Authors: Robert Jeffrey
Whether he won that particular war of words is unclear but he did have some success on other fronts. He was very concerned about the food dished out on special occasions like Christmas. These days in Her Majesty’s prisons the important role of a decent healthy diet is acknowledged. What is served up is far from celebrity chef nosh, but it is edible and nutritious, which was not always the case in the ’30s. Back then the idea was to sustain life at the minimum of expense and not much else. Locked up when not doing hard labour in the prison quarry there is little else to think about other than the next meal. Johnny was outraged at what was on offer for the Royal Coronation and Jubilee celebrations in the ’30s. Although it might puzzle the reader these days why such celebrations were marked in a 1930s nick at all. These days the tabloids like to keep tabs on any special treats and tend to become red-faced with anger, as well as red-topped, at any hint of an extra bar of chocolate or other wee treat for the cons.
In 1937 prisoner 3747 (one Johnny Ramensky) wrote to the governor, Captain J. I. Buchan, as follows:
Sir,
On Thursday night I was asked which would I like, an apple or an orange, on Coronation Day. I replied neither. Last year on Jubilee Day I was robbed of half my dinner and so were all the other convicts. I was deprived of my beef and I got a half-pound of potatoes instead of a pound. I was given an apple to make it up. The soup that day was rice soup which is horrible and I never eat it. I was starving that day. I wish to protest at the taking away of my food and ask you to consider that if there is any cutting or slicing of diet not to take it away from convicts who are starving enough. I wish to draw to your notice that I lost half my dinner on Jubilee Day and have no desire for a repitition
[sic]
on Coronation Day.
Yours sincerely
John Ramensky
Johnny was over the years both a persistent headache with his escapes but also a friend in his later commando days to Captain Buchan. But his complaint on this occasion was given short shrift. The prison medical officer wrote in a report: “The Coronation Day dinner would be 10oz bread, one pint soup, and 3oz of meat, potatoes and turnip and an extra 4oz bread and half an ounce of marge. For the Jubilee dinner there was a deduction of 6oz bread and 8oz potatoes but an additional 3oz meat and an apple or orange was given.” It was hardly starvation, but as I remarked in my biography of Johnny (
Gentle Johnny
Ramensky
, Black & White, Edinburgh 2010) it was not quite a celebration dinner either. And in the climate of prison life in the 1930s it was perhaps not the cleverest of moves to become known as a regular complainer even if your letters were more literate than that of the run-of-the-mill con.
Johnny was in a state of mental turmoil at this time. In his later years he grew to accept prison life but in this early long sentence he was prone to depression and that chip on his shoulder, first placed there in the Glenboig and Gorbals days, grew heavier by the year. He resented particularly that the authorities had refused to let him travel to Glasgow to attend the funeral of his first wife. A letter he wrote in 1937 to the Scottish Home Department is indicative of his mental state of mind and of conditions in the prison in that era:
Sir,
I appeal to you for fair play. On 4 Nov 1934 I escaped from Peterhead prison and was caught and thrown into chains. Ever since I have been the victim of petty tyranny and vindictiveness on the part of the governor here. I will relate the latest and you will see for yourself. Bear with me a little and note. On November 1936 the head warder spoke to me in the quarry. He said would you like to be considered for the bathroom job. I replied yes. He said, “Very well, I just thought I would ask you before anyone else asked for the job.” He added, of course, you will play the game. The head warder said that’s all right then. The bathroom job was not available till Feb 37. In December 36 the head warder again spoke to me in the quarry. He said would I like a job as fireman in the kitchen? I replied no. He said, “You would not like it.” He then said all right, of course, and then I have not forgotten the bathroom job. I said that would do me.
On February 10, the day before I was to take over my new job, the head warder told me I was considered an unsuitable person for the job and I could not get it. I saw the governor the next day and stated my case. He admitted the truth of these facts. He told me the reason I did not get the job. He told me that I had written a petition to you
[the governor’s superiors]
on December last and when I did so a black mark was put against me. I also wish to draw your attention to the fact that in the petition I informed you of the conditions under which a convict by name of Kidd died. By writing to you on that matter I have again angered the governor here. Because he informed me that there was a black mark against me and I was being punished for doing so.
