The Three Musketeers! I think he knew it too. I’m sure that was the idea. Hales the hero. 85

The trouble was that Hales was incredibly ignorant, a number-one double-action bloody fool. (I write without prejudice. Hales gave me the Isle of Wight on a plate. I could do no wrong). The reader must imagine Boysie Barron. Boysie might have been twenty, an extremely good-looking child, with little golden curls and innocent blue eyes and a deprecating smile. I have called him a child. That is what he was —Boysie was a half-wit, a mental defective. (Parkhurst was crawling with them. And that was supposed to be the professional criminal!) Boysie had fourteen years’ penal, or something like that, for having incest with his little sister, another half-wit. His mental age was about six. (But very few six-year-old kids would really be as backward as Boysie Barron.) Now imagine Boysie, prattling to himself like a baby in a pram, crossing the prison yard at Parkhurst. Suddenly he is confronted by a large man, with a long naked sword in his hand, who says “How dare you speak when in the

presence of a senior official?”―or some other remark, anything, any bloody silly thing, as an excuse to press the button of the sword-stick. Poor Boysie screams in terror and all but swoons. Half on his knees, he clasps his little hands and begs the terrible bogeyman to spare him. Hales sheathes the sword-stick and strides away. Civilization is saved again. Hales strides away. He strode everywhere, and there is only one phrase to describe his gait. Hales walked about like a small boy playing pirates. He took a tremendous pace, and his shoulders went from side to side like a sailing-ship pitching in a heavy sea. (Ever seen a four-flusher, a bluffer who hasn’t been caught out yet, striding around from café to café? Seen that? That was Hales. Plus the sword-stick of course.) It was a dreadful thing that hundreds of helpless men 86

should have been placed in the “care” of such a person? That is agreed at once. But let me add—Hales was a mile superior to Stinker Stephen, and two miles superior to others. Perhaps that will be enough “penology” for the moment. Anyone may gather how incredibly fortunate I was to fall on my feet in such an environment. I might have been dead in less than a year. I might have been in a mad-house in less than six months. Such things happened. (I do not want to be reminded of Alec Robb.) But instead of anything like that, I could do as I liked. Neither Hales nor anyone else meddled with me. Naturally I loved working on the forestry. There were no walls to choke every wish and thought, no hampering and smothering barriers between the man in the forest and the sun outside it. No walls. It is necessary to digress here, a small digression which may amuse almost any reader. The idea is to make an artistic principle clear. Thus—I am a fairly skilful writer, and conversationalist, and public speaker, and broadcaster, and actor, and so on. I do know my trade in didactics, as the old philosophers used to call the art of telling the tale! Didactics. Well, rule one in all tale-telling, in every branch of the trade, is that the reader, or the hearer, or the audience, or the observer, must be ahead of the actor or artist or writer. Unless they’re ahead of him, he fails. Thus, I have explained that the farmland, plus the wide free forestry area, around Parkhurst Prison, made up an ideal place for a convict station.

Hundreds of men worked hard, and produced plenty, to everyone’s satisfaction. There was no trouble. The gangs of convicts marched out to their work, along the public roads of the Island, and there was never any unpleasantness. None of the local 87

people ever said or did anything offensive, to or about the men of the forestgangs. None of the convicts ever broke the rules, on their way to and from the woods. There were no walls, to smother and stifle the boys, and to hamper their work. So they laboured hard, and laughed, and liked it. At that stage—. Of course the reader is ahead of me by this time, and knows quite well what happened at that stage. £165,000 was the bill. First bill, that was. For—for the new penology, of course. For the walls around Parkhurst. To stop all the—. All the—. Oh, well, to stop whatever nasty things the convicts might do if they didn’t have walls around Parkhurst. £165,000 the first bill was. (The old lags used to say, with wistful liplicking, that those prison reform bastards weren’t half wide!) Then there was £11,500 and odd. That was for the special secret silent cells. It is to be hoped that no reader will be so unprogressive, or so suspicious, as to ask “What special silent cells? I mean—what for?” Any question of that kind would be in very bad taste. The special secret silent cells—proposed, devised, arranged and supervised by that famous penologist Colonel Hales-—were to be a haven of peace and quiet, where the bloodthirsty malefactors of Parkhurst could be dealt with. (All the desperate, bloodthirsty malefactors, such as Boysie Barron, etc.) If those nasty persons were to scream and shout, as doubtless they would if they were penologically “treated” in the ordinary prison cells, then they might disturb the civilians who resided near Parkhurst. So—for a mere £11,500—! Silent Block D was a group of cells from which no sound, 88

not even the screams of a tortured man, could emerge. Hales had saved civilization again! But, the reader may object, but you don’t need places like that on an English convict station. People aren’t tortured, and they don’t scream and shout. That money—the reader might say—was simply wasted. The answer is a question. Does the reader think that he, or she, knows more about prisons than the penologists? No? Very well, then. £11,500 please. I am reminded of what is perhaps the most poignant long poem in the English language—The Ballad of Reading Gaol. But this I know, and wise it were If each could know the same. That every prison that men build Is built with bricks of shame And bound with bars lest Christ should see How men their brothers maim. With bars they blur the gracious moon And blind the goodly sun, And they do well to hide their hell For in it things are done That son of God nor son of man Ever should look upon.

Those verses say the last word on penology. Here and there, in this book up to now, I have written jocularly and in good humour. It is the only way when dealing with such an unpleasant subject as penology—the science of inflicting pain! But I have to write about prisons if I want people to meet those friends of mine in the criminal class. Here, though, I would like to be very serious for one moment. Thus: if the reader does not know Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol then he or she should get a copy 89

at once. Also, whether the reader is a bank manager or a farm labourer, a housewife or a city secretary or an electrician, he or she should memorize

every word of that long poem. Even if the reader is the biggest dumb cluck in the world, that long poem learns itself That knowledge will be more rewarding than a gift of a thousand pounds. Because, since the time when Wilde wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol, sixty-odd years ago, nothing whatever has changed in the prisons of England. Except for the worse. Thus, a knowledge of that one poem will be a mental implement for the reader, and will help to turn the spotlight on the shabby pretences of the “penologists”. But even already, the reader knows the genesis of the secret silent cells at Parkhurst. The same “logic” was applied to the vast expenditure on the new walls around the island convict station. Disgruntled convicts, or prisoners hoping to escape, or uninformed readers, might say that the £165,000 was simply wasted. Or they might say that the public’s money, by the hundred thousand, was just handed over to the “reformers’” relatives in the contracting business. Those statements would be false. The walls were necessary in case the convicts suddenly started to rape and murder the residents and pedestrians on the public roads of the Island. The fact that nothing of the kind had ever occurred, and the fact that the Island people rather liked the tough lads of the convict station—those things only proved that readers and such-like people know nothing about it. So third-cousin Contractor, and brother-in-law Contractor, accepted the £165,000 with the reader’s compliments. They speeded up the making of the walls, and the building of the silent cells. Meanwhile the gallant Colonel —and the sword-stick—held the nine hundred desperadoes 90

at bay until the walls were ready. As for myself—the reader is, I hope, beginning to know me by this time. My friends call me indomitable, one who cannot be downed by any misfortune whatever. My enemies call me a bloody trickster, who’ll always find some way to slip out of a trap. They are both right. So, when they started to put the walls round the forest, and to keep away the sun and the sky, I just turned my back on them. I went straight to the Chief Engineer, a man named Arthur Wright, a smashing fellow and a fine administrator.

Wright had heard of my Dartmoor reputation as a blacksmith, but of course had never suggested that I should throw away the forest and the sun in exchange for a blacksmith’s shop inside the walls. When I said that I “wanted to keep my hand in at my trade” Wright jumped at the chance. Next day I owned the Island again. I was number one in the blacksmith’s shop. It is a very pleasant feeling—anywhere—to be the chap that can get things done with and for the other folks. But it is more pleasant in a jail than anywhere else in the world. Besides, one doesn’t expect to see the sun shining in a blacksmith’s shop. So the deprivation doesn’t hurt. See? Before I had been one week in Parkhurst forge I was in charge of it, for all practical purposes. (Of course there was a blacksmith warder, a good fellow, and there was an engineer warder, also a good chap, and there was a foreman of works, an exceptionally fine type, and there was Arthur Wright, the Chief Engineer, a smasher as I have said.) All these people signed the printed forms, and took the salaries, and were of course in charge of Parkhurst forge. But maybe the reader knows what I mean. Something about keeping good men down and the like. There was no question of ousting anyone else from a 91

convict job or a convict position. The two men who had been the “tops” of the iron workers up to that time, both wide people, were only too pleased that I had come along. They deposited on my plate, with a series of malicious grins, all the hopeless impossible jobs that had been lying around for the previous seven years. Of course I loved it. That is my life. Before I had been two weeks in Parkhurst forge I was being contacted by the twirlers, the chaps who wanted keys made. Twirlers are part of the furniture at every convict station. It seems to be a law of nature that there are always a few people who can work magic on the “stoppo lark”, the escape business. Naturally they always need blacksmithing work done on the keys-to-be. Even more naturally they are always glad if the blacksmith happens to be a wide man and middling competent. As I say, I had queries. Of course I would not break the prison rules by making a key for anyone. But—some of the drawings and sketches and blueprints were wonderful. Perhaps we could say that no twirler on the island ever quarrelled with me—and leave it at that.

But, apart from the twirlers, I was one day slipped a small piece of parchment with a beautifully executed engineering drawing on it. I had not the faintest idea what the thing could be―it certainly was not a twirl. As nearly as I could guess, it looked like some kind of instrument that might be used by a dentist. Or a surgeon ―on illegal operations or something. My mind practically turned somersaults trying to work out what the instrument could be. The man who wanted the instrument made, Joe Westlake, was one of the wide folk, a very quiet, soft-spoken fellow who looked like a schoolmaster. He was very thin and pale and hesitant. But I knew that the slimness, and the pallor, and the 92

soft speech, only indicated that Westlake” had a couple of tough laggings behind him”. They meant a few long spells of solitary. In other words, Joe had had at least two penal servitude sentences, had fallen foul of the authorities each time, knew the shock of a warder’s club and the taste of bread and water. I wondered what was his lark, his particular brand of robbery. Also I speculated about his tenacity. What I mean is that he was wearing good conduct badges at the time when he came to chat me about the instrument. But the parchment drawing meant that Joe was game to risk another spell of “chokey”. I wondered what that instrument would be, if or when I made it. I chatted Joe. Naturally I had checked up about him. That kind of thing is necessary in any place, in or out of jail, but it was particularly important at Parkhurst. Because, whatever the authorities might say or the (honestly mistaken) journalists print, the vast majority of the prisoners at Parkhurst were not professional criminals. They were ordinary people. That is to say—they were a hundred per cent unreliable. “A steamer’ll always put you away.” That is the dogmatic decision of the wide men, about normal, ordinary, decent people. It is a devastating doctrine, I know, but I am afraid it is all too true. No steamer—no ordinary law-abiding person—can be trusted with any secret whatever. I wish that dogma was untrue. After all, both my parents, and all my family, and my forebears for many generations, were all steamers. Of course I wish that dogma was false. But it is true. Thus, I could never have made Joe Westlake’s “tickler” if Joe had not been a wide man. Because, in

the ordinary run of events I would have been on bread and water for a month or two. Steamers is poison. It will be gathered that at Parkhurst a wide man walked 93

warily. There were between eight and nine hundred convicts in the prison. Of that number only about a hundred and twenty were professional criminals. One in seven. The robbers of course “in” for robbing. The others, the steamers, had done the most amusing and incredible things. They divided up into natural (or unnatural!) groups. First of all there was a group of about two hundred people—respectable ordinary middle-class folks—who had been caught doing the ordinary kind of little fiddle. (You know, the kind of thing we don’t do, but practically everyone else in the world does.) They had wangled wills, and misappropriated funds. They had falsified accounts and lit out with slate club money and swindled insurance companies—all ordinary respectable people as I said. They kept themselves to themselves, did not speak to the half-wits and sex offenders, and naturally they ran like hell if a wide man came within eight yards of them. Also, since they could not patter the bat, they could hold little converse with anyone. Apart from this, from what the boys called “the law-di-daw-crush”, there was a group of about two hundred prisoners, with sentences from three years to life, who had gone in for curious sex aberrations of one kind or another. These were not mental degenerates or half-wits or anything like that. As with the law-di-daw-crush, they were ordinary respectable people who had been caught. They were in for the hairy, the bottle, the dick-flash, the godforbids, the brewers, the double-splice, the coat and vest, and suchlike pastimes. Even the warders learnt to use that much of the jail jargon, enough to describe the funny offences committed by normal decent people in a moment of forgetfulness. The hairy is just rhyming-slang, disguised by being 94

abbreviated. By this time any reader would know that the complete expression, hairy ape, would rhyme with, and would mean, rape. The bottle

means sodomy, and the dick-flash is what the law books describe as indecent exposure. Godforbids refers to those gentlemen who molest little girls. (Godforbids = kids.) The brewers is one of those amusing terms. It refers to an offence which is very common indeed among the middle classes of England and America—indecent assault. There would not seem to be any connection between the word “brewers” and a sex assualt on a little girl. But when it becomes brewers’ malt everything is plain. So it goes on. The thing would be a nightmare or a madhouse fantasy unless one learnt to laugh at it. Double-splice was obviously bigamy, coat and vest was incest, and so on. One most amusing feature of all this daft steamer activity was that the various groups of people kept together, according to what they “were in for”, that was very amusing, and indeed fascinating. Two ex-parsons might be in cells next door to one another. Naturally, with the same kind of education and background and home life and professional interests—naturally one would understand the two men meeting and talking as often as possible. Not a bit of it. One of them, in for the godforbids, would pal up with the nearest godforbids case—even if that case was a hulking illiterate from the slums of London. The other ex-parson, maybe in for the bottle, would hurry away from his next-door neighbour, to “chat” a bottler from a distant cell, even if the said bottler was a lumpen proletarian ex-stoker thrown out of the Royal Navy. It was very funny indeed, and there were no exceptions. The wide men, of course, kept mainly with other wide men, partly because mugs could not speak the bat very well, but also because any friendship with a steamer was 95

a waste of time. (A steamer stands for the kid stakes. A wide man does not. Q.E.D. Verb sap.) But even within their own circle the wide men split up into little trade groups”. Like a lot of commercial travellers at a convention, or a lot of artists at an exhibition, or a crowd of writers at a meeting of the Authors Society. Like went with like. The screwsmen did not overly mix with the screevers, the forgery experts. A man put away for the bash lark, for a smash and grab, talked

shop with others like himself It was greatly funny. Thus, when Joe Westlake told me he could write a bit, I did not make the mistake of taking him for a novelist or a short-story man. Mr Westlake’s writing was mainly done on other people’s cheques, with other people’s signatures. Joe was a “screevers”, a forger. It is both amusing and interesting that the original word, perhaps going back to the very beginnings of commerce, somewhere about Tyre or Sidon or Damascus or Byzantium—the original word screevers meant a writer. Lovely to hear Joe Westlake, two or three thousand years later, explaining that he did a bit of writing. That is tradition. But the thing shown in Westlake’s little drawing was not a pen or a stencil or anything like that. Neither was it a twirl. However, there was no point in asking Joe to tell me. No wide man will ask—or answer—any question of importance, except to discuss some point of importance in his lark. It is one of the clear-cut unmistakable differences between the wide people and the steamers. As the wide men put it—if you go around asking a lot of questions, people are apt to think you want to find out, and then where are you? Amusing, but unanswerable. It took me some time to think over the problem of Joe Westlake’s “tickler”. (That was what I christened 96

it, and that was what Joe and I spoke of whenever the subject came up. The reader does not have to be a Freudian to see what was in my mind!) In the meantime, without being inquisitive, I found out plenty about Joe Westlake and about screeving. Joe was what the boys call a legitimate screever. That is, he simply copied other people’s signatures on their cheques. Then he presented the cheques and took the money―or the lagging as the case might be. Like the great majority of legitimate screevers, Joe had had a commercial career to start with. He had been the confidential head clerk of a big shipping company. Then one day—for fun, he told me, and I believed him—he forged his employer’s signature on a small cheque, for sixty pounds or so. He presented the cheque himself—a crazy risk—and got the money. (He did not need the money.) Then, when the cheque and the statement came through, Joe was able to cover the irregularity without any trouble.

