Peterhead (2 page)

Apart from the obvious effect on the seafront, the project was to cause major changes, even inland. New roads were to be built and a railway constructed to connect a quarry, the prison and the construction yard at the harbour. The railway was to run from St Catherine’s to terminate at the quarry, and the Admiralty was given more or less
carte blanche
to move houses and existing tracks and road as part of the master plan. These days local objectors would no doubt hold back such a building project for years with endless expensive inquiries that would make many lawyers rich, but in less sophisticated days that was not a problem.

Little matters like consultation with locals affected by the project were not to be allowed to slow construction. In particular the holder of the office of harbourmaster was given more or less dictator status in the collection of dues and running the building sites around the harbour. This was important stuff, and although the actual building work had started, the final authorisation of the harbour/prison/quarry/railway appeared in the
Edinburgh Gazette
of 29 June 1888 – along with such other titbits of information such as that Mr John Galloway was to be Consul General at Glasgow for the Republic of Paraguay and that Maharaja Narendra Krishna deb Bahadur was appointed Knight Commander of the Eminent Order of the Indian Empire. As they used to say of the late unlamented
News of the
World
– “all the news that’s fit to print”!

The notion of building a Harbour of Refuge had been talked about as far back as 1859 and in fact work on the breakwater started in 1886 and was supposed to last for twenty-five years. But it continued, interrupted by two World Wars, until the final few granite blocks were laid in the late 1950s.

As previously noted, in the early days a letter from the Treasury recommended to those concerned with the project that the south bay at Peterhead was the best choice for the site. There was more detail: “Principally on the grounds that the construction proposal for the works is peculiarly suitable to convict labour.” Peterhead was judged “the place capable of affording the maximum shelter, the necessity of which can be foreseen, or that can reasonably be required, under all conditions of wind and weather, for passing ships engaged in commerce, together with space available of a few cruisers of the Royal Navy. And also to give accommodation to the fleets of fishing boats occasionally congregated on this line of the coast.” The throwaway line on a “few” cruisers raises an eyebrow in these modern days when the Navy has, sadly, more captains than ships.

From the beginning, the link between the prison and the imaginative and massive humanitarian civil engineering project was vital. The authorities were also concerned with the long-term and wanted the prison built in a way that would allow it to be expanded and used as a place of incarceration after the harbour was up and running. The fact that when North Sea oil began to be extracted in a hundred or so years’ time the sheltered harbour would suck big oil money into the area was, of course, an unforeseen and lucky twist of fate.

Even in the far-off days when the new project was started you never got anywhere without a committee. So one was formed with the interested parties being the Home Office, the Admiralty Department of Engineers and Architectural Works, the Board of Trade, the Prison Commission of Scotland plus a nominated member of the Merchant Company of Edinburgh who had control of lands in and around Peterhead. The old joke about a committee being an organisation that takes minutes and wastes hours comes to mind. But they got it done. The Harbour of Refuge was to become fact rather than a dream.

Life in Peterhead prison was for the convicts, from day one to those imprisoned at closure in the far-off twenty-first century, to be earthy about it – pure “shit”. So any complaining cons might have had a laugh at the early reports on buying the farmland for the site of the prison. The land was controlled by the august Merchant Company of Edinburgh. The committee in charge of the project was concerned that a “fair” price was paid to the farmers and that there was to be a feu duty which should “include the value of the crops and unexhausted manure”! The farms involved were Middleton of Clerkhill and Wellington and to begin with the area was around twenty-five acres. Sir John Coode was engineer in chief and a Major Beamish of the Royal Engineers was architect to the Prison Commissioners. No doubt the farmers were happy to sell, as the land could no doubt have been obtained by compulsory purchase. What happened to that “exhausted manure” remains a mystery.

One of the first tasks facing those running the project was to choose a quarry. Delegations of bigwigs had a look at three quarries and there was no shortage of granite or quarries in the area. First to be looked at was the Upper Quarry at Stirling Hill, three miles north of the harbour site, then Blackhill, a half mile closer, then finally Boddam. Stirling Hill granite was used in many of London’s most notable buildings, including Australia House and Covent Garden, and some even found its way into public buildings in Canada. At one time there had been almost a dozen quarries in the area. The granite that came from them was considered to be suitable to withstand the pounding of the North Sea for centuries and here in the huge quarries the convicts who would smash rocks were offered a choice of seven- or fourteen-pound hammers. Those who swung such muscle-breaking implements would no doubt be unimpressed that in earlier times, four thousand years ago, ancient man in the Neolithic age had formed flint into hunting tools in encampments near to this site. Nor, I suspect, would they much care that the granite they were attacking with the sledgehammers had started life as a molten layer five kilometres down millions of years ago. But if the cons ever did think about the material they were working with, it certainly would have put a sentence of a few years in jail into perspective!

A major practical advantage of quarrying in the area with convicts was the closeness of the sea, which was particularly important, as it blocked any escapes on the east of the prison except for the most determined. As we will see later, escapers down the years, like the legendary Johnny Ramensky and others, were forced into fairly heavily populated countryside immediately after they had got over the prison wall unseen by the guards, something that made the detection of a fleeing convict that much easier. The escape routes were limited. The site for the prison also had the advantage that it was near the town water and gas supply and had good road connections with Aberdeen.

The quarry site was also vital. Consider the plans for a breakwater to be built largely by manual labour: First a “kind of embankment” fifty feet high was to be built in the sea, then on top of that five- or six-feet-high blocks of stone were put down. And on top of that huge concrete blocks made of granite crushed at the Admiralty site were added. Some blocks were said to be up to forty feet high. It might look to the layman like over specification, but not if you have seen North Sea rollers in a winter gale.