At the same time yesterday he deprived me of all privileges on a trumped up charge of insolence. A deliberate fake. I have put up with everything these years because I have not proof. I have not written to anyone before because things do happen. But when the governor told me himself I can not do less than see daylight. I was led on to believe I was getting a change of job. And in addition I was deprived of privileges. I have been nearly three years in the quarry. Other men do only a few months or a year and are then shifted to another job. I do not want a shift. I only want left alone. Nor do I want to be the victim to the malice or vindictiveness of the governor here. I trust you will look into this matter and help the underdog a bit.
I am, sir, yours,
John Ramensky
The reference to work conditions in the quarry is significant. Speak to any old-timers who worked there and you get a picture of how grim it was in the ’30s. The little train written about earlier may have looked a tad like
Thomas the Tank Engine
, so beloved of children’s TV, but its passengers were heading for a hellish day of stone-breaking, hard manual labour of the sort that most folk of the time fiercely believed was due punishment, however severe, for lawbreakers. The convicts slaved in all weathers, under the vigilant eyes of guards armed with rifles and cutlasses, to cut the stone to make those massive blocks for the harbour breakwater. When you visualise the conditions and what it must have been like, you understand the desire of the prisoners to get out of the quarry and into a relatively cushy job in the prison hospital or the tailors’ shops. Or maybe even an attendant in the bathroom.
This was not the first time Johnny had taken up his pen in the interests of Prisoner Kidd. In December 1934 he had written to the governor in the following terms:
Sir,
I wish to draw to your attention to the conditions under which a convict has to fight for his life when attacked with pneumonia. Yesterday, Friday, December 4, convict Kidd died of pneumonia. I do not say he died for want of attention, but I do think he died for the lack of proper treatment and the care of those most competent to look after him. When he died, convict Kidd was in the care of a prison warder. The warder does his best. At least I hope so. But even his best, after all, does not mean very much. I bring this to your notice hoping you can do something to give a convict a chance. The same chance as every other prisoner receives in other prisons. Speaking personally, from experience, when I was unlucky enough to contract pneumonia in Barlinnie in 1931, I was immediately rushed to Lightburn Hospital, Shettleston. If I had been kept in Barlinnie I would never have pulled through. So I also believe Kidd would have pulled through. The brightness and hope one meets in hospital helps wonderfully. The drabness of the surroundings in prison does not help a convict in his fight for life. I therefore ask you to advocate that when a convict is seriously ill to send him outside to the care of those who are highly proficient in this matter. I lay this subject before you and trust that you will give it your earnest consideration.
I am sir, etc.
This is an intelligent, compassionate letter and its main point – that seriously ill prisoners should be given prompt and expert medical attention – cannot be contested. But the “earnest consideration” given to it was not what Johnny expected. The governor and the medical officer were more concerned with what they thought was a slur on them rather than the circumstances of poor Kidd’s death. They considered legal action. You can’t help but think that in similar circumstance these days it would be the other way around and m’learned friends would have to be consulted forthwith by the relatives of the deceased and compensation sought through the courts. And probably awarded.
However, Johnny Ramensky all these years ago was not going to be scared off or pushed aside. The deaths of prisoners in custody became something of an obsession with him and he regularly used his skill as a “jailhouse lawyer” in letters to the authorities on the subject. Far from being cowed at the threat of legal action against him he got bolder as he went along. The original Kidd letter was followed by this one:
Sir,
Last December I wrote to you a petition concerning the death of a convict name Kidd. I received your answer “no reason for taking action”. Since then another convict named Gray died. I wish to draw your attention to the fact that his death was caused through neglect. Frank Gray reported sick on Sunday 21st but received no treatment. On Monday 22nd he again complained of not feeling well. The doctor told him there was nothing wrong with him and gave him two aspirins. On Tuesday 23rd Gray had to be admitted to hospital. He was kept there some time and finally sent outside to some infirmary. He died there. If ordinary precautions had been taken by the authorities here, that man’s life could have been saved.