That satisfied Joe Westlake. Thereafter, for nearly eight years, he never made the slightest deviation from the ordinary paths of correct conduct. At the end of the eight years he was thirty-four years of age. He had been married for over nine years (even before the ‘poking” experiment), and had three children, the eldest boy nearly eight years old at that time. His wife was apparently an ordinary young suburban low-middleclass wife. The Westlakes were very happy. Significantly, Joe had never told his wife about the “joke” with the sixty pounds. The three youngsters were flourishing, and of course Joe had a good salary, since he was holding a very senior position for a young man. Suddenly, without a word of warning, Joe was dismissed. He was dismissed for forging a cheque. The cheque carried the signature of Joe’s boss, the managing director 97

of the company. When Westlake reached that stage in his story—told while we walked round the exercise-yard at Parkhurst—I checked in my stride, in spite of myself I was in front, and I all but swung round to say “For Christ’s sake Joe tell us another.” Just in time I remembered where I was, and saved myself from three days, bread and water. But—but that thin, silly, daft story! “Straight up, Jim”, said Westlake gently. It is the wide man’s equivalent of a stack of bibles. Besides, after a second’s reflection I believed Joe, without his assurance. Just because the story sounded so patently thin and false, I believed it, and I wondered what had happened. Westlake had never found out. His guess was that some personal enemy, some rival on the staffs had deliberately committed the forgery in such a way as to throw suspicion on Joe. My own theory—I never told Joe Westlake—is that there never was a forgery. The manager, I think, had known or guessed, all the time, about the sixty pounds. He had kept quiet for his own reasons. Then, when he had no further use for Westlake, he had simply written a cheque and denied his own signature. Joe’s guilty knowledge had done the rest! I never told Westlake my guess. What was the use? Joe had never looked for a legitimate job again—there would not have been many, for a man with

that “record”. Joe had gone in for legitimate screeving at once. “Legitimate screeving” (wonderful name) is the actual copying of a person’s signature on one of his own cheques. As opposed to “jimmy screeving”, which means any kind of forgery involving the use of a printing press. (Bookmakers, tickets, pools coupons, hire purchase receipts, securities, winning lottery tickets, and so on, are all jimmy-screeving.) 98

Joe had “fallen” three times in nineteen years—the wide men always speak of “falling” as a steeplechase jockey does—it may happen to anyone. He had two three-year sentences, had lost all his remission each time. I.e. he had served the whole six years, mostly on bread and water. It was just a case of starting on the wrong foot, making an enemy on the first day, as I had done with Stinker Stephen at Maidstone. Joe’s present “lagging” was also three years, but this time he was “fetching her sweet”, which meant that he was having good luck. (I had known that, by the good conduct badges on his clothes.) Joe Westlake had been eight years in prison, out of nineteen years on the screeve lark. During the nineteen years he had screeved a little over fifty thousand pounds. Thus his income had been roughly three thousand a year, even counting in the time he had been in prison. (It had to be counted, of course, as Joe’s wife and children had to keep going.) His wife had “taken it bad” when she discovered that her husband was a criminal. For a time, as Joe told me, it was touch and go whether she left him, or went to the police, or both. In the long run she laughed—and took the children for a protracted expensive holiday on the Riviera. Wide woman! Quiet, pale-faced, gentle-voiced Joe liked being a screever. I was always profoundly impressed, and thoroughly amused, by the Westlake logic about the Westlake lark. Screeving, it appeared, was a kind of Robin Hood activity. He meant to say—Joe Westlake meant to say―you couldn’t very well screeve off any poor blighter that had nothing for himself, could you? The very fact that you were screeving, on the legitimate, meant that you weren’t hitting any poor blighter like yourself Didn’t it? Thus Joe. He never wanted to be anything but a 99

screever. Except for whatever the “tickler” was to do. He got his “tickler” made. (I wonder who made it——naturally, I would not do anything of that kind,—naturally!) But I did not find out what it was for until nearly nine years later. In the meantime Joe Westlake circled the yard at Parkhurst, and told me stories about legitimate screeving. I liked that word legitimate—and I often wondered what the boys would have described as illegal! 100

CHAPTER SEVEN

PIECES OF SEVEN-AND-A-BIT     One of the most respected names, in commerce, in science, and in literature, is Snider. Sometimes it is spelt in German fashion, as Schneider, and sometimes in the Dutch way, as Snaidar. But most often it comes in the English spelling, as above—Snider. It is a name rightly honoured in many lands. There is a Snaidar in optics, and a Snider in ballistics, and a Schneider in medicine. Also there has been a Snider in engineering, as well as the gentleman who gave his name to the Snider rifle, which was used in almost every country in the world at one time. It is well to make those things clear at the beginning of this chapter. The author of this book, and the readers of this book as advised by the author, have only admiration and respect for all persons named Snider, past and present. The libel laws of this country are different from the libel laws of any other nation in the world. In England, if a man named Fimpleguzzler is the son of a well-known prostitute, and if an author writes about a man named Fimpleguzzler whose mother once allowed a man to see her thighs and a little more—that is libel. Mr Fimpleguzzler—the son of a whore—can collect vast sums from the author and publisher and printer and others, for libel. Because they said that his mother was immodest enough to lift her skirt above her knees. Libel. That is the law. (Now if the reader of this book says that’s one law that must have been made by, with, and for the wide people, then the author can only say he wishes it were!) 101

But that will be enough to make it clear that all persons called Snider or Schneider or any of the derivative surnames—they are all blameless, praiseworthy and splendid citizens. Can any thing be fairer or clearer than that? Having said that much, I can now tell that one of the first people I saw, when I went to work at Parkhurst forge, was an ancient, white-haired, red-

faced, blue-eyed, smiling person. He looked just like Father Christmas off duty—except that when I saw him first he was carrying a crucible full of molten lead. He winked as he passed me, and he gave the wide high sign, so I paused, and watched what he was doing. He had fetched the crucible of liquid lead from a furnace, and was pouring the seething metal into a row of little moulds. I could not see the shape of the moulds, but I guessed that the things he was making would be small lead balance-weights, for a machine of some kind. What impressed me was the care and precision with which the old chap worked at the pouring of the metal. Clearly, nothing but the best was good enough for this Santa Claus moulder. Clearly, he was as big a bloody fool, straining after perfection in the moulding lark, as I was in the blacksmithing lark. I wanted to know more about this fellow. So I was pleased when the preliminaries of my employment were arranged. I was given a forge—Number One forge, as was but sensible, I noted—and I was given two hammer-men. Then I was “introduced” to the discipline screw, Frank Hill, a tough wicked-looking blighter who never did an injury to anyone in his life. After that I was left alone, to please myself about my jobs. I noticed that the working-place of Santa Claus, the moulder, was not far away. Thus, as soon as I had my tools straightened up, and had given my two helpers a job to do, I strolled over to the foundry. 102

The old chap started to talk about seven seconds before I got there. He was still talking, twenty minutes later, when the discipline warder made a signal which told me a senior official was on his rounds. So I went back to my fire, without having spoken more than five words. I like that. But it does not often happen. There was no need for the Santa Claus chap to tell me that he was a toprank moulder, a craftsman of the first order. I could see that for myself. But no one learns things like that in a prison. This man had a history, somewhere, a history of experiment and practice and testing and proof I am saying that his skill indicated years of travel and experience in different countries. Then why Parkhurst? Above all, why and how the “cap alphabet”?

That last is a jail joke. In the old days a convict carried his history in three places—in the club scars on his head, and the hunger pinch in his cheeks and in the letters on his cap. It is very amusing. About the cap-alphabet, I mean. The reader should remember that his or her grandparents paid some gifted penologist thirty or forty thousand pounds for working out such a wonderful scheme as the cap alphabet. Looked at that way, it is very funny indeed. In 1800—when the reader’s grandparents were paying over the money— the penologists devised a marvellous scheme, a system of identification, stretching forward into all eternity. For all time, a convict’s history would be known at a single glance. That made England safe for ever from—from whatever Boysie Barron or some such person might do. Now, for a paltry £40,000, you’d know the man’s history. Because a convict who went to penal servitude in the year 1801 carried the capital letter A, in brass, on the side of his funny little convict cap. If he were sentenced 103

again, in 1812, he would carry the capital letters A L on his cap in brass. That would tell everyone qualified to know that the man had been sent to penal servitude twice. (They used to brand them in the Middle Ages. Who says there is no progress!) Thus they went on through the alphabet, down to a convict’s cap bearing the letter Y in brass. Which of course would tell that the man was first sent to penal servitude in 1825. Then, since there are 26 letters in the alphabet, they left out Capital Letter Z, and started again with small “a”. So if a convict had W a f, in brass, on the side of his cap, that would tell any skilled penologist that the man had first been sentenced to penal servitude in 1823, then again in 1826, then again in 1831. Fascinating study, yes? The reader’s grandparents, and their contemporaries, certainly got good value for their £40,000. For instance, if they saw a convict (which they would not) and if that convict had b e t on his cap, they would not take him for a racecourse tipster. They would know he had had “laggings” in 1827, 1830, and 1845.

Very useful knowledge indeed. Information no household should be without. Well worth every penny of the £40,000. The marvellous intelligence and circumspection of the penologists will be obvious to the meanest intellect. (Yes, indeed, to the very meanest intellect.) It is a long way round, to explain a jail joke about a convict’s cap. A convict with a whole string of brass letters on his cap, showing that he had been lagged many times—he carried a cap alphabet. All penology is like that. The public pay over a few thousand or a few million pounds, and they get the most interesting things for their money— flogging-triangles, and special types of gallows, and many varieties of 104

handcuffs, walls within walls, and cap alphabets, and secret silent cells, and scientifically graded dietary punishments, and scientific rules for flogging —the most wonderful variety of penological inventions are at the public’s disposal. All that is necessary is the paltry few thousand or few million. Now back to Santa Claus the moulder with his cap alphabet. It was nearly the end of that “system” of registration, but the old-timers carried their ancient brass-lettered caps like Sir Galahad with his carven shield. The moulder-convict had five or six letters on his cap, i.e., he had been in penal servitude umpteen times. Then where did he get his dexterity and skill in moulding? Where had he had the opportunity to study and practise? What did he work at “on the straight”? What was his lark? What did he do as a professional criminal? Above all, who was he? The answer to most of those varied questions went into a single word— snider. The old chap worked at snide, false money. He worked as a moulder sometimes, “straight”, but it was for experience at the snide. His lark was that he was a snider. And his name was Snider. He was a counterfeiter, a maker of false coins. His father had been a counterfeiter, and his grandfather. There was some talk—that was how Santa Claus put it—there was some talk that one of his grandfather’s grandfathers had lived in Barbary. On the snide of course. In Barbary! There is no such place. But the word has been used for thousands of years, up and down the Mediterranean and the Red Sea and farther afield. It describes some half-mythical place where—where almost anything is possible. Barbary.

So his grandfather’s great-grandfather had been there, a Snider and a snider. Taking the fat gold pieces of King Midas, in exchange for the snide ones, when luck 105

was in. Pulling an oar in a galley when luck was out. Dreaming always of ways to fake the snide. It was like reading the Odyssey, or the early poems of Francois Villon, to hear old Snider tell about “days gone by”. One never knew whether the background was a Roman galley, or a kennel in Marseilles, or a thieves, kitchen in the London of Charles II. All Snider’s talk was in primitive archaic thieves’ argot. He said “fake” instead of make or work, and he said “dubsman” instead of warder or twirl. To fake the snide was to manufacture false money—the earliest coiners, back in the days of King Midas, probably used the same words about the same things. Santa Claus—his name was Bill Snider, but I never thought of him as anything but Santa Claus—had been faking the snide since he was about fifteen. He had been an apprentice moulder in the early days of Woolwich Arsenal. From there he was lured away, by the offer of big money, to work in Krupps at Essen in Germany. He had played at making groats and testers—the names of the coins made Bill Snider sound at least a hundred years old—before he left England. He continued his studies at Krupps, and was making German Marks, without being caught, in 1870. (Nearly a hundred years before the writing of this chapter! No wonder Bill Snider had the alphabet on his cap.) Bill was sufficiently objective to remember, after all the years, that the Marks he made were really “duff stuff” (The ancient words! The old, old words. Duff stuff!) Probably Snider the snider only survived because there was a big war on. Bill managed to get out of Germany “before the tumble”. When he got back to England he was already well on his way to being a skilled snider. Also he had about one thousand six hundred pounds in English money, 106

the profit on the snide Marks. He was only twenty-two.

In Hamburg and Berlin and Essen he had met a few of the German wide men. So that he knew where to go and what to say when he got to London. He never worked for an employer again, except when he needed access to a large well-equipped foundry, to study some problem of his “lark”. Snider talked for about seven weeks, practically without stopping, from our first meeting onwards. Of course he had never had a worth-while audience before, not once in his life. There had been admiring young wide men, who would have appreciated Bill’s cap alphabet, and his being tops of the snide lark, and his “stack of dough”. But they would not have understood Bill’s art. On the other hand, in his wanderings around the world, in and out of the great metal foundries of the capitals, old Snider would have met many people who would have known he was a genius in metals. But they would have been straight mugs, steamers, who would have run like hell or screamed for the police if Bill had told them about the snide. All that was bad enough. But the worst of all was that Bill Snider, the snider, the artist in metals and the counterfeiter of coinages—Bill was an incurable romantic, with a definite liking for ancient history and for tales of the long ago. Tales about snide for preference. So that it would not have been easy to find a listener who could feel with Bill on all the different aspects of his life. Thus I was a wonderful godsend to Santa Claus. Partly because I was that sort of mug myself but mainly because my own experience and my early training made me eager and anxious to know all about Snider and the snide. So Bill talked. One curious and profoundly interesting detail was that there seemed to be no economic aspect of the snide lark. 107

In any other racket—whether a man is a novelist or a film producer or a jockey or a burglar or a bishop or a blackmailer—sooner or later people get down to the question of how much a year you make. It is only natural, and is indeed inevitable. But Santa Claus—I mean Bill Snider—responded with a complete blank each time the question of money cropped up. He seemed never to have heard of money! Naturally I thought it was a joke, a kind of quizzical legpull. Here was this fellow who quite literally made thousands of pounds. He made it, out of his own crucible, in his own workshop.