The rough state of the seas also came into play when the problem of moving the granite from quarry to harbour site had to be resolved. Initially it seemed that using barges might be a good idea. And the barges could perhaps also transfer prisoners from jail to the harbour work shed. But on consideration there were deemed to be important snags with this idea – not least the thought of convicts desperate to escape taking hostages and seizing control of the barges. Also, work would be confined to spells of decent weather. And the alternative of marching men between quarry, harbour and the prison did not seem too clever either.

It may have been what we now call “blue sky” thinking but a railway was by far the best solution to a unique set of problems. The fact that some of the blocks needed were too big to be transported by a mini railway did not matter – they could be built in work sheds at the harbour from stone broken by convicts swinging sledgehammers up at the quarry. And convicts could “commute” from the prison to the quarry and to the harbour on the rail line. Sand and gravel were also available in plentiful quantities at the seashore. The railway was unique in that it was the only state-owned passenger-carrying line in its day. Just a few miles long, but a nationalised railway nonetheless.

So the rough outline of the procedures involved in the project had been established. The cost of the prison was, seemingly like every building estimate since the first brick was laid on brick, rising. Early estimates were an optimistic £43,000 or so. But when detailed work was done on the plans it seemed like more than £90,000 was needed. (Interestingly, the prison’s twenty-first century replacement, HMP Grampian, is costed at more than £140 million and take no bets on that figure not rising.) The architects were sent back to the drawing boards to think again. Money had to be saved. This they did by cutting back on staff quarters, using less stone on walls in and around the grounds and substituting corrugated iron for slate on some roofs. A hard-hearted suggestion that savings could be made by providing dry earth toilets for the prisoners rather than water closets was rejected. The cost came down to around £56,000. And the doors did open. Or clanged loudly behind you if you were a lawbreaker. That was not the end of building work, though, and additional structures were erected in 1909, 1960 and 1962.

When the breakwater was conceived, the long term, as opposed to the early building costs, of the undertaking was estimated at £750,000, it being anticipated that the work would be completed in twenty-five years. But from the arrival of the first convict it was to be more than seventy years before the last granite block was laid in the north breakwater.

From 1888 the harbour facilities were gradually improved with the building of the huge breakwaters that were creeping slowly out from the shore, the largest being 900m in length. As this work went on, the boom and bust in the whaling industry was beginning to be mirrored in the herring fishery. Though even the slimmed-down fishery still had one of the biggest fish markets in Europe, with herring largely replaced by other species. Over recent years the difficulties in the fishing industry, the downsizing of the RAF presence in the area and uncertainty about the future of the prison itself have caused some worry in the local business community. But, of course, since the 1970s Peterhead prison has been an important part of the North Sea oil industry, something that brought unexpected wealth to the area. And now with the new HMP Grampian under construction to replace both the town’s old Victorian jail and Craiginches in Aberdeen, the town and surrounding countryside has an air of prosperity.

But all this bustle and boom was far in the future when, even in the nineteenth century, Peterhead Prison was starting to earn a reputation as the toughest prison in the country. Conditions there were harsh even for the time. One local paper commented with masterly understatement that the accommodation in the cells is “limited” and went on to describe a cell. It pointed out that all the cells were identical from basement to top storey. Each cell was seven feet by five feet and only nine feet high. Originally there were 208 in a block. The only natural light came from an eighteen-inch square window with strong steel frames and iron stanchions on the outside built into the granite wall. On top of “each door is an iron box with flaps for ventilation. Each cell was lighted at night by a single gas jet enclosed in an iron box inaccessible to the prisoner.” This report went on again with that same understatement to say that the fittings are “very limited” and comprised of a small hinged flap of iron covered in wood which was used as the “poor” convict’s table. The size of this table was two feet by eighteen inches. The sleeping accommodation was a hammock slung on hooks at each end of the cell. The report went on to remark that this was the sole furniture in the cell.

Those tiny cells in the hellish prison were, over the years, to be a second home for the low-lifers of the Glasgow streets. A spell in Peterhead was almost a necessity if you wanted to claw your way to the top of the crime ladder in Scotland’s industrial capital. In May 1888 the
Aberdeen Journal
reported on the start of what was to become an almost traditional journey for Glasgow’s bad guys. The prison was due to open for business in July/August of that year and at the Glasgow Circuit Court twenty-one men were sentenced to penal servitude for various crimes. They were to do their time in the new prison. At the trial Lord Young had expressed his desire to rid the city of “dangerous characters whose sole aim and object in life was to prey on society.” The
Journal
went on to say: “there was a slight commotion at Buchanan Street station as the prison van – better known to its occupants as the Black Maria – rolled into the railway station where there was a posse of police in attendance.” According to the report, a smart warder opened the doors of the van and the curiosity of friends and passengers was satisfied. Twenty-one “powerful-looking men dressed in moleskin and caps, stamped with a broad arrow, stepped on to the platform. The convicts were handcuffed and linked to a strong chain that made escape out of the question.”

It was said that the men who filed into the railway van provided for them looked like men capable of doing good service in the public works at Peterhead Prison “which is now ready for their reception.” It was then explained to the readers that at the prison “the civil guards with loaded rifles will command the heights above the quarries and commanding positions in the vicinity of the prison.” Reportage slipped into comment at the end of the article: “One sad feature is the extreme youth of many of this gang, their ages not exceeding twenty. There is no doubt the city is well rid of them.”

The curiosity of the public to see the villains bound for Peterhead was not confined to Glasgow. A special railway Black Maria – the only one of its kind in the country – was met at Peterhead with crowds of locals bent on catching a glimpse of the men who were to be the first of many thousands who would spend their days and nights behind bars in misery in what would in time become Scotland’s most infamous and toughest jail.