He was kept waiting so long in hope of treatment and then too long in the prison hospital that the man had no chance. The only good thing I can see is that he was allowed to die outside of prison. The food here is very bad and a convict has no stamina to fight an illness.
Ramensky went on to point out that Gray had been serving five years and added that the longer a person was held in Peterhead the greater the effect on his general health. Again he asked “for steps to be taken.” His prison correspondence, held in the National Archives, shows a penchant for ending letters with various versions of “I trust you will act.” No doubt composing these wordy epistles kept his mind active, but there is little evidence that they did much to change conditions in any of the many hard places in which he was held.
The one notable exception is that Ramensky was largely responsible for ending the barbaric practice of shackling prisoners in iron restraints. He was, in this era of the ’30s, big news in the papers, and when he was shackled after being caught following one of his escapes it made headlines. The thought of “Gentle Johnny” in chains upset the readers and, more importantly, angered MPs and do-gooders of all stripes. The fuss was such that the authorities had a blacksmith go to his Peterhead cell and cut him free and from that day on no shackles were used in Scottish prisons. It was a major victory in the battle for humane treatment of offenders. Without the Ramensky effect, shackling people in irons might have continued on for years. His celebrity was the key to the end of this horrible, almost medieval, practice.
Johnny’s prolific letter-writing on behalf of those taking ill in prison is particularly ironic in that his own life ended in a similar incident, though on this occasion, despite a certain amount of controversy, there can be no serious criticism of his jailers. In November 1972 he was serving his final sentence in Perth Prison, a broken man, a shadow of the figure who had left Peterhead in the 1940s to train as a commando in the Lochaber hills, fight alongside partisans in Italy and after the war spend years running darkened rooftops en route to blowing yet another safe. He had been arrested earlier in the year in Ayr hiding behind a chimney, and not long before he had fallen from a building in Stirling in the act of avoiding the cops. He sustained serious injuries in this fall, was hospitalised and appeared in court as a tragic figure in a wheelchair. His friends felt that he never fully recovered.
On the weekend of his death he was, on the Friday afternoon, doing some “light work,” as the Perth Prison official report described it (sorting mail bags for the Post Office), with a party of fellow prisoners and to help pass the time the cons were playing a friendly game of “Wordie,” a sort of Scrabble in which little slips of paper were passed round and the players added letters and tried to create words. It was a game popular in prisons in the days before electronic entertainment. The tragedy of his final hours was told to me in detail by Willie Leitch, a famous ex-con who had become over the years a close friend of Johnny. Willie himself had been a jailbreaker and like Johnny he had a service background, though Willie was a Navy man rather than a commando.
When Willie told me about the game of Wordie I remarked that Johnny, with his passion for letter-writing and words, would run out an easy winner. With a twinkle in his eye Willie told me, “Not necessarily – there were a lot of clever folk in Perth prison that day!” But although most of the players were in good humour looking forward to the break in routine that the weekend brought, Johnny was low, complaining of a headache. He put down the increasing frequency of his headaches to the odd whack with a police baton down the years or the after effect of his Stirling fall. He was rubbing his head and, according to Willie, there was a red patch moving across the side of his face. His fellow Wordie players became so worried, although he insisted he was all right, they thought that he needed looked at and they summoned Sandy Bain, a popular warder who before joining the prison service was in the RAF. Sandy decided that Johnny should be taken back to his cell for a lie down and the cell was kept unlocked so that the warders could keep an eye on him. The prison surgery was involved and it soon became clear that something serious was wrong. Johnny was bleeding from the mouth and confused, talking to himself. In contrast to the Peterhead situation with convicts Kidd and Gray back in the ’30s, prompt action was taken to send Johnny to Perth Royal infirmary.