But to all queries as to how much a year he pulled down, Bill just shook his head and looked blank. It took me nearly three months to decide that he was being quite serious. The question of money just didn’t arise. If you needed four hundred pounds you made four hundred pounds. If you required ten thousand in a hurry, you turned off ten thousand in a hurry. It sounded simply crazy, but those are the facts of life in the snide lark. If any reader of this book has any abilities as a thought-reader, no prize will be required to elucidate guesses about my thoughts at that stage! I mean—here was I, Jim Phelan, a mechanical genius as Bill Snider would testify, and a competent craftsman in many fields, as a dozen top-rank engineers could testify—here was Jim Phelan, wasting his time and his life, when he could have been perfecting on the snide lark, under the tutelage of Snider himself all in readiness for some day when Phelan might be released. The snide! That was the lark of larks. Anyone will have guessed that much already. The snide lark sounded marvellous. Every man his own banker! Fortunately for my peace of mind I decided to continue as a vagabond and a writer—if ever I got the 108

chance. But—but I still think the British Treasury, and the French Mint, were very lucky indeed when I decided not to be a snider. But speaking of sniders—back to Bill. No one knew how much money Bill had passed through his hands, since that first sixteen hundred pounds, before he was twenty-two. But there was one factor which served as an index. I noticed that whenever Bill had “had it off” (i.e., concluded a big job) he invariably made for Mentone or San Remo or the Bahamas. In other words, the snider knew nothing about cash-values or incomes. But he automatically put himself in the millionaire bracket. (Since those days, I have known other sniders, people who made twobob bits out of lead-piping! Ay—and threepenny bits out of pewter pots. It is a fantastic trade. But even the two-bob man had the snider’s characteristic outlook about money. He only went to Brighton because he didn’t know San Remo.) Naturally I wanted to know about raps, about stir. How much stir had Bill Snider done—how many times had he fallen, and how hard had he fallen? One doesn’t ask. But it is important to know. For manifestly if a man

can make six million pounds in four hours on a lark, that is a good lark—if the rap is not too hard. But if a man gets six million pounds in four hours—and then gets a certain life sentence―well, the reader can have that lark for free. Thus I wanted to know from Bill—how often, how long, and how hard. Especially as he was carrying a whole string of brass letters on his cap. The answer staggered me. Naturally I had been put off—very much put off—by that cap alphabet. Here was a signpost saying plainly “NOT this way, brother”. But when you started to do a little addition and subtraction 109

old Santa Claus didn’t look such a mug as at first. Bill had had one short local jail sentence, one year. That wouldn’t be on his cap. But he had had half a dozen laggings which were indicated in the cap alphabet. Snider had had six penal servitude terms, of three years each time. On each occasion, as a well-behaved prisoner (not brawling or troublesome, only interested in his foundry work—his snide experiments!) each time he had had nine months’ remission. On the local jail sentence he had earned three months’ remission. Thus Bill Snider had spent fourteen years and three months in prison, out of—? At that stage I began to do some swift calculation on my own account. Bill had been on the snide lark before the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. I met him in Parkhurst forge at the beginning of 1927. Fifty-seven years. Fourteen years and three months in jail. Forty-two years of liberty. A hundred and fifty thousand pounds. At least. Days gone by, King Midas got on to this lark—back in Barbary or one of those places. (Read the classics, and read any good mythology.) Days gone by, Alexander the Great, and Ptolemy the Great, and Augustus Caesar and —well, put in any great names you like, from the brightest pages of history —they were all on the snide lark in one way or another. No wonder that Snider is a worthy and famous name! Above all, what a beautiful concordance and magical coincidence that the greatest snider of this or any other period should have been called—Snider. It will be clear that I realized just how lucky I was, to have Santa Claus Snider in my own workshop, willing and eager to talk. Bill did in fact talk his head off, for over seven weeks. One of the amusing things I learnt—the things that can go on, under everyone’s nose!—I learnt that, as in

110

the case of the screeve lark, there was a legitimate snide lark too. You could fake the snide without breaking any law! Many of those who used to be described, in Victorian days, as the highest and most honourable in the land, have handled the legitimate snide for years. The lark is not quite dead even now. It was roughly comparable to the currency swiz—of course every news-reader will know about that. Yes? No? Well, well, the journalists must have missed it. In the currency swiz, if you were one of the highest and most honourable in the land, and if you had a million-pound yacht, you just sailed to and fro between some small port in Britain and some small port on the French or Italian Riviera. That was all. In England a pound note was worth a pound. In Antibes or Mentone or Le Lavandou or Hyères, an English pound note was worth anything from 21/– to 23/6. Naturally the export of currency was forbidden by law. Naturally if a Customs man caught Boysie Barron with twenty one-pound notes stuck down the front of his trousers, intending to flog them for £23 10 0 in Antibes—naturally he snitched Boysie, and Britain was saved. Also naturally, the Customs man would not see a million-pound yacht sailing from a small English port to a small French port. Not his business. Besides, the highest and most honourable would have been cleared. No currency. No laws broken. Legitimate, as one might say. If someone from that yacht—not the owner, no, no, not the owner—were to offer 20 one-pound notes, in Antibes, to get the (legal) £23 10 0, then everyone on Antibes waterfront would have had hysterics. Laughing at the mug. But if that same man had offered 20,000 English 111

pound notes, for £23,500, that would have been okay, all ordinary, all legitimate. What a shame that the reader never heard or read about the currency swiz! It is, as anyone can see, a terrific story. Strange that all the journalists missed it—chaps who are generally so alert—for instance, if Boysie Barron the half-wit tried to smuggle a tenner, the journalists would get that, and very laudable it would be, to help keep down crime. Million-pound yachts—well, any sensible journalist, or Customs man, or treasury detective, or revenue watcher, would have plenty to do keeping

track of Boysie Barron—yachts can look after themselves. That’s the currency swiz, that was. It cost Britain—i.e., the reader and friends—something like 2,000,000,000 pounds. But none of that money was taken by members of the criminal class, so it does not interest us here. The legitimate snide lark is the same, or even funnier. It was started, in reverse, by William the Conqueror! Although, as Bill Snider would claim, one of his grandfathers grandfathers, days gone by, did a bit on that same reverse lark, back in Greece and Barbary and them places. But in the beginning, in Norman William’s day, the kings used to put the snide in themselves. It became almost a rule of thumb, in history, to read that “One of the first acts of Blank, as soon as he came to the throne, was to debase the currency.” Everyone has read it. It crops up again and again in history. That was one of the things you got for being king. Because if anyone else did the snide lark his head was chopped off. But a king could do it and it was all legitimate. (This use of the word “legitimate”, by my friends in the criminal class, seems to be very well thought out indeed!) But that method, the debasing of the currency, was 112

really, as I have mentioned, the snide lark in reverse. Suppose the reader was a newly-made king, who needed a few thousand écus or obus or other solid gold coins. You couldn’t very well just grab them and hang or stab the owner. (Or at least, some didn’t.) So a good way was to get forty thousand écus from your treasury. (Not to keep; you don’t own that money. Just to look at.) Then you get a craftsman—Bill Snider’s grandfather’s grandfather or someone like that— and he made you forty thousand écus which are nearly solid gold. Nearly. Say three-quarters. So you paid back the forty thousand to the Treasury, and you still had ten thousand for yourself That is debating the currency. Tut, tut! I mean debasing the currency. That kind of thing has been going on, all over the world, since King Midas and Bill Snider’s ancestors started to make money. Offhand it would be difficult to name a country in which it is not or was not done. (Any reader over middle age will remember the time when a five-bob bit was a whacking great lump of silver. Real silver. Those were the days!)

But the legitimate snide lark consists of making gold coins out of real gold. Full face value, too. Every gold sovereign containing a sovereign’s worth of real genuine guaranteed gold. What could be more legitimate? It may be possible to tell a little more about it later. In those early days at Parkhurst, after I had satisfied myself that Bill Snider had had “all the dough in the world” as the wide boys say, I wanted to know about the technical difficulties of the real snide lark. You have to make gold or silver coins out of some base metal that looks all right. That part is easy enough. But—to make those coins in any large quantity, especially after the detectives had been alerted—that would call for a good deal of planning. 113

I had guessed in advance, and Bill Snider confirmed, that the disposal of the snide was the biggest problem. Disguising the place of manufacture as something innocent was the next biggest snag. Last of all, but very important, was the question of personnel. It is not easy to operate a foundry single-handed. But if other people are employed, they have to be trusted—you can’t kid a professional moulder that he’s making gold medals for the Football Association, not if he made the mould! Thus, the snider can only have wide people to help him. That costs money. At the same time, in spite of Santa Claus’s lack of interest in figures, I could gather that the profits were enormous. (When one considers that a man can make an English sovereign, and put in a pound’s worth of real gold, and make a profit, the bunce on making them, as it were, out of old boot-nails, must be colossal.) Sniders take huge risks. They get penal and plenty if caught. But when they have it off they go straight to town. Not even the bullion snatch pays greater dividends. I was sorry when I was moved to another work-place (out in the forest!) for a few weeks. Because when I got back to the blacksmith’s shop old Bill had been released. I did not want to see him again——in stir—and there seemed little likelihood that I would be turned loose for a very long time. So of course I hoped I would never see Bill any more. (It is another of the direct contradictions between the wide man’s thinking and the thought habits of ordinary folks. “Hope not to see you later”, in fact!) But I often wondered if our paths would cross again.

They did too, and I hope I may tell about it in its place. But at that time, when I was employed in the blacksmith’s shop, although working in the forest, I had plenty of other things to think of. 114

So I said goodbye, metaphorically speaking, to the snide lark for the time being. But I often thought of Bill, slaving away in a foundry somewhere, turning out the pieces of (nearly) eight. 115

CHAPTER EIGHT

STONE WALLS DO NOT…     The job in the forest was one after my own heart, as interesting in its way as a chess problem. Except that the chess-board would have been about seven miles square and the chess pieces would have been tree-trunks of up to forty tons. The reformers had made two concentric walls, one of them enclosing a circle of only about half a mile diameter, the other bounding a rough circle of a little over a mile. All the prison buildings, all the workshops, and the the exercise-yards, were inside the smaller circle, the compound. That coped with the vast majority of the convicts: they never saw the island from the first day of their lagging. I ought to mention—isn’t penology a very intricate science!—that there was a third concentric wall, bounding a still smaller space. This space held the jail buildings, the offices, the warders’ mess-room, and very little else. A gate, locked day and night, cut off even the compound. The gate was unlocked in the morning to let the compound men out to work, and then locked until evening, when the compound men came back inside. Outside the compound wall there was a large space, mainly farmland and forest. “Days gone by” this territory was ordinary forest, open to the public. Also the main road of the Island, and several smaller roads, had traversed this area. But now the outer wall cut off the roads, and cut off the paths, and excluded any trespasser. Now you didn’t see the hills or the road or the people—you just saw the wall. 116

Inevitably, the building of two walls and the closing of the roads had presented various problems to the forestry gangs. In the old days they used to fell the timber, stack it by the roadside, and move on to another neck of the woods. Presently a haul-gang, with a cart and twenty harnessed men, would load that timber and move it on to the sawmill inside the prison. Now all that was changed. You might risk a felling-gang outside. But if you were going to have all kinds of loaders and haulers and casuals going in and out, then you would have to employ a couple of extra warders, to be

locking and unlocking the new gates all day. Or you would have to leave the gates open so that the haul-gangs and other people could go through. But in that case some silly newspaperman might say you were wasting the public money, and that the walls might as well not have been built. Very annoying. Because— (This is the place to take the reader into a secret. All the above problems arose from one very simple cause. They arose because the planners hadn’t either known or cared what went on. They took the money, the walls were built, and the timber-felling business of Parkhurst Convict Station came to an end. That was where I came in.) That first morning I was marched out into the yard outside the blacksmith’s shop, by a silly young screw who was obviously dying for a chance to use his new club. (Some people are like that.) So I asked no questions and offered no info, as the old lags say. He got me passed through gates and walls and compounds, until at last we fetched up at a corner (a round comer) of the outer wall. The foreman of works, and the Chief Engineer, and head man of the forestry corps were all there, standing by a platform, with steps, about twenty feet inside the 117

wall. To my surprise, the young screw, instead of handing me over to the Chief Engineer or someone, to discuss whatever it was they wanted, marched me to the foot of the steps leading on to the platform. Then, while the “heads” looked on curiously, he got me up the steps and on to the platform. From here I could see over the wall——I could see the place where I used to work before the reformers took over. There was a big stack of timber nearby, some of it, I should guess, having been there since before I left. The young warder waved to the stack of timber and spoke, in very official tones. “Make—er—a thing”, he ordered, “to get all that timber hauled over the wall and in here.” So they’d realized that the damn swindling fools of reformers had just bitched the whole forestry project. Now Jim Phelan was to help them out. I was to straighten out their mess for them—and to assist in stealing the sun and moon from my mates. Of course I refused. Nicely, though. Nicely!

“Yessir”, I said snappily. “What shall I do first, sir?” I leant slightly towards the young screw, all eagerness to hear and obey. There was a guffaw from the group of “heads”, who were listening to every word. It was a toss-up whether the young screw clubbed me to rags then and there. (He knew that story would be told, in the mess, by the “heads” and that it would be all over the Island within twenty-four hours.) He even reached one hand, almost automatically, towards his “cosh-poke”, his truncheon-pocket. But the heads were watching and listening. “All right, Mr Er—”, called the Chief Engineer. “That’s all right, thanks. One on.” The last two words were the official formula indicating acceptance of responsibility for a convict. “One on” meant that I was now the Chief Engineer’s pigeon. (If I escaped or attacked anyone or went in for rape or any of those things, the young screw 118

could not be blamed.) The young screw went down the ladder and disappeared. I stayed where I was. The Chief Engineer and the works foreman, followed by the forestry chap, all came slowly up the steps. They moved across the platform and stood looking over at the stacks of timber. Plainly they were allowing me plenty of time to assess the various factors—and to decide whether I would do their job or not. “The point is”, said the works foreman, as if he were continuing some former discussion, “point is that you don’t want a gantry, or a crane, or a caterpillar track. For if you have swings and slides and helter-skelters there isn’t much point in having a wall.” The others grinned agreement. “A tunnel”, I suggested enthusiastically. “A tunnel—outer end in the forest, inner end in my cell, say. I’m sure that’d give satisfaction all round.” There was another guffaw. Then the works foreman looked grave. ”Point is”, he said gloomily, “that timber has to come in without going all the way round by the main road.” Between the three of them they suggested half a dozen ways of coping with the problem. But all of them struck on one snag or another. I made no suggestions other than my tunnel idea. But I knew very well what I was going to do—if the heads of the Parkhurst wide men were agreeable. In the long run it was agreed that we—that meant me—would think it over, and that I would let the Chief Engineer know—“well ahead of time” what I would want in the way of materials and tools and men. We all drifted

towards the impound gate, and the Chief gave the “one on” to the first uniformed warder that was going our way. This warder was marching a single prisoner towards the prison gate, a man I had seen once or twice but with whom I had never spoken. H was a very small, very thin 119

man, with horn-rimmed spectacles (which at that time were most unusual in an English prison. Generally, if your eyes were bad, you wore cheap steelrimmed glasses, which were all right, but which looked very proletarian.) The little fellow said a wide word and told me he was going to the hospital. Promptly I told the escorting warder that I was in no hurry, and that he could drop me at the blacksmith’s shop after he’d left Murray—the chap with the spectacles—at the hospital. The screw agreed, and we marched on ahead of him. “Tem guff”, began Murray, in the bat. “Know Alec. Dratsabs. Know Rohan. Want a twirl? Want any stuff? Got any oners or smash? What strength teserof?” “I had intended to have a talk with you”, he was saying. “I know Alec— what a lot of bastards those Moor warders were. I know Dick Rohan, too. Do you want to bribe a warder? Are you in need of any tobacco? Have you any pound notes or silver money? What’s going on in the forest?” “Twirl later”, I told him. “Half pig. No oners. Nicker smash. Eight hard. Teserof—nant.” In the abbreviated jail talk I was merely answering his remarks. I did not want to finance a warder at that moment, but might later on. I was in the market for half an ounce of pigtail tobacco. I had no onepound notes, but I had a pound in silver. For this last I would accept half-apound of pigtail tobacco. What was going on in the forest was of no importance for the moment. (It takes up a lot more space in normal speech or writing!) On the way to the hospital, Murray got round to mentioning that he played chess. Also that he read only detective stories. Also that he was “lagged for the jargoons”. All over the world I had heard bits and pieces about the 120

jargoon lark, but I had never seen one of the practitioners before. Up to then I had been visualizing a tall man of flamboyant appearance and speech,

possibly an Arabian or an Indian—someone who could do the kind of Indian rope trick switch-over which was the heart and soul of the jargoon lark. Here was a slim, pale, horn-rimmed person who talked about chess. Offhand I would have rated Murray’s chances of working the jargoon lark on any normal drunk as about fifty-fifty. But the drunk would have to be drunk. I just could not see the diminutive Murray “pushing the jargs” on anyone else. Briefly, the jargoon lark is a simple case of sleight-of-hand. With one difference from an ordinary conjuring trick—the mug is not allowed to see and handle the rabbit before or after it comes out of the conjurers hat. He is allowed, and expected, to handle the jargoons. I told Murray that I “fullied a guff”. Or, in other words, I hoped for the pleasure of a long talk with him in the near future. (The jail talk is very time-saving.) Then, as I was turning away, Murray leant a little closer. “Punnim or oppostay”, he said casually, and went on up the steps with the hospital warder. I preceded my own screw, towards the blacksmith’s shop, thinking furiously. It was one more case of something to which I, and other writers, have often referred—the illative thinking of the convict stations. It is met with all over the world, at Dartmoor and Parkhurst, at Devil’s Island and Biribi and Noumea. Again and again the observer is dumbfounded by examples of what appears to be hundred per cent telepathy. Murray had asked me, casually, to put him on the queue for an escape or, alternatively, for a gift-parcel. The shock nearly gave me heart failure! I was very abstracted indeed when I got back to the ironworks. 121

The blacksmith-warder was eager to know what I intended, or what I might suggest, about the forestry problem. But I hardly heard him. The diminutive Murray had not only read my thoughts. His remark showed that he knew things, about my plans, which up to that second had not been clear to me! Dick Rohan had done the same thing about Stinker Stephen. I am reminded of a comic drawing I saw in a newspaper once. Two “fortune-tellers”, men, are playing poker. Each has five cards in front of him, face downwards. One of them waves to his opponent’s cards,

without touching them, or his own. “You have the ace and queen of hearts”, he says with a bored yawn. “Also the five and nine of spades, and the seven of clubs. What have I got?” Some animals think like that, even nowadays, but most have forgotten. All men will think that way, some time in the future. But most are incapable now. Only here and there, in the monastic seclusion of a Buddhist centre, or the isolation of a hermit’s cave, or the lone long nightfall of a convict station, it shows itself even today. Illation some psychologists call it, and the term seems just right. It is not telepathy. Nor is it magic. Nor logic. It is the habit of thought mocked at by peasant people when they say of a man that if he saw shells he’d guess eggs. Except that the illative fellow doesn’t have to see anything so gross and material as an egg-shell. He can make do with a wisp of mist, a tone of voice, a smile or the absence of a smile, a cough or a laugh or a single dropped word. All con men are wonderfully illative. It seems to be a prime necessity of that particular trade. Then, since the jargoon lark is a highly specialised form of the con—it was no wonder that bellery chess-player, 122

Goggles Murray, had been reading my thoughts. (Bellery is only a joking way of calling a man a bastard—it is like making sure to laugh when you call a man a liar.) Briefly, I had allowed myself to be forced, to be pressured, into “working with the twirls”—which is almost the last degradation in a place like Parkhurst. Normally I would not have been interested in the problem of getting the big stacks of timber out of the forest and into the prison. The reformers had ordered walls. The authorities had built them. Somehow they seemed to have destroyed the forestry business. Well, let them get on with it. As far as I was concerned, there was no problem. A wide man did not work with the screws. If the screws wished to destroy the forestry works, they mustn’t ask me to undo their destructive acts. Of course if the heads of the wide people wanted a favour—that would be different.

Thus there is no need for a language lesson, to translate the phrase Murray had spoken to me in the vestibule of the Parkhurst hospital. Punnim means a gift-parcel, a kind of Father Christmas present. Oppostay is an escape. Murray was game for either! That was because he had read my thoughts while we were on our way in to the hospital. So he was able to put into a three-word phrase all the million things that had been whirling through my mind from the moment I stood on the platform and looked over the wall at the stacks of timber. The reader is here to meet the criminal class, not to hear anyone’s secrets betrayed. Thus it will only be necessary to say that I had to “chat” two convicts before I could decide to go ahead with the plan that had occurred to me. That was because no wide man, unless for some purpose approved by his chinas, will do anything whatever that 123

co-operates with jailers, executioners, torturers, police or detectives. That holds in every country in the world. The minor officials at Belsen and Auschwitz, who murdered prisoners by the million, were not wide men. They were all normal respectable citizens. The public hangman in London or Leeds was not a member of the criminal class—he was a normal law-abiding citizen like the readers. (But only, I hope, like some readers!) If there were convict gangs at work, cutting big trees as they did before the building of the wall, then the transport of that timber, all the way round outside the walls, would call for the making of a new road and would cost X pounds. At the same time, as the foreman of works had pointed out, the outer wall of a convict prison is not a place to have gantries and cranes, slopes and slides and helter-skelters. Everything of that kind is barred. Because someone might climb in or out, mightn’t they? My own suggestion of a tunnel seemed to be the only practicable idea put forward. That was, until I had seen the two “heads” and had got the goahead. Then, in less than a fortnight, my two mates and I had started the “timber shift”. I had been warned, by the works foreman’s early remarks, that I would not be allowed to build anything like a crane or a gantry or an escalier. Security first is, naturally enough, rule one in a convict prison.

But there was no road, and no money or equipment to make one. All I had was a narrow path through the woods, winding hither and thither to follow the gentle slope of the wooded hillside. Nearly two miles it went, from the timber-stacking place to the main gate of the jail. Hopeless, it looked. But I knew something already, from my work in the forest. I remembered it that morning, when I looked over the wall at the stacks of timber. There was in fact a 124

gentle slope along the path, for every inch of the way. So, as I have told earlier, although I talked jocularly of tunnels I knew already what I was going to do. My mates and I did a survey first. Then we got a warder and a gang of men to cut down the trees at any point where the path turned at too sharp an angle. We left them at that, and got another warder with another gang to level and concrete a narrow path, all the way through the wood, in the middle of the existing track. Then we went back to the blacksmith’s shop for a fortnight’s hard work. We spent the fortnight making “cradles”. The cradles became famous later on, under that same name. But while we were making them we called them push-chairs. They were, in effect, tiny little prams, each on four wide-rimmed, castiron wheels about eight inches high. The body of the pram was just a metal platform about two feet square, with a slight hollow fore and aft where the trunk of a tree might rest. We made forty of those prams—and I am proud to say that I never tried even one. Half a dozen times during the fortnight, when they had begun to see what I was aiming at, the blacksmith-warder and the Chief Engineer had suggested a trial run of some kind. But I refused point-blank, and they both approved. What I was after was the old, old stand-by of Man the primitive inventor. When in difficulties, you don’t try to be God, creating things and making new forces. You see if you can dope out some way to use the forces of nature instead. That was what I wanted to do in the forest. I knew that the path sloped gently downward for the whole distance. Well, I was game to use the force of gravity—I wasn’t such a mug as to think I could better that.

No one was supposed to be in that part of Parkhurst 125

Forest, except the few men who were working on our “project”, and the engineer officials. But on the morning when we rigged the first lot of “prams” half the convict station—with their warders of course—seemed to have business in that part of Wight Island. We rigged ten “prams” to a thick heavy tree-trunk forty feet long, fastening them with chains. When all the prams were in place, and when the tree-trunk lay along the narrow concrete path, it looked like a giant caterpillar, or like a nightmare creeper from one of Walt Disney’s films. I rigged a ten-foot chain on either side, at the front, and put three men on each chain, not to haul but to steer. Then I gave the big tree-trunk a flathanded push—with one hand. “Take him away, sir”, I ordered. The wheels began to revolve, ever so slowly. The huge lump of timber moved forward, on the gently sloping path. At the first bend the chain-men hauled the trunk straight, and it wiggled its way ahead, looking more like a massive caterpillar than ever. We all walked behind, slowly. It took a long time, nearly an hour, to cover the two miles to the gate. But there were no difficulties. The big caterpillar crawled every inch of the way on his own feet. I felt like Benvenuto Cellini when he invented, and tried, the first heavymissile cannon. Of course everyone was delighted, among the Chief Engineer’s and works foreman’s crowd. But they weren’t half as pleased as I was. Except that I was not thinking of caterpillars or cradles or tree-trunks or prams. I was thinking of punnim and oppostay. When Murray had used those three words to me, on the first day of my forest survey, he had in fact shot right ahead of me, to think of the time when I would have the 126

timber-machine made—whatever it was going to be—and working―wherever it was going to work. He had grasped everything that was in my mind. Indeed, one might say he had grasped some of the things that were going to be in my mind. And it was not guess-work. Nor was it logic. It was, as I have said, illation.

One simple example occurs to me here, which may help to illustrate the mental differences between some of the wide folks and normal people. It is quite impossible to tell a lie to a wide person. There are no exceptions. The thing is proved a thousand times a day. Standards of culture have nothing to do with it. E.g., a wide millionaire (there are one or two) and a wide fairground man will have the same immunity from the kid-stakes. Even if one is illiterate and the other a scholar. Thus, on the first day, I was not at all interested in the difficulty confronting the prison authorities. As far as I was concerned, they could stick the eighty-four thousand tons of timber right up the prison reformers’ arses. But as soon as the foreman of works began to give a list of all the things one must not have—cranes and gantries and helter-skelters—then I began to sit up and take notice. Because all the objects the foreman named were barred by the security code. Nothing of that kind was allowed to be near a prison wall, inside or out. For obvious reasons. One sweeping rule made it clear that all objects of over six feet in length were barred from being left lying anywhere within eighty feet inside or outside a prison wall. That effectively anticipated the wishes of anyone who wanted to break out or break in. (Oppostay or punnim, in fact!) So, in transporting the timber I had had to give up all the many easy ways of getting those logs over the wall. Also I had had to avoid the use of any apparatus such as iron girders, or long planks, or railway lines—I had to 127

avoid everything over six feet and everything that looked like, or could be used as, a ladder. Well, I had done all that. Not exactly by royal appointment, no. But with the say-so and the go-ahead of the wide folk. All that was necessary now was to wait for the dark nights. Then the Punnim and Oppostay Transport Company Unlimited would have its inaugural trial run. It was the first week in June. I had about four months to wait. So I settled down to pass the time with as much patience as I could muster. Whatever happened to the over-the-wall travel route, I would not be blamed, for two reasons.

The first reason was that I would not be a director of that tourist venture. I would only be the (innocent) blacksmith who made the (innocent) cradles. But the second reason was far more important. (That is, if anyone bears in mind the fact that I was a lifer—and a lifer who had already been frustrated in one escape-move, at Dartmoor.) The second reason was that, whenever the row broke about the misuse of the cradles, I expected to be very far from Parkhurst. So I counted down the summer days and passed the time chatting Bill Murray about jargoons. 128

CHAPTER NINE

DIAMONDS—OR AS GOOD AS     No one seems to be certain as to what language the word “jargoons” may belong to. It could be Afrikaans, or Basuto, or Swahili, or it could be mispronounced Dutch. The word is spelt and pronounced in a dozen different ways. But in England and the United States it is always “Jargoons”. The people who follow the jargoon lark are of many different physical types. But they are all the same, mentally. They are all mystics. There seems to be some kind of enchantment or fascination about the jargoons, a form of hypnotism. So that the people who peddle jargoons will never touch any other lark. There is a definite and obvious pleasure and self-expression, a kind of fetishistic ecstasy, in the actual handling of the stones. This fetishism seems to give the jargoon man a marked satisfaction, quite apart from the fact that it is his living. Jargoon men have even been known to play with the jargoons “out of hours”, as it were. Devotion could hardly go further. Billy Murray, like so many other jargoon people, had lived in South Africa as a young man. Murray was born wide—his parents were both wide people, both from Scotland. Murray Senior had been lagged at Peterhead, in Scotland, and had cleared out to South Africa just after the Boer War (i.e., at the beginning of the twentieth century.) He had been lucky throughout in Africa, had never fallen again. 129

Old Bill Murray had been a confidence man, “working” the masses of new-rich people who thronged Johannesburg and Bloemfontein at that time. It was taken for granted that young Billy would emulate his parent, and the youngster adored the idea. Then one night, in a saloon, one of young Billy’s mates cheated a miner out of eight small diamonds. Billy was there when it happened, and he was in another saloon, with his mate, later on, when the eight diamonds were examined.

They were not worth a million—more likely about £60 for the eight. But of course, as the result of ten minutes’ talk and the price of three whiskies, they were money for nothing. Billy Murray’s mate let him have four of the diamonds for eight pounds. Murray knew he would get £30 for them, probably £35, so he jumped at the chance. Next day it transpired that the “mate” had done the same kind of deal with several other youngsters. Also it appeared that he had left—for Cape Town, some said. It was not until much later in the day that Billy Murray discovered that the four good-looking stones were worth practically nothing. That was Murray’s first introduction to the jargoons. Perhaps it might be as well to make one thing clear at the beginning. The jargoons are nearly always sold to jewellers, or to people who know all about diamonds! Yet no jeweller in the world, if offered a jargoon, would be deceived for ten seconds, or for one second, into thinking it was a diamond. Then why in God’s name do they buy them? Why do they pay big money for jargoons? In London, Amsterdam, New York, Buenos Aires, Berlin and Bombay—there, every day in the year, vast sums of money are paid out for jargoons. Why? Straight swiz, say the fraud men. Dairy-take, assert the 130

larceny people. Binnie Hale, grins the con man. Pure hoist, point out the shoplifters. Cert buzz, claim the pickpockets. They are all wrong. That is my opinion, after fifty-one years’ experience of the wide people. The jargoon lark is neither a simple fraud nor a larceny nor a confidence-trick. (Binnie Hale = the tale = the con.) Nor is it simple subtraction, or hoist, the shoplifter’s work, nor yet is it the buzz, pocketpicking. The jargoon lark takes in some part of all those trades! But it includes one thing more, the most important of all. That one thing is the fact that a jargoon looks more like a diamond than any diamond. Imagine a horse-dealer, in the market for a valuable race-horse, an animal worth perhaps twelve thousand pounds. This man knows all about thoroughbred horses. That is why he is wealthy enough to buy a twelve thousand pound horse instead of one costing fifty guineas. He knows about height, and shortness, and too-great length, and fetlocks and cannon-bones and roarers and tubers and rogues—he knows what a

really top-rank horse should look like. So, when he is confronted with a patchy, droopy, nervous animal, he does not make the mistake of offering fifty guineas. Knowing his trade, he examines that horse, and in ten minutes he knows that the animal is right. Length, bones, stifle, height, un-tubing and all the rest—a clear bill. Then the pedigree. That too is satisfactory. Just for the sake of making trade he might offer eleven thousand five hundred. He might. But mostly he doesn’t bother. Twelve thousand they said, and the animal is what they said, so twelve thousand it is. An inexperienced buyer might have offered a hundred pounds for that horse. But the horse-dealer knows—it is his trade to know. No matter how droopy and unkempt and plebeian the horse may look, the seasoned horsedealer knows. 131

Well, what is that horse-dealer to say if he finds a horse with the same or a better pedigree, with the same or a better individual history, and with a similar physique but with a much better appearance? Confronted with a horse that looks and sounds worth twelve thousand pounds, that buyer is apt to be sold. Sold? Well, that is how a “ringer” is flogged. Horse-dealers use the word “ringer” for a horse which looks a super thoroughbred but is really worthless. The jargoon is a ringer. That is why the most experienced, the most hard-boiled people in the world, the professional jewellers, buy the jargoons. They buy them every day. Anywhere from Amsterdam to Tokyo, via London and Paris, the jewellers dicker and trade for parcels of diamonds. They argue about the quality of the stones, and they handle them, and weigh them, and look at them under magnifying glasses. Then they squabble some more about the price. They argue again about the quality, trying to beat the seller down. They handle the stones again, to point out real or imaginary flaws, and in the long run they agree on the price. The jeweller takes the packet of stones, in their little wash-leather satchel. He hefts the packet for a last time, then closes the satchel and drops it into his attaché-case and pays the money.

Nearly all those deals are in cash, because neither buyer nor seller wants anything to do with inquiries or delays. As often as not the vendor would prefer cash anyway. That is all. The purchasing jeweller goes away with the parcel of newlyacquired stones. Presumably he puts them in his safe when he gets back to his office. It may be an hour, or a day, or a week, before he discovers that he has bought a handful of jargoons. At 132

that stage he generally says that he knew the fellow was a crook, and that the fellow must have changed the packets, or picked his pocket, or something. Or something! That is the jargoon lark. The “something” is human nature. Every jargoon-peddler is a psychologist, a humorist, and a mystic. All three of those professions call for a profound knowledge of human nature. That is really the whole story. Bill Murray was a recidivist when I met him at Parkhurst. That is to say, he wore no stripes or stars or bars, so I knew he was not a first-offender or a second-offender. (Did I not mention that the stars and bars and stripes had now—at a certain small expense to the reader and his or her friends— replaced the cap alphabet?) A first-offender would now have had a red star on each sleeve. A man with one lagging behind him would have had narrow stripes on his trouserlegs and coat-collar. Etc. Etc. (And if the reader says that a lot of silly daft old blatherskites have been playing around with their nursery-rhyme nonsense at the public’s expense— then the reader is wrong. Those people are no mugs, and some of them were born in the racket, just as Bill Murray was born in the con game!) Bill had no badges or stars or anything, so I knew he was a recidivist. He had been lagged twice, each time in England. Also he had had a two-year sentence, at an Irish prison. Seven years and seven months he had been in prison altogether. He was about forty-two when I met him, and he had been on the jargoon lark since he was seventeen. Twenty-five years. He had lived in Cape Town, Amsterdam, Paris, Nice, Cannes, Rome, Naples, Alexandria, Bombay, Melbourne, Sydney, Liverpool, Dublin,

Mount Joy (a prison in 133

Ireland), Belfast, Glasgow, New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Marseilles, Cherbourg, London, Dartmoor and Parkhurst. That’s a lot of travelling. But Bill Murray liked moving on. Which was a good thing. Because in the jargoon lark you are always catching a train or a plane just before the detectives arrive. So the boys get around. Murray had a quiet, dry, humorous way of telling a story which was vastly entertaining. He told a dozen yarns about the jargoons, and each one was better than the last. That was in spite of the fact that one knew the end of the story! The end would be that the mug paid over twenty thousand pounds for the big packet of genuine diamonds which he had examined so closely. Then, satisfied with his own business acumen, the mug would place the parcel of genuine diamonds in his attaché-case, and drive off in his Rolls-Royce with the packet of jargoons. That was always the climax. But Bill Murray usually told the yarn so well that the hearer had bought the jargoons as well as the steamer. One of his yarns was about a crotchety old jeweller in Liverpool. The jeweller in question had been dead for some years, so there will be no harm in mentioning his very attractive name—Snuffy Guffy. (Guffy was his real name. The boys added the first word for obvious reasons.) Bill Murray explained that Snuffy Guffy was as rich as Croesus and as mean as a flint-skinner and as straight as a battered corkscrew. Snuffy would not, Murray said, throw a rope to his drowning mother unless she first signed for eight ropes received. A “fence”. The reader probably knows that a fence is a receiver of stolen property. They are all very unlovable people—an occupational predisposition, perhaps. Snuffy Guffy, Bill related, had made a fortune out of 134

flogging big vulgar slabs of jewellery to sporting people who’d had luck, or to tarts who had found a rich mug, or to actresses who didn’t like imitations. Snuffy had no imitations. All his stuff was genuine, but none of it was expensive.

That was because half of it was stolen property, and the other half came from illicit diamond buyers, which was the next thing to being stolen. Thus Snuffy Guffy could afford to cut his prices down hard. Thus, also, Billy Murray was welcome one morning when he turned up in Snuffy Guffy’s private office, Because he had a good-sized packet of uncut diamonds which he said he had bought in Amsterdam, for £11,500. But one look at the contents of the packet had told Snuffy Guffy he was dealing with an illicit diamond buyer from the Rand in South Africa. “I see you come from Cape Town, Mr Er—”, Guffy remarked, after his preliminary survey and after he had returned the packet of stones to Bill. “Or would it be Bloemfontein?” Murray coloured up, and looked embarrassed, and said after that he came from everywhere—everywhere, see. Whereat Guffy smiled, and there was a pause, the caller laughed, and they got on well together after that. They talked a little about prices, and a little about the quality of the stones. (It is the usual thing, in horse-dealing, and diamond-selling, and the marriage market, and the discussion of blackmail preliminaries, and in talks before the formation of a Cabinet. Each side to the discussion seeks an opportunity to show the other fellow how much he knows, and to suggest that he could say more if he liked. The usual thing.) Twice Billy Murray had mentioned the price he had paid for the parcel of uncut stones, in Amsterdam. The first time it was £11,500. The second time it was “near enough twelve thousand nicker”. Snuffy Guffy smiled 135

each time. This was all usual. “All right then”, he said snappily, at the correct stage of the interview. “Let’s have another look at ‘em, and I’ll make you a price.” Bill Murray put the wash-leather satchel on the table, Snuffy Guffy poured out the stones and fingered them over. Then he looked up. “Best I’ve ever seen in my life”, he said. “These is the tops.” Billy Murray all but died of heart failure. What Snuffy Guffy was supposed to say was that the diamonds were flawed, that one or two of them had been cut carelessly, that a couple of the smaller ones weren’t the proper water, and that, in short, the packet of diamonds wasn’t worth three thousand pounds, let alone eleven thousand five hundred. But that, seeing Mr Er— had come such a long way, Snuffy Guffy was willing to stretch a

point and let him have three thousand pounds for the lot. Would that be okay? That was what Snuffy should have said, more or less. That was the usual drill, when you were bargaining with a fence. But instead of that he moved the stones here and there on the table, and looked up at the vendor again. “Best ever”, he murmured, half to himself “I must have this lot.” He paused, and glanced at the stones again, then back at the customer. “Two quid be all right?” he asked. “Yes?” Billy Murray’s right hand slid down, unobtrusively, towards the hippocket where he carried a small revolver. Fences are unscrupulous people as a rule. Businessmen, not wide folks, they generally work in with the police, and will fleece an unfortunate burglar or bandit without a qualm. Unless he can show them that they would be hastening their own demise. But almost immediately Bill Murray knew the fence was not going in for barefaced robbery. He was not going to pay two pounds for property worth twelve thousand 136

pounds. Murray could feel that Snuffy Guffy was not “taking him on”. Then what in God’s name was he after? All that only took Murray one second. In less than another second he realized what he had done. The operation he had in hand, like every jargoon swiz, necessitated the use of two precisely similar packets. One packet contained genuine diamonds, worth perhaps ten or twelve thousand pounds. The other packet contained the same number of similar, or even betterlooking stones. These were the jargoons, and might be worth ten or twelve pounds. Diving in and out of his brief-case, Billy Murray had got the packets mixed. Instead of the genuine diamonds, he had passed the packet of jargoons to Snuffy Guffy, who promptly enthused over them and offered their owner two pounds in payment! Murray braced himself up to grab the jargoons and dash out of the office. Then, instead, he lay back in his chair and roared with laughter. “Wait a bit”, he enjoined. “Hold on there. Them’s the jargoons you’ve got. Tom Gowland’s jargoons.” Tom Gowland was another fence in Liverpool, now also deceased I am glad to say. Tom’s technique was to bargain about stolen property with a

wide man. Then, in the middle of discussing the price, Tom would dial the Central Police Station and have a chat with his friend Detective Inspector So-and-So. Thereafter Gowland would offer the screwsman or bandit a pittance, remarking with a grin that there were lots of empty cells in Walton. (That was the big jail near Liverpool.) Only the smallest and least-informed people of the Liverpool underworld went near Gowland. But for Billy Murray to go and see Gowland, on a large-sized diamond deal which was really a jargoon swiz—that was very funny indeed. Besides, it was good news. Because Tom Gowland was Snuffy Guffy’s worst enemy. 137

(The illative thinking! The illation, the near-telepathy, of Bill Murray the jargoon-peddler! He had chosen the only subject in the world which could have drawn the shrewd and suspicious Guffy’s attention away from the business in hand. The business in hand was the purchase of a packet of diamonds. But Guffy was thinking of that bastard Tom Gowland.) “Gowland?” he grinned, and licked his lips. So the jargoons were for Tom, eh? Honest Tom Gowland, the bastard. Couldn’t Mr Er— give a hint —what had he in mind for Gowland the twister? Mr Er— grinned maliciously, and said he would tell Snuffy Guffy later. He said various rude things about Mr Gowland’s parents, and about his future. With Snuffy Guffy he licked his lips at the thought of what was coming to Honest Tom. Also he repeated his promise to tell Guffy more, later. Mr Er— would be in Liverpool for about three weeks. Had two more packets coming from Cape Town—he meant Amsterdam. Would show Guffy. The Gowland do was next week. Unobtrusively, while he talked, Bill had taken back the packet of jargoons. When Snuffy Guffy resumed negotiations, and asked for the packet of diamonds again, Bill gave him the correct packet that time, and allowed him to “play to his heart’s content”. (All the jargoon men bring that phrase into their stories somewhere. At one stage or another, in all their tales, the mug just plays to his heart’s content, either with the packet of genuine diamonds, or with the jargoons.) Thereafter the Guffy affair proceeded according to plan—Murray’s plan. The diamonds were picked up and laid down, turned over, held up to the

light, pointed at in ridicule, stroked in praise, thrust aside in contempt, cuddled together in affection, and so on. An ordinary diamond deal. 138

At the end the price was agreed. Five thousand two hundred and ten pounds was what Mr Er— called a bloody swiz and Snuffy Guffy claled a fair market price. Bill put away the jargoons, pattering a little about Tom Gowland’s coming good fortune. Snuffy paid the money, in notes, making seven unsuccessful attempts to cheat on the counting. In the long run Bill Murray caught him slipping out two of the five-pound notes. He pointed out the swindle gloatingly. Also he grinned and boasted about his own shrewdness. Busy boasting, he failed to notice that Snuffy Guffy was cheating him out of the last ten pounds, the odd tenner. He was hesitating, with one hand outstretched, over the pile of money but not touching it, when Snuffy pushed the batches of bank-notes together. He shoved the pile a few inches towards Murray, and he abstracted four more of the fivers while Murray was busy with his briefcase. Then Guffy examined the diamonds, saw that they were correct as to number and quality and condition, and closed the little satchel. With his right hand he opened the drawer of his table. “Hold on there”, ordered Murray in a furious tone. He lifted the money in both hands, and dumped it on the desk. “What’s this?” he demanded. “Robbery with violence or something? Gimme them sparklers.” He reached for the packet of diamonds, and made to thrust the money at the fence. “Now wait”, pleaded Guffy. “Wait, Mr Er—. A small mistake. A small mistake.” Reluctantly he produced one more five-pound note from the drawer. Reluctantly the caller released the packet at which he had grabbed. Then Murray stowed away his money, and got out of that office, and headed for the Dublin steamer. He may have been bound down the Mersey, towards Ireland, 139

about the time that Snuffy Guffy discovered that he had the jargoons again. Every jargoon story is like that one, in essence. Except for the last word. There cannot be many such tales which start with the jeweller looking at a packet of worthless baubles, and saying enthusiastically that he simply must have them!

140

CHAPTER TEN

THE GREAT DIPPER     In astronomy and aquatics and amusement—mass amusement of the fairground type—one comes on this same phrase, the great dipper, which is at the head of this chapter. But the chapter is not about constellations or swimming races or swings or roundabouts. It is about the chief of the South London whizz mob, the head of the buzz lark south of the Thames, the Number One pickpocket of all Southern England. The reader must meet Terry Mackesson. Let it be said at once that the reader might be forgiven for having failed to notice Terry. He was almost invisible—many pickpockets are. Apart from the fact that Terry was very small—four feet eleven and a half thin and pale and meek-looking, and little more than six stone in weight—Terry was easy to overlook. It would have been easy, but it would have been a serious error of judgment. At the time when I met him, Terry Mackesson was the “tops of the buzz lark”, which is to say that he was the acknowledged Number One in the pocket-picking business, anywhere from Birmingham to the South Coast. Any person who carried large sums of money, or important papers, would have had very good cause not to overlook Terry Mackesson. He was a little terror at “the dip”, at picking a pocket. It is always pleasant when an author can recount some personal experience in developing a narrative. When a famous steeplechase rider is contributing an article on the Grand National for an important weekly paper, it is nice if he can turn aside now and then to say, “I remember one time.” 141

Well, I can personally vouch for the authenticity of Terry Mackesson’s reputation. Because I have seen him take a wallet from the tunic pocket of a grumpy old senior warder, examine the contents, take out two pound notes, and replace the wallet, all in the space of about forty seconds. That was in the crowded tailors’ shop of Parkhurst Prison, with three other warders, and forty prisoners, looking on.

True, the “dairy-taken”, i.e., the attention-diverter, was good in that particular case. But then it had to be. Four warders and forty convicts! A huge Yorkshireman, purple-faced and goggle-eyed, started up from his seat, only a yard or two from the old senior warder. Making incoherent noises, nearly black in the face, and pop-eyed, the big fellow pointed again and again to his mouth. He swung from side to side, and made more of the formless horrible sounds. The old senior warder, and the other warders, reached down towards their truncheon-pockets. Then they stared at the convict in consternation, while he waved his hands and gasped and choked. It appeared that he had swallowed his false teeth, and was dying before their eyes. Only two people did not look at that big Yorkshireman. I was the other. Terry Mackesson was really “buzzing the principal”, robbing the head warder, to impress me! He had told me not to take my eyes off his hands for any reason whatsoever. I had even been warned in advance about the “dairy-take”, but even then it was hard not to follow the big chap’s hand and face movements. Thus, trying to obey Terry, I only saw the Yorkshireman and the warders from the corner of my eye. Ninety-nine per cent of my attention went to Terry’s hands. As far as I am aware, no one since the days of Miguel Cervantes has written with knowledge, understanding 142

or experience about a pickpocket or his modus operandi. Mind you, it is no wonder! Very few people can have seen a real “tops of the buzz lark” person at work. Thus almost any reader may be interested in this account of a whizz, a pocket-picking. Because most of the activity, except the last little bit, seemed to be in slow motion, very slow motion indeed. Terry practically crawled over to the old warder’s side. Slowly and carefully—while the warder gaped at the apparently demented Yorkshireman, Terry opened the old man’s overcoat buttons. Still slowly, he opened one button of a tunic pocket, and fetched out a wallet. I nearly had hysterics while Mackesson looked over the contents of the wallet. He took out something—I could not see what—and closed the wallet. Thenputback- tunicpocketbuttonovercoatstepaway. The latter part of

the operation was like that—it was lightning. The whole thing was over in less than a minute. By the time the big Yorkshireman had been calmed down, after he had given a few coughs and announced that he hadn’t swallowed his teeth after all—by that time Terry Mackesson had vanished the two pounds, plus any other contraband he was carrying. But even there the expertise, the wildanimal competence, of the competent pickpocket, came to the fore. Terry had made a small bundle of all the bits and pieces. He hastily put in his few fag-ends, his few bits of pigtail, the two pound notes, an illegal letter from his wife, and nine shillings in silver. Then he popped the lot into a nearby mailbag which was being repaired. That was “in case of a tumble”, he explained to me later. If the old warder had become suspicious, and had ordered a special search of the tailor’s shop, then One-o-nine, Mackesson, T., was going to be purer than the untrodden snow. Incidentally, the mailbag was the work-job of a grass, a bogey of Terry’s. 143

Meaning an informer who was an enemy. Every modern convenience! There was no tumble and no frisk—that is, no suspicion and no search. Wherefore, before knock-off time that evening, Terry recovered his property from the grass’s mailbag, and bunged it in his own plant. The plant business is one of the tragi-comic features of life on a convict station. Briefly, a convict is not allowed to have a plant. But if he has not, then he dies or goes mad. The steamers, the inexperienced people who obey all the rules, naturally do not have plants. Although any intelligent four-year-old child will make a plant for itself if hampered or frustrated. Ask any observant mother, or any intelligent matron of a nursery school! The authorities—i.e., the penologists—seek always to drive the helpless people of the big jails deeper into the morass of animalism. The convicts are forced down to brute level, compelled to live a life comparable to that of wolves and bears and foxes. Some, the steamers, cannot stand that strain or make the necessary adaptations. They live as the convict code expects them to live. That is, they survive for a while as shells, deprived of manhood or initiative. But many of them had not a great deal of manhood to start with, and would never

have had much initiative anyway. So they soon die, or pass on to the mental homes. Others, the grasses, try to avoid being killed or driven mad. But, lacking courage, they try to survive by currying favour with the officials. Sometimes they live through a long lagging, and go out from the prison, and starve around or act as police informers. But that is a small minority. Mostly the grasses die like the steamers, after a few years of being kicked and beaten and “chivved” (razor-slashed) 144

for their grassing. Hated by the convicts and despised by the warders, they seldom last long. Those two categories comprise more than four-fifths of the prison populace. The remaining fraction is almost entirely made up of professional criminals, wide people. The wide men fight back, against the suppressions and the deprivations. They develop a wild-animal competence, a jungle technique of survival, which would be of tremendous interest to any anthropologist—if anthropologists did not take all their “facts” from the penologists! Let me shorten the statement here. I am a writer, a broadcaster, a civilized person. I work on film scripts and television shows, and I earn my living in cities like London or Paris or Rome. I do not live in jungles or forests—except for pleasure! But if I am in a film studio, discussing a script with eight other men, I can smell each one of those eight people separately, and I know his scent, apart from the other seven, without looking at him. Furthermore, I could kill any one of those eight people—or all of them if necessary—with my knees and hands alone. More important, perhaps, I could lamp-fork, (i.e., blind) any or all of those eight men in less than one minute. Going out from that studio, into a corridor in an ordinary office building, I can hear every word, in every office, as I walk along outside. I can hear a man in sandals sixty feet away. Also—and again important—I can lip-read every word of a conversation at thirty yards’ distance. I have no need of these accomplishments nowadays. Sometimes, indeed, they are an embarrassment. But the penologists taught me, and I learnt those things in the jungles of Parkhurst and Dartmoor, where only the efficient jungle animals survive.

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Having said that much, anyone will understand why I smoke a cigarette turned inward, with my hand cupped close around the lighted end. The reader will also comprehend the fact that I can strike a light in four separate ways, without using a match. One amusing part of the jungle training is that, even now, I will clear an escape route from any and every place where I lie down to sleep. (Otherwise I will only lie down to wake.) This is fairly ridiculous, if I am in an hotel room in London or Paris! But jungle habits are not easy to learn— or unlearn. Perhaps the use of a “plant” will not now appear so foolish. Every man in a convict station, if he is a wide man, has a plant, just as a bear has a cave or a wolf has a hide. In his plant a convict keeps the few bits of things which are himself the scraps which are forbidden by the penologists. There will be a tinder-box, with flint and steel to make a light. Generally there is a little box with tobacco mixtures maturing. (Convicts “make” a lot of tobacco—some of it better than a lot of the stuff one buys.) Often there is a blob of invisible ink, which can be priceless at times. There may be a few shillings in silver, or a pound note or two. Also a few cigarettes. Sometimes a bit of writing-paper. That would be all. Unless, of course, that convict was a prize bloody fool, risking bread and water and solitary for a lot of nonsense. That is, if he kept in his plant the scribbled pages of a book like this. But very few wide convicts would be so foolish! That last sentence is not written in jest. It is a fact that the wide people, the professional robbers, are strictly practical. They are not interested in arts or theories or sociological diatribes. They rob for a living, like the wolves and the bears and the eagles. The penologists catch them sometimes, and put them in cages, to starve and droop and die. 146

But the wide folk do not droop or die. They fight back, and mostly they survive. That is one reason why no wide person will listen to any talk about prison reform. Like the veriest reactionaries, they dismiss all such thoughts as rubbish.

The jails of England, and of every country in the world, are forcinggrounds of cruelty and injustice. They are training-schools of perjury and falsehood and mean deceit. The wide man does not commit the perjury or tell the lies or work the mean deception. But he does not object to those things. Not at all. When the penologists have done their worst, mostly they will have done it to some poor mug who does not count, or to some rat who is as bad as themselves. The wide men will have steered clear of trouble, because of their jungle training—given to them free by the penologists! To put it more briefly still—can anyone imagine any mug, anywhere, having the audacity, the courage, and the ability, to pick the pocket of a senior warder in front of forty-three witnesses! Little Terry Mackesson did that, not for the two pounds, but to show me that he was in fact tops of his lark. (Just like a bull-buffalo going through his paces, or a leader-wolf demonstrating the slash-and-rip, in play, or a father-eagle swooping on his young ones, just to show off.) Terry Mackesson nearly got me bread and water a dozen times. That would have been for laughing at his yarns, in the quiet of the tailor’s shop. Mackesson was born wide, as so many of the wide people are. His father was a respectable, law-abiding taxi-driver in London. Well—taxi-driver anyway, Terry would remark at that stage. Many taxi-drivers, in many cities, are mugs. But some, fortunately for everyone, aren’t. 147

Terry went to school in a place near London. (I had better not get any nearer, geographically, or the lawyers will do some cutting, because of the next paragraph.) From the age of twelve, young Terry, like many of his friends at school, went out on the hoist and the buzz. Hoisting is shoplifting. The object hoisted may be a sixpenny cake in a chain-store. Or it may be a fortythousand-dollar diamond necklace at a big jeweller’s in New York. The hoist is the hoist, as the shoplifters say. Meaning that it is just as hard to steal sixpenn’orth of sweets in Woolworths as to steal an emerald necklace in Bond Street. The hoist is the hoist. Very early in his “career”, Terry Mackesson discovered that he liked the hoist but he preferred the buzz. That was because “the buzz was more

private like, and you had to be sharper, and sometimes they gave you more”. Meaning that pocket-picking was more specialized, and more demanding, and sometimes more lucrative. “They gave you”, = “You stole”. The pickpocket never speaks of stealing anything. His friends gave him two pounds, or forty-one pounds, and so on. It is always given! At that time, school-leaving age was fourteen. At the age of fourteen and one day, Terry, with two friends who had also just left school, descended into a large public lavatory at the centre of the suburb where they lived. (It must have been a marvellous school! One hankers to know the histories of a few of that school’s old boys!) Terry and his friends knew a few bits of graft: even then, apparently. For instance, two of the youngsters began to behave suspiciously. They sidled up close to men who were going to wash their hands or faces, and they whispered, and they pointed to breast pockets, and they tapped their own breast pockets. An infant dairy-take, as it were. 148

Meanwhile Terry, the quiet one, the well-behaved boy ignored by the irate and suspicious attendant—Terry approached a man who had taken off his coat and hung it on a hook nearby. The man started to wash, and Terry waited impatiently. That was because he, and his school friends who worked the buzz with him, knew one unbreakable rule. When you were buzzing a steamer in the wash-place, you waited until he had the soap in his eyes. No one knew why. But there it was, like so many of those interesting chapters in the Buddhist and Mohammedan and other scriptures. Meaning the chapters which commence with the simple formula, “And Buddha said”, or some similar remark. They said you never buzzed a mug until he had the soap in his eyes. No one knew who “they” were. But they said it. So Terry Mackesson waited, that first morning, and watched the man cleaning his nails, and brushing his teeth, and soaping his hands and arms. The unscrupulous bastard even shaved, while the unfortunate Terry hovered near the hanging coat, trying to keep his hands from grabbing at the inside pocket. Meanwhile his two boy friends had nearly exhausted their “dairy-take” repertoire. Worst of all, the attendant was obviously getting tired of them or

bored with them. Twice, even, he had glanced over towards the wellbehaved boy who had washed and dried his hands a couple of times already. The two friends had nearly reached the stage of shouting over to know what was holding things up. Terry was almost driven into letting them know that the fellow wouldn’t soap his eyes. But at last the man did in fact have a wash. He soaped his hands, and he soaped his face—and Terry Mackesson shot past his mates with the wallet almost before the soap had lathered. It was incredibly funny to 149

hear the diminutive Terry explain about the soap-in-eyes convention. In fact, Terry was nearly eighteen, and was “getting hot on the buzz” before he decided that soap was unnecessary to success. Wide people are very conservative! That first wallet, apparently, “gave” the three juvenile adventurers eighteen pounds each. Of course at that time, when Terry Mackesson was a youngster, fifty-four pounds was a lot of money. So the small “whizz mob” did not work again for over a month. (Incidentally, when one man picks a pocket that is the buzz. If a crowd of people combine to pick pockets, it is a whizz. The group is a whizz mob. No one’s secrets are being told here—the police use all those terms themselves!) When Terry Mackesson went back to work, about a month after the facewashing buzz, he had a try at working alone. His first attempt was disastrous, and might have meant a spell in jail but for the Mackesson luck. Terry had ventured into the West End of London, a district quite unknown to him. He had looked in at two or three washing places, underground lavatories and so on. But there was no one with soap in his eyes. Then Terry followed a very opulent-looking gentleman into a large salon full of “daft-looking pictures and that”. Seemingly he had found his way into an art gallery in Bond Street. The opulent-looking gentleman had inquired about two pictures, and had asked for a catalogue, and so on. The nimble-eyed Terry had spotted where he carried his wallet—in an inside pocket that would be easy. It looked a “bun poke”—a well-filled wallet too. The opportunity came, and Terry seized it. His man was turning away from a line of pictures, was temporarily obstructed by two other visitors.

(Practically a dairy-take!) Terry and the man were thrown together. Then Terry had the fat wallet—and the man had Terry by the wrist. 150

A detective, who had spotted the juvenile dip, and had given him a chance to show his paces! I said, earlier, that Terry only escaped that day because he was a lucky little devil. But really the operative word is “little”. The detective, about a foot taller than Terry, had him by the right wrist. Five or six people were closing in behind, to see what the trouble was. Terry hadn’t a dog’s chance of breaking through. He didn’t try. Instead, he dived straight between the detective’s legs, fetching the man’s right hand with him. Naturally and inevitably the detective stood on his head. “Dives froo ”is legs”, was the way Terry put it. “So o’ course ‘e don’t let go, not ’im. So ‘e turns cart-wheels, plunk, in among that crowd. So I’m in an’ aht among their legs, wiv abaht twelve people grabbin’ at me, an* then I’m aht.” He paused and drew breath. “So I don’t go near Bond Street for the next five year.” All Terry’s stories were the same. His own cleverness and courage, his own quickness of hand and eye, were never mentioned except casually. But nearly every tale had a similar ending. “So I dives froo the swing door an’ trips ’ead over ’eels”, Terry would narrate. “Copper dives aht an’ falls over me”, the story would proceed. “So I falls back in the uvver side o’ the swing door, an’ gets away.” The element of luck was always there. But I think the irrepressible mischief and good humour, plus his diminutive build, got Terry out of trouble more often than anything else. I was very curious indeed to know about Mackesson’s home life. He was quite devoid of culture, could read a newspaper and that was about all. Travel meant nothing to him; he read hardly any books; music meant “the wireless” and drama meant a variety programme. (Almost, one might say, almost a normal voter!) 151

How much a week did he make? What did he do with his money? Had he ever had a “straight” job? Was he married, and what did his wife think of his way of life? Had he any children, and what did he want them to be?

These were some of the questions I “slipped in” while Terry was reminiscing. (One must not be curious, as I have explained. The boys just clam up.) Terry’s answers to some of my questions surprised me. About money first—Terry “knocked down a century a moon.” He made about twenty-five pounds a week, only “working” about three days a month. He preferred to do his dipping in the City of London, or at the big railway termini. (You got to know how much a chap would give you. Give!) Terry Mackesson never travelled anywhere, had never been to Brighton or Blackpool, didn’t want to go any such place. (Same steamers as anywhere else, Terry said, and how devastatingly true it is!) Neither he nor his wife spent money on showy clothes. They had a comfortable modern house in a suburb of outer London, and they just enjoyed life. Terry had never tried an ordinary job, and would not have liked one; without saying so, he implied that he wanted to be his own master. The Mackessons had two children. Terry’s wife adored “the lark”, although—he told it reluctantly—although all her family were “dead straight mugs”. The children, a boy and a girl, knew or guessed all about their father’s “commercial travelling”. (I wondered if they, too, were at one of those wonderful schools like Terry’s.) Terry hesitated, and evaded, and hummed and hawed a little, when we got round to the question of the children’s future. The girl was thirteen—a big good-looking child apparently—as far as Terry was concerned, that problem solved itself, She would almost certainly get married. To some good young kid, Terry hoped. 152

The boy, though—Terry had an idea that he would like his youngster to be a builder or a carpenter or a librarian. A curious choice of jobs, I noted. Also I noted that Terry, who had never been anything but a “dip”, was now seeing the other side of the medal, and wanted his boy to be a law-abiding citizen. I took care not to make any comment, except to say that bricklayers and carpenters didn’t risk much solitary or bread and water anyway. To my surprise, little Terry flushed up and looked awkward. “Y’see, Jim”, he explained, with many hesitations. “I ain’t stuck up, like —you know that. ‘Course I’d like the nipper to be top o’ the buzz, like ’is ole man. But—He paused, and looked at me suspiciously. I took care not to smile.

“Oh, well”, I said very casually. “That wouldn’t be easy, would it?” Terry stole a glance at me, and decided that I meant no harm. “To tell you the truth, Jim”, he confessed, “the nipper’s the biggest bloody steamer on earth. So—so I’d like to see ‘im in a straight mug’s job ‘fore ’e spends the rest of ‘is bleedin’ life in stir.” It was a painful moment. No fox-hunting father, who discovers that his eldest son wants to be a retail shopkeeper, could ever have known such disappointment and annoyance. I left it at that. To be “tops of the buzz lark” is not given to all, nor to many. 153

CHAPTER ELEVEN

GRASS IS POISON     Early one afternoon, on towards the end of the summer, a chain-gang from Dartmoor came in unexpectedly. By pure accident, I happened to be inside the prison walls—my blacksmith’s shop was out in the compound——when they arrived. I saw the familiar line of men in cheap civilian clothes marching along in single file, from the front gate of the jail. Beside them, also in single file, marched a line of warders, and down the centre of the line ran the usual bright steel chain. I recognized a couple of the warders as Dartmoor men, and wondered who was in the chain-gang. Then I saw a big man, with his left arm in a sling, marching at the head of the line. Dick Rohan, looking badly broken up. Our eyes met, and we passed one another without a sign of recognition. That kind of thing is almost a sine qua non. (I remembered back to my first morning in Dave Kingham’s barber’s chair. “If I call you a flicking bastard that’s all right and the screws don’t watch us. But if I call you Jim they’ll watch. Silly lot of sods—know no better.) But I “spoke to” the convict orderly from the reception cells at the first available moment. To speak to a person, in prison, means the same thing as in business! So I knew that Dick would be well looked after. I sent him a few cigarettes and a few matches and a note telling how to reach me without delay. Then I hurried away and got on with my job, without having my mind on it very much. Rohan’s arrival had coincided with the final planning 154

about the helter-skelter, as a few of the “heads” were already calling it among themselves. (It took more organising than the start of Imperial Airways or the attack on the Normandy beaches!) Always modest and unassuming, I had not insisted on being the very first to sample the outgoing service. But I wanted to go second, and it had already been agreed. A word about the finance will suffice. Each “punnim”, the passing-in of a whole dollop of Father Christmas parcels for various selected men, would

cost a little over a hundred pounds. (It would be nearer five hundred nowadays.) Each exit, with no more than two people per trip, would cost two hundred and fifty pounds. (Over a thousand today.) I had intended to go with a china, who would put in a hundred and fifty pounds, while I chipped in a hundred, all I could raise. Now with the arrival of Dick Rohan―with a ten-year sentence as against the other man’s five, Dick being thirty-three years of age as against the other chap’s twenty-four—that altered everything. I knew my china would not mind Rohan having first go. Also I knew Rohan had plenty of money, so he could put in the bulk of the “fare” as the other chap had intended to do. The query was about Rohan’s wound—the arm in the sling. A wounded man is worse than useless in an escape or a mass fight. Thus I waited impatiently for a letter from Dick, and for word of his injury. If he was going to be admitted to the prison hospital, then I would have to leave him behind me, and there was no knowing when his turn would come round again. (Thousands of ex prisoners-of-war have been through that same drill of taking your turn on an escape-route. I hope some of them are among the readers of this—they will maybe find amusement and nostalgia in recalling their own helter-skelters. But no one else will understand 155

that business of taking your turn, and keeping a mask on your face when you pick a blank.) I got a long letter from Dick, which was discouraging. He would stay out of hospital, if he could, but of course he would be put on light labour. That meant he would be given a job sitting down in the tailor’s shop, or in some such place, and “located with the compound men”. Those last five words meant that he would live in a different cell block, a separate building, away from the stoppo mob. He had not been fighting and had not been beaten up by the screws, as I feared at first. (A man with a broken arm generally had a few cosh-scars on his skull as well!) Rohan had been trapped by a rock-fall, out in Dartmoor quarry. Three of the convicts, and one warder, had been badly hurt, but Dick was the only prisoner sent to the Island. He would have to do the light labour for at least a fortnight, would then try for the heavy work-gangs. Perhaps it would be better if I went ahead and good luck—I was the lifer.

Not a very encouraging situation. Especially with the million worries and alarms of the approaching “D-Day”. There was no real danger of discovery, as far as the actual staircase operation was concerned. For the simple reason that, speaking in material terms, there was nothing to discover. Ten screws, or ten thousand screws, could have watched the punnim-or-oppostay place, for a week on end, and they would have seen nothing wrong. There was nothing wrong. Blessed be the makers of security codes, everything was according to rule. In every jail escape plan, whether it is of one man or five hundred, the main and basic problem is—how to get over, or under, or through, that wall. The other things are details, varying with time and place. But, all the world over, the wall is the main part of a jail. That is why thousands of prisoners have dug tunnels, 156

many with success. Thousands of prisoners have used firearms and coshes and knives, to break through prison gates. But I think hundreds of thousands must have climbed, or set about climbing, the walls of their prisons. It has come down to us, that story, from the earliest days of history. Until yesterday, until the last crop of yams from Kenya and the Congo and Borneo and Dartmoor and Sing Sing. In our case the problem of getting over the wall did not exist. There was no problem! For the first time in history, the authorities would provide a set of scaling-ladders. Or, to put it more exactly, they had furnished a kind of giant Meccano set from which any man could make, in four minutes, a light strong portable steel ladder twenty feet long. (That first day, on top of the platform inside the wall, as soon as the foreman of works had spoken of the things we couldn’t have, I had seen that ladder. The darling cradles, each of them two light rungs of a sturdy ladder, I saw them then, and I made them later, and they worked. So that neither I nor my mates had to worry about the screws finding our “gear”. There was no gear, only the cradles used in the forestry work. The reason for “setting a lock upon your lips and making your face a mask” was that all of us in the plan had to guard against careless speech―or even a careless grin!

I have told about Billy Murray reading my thoughts. If Murray had been a grass he could have stopped the cradle-making before it started. As it happened, Bill was a wide man, and his only reaction was to ask for a place in the queue. But one or two of the old screws had that same monastic-or-hermit type of illative mind. Probably, having been so long in touch with the silent system, and of course having to be silent themselves, they developed the same 157

kind of mental responses as the old lags. That might be it. At any rate, some of the old-timers in uniform could read a convict’s thoughts far better than any psychologist. There was one old devil called Fishy. I am calling him an old devil because of his humorous, comically sadistic twist. But Fishy was as good as gold, really. His name was Fishburn or something, and of course everyone called him Fishy. He was an absolute demon at reading a person’s mind. I have seen him torture a convict by making the fellow burn his treasured hoard of tobacco. Burn it without being seen or caught! If he didn’t burn it, he knew Fishy would “chokey” him on the “rub-down” (daily search). The joke was that Fishy wouldn’t have done anything of the sort. Fishy was six-and-eight! It was just mental sadism, of a very comical kind. But of course the mugs and half-wide people didn’t know that, and also naturally the wide folk didn’t tell them. I for one was glad that Fishy had gone elsewhere when the cradle lark started—Fishy would have smelt that wall cross, a mile away. Thus there was no real danger. As long as the people who knew about the stoppo lark took care not to talk, or joke, or even sigh (!) in the hearing of any of the “old villain” screws, there would be no trouble, no “tumble”. Some of the real old grasses—the crazy, neurotic, hysterical, screaming type of grass—were also fantastically good at guessing another convict’s secrets. They would stand—in their correct places―on the parade-ground in the morning, looking straight in front of them, ostentatiously keeping themselves to themselves. On the morning parade all the hundreds of men fell in, group behind group, each gang with its own convicts and its own warders. When the roll was checked and found correct, when every convict in the prison had been

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accounted for, the old Chief Warder gave the command to “March Off”. Many and many a time, in the few seconds of perfect silence preceding that order, would come the high-pitched, hysterical scream of some grass, “Tobacco! This man is carrying tobacco. Sir! Sir! This man has tobacco.” They were never wrong, the old grasses. Five minutes after that scream, one of the boys would be marched away to the punishment cells for a “special search”. Unless he was “hot on the lumber”—i.e., very quick at getting rid of undesirable objects―or unless he copped for a six-and-eight twirl, he fetched up with a spell of bread and water and a couple of weeks’ chokey. That was grassing. There was no defence against it. (Except—I do hope the reader has not thought of it. I hope not!) Except to kill the grass first, and one couldn’t do that, not with any safety. Nothing else was of the slightest use. The hypothetical grass just mentioned, who shopped a swag of snout, might have betrayed six men’s supply of tobacco, costing them perhaps £30, to the warders. So he might be tanned and coshed and chivved, before he was two hours older. But as soon as he came out of hospital he did it again. Thus there was no defence. Except a kind of perverted dairy-take, with someone behaving suspiciously, and being shopped by the grass, and then taken down below for a special search. At which stage it would be discovered that he was innocent, and by that time the dollop of snout would have been passed on. That was all. Unless one had a decent old twirl who stuck the grass in for a special search first! (Old Duckham at the Moor could not bear grasses, and he slammed many a grass below. With the added pleasant feature that Duckham was a bloody old villain: when that grass was 159

searched in the chokey they always found an inch of pigtail in his pocket. Vive Duckham!) But that kind of thing, alas, did not happen every day. It was a grass’s world. So it behoved the boys to watch their words. The only thing in our favour was that there was nothing to discuss inside the prison, while the

outside gang, who were working the cradle-haul of the timber—that had no grasses. (The percentage of regrettable accidents, to grasses, in that particular working party, was one hundred per cent of the available grass populace. Few convict gangs, outside of Devil’s Island, can have been so selective!) Thus, slowly and impatiently, we came up to the middle of October, to the dark nights. That brought the beginning of the death or glory pleasure trips, as Billy Murray called them. Murray had put his name on the stoppo queue, but he came about seventh. He was, however, among the first group for a “swag”, a Christmas parcel. I myself with Dick Rohan I hoped, would be on the second out-go. The first pair of stoppo mushes, of escape men, were Tiddler Bullen and Long Tom Weales. They both knew the drill, knew the jail territory inside and outside the walls, and they were both athletic and fit. (That last factor is of vast importance in a stoppo. Mugs never know about it—that is one reason why steamer stoppo mushes are always caught.) They did not have to saw their window-bars, or tunnel through their cell walls, or make clumsy skeleton keys. The stoppo mob dealt with all that. (Probably they employed some locksmith in London or Birmingham to make the master-keys, and then had them smuggled into the prison. Something like that could be the explanation. Most certainly no prison blacksmith would have risked his liberty to make them.) Thus, at the suitable time of the moon, Tiddler and Long Tom stood by for the signal. Their cell doors would 160

be opened, and the cell-block gate would be opened, and a steel ladder would be ready in place, inside the inmost wall. Silver Dick Willerby and Brummy Sparkes, both of whom had worked in my “caterpillar” gangs, had been released a few weeks earlier. Both wide men, and a hundred per cent reliable, they were to arrange about the incoming supplies and get the parcels on to the Island without attracting attention. (No easy job.) On the island, choosing their night and their time of night, they were to make the scaling-ladder from nine or ten of the cradles which were lying about all over the forest. They were to cross the outer wall, take the ladder with them as well as their parcels, and make for the compound.

This part of their journey, between the two prison walls, would naturally sound the most dangerous. But really it was as safe as walking down Piccadilly. That part of the convict station was so impregnable that it was not patrolled. At the second wall, the compound boundary, the boys would have to pick their moment—their second!—as there was a strong patrol and an iron routine. But of course a rigid routine is its own worst enemy, so to speak. Naturally the strict-routine people will not accept that. Which is a nice thing for the stoppo lark. Because if you know where an armed warder will pass, at precisely ten minutes past two in the morning, then that is a very good place to be—at about twelve minutes past two. Brummy and Silver knew the routine far better than any screw, and that was how they worked. Crossing the compound wall, with their parcels and their ladder, they listened to the retreating footfalls of the patrolman. Then, in haste, they stowed the parcels into the ready-prepared “plant”. Again in haste, they took down their ladder and hid it, then faded away into 161

the gloom before the next patrolman came plodding around. The same timing worked at the cell-block gate, and then Brummy stole away alone, towards the cells where the two stoppo men waited. Silver Dick shrank back into the shadows, and presumably felt for his cosh, and presumably hoped it would not be needed. It was not, as we others learnt later, although not one of us heard a sound at the time. Brummy Sparkes floated up out of the gloom, with Tiddler and Long Tom like a double shadow behind him. The rest of us waited, in our cells, and guessed it was after three o’clock. Or we hoped it was after three o’clock. But of course there are no clocks or watches in a prison. We waited. At Parkhurst one can hear the fog-horns of the ships passing on the Solent or on Southampton Water. The shrill peep-peep of the coasting steamers contrasts sharply with the piercing sirens of the Atlantic liners and the hoarse bellowing of the big ocean-going tramp steamers. In between these, the musical mooing of the ferry steamers is unmistakable. The heads of the wide men had arranged a signal with the stoppo mushes, or rather with Silver Dick, who was “conducting” the party. When they were clear away, on the ferry steamer making for Southampton, they would let us know.

That was all I had been told, and I asked no questions. But I knew that someone on a ferry steamer would be “spoken to” if all went well. So I listened to the foghorns that night, and round about three in the morning I sat up and sighed relief Somewhere out on Southampton Water a ferry steamer was bleating. I knew neither how or why it was making those particular sounds. But I grinned as I listened. The ferry boat was saying Moo-moo, two short notes. 162

Then Moo-moo, two more short notes. Then moo-moo-moo three notes. Two Two Three. It was Silver Dick’s convict number, the code signal. They’d made it. The big Parkhurst hooter, indicating an escape, did not sound until nearly seven o’clock in the morning. Four hours’ start—good as a week. The authorities made very little to-do about the “two away”. Escapes were very common at Parkhurst, and three times in four the fugitives were caught. Thus a stoppo made very little difference. The discipline was tightened up for a day or two, obsolete rules were enforced (!) for a while, and it was easy to get bread and water for minor offences. Also—a most amusing feature—the Governor would automatically refuse all requests for letters or visits or books or anything like that. (It was supposed to be subtle psychology! The idea was that a stoppo mush got your letter and visit and library book stopped. Ergo, when there was another stoppo you would turn grass!) The psychologists and philosophers say that every man sees the world in terms of his own secret thoughts. If it is so, and it could be, what dreadful grasses all disciplinarians are at bottom! Because the things mentioned above, about visits and letters and books, are basic with all the strict disciplinarians of England and Germany and the United States. A bad sign. But the “stoppo scream” made little difference to us. It only lasted a few days, as always, and during that time no one made any attempt to touch the “plant” in the compound. But after about twelve days the plant was opened up, and the first comers got their parcels. Each man, of twenty, got half a pound of pigtail tobacco, a hundred cigarettes, a bottle of whisky, four letters from his friends, a pound of

sweets and a pound of raisins. Each man paid five pounds. Father Christmas had called. 163

It would be nearly three weeks before the next stoppo, all going well. It was a race whether Dick Rohan would be fit, but we thought yes, and we got word through to Silver Dick. Then we grafted around and crossed our fingers. We did not have to cross them for long. There had been no suspicion whatever about the cradle lark. Partly because the methods used were unlike any previous stoppo. But also because the stoppo mob, like sensible men, had provided a few answers to the inevitable questions. For instance, the screws knew how the boys had crossed the inner wall. They had found part of a home-made rope, made from a convict’s bed sheet. A check-up showed that it had been Long Tom’s. Also they had found a long branch of a tree, sloping against the compound wall, on the side farthest away from the timber-hauling job. But best of all, from their point of view and from ours, was that they had an idea where the keys had come from. There was no question of an innocent jail blacksmith having made them, nor even a query about the keys having been smuggled in from outside. The authorities had a theory. Naturally the boys did not confide in me and also naturally I asked no questions. Thus I do not know why the Chief picked on Smiler Sennie, but I think it might have had something to do with his key-chain. Smiler was the biggest bastard that ever carried a cosh or gave perjured evidence against an innocent man. The reader will remember that I have been on every convict station in England. So that I have met some of the lowest mental types in the world. Smiler left them all standing. The old convicts used to say of Smiler that he would have flicked his own mother, and then got her bread and water for committing incest, and then stolen the 164

bread and water and sworn that the old girl had flogged it. That was what the boys said about Smiler Sennie, but I think they were wrong. Smiler was worse than that. The worst feature of the case was that he was a youngster. Also he was very good-looking. Also he was very good-humoured, with a pleasant

perpetual smile. A bad thing. A very bad thing. I have cursed the Nazi bombers many times, but they did humanity a great service that night in Plymouth when they scattered Smiler Sennie into a thousand bits. Truly, as the parsons say, there is good in all things. So there was no tumble for the inaugural stoppo, and the dairy-take was sweet for the future. Dick’s arm was out of the sling, and he was able to exercise it gently. Also he was being moved to “B Hall”—i.e., to the cellblock of the hard-labour men, and also the cell-block of the stoppo mob. The names and addresses for the second lot of parcels, and the money, had been sent out to Silver Dick. Rohan and I paid in our money, Dick putting up two hundred and I furnishing fifty. That was coming on to the middle of November. Then one morning, towards the end of the month, all the men in the blacksmith’s shop were sent to work in the tailor-works. Except three. My two hammer-men and I were bunged in the cooler. Fortunately we had nothing on us, and were only kept in the punishment cells while our prison cells were searched by the “Judas mob”, the warders who did special searching as against the search of other ordinary warders. Again all three of us were “sweet”: we had nothing incriminating. So we were marched out to work—in the tailors shop. I wondered what was on, and made many guesses, and hoped I was wrong. I was too. It was worse than I had thought. From official and semi-official sources I learnt later 165

what had happened. The blacksmith-warder, with two warders to strike for him, had taken over my blacksmith’s forge. There, slaving for two days, they cut up into little bits, and threw away on the scrap-heap, all the steel cradles from the forestry job. It was a “dead tumble”. The story goes that an apple fell on Sir Isaac Newton’s head one day, and from that apple he deduced the theory of gravity and possibly the history of the universe. The Parkhurst grasses went one better than that. A grass in B Hall found a raisin―one raisin. He knew the man who must have dropped it, and the man who would have swagged it to him and—. And that was our lot. The loveliest escape stunt in the history of prisons —the Wooden Horse of Troy working in reverse—plus twelve Christmases a year, all destroyed because one grass found one raisin.

That left Dick Rohan with nearly five years of his sentence to serve. He did it, too, every day of it. Besides, he “pipped” me even at that. Following that second hard-luck break, I never had another chance for a stoppo. So when Dick went out I stayed behind, for another five years. Grasses are poison. 166

CHAPTER TWELVE

ROLL CALL     Well, reader, whoever you are, man or woman, that is truly the best I can do for you. Except that I may perhaps let you into a secret. The secret is that the numbers of writers in the world who are allowed to do their best is very small. I only know two others besides myself. Would it be coincidence, I wonder, or consequence, that I am a vagabond and the other two independent writers were vagabonds also? Three people, out of two thousand million. It is not a lot. But if I may put Karl Marx into reverse, quality becomes quantity. Omar Khayyám was a vagabond writer—one in a million—and his little book, the Rubdiyát has gone all over the world since the time he wrote it, about 1066. A couple of thousand years before Omar, another vagabond writer took the bit in his teeth, and he told people about his mates, and that book has gone into every language and travelled all over the world too. Homer’s Odyssey—what is it but a book about a man and his mates, written by a vagabond? So perhaps it does not matter that most of the books come from nice, clean, decent, normal, ordinary people. The books are all right, and are not likely to upset anyone, and they do no harm to the kind of people who read them—the kind of people who most certainly would not like this book. So, reader, man or woman, the fact that you looked at a book title, and saw the author’s name, and accepted an invitation to meet the wide folk— that fact sets you 167

apart as a reader. Thus l am glad I have done my best, for you and for my mates. Here they are, my chinas, my buncers, all wide men, every one. Anyone can be “friends” with a respectable conventional upright law-abiding citizen. The wide fellow is not so readily available. My own outlook on the matter is purely selfish. I do not bother to be “friendly” with respectable conventional people. They have nothing for me.

On a convict station the man with whom you make friends holds your life and liberty and sanity in his hands. So, in simple self-preservation, you do not choose in haste. After all, every grass in the world is a respectable conventional person! Isn’t he? Isn’t she? But this is not a book about grasses. It is about the criminal class. I am glad to have written it, because it is the first book of its kind in the history of the world. Always, up to now, the books about criminals have had to be against them. That has been true for hundreds of years. Books about criminals were always written by members of the opposite class. Indeed, in our own time, the majority of the books about “the Criminal Classes” have been written by ex-detectives or ex-warders! It is a law of nature—human nature. It is human nature to take the easy way. Only a person without roots, possessing neither rank nor wealth and scorning both, can take the hard way and like it. For any other poor devil, even if he wanted to write a book about the wide folk, would probably be cut off from any real knowledge. But also, even if somewhere, somehow, he came by a few bits and pieces of information about criminals, that poor devil cannot write his book. Because he has to conform. He has to make the wide man look silly. Otherwise he 168

gets no money. Alas, the money comes first, for the majority of writers, and how can they help it? One need only glance at the books, to see that the money comes first for the writers. It is time for one of the Phelan asides—I promise, reader, that this will be the last. I am reminded of a funny picture, in a newspaper of 1909. There was an old bent man, crouching in a prison cell, counting over fifty thousand scratches on the jail wall, and trying to work out whether his life sentence should be over. That was counted as screamingly funny when I was a kid. On the day that I typed this chapter, fifty-nine years later, I saw that same drawing in the morning newspaper. It was precisely the same, except that the convict does not know it is 1968, and says so. All good clean fun. Poor devil. I mean the artist! Poor devil.

Almost every writer in the world is compelled to write the literary equivalent of that sketch. Even if he knows it to be false—if he wants to write about a “lifer” he must make a laughing-stock of him. But fortunately for his peace of mind, and his bank manager’s peace of mind, he manages to believe it all. So having told the petty lie to himself he now tells it to the world, and everyone is happy, especially the bank manager. The criminal is always wrong, in every book in the world up to now. Even Jack Black’s good little book about the wide people was twisted into a grass effort, by skilful deletions. It was published under the title You Can’t Win! Thirty years ago Mark Benney wrote a fine book, called Low Company, about the Borstal jails for young delinquents. It was originally a good factbook about young men of the criminal class. But with skilful “editing” it became—something other than that. Even the title speaks for itself! Benney could do nothing—he was a city man and he had to live by writing. 169

But you don’t stay alive, in cities, by writing facts about criminals. If the city owners permitted any other state of affairs they would be mad! So— Mark Benney’s book was spoiled, and what could he do? Nothing. Me, I live on the road. That is, I own the world. No grass can order me to be a grass like himself No rich man can bribe me to say that Dick Rohan is a little sneaky, slinky illiterate who, in the intervals of sleeping with his mother, goes out and steals coppers or sixpences from (sick) schoolchildren. Dick Rohan doesn’t do that. The respectable people do those things. Dick just robs a bank now and then. A bank. Not sick schoolchildren. If the reader has a bank—well, there is no more to be said. But if not, then the chapter about Dick Rohan may be worth another glance. What I am saying is that no one can offer me enough money to induce me to say things like that about Dick Rohan. That is not because I am pure or noble or self-sacrificing. It is because I don’t need money. I have more than enough for my needs. So—I have written this book about my mates, for myself and for the reader, as I say. Here are the boys. I am not asking you to like them—that kind of thing is merely sentimental. But I am asking the reader to learn a

few facts of life. Meaning a few things about himself or herself For that is the way to add a cubit to a person’s stature. The reader belongs to the respectable community. (Well, we hope he or she does. Readers of the other kind need not bother to read this chapter! Eye-eye! The wide man is an outlaw. A very few questions will establish which camp has the reader’s sympathy.) But it is nice to know a few facts, about wide people and crime. That is, crime as it is known to newspaper readers. 170

Crime as it is met with in columns of statistics—and in the annual bills for the great prison reforms. It may be pleasant to know that the wide man will not strangle your baby, or rape your little girl on her way home from school, or steal your grandmother’s spectacles, or commit a sex-assault on your schoolboy son. All those things are done by respectable people, by law-abiding folks, not by professional criminals as the alleged statistics try to show. The wide man doesn’t go in for anything like that. He is just a robber. If your bank balance is over five figures, that wide man is your enemy and you should beware of him. Also you should take every opportunity to vilify him—and if necessary to say that he did take your grandmother’s spectacles. How right you would be! But if you haven’t got that kind of bank balance—now read on. The distinction between respectable people and professional criminals is particularly marked in the field of sex. The wide man, like the Tuareg in the desert, is apt to be very primitive and old-fashioned in these matters. He treats his women as females, not as intellectual comrades or political associates. Many conventional, respectable people, on the other hand, take a more sensible, a more enlightened and modern view of sex. (I mean—ask any shifty-eyed, chinless little degenerate at a quasipolitical meeting. He’ll tell you that lawbreaking people, low people, often revert to primitive savagery in sex matters. While modern folks—like the speaker, e.g.—are more up-to-date and rational in such affairs. Ask any such person, and listen to what he says. It will be most instructive— especially if you note that the same thing is in almost any newspaper you open. Listen to the chinless type explaining modernity in sex—but keep an eye on your small daughter, coining home from 171

school, if the modern rational chap is anywhere about.) That whole question, about the psychology of the criminal class, can be disposed of in two sentences. The wide people are old-fashioned in sex and politics and friendship, as they are in economics! But they do not write books, so any cheap liar can attack them with impunity. There it is in a very few words. Any sophisticated reader will see what I am doing—I am charging the readers’ artillery, so that they will be able to shoot down a few literary grasses, at need! In Scotland they say that they like a man to “ha’ a guid conceit o’ himsel’.” Need I say that the Scots people like me? But that will be enough of jesting. Now I want to say it as briefly as I can. I am a man. There are not many. Most of the manly people I know are outlaws. There it is. A man’s philosophy of life could hardly go into fewer words. It is a wide and sweeping statement to make. But—I have travelled the world, and I have met with most of the top-rank intellectuals of my time. Also, the journalists call me a well-known author and a gifted story-teller and a brilliant broadcaster and what have you. I do know rather a lot about people. But I have nothing to add, or to subtract, in the statement I made just now. There are not many men in the world. The few manly people I know, out of all the thousands of millions there are, are mostly outlaws. Now, this book will be first published in England (I hope). There are laws in this country, and people have to keep them or take the consequences. The reader is one of those people. The author, at the moment, is another. My outlaw friends live by their own code; when that code clashes with the laws of England, the boys depart for Dartmoor or Parkhurst. The reader does not belong in that camp. Neither do 172

I, at the moment, and it is unlikely that I shall ever rob a bank or shoot a publisher. Unlikely. Those wide men do not keep the laws. Therefore the reader should not admire them. Let that be made clear, to start with! But there is no law compelling the reader to be a bloody fool. Is there? Thus, ten million newspaper-readers may believe that people like Dick Rohan or Billy Murray or Joe Westlake go around stealing milk-bottles and

fingering schoolgirls and assaulting little boys in public lavatories. Ten million news-readers do believe those things. But there is still no law compelling the reader to be a bloody fool. The reader doesn’t believe those things now! The reader will never believe them again. It is against the law for the reader to admire an outlaw. But it is not (yet) against the law to admire manhood and courage. Somehow, these qualities don’t crop up very often nowadays, among the kind folk who make the laws. As I said somewhere, there is a nasty, smelly, petty breed in control, nearly everywhere, and they make the rules. So it may soon be illegal to admire bravery or manliness. I am not joking. Reader, I, Jim Phelan, am deadly serious. It may one day be the law to say, in contempt and disparagement—“Him! That fellow! Why he’s as brave as a lion—wants watching.” It sounds like a joke. But it is a great idea to read a few very old books now and then. It will scare the reader cold—to discover the things which are now legal and praiseworthy but which once were punishable with death! I mean—even in our own times, in the Christian Era, the crime of usury ranked far worse than homicide. But today the highest and most noble in the land are in the banking business. That is only one small example. Suffice it to say—no 173

one knows what silly rubbish may go into the law books. But while it is there, the law has to be obeyed. Therefore, again, no praise for these mates of mine. But it is always a good thing to know. Of course if the reader happens to own a bank, or does heavy business with banks, then it would be an idea to keep clear of Joe Westlake’s heirs, descendants and followers. (Joe himself is dead). Otherwise a cheque might turn up one morning, with a perfect signature, a wonderful work of art, and Joe Westlake or whoever wrote that signature would have gone to the South of France. Incidentally, it was nearly four years after my Parkhurst days before I found out about the screever’s “tickler”, the thing I made for him in Parkhurst forge. I should have guessed, of course, but it never crossed my mind. Modernization, no less! Joe Westlake was going in for a spot of mechanization, as every forward-thinking citizen should! The “tickler” was

a mechanical aid to forgery, thanking you. The little blighter! He had got me to make the first “screeving machine” in the history of the world, or the history of banking or forgery, and he deliberately led me to think Freudian things so that I wouldn’t ”tumble”. The dairy-take. You can’t beat these outlaw types—they have all the cunning of the jungle to which they belong. Another person known to the reader came my way in London back at the beginning of World War II. I was at that time prowling between the publishers’ offices, trying to sell the best novel ever published (!) and having it rejected by every publisher in London. No sensible wide man would have put up with their nonsense, but of course I was a steamer at bottom, so I stuck it out, and starved around—and flogged the novel in the States! Whereupon the London publishers started to chiv 174

one another in the attempt to get hold of it! Seemingly I had learnt a few bits and pieces about human nature among my wide friends. That novel went into about twelve languages, and it sold for 28 years, and the reader can guess what is the subject! But at the time I met my man I was starving around in Hampstead, and walking to and from Fleet Street because I had no bus fare. So whenever I saw one of the wide boys I ducked—not wanting them to see that I was a steamer. Thus, one morning at the end of High Holborn—the easterly end— when I saw Billy Murray standing on the kerb I tried to duck down an alley. For two reasons. The first reason I have mentioned. I did not want Murray to see me broke but apparently afraid to get myself some money. But the second reason was even more to the point. The second reason is that the Eastern terminus of Holborn is the corner of Hatton Garden, and Hatton Garden is the home of the jewellers. Some wealthy jeweller, I knew, was going to buy himself a beautiful parcel of jargoons for ten or twelve thousand pounds. Mr Murray had just the look of one about to “have it off”. So I tried to duck. But Billy gave me the high sign—in a roar that stopped every taxidriver for two hundred yards. We went to Henekey’s for a drink: as I had guessed, Murray was “working” but he made time to natter and swop addresses and grin about

the punnim or oppostay. He seemed to be loaded with money, although one can never tell, with a con man or a jargoon-peddler. He asked if I could use fifty, and I said no, that I managed. We talked fast, and pleasantly, and then Murray drifted away to face the jewellers. Another who cropped up was Terry Mackesson, the dip. I had forgotten about Terry, although I was staying at Thames Ditton and I knew that Terry sometimes visited that part of outer London. I was in a downstairs 175

lavatory in Kingston-on-Thames one morning, having a wash, when I noticed a very small man hanging his coat near mine. It was Terry, and he hadn’t recognized me, and he was coming for my wallet. I soaped my hands, and Terry dried his, and turned away towards his coat. At which moment I said in a low voice, “Narkit china. Ain’t got the cape in me mincers.” Which means——stop it, mate. I haven’t got the soap in my eyes! Gosh, gosh! it was lovely to see his face. We had a great palaver, in a riverside pub, and then Terry went off to see who would “give” him large sums. Years later, when I had collected a few coppers from the publishers, and when I was back tramping around—but was now tolerated as a wealthy eccentric genius—I came close to Harry Parry the con man, but never actually met him. Twice, at expensive resorts on the French Riviera, I heard of a foreign nobleman who vanished with a large sum of money. In each case the large sum of money had belonged to a stout, pale-faced, shifty-eyed chap. In each case the unmistakable shark-like mouth of the “successful entrepreneur” was observable. So I knew that, each time, they were nearly able to swindle that innocent foreign nobleman out of the still larger sum of money. On both occasions the nobleman was Harry Parry from Barry. I was very sorry indeed to have missed him. But of course a con man is always bound for somewhere else, good and fast, when he has had it off. So it might have been just as well that I missed Harry—the shark-mouthed chap might have blamed me! One other friend or near-friend of the reader, who turned up from nowhere, after my jail days, was Snider the snider. I was in Villefranche— where I wrote most of this book—when I got a brief note. Indeed, it would be fair to call it a very brief note. 176

It ran like this: ‘José’s place. Tonight any time. Loaded. Legit. Bill Snider.” Jose’s place was a very expensive club, but it so happened that I had the entrée there. Not because I was “loaded” but because I went to Jose’s and similar places with a man to whom I was selling a film story. I had been in and out a few times, but had never seen any sign of Snider. That would not have been unusual, in the ordinary-way—a man on the snide lark does not advertise his movements. But Bill was “on the legit”, which meant that he had nothing to fear from the police. That last statement will sound like a fairy story, I know. (Just imagine living in a country where the con lark was conventional, and burglary was the legal duty of every good citizen! Sounds daft, eh! But just think of the time when a money-lender was burnt at the stake—and nowadays the bankers make the laws. Besides which, one may lick one’s lips to think of the millions which changed hands on the legitimate currency swiz. Not so daft.) Thus, that word “legit” told me that Bill Snider would not be hiding his light under a bushel. The police would be his friends, his servants. Yet I had been in and out of Josh’s place but had never fronted Bill. So I went along that night hoping to hear a few bits about “days gone by”. Elsewhere I have told that the highest and most honourable people had worked nobly and well, on the legitimate currency lark. But none of that money came to my mates. It was, so to speak, a closed corporation. The same worthy people took a few stray million in the legitimate snide lark. But of course they were handicapped because all the really good snide people were wide men. Would it be fair to expect a competent snider to make a mould which would turn out gold coins and then to take a couple of hundred pounds for it? From a man 177

who was going to make a couple of hundred thousand! Literally make them. Of course not. Most unfair. So the highest and most honourable etc. did not have all the money on the legit snide lark. The heyday of that lark is over now. So there will be no harm in telling how it worked. Briefly, the price of gold went up. So an English sovereign, value one pound, cost one pound one shilling to buy. The fact would not interest

anyone much, not among the wide people. But almost every sovereign in England vanished overnight. Sold to the Government for Then the price [was 23/–. Then it was 27/–. Then it was 32/6. And so on. Presently it reached the stage at which a competent man could fake the nicker—make real money, not snide. He could pay 24/– for enough gold to make one sovereign, and 2/– expense of making that sovereign, and a shilling expense of “marketing” it―and he could still sell that sovereign to the British Government at a vast profit. That was the legitimate snide lark. There was one snide genius, an Austrian, who worked near Trieste. Then there was George Dewar, a Yank, whose “mint” was in Morocco. Running them close, for top place on the “legit”, was Bill Snider. Thus I was on my toes when I drifted into Josh’s place. There was no sign of Snider, so I sat down with a drink and kept my eyes on the door. The place was busy, and crowded, but I knew Bill would not miss me—not for long. There was some bloody old fool of a Turkish or Persian millionaire who had practically taken over the whole place. He had half of the beautiful women on the Mediterranean coast around his table. Also he had all the tappers on the Med run, coming and going and 178

copping for various douceurs. The head waiter and the rest of the flunkeys were practically touching the ground with their foreheads. It took me nearly half an hour to realise that the Persian potentate was Bill Snider. Then, at the top of my voice, I gave the “Orketnay”, the Parkhurst hail. Old Santa Claus waded straight through the crowd of admirers and flunkeys and more-or-less virgins, and came straight to my table. Ten seconds after Bill sat down he began to talk about “days gone by”. It was lovely. He talked until two in the morning. Bottles of priceless wine appeared and were emptied and were replaced. Half of the floating populace of Villefranche appeared to be the guests of M. le Comte, otherwise Bill Snider. God knows what the bill was. Snider hardly glanced at it. He neither knew nor cared about money. He was on the legit.

Bill Snider must have been very close to a hundred at that time, but he looked a youthful fifty. Very youthful. A good conscience, I suppose. Yes, of course that would be it. Especially in the case of a man who had had a cap alphabet! In addition to everything else, Bill was radiantly, gloriously happy. Imagine a good competent screwsman who suddenly discovered that burglary was permitted by law! As far as Bill was concerned, it was “days gone by” all over again. Santa Claus the snider was back in Barbary. The meeting with Bill was of course a lovely thing for me. It came at a time when I was rapidly coming to feel that in the cities of civilization, among the law-abiding people, there was nothing for anyone of my type. That state of mind is not good for anyone. But least of all for a person who does not take kindly to discipline. Thus, when Bill Snider asked me where I was staying, 179

I told him I was pulling out. Inevitably he asked what I wanted. Not did I want some money. Not could I use a loan. Just—how much? Of course Bill had never known or cared about sums of money, even when he had to risk his liberty for it. Now when he was practically respectable, he still cared nothing. A hundred, or a thousand, it would have been all the same to Santa Claus! But I said I was “jake”, and so I was. The last thing in the world, for me at that time, would have been security as it is called—the security that comes from the possession of money. What I intended was to go back on the road, just go tramping at random. I hoped that I would write and sell an occasional book, but if not, not. If I couldn’t write my books my way I didn’t have to twist them to suit the decent respectable law-abiding people who thought Dick Rohan was a drunken sneak-thief Millions of people would write that kind of book for them. I would go back to the road. I did, too. A hundred, or a thousand, from Bill Snider, would have held me. Then maybe I would not have softened and weakened and lost my courage. Maybe. But I would never have written my road books, and I would never have written this one. Besides, I might have died twenty or thirty years ago, if I had stayed in the cities. Definitely I would not have liked it!

It would have been dreadful if no one had ever had the opportunity to write a book about the ouaide-kai. But, as anyone may gather, that is not everyone’s cup of tea. Very few people outside the ranks of the wide folk would have any chance of even starting such a book. Hardly anyone among the ouaide-kai would have bothered! Books, I fear, are just a lot of nonsense to the wide people. 180

So it looks as if I chose well, when I went back to tramp the road. Because I have travelled a million miles, and met the wide folk in many lands. But also—also I am glad that I have had the chance to write this book, to let such readers as can grasp it come to know my mates, to meet the criminal class.   THE END 181