STRANGEDAYS

On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the Strangeways protest, we look back at the cause and effects and speak to to David Nolan and Tim Booth, Producer and Narrator of Granada's new documentary Riot! Strangeways Ten Years On.

I was with a man called Bill William, searching for the oldest immigrant house in Manchester. Bill, a local historian, was leading us on one of his guided walks of the immigrant mean streets. From the 1840's, Europe's abused, dispossessed and oppressed arrived at Red Hill , behind Victoria Station and made their way to the stacked-up hovels of Strangeways. It was 11.30am on Sunday morning and Bill lead us across Bent Street, heading towards the prison. It was April Fools' Day 1990and scallies in hooded tops were bursting through the roof of the Strangeways prison rotunda. Police had already closed the streets with plastic ribbon. They remained closed for a month.

David Nolan, the Granada producer who has made an hour-long documentary about the Strangeways riot knows of my interest in buildings. When I told him I wanted to riot about the protest, he very nearly sneered, “Oh, the architectural slant on prison riots now is it?” Well, yes Dave, actually it is.

Strangeways opened in 1868, designed by Alfred Waterhouse, who also did the Manchester Assize Courts, the Victoria University, St Mary's Hospital and Manchester Town Hall. The prison was originally designed to house 1,059 male and female prisoners in single occupancy cells. Women prisoners were moved to Styal, Cheshire in 1963. The Certified Normal Accommodation figure for Strangeways in 1990 was 9970. On the night of 31 march, there were 1647 men in the prison.

The design of Strangeways is called “Panoptican”, which means that the cells circulate around the central warders blocks. Inmates have clear site of their nemesis. The prison is a Manchester landmark because of its riot-stick chimney. As kids we imagined that when smoke came out of the chimney, they were burning the prisoners. Strangeways hands over the prison as a threat: the everyday symbol of institutionalised retribution. It is sinister, enclosed, secret. It is a town within a town, a forbidden city to all but the banged-up, and the men who do the banging.

1 April 1990, the day after the poll tax riots. Happy Monday's “Step On” is top 10. Madchester is at its height and there is a raid on the roof of Strangeways. Two years earlier, Monday's manager, Nathan McGough approached Granada TV to propose a televised gig in Strangeways. It never happened, but I guess Shaun and Bez were on the roof in spirit, or even substance.

Step back; Mandela walked free a month earlier, Ceaucescu was dead, the Berlin wall was down. On Saturday night, 31 March, a number of inmates,including Paul Taylor, refused to leave the prison chapel after a film show. This was their 25th small scale protest in four weeks. The inmate's complaints were to do with visiting rights, association, bad food and slopping out. The next morning in the prison chapel at 11am, Paul Taylor began the 26th protest; to deliver a prepared speech following the sermon by a visiting church army preacher.

We know what Paul Taylor said because the service was recorded by prison chaplain Noel Proctor, presumably for a later greatest hits compilation: “ I would like to say, right,” begins Taylor, “ that this man has just talked about blessing of the heart, and the hardened heart can be delivered. No it cannot, not with resentment, anger and bitterness and hatred being instilled in people”. Another prisoner shouts “ fuck your system, fuck your rules.” Prison officers intervene, one of who's keys are taken and passed to Paul Taylor who first escorts Noel Proctor to a safe place and then shouts, “It is time everyone had a little association and communication”. And so they did, for 25 days.

David Nolan, producer of “Riot! Strangeways Ten years On” explains “ There was building work going on inside Strangeways at the time. And scaffolding reached up to the roof of the rotunda. What had been planned as a short lived sit-in protest in the chapel, exploded into the biggest UK prison protest of the 20th century.” David was journalist at Piccadilly Radio in 1990, he spent 18 days and nights in a radio car outside the prison. He was determined not to air anything that he could not validate. He did not repeat hearsay, and Piccadilly's coverage subsequently won awards. “On Monday 2 April, “ says David, “the Manchester evening news ran three different headlines across its three editions.....'20 dead', '20 dead?', 'Mayhem'. Mid-morning a banner appeared on the prison roof declaring 'No Dead'. That was the truth, “ David explains. “Derek White and Walter Scott died in Bury General Hospital in circumstances that might have had tenuous connections with the protest. Subsequent charges relating to these deaths were eventually dropped.”

Granada's documentary is fronted by Tim Booth, frontman of James. Tim tells me he wouldn't have been in the band at all if their original singer hadn't been banged-up in Strangeways before he joined. Tim and the Granada crew spent a day in the prison. Being the method man he is, Tim had asked to stay the night. That couldn't be organised. (Now if Shaun Ryder had been doing the presenting job, I can only speculate that all he would have needed to do was empty his pockets and a night in the nick would have been guaranteed).

“What really struck me when I went in,” says Tim, “was how organised the place is; a total faceless organisation. Everything there is the ritual of the keys. Prisoners have keys to their cells now, but so do the officers and they never knock. The officers just walk in whenever they please. Prison is a total loss of individuality.2 I have no idea whether Tim harbours any illusions, but he claims that officers and inmates alike seem, “conscious of having to make the best of a difficult situation. They just have to make it work.”

I asked David Nolan to sum up what he thinks is the outcome of the Strangeways riot, ten years on. “Prisoners no longer have to shit in buckets,” he says.

Apart from his on-roof broadcasts, the highest profile Strangeways protestor, Paul Taylor, speaks for the first time on camera in Riot! David Nolan describes him as “fiercely intelligent, and keen to remind you of it. His talk is full of literary allusions. He's sure of one thing, he'd never hit a prison officer again and he's never going back to prison.” I can only hope that, on this occasion, Taylor is afforded fair treatment by the media, because if for nothing else, Strangeways should be remembered for this; day after day, page after page, headline after headline, the media confirmed the impression of out of control scum.

As with the miners' strike six years earlier, editors of broadsheets, tabloids, radio and TV coverage alike chose to except everything the the authorities said as the truth, and all other testimonies to be lies. In fact, almost the exact opposite was the case. That is, and should be, on of the great, enduring and repeated lessons of the Strangeways Prison Protest.

Protestor Alan Lord was nabbed while 'negotiating' on day 24. The following day, the final five came back down to earth in the bucket of a 'cherry picker'. Paul Taylor, Mark Williams, John Murray, Martin Brian and Glyn Williams joined the rest. Some talked about the inmates who were beaten; the informers, the ex-policemen, the sex offenders. None of these beatings were ritualised. There had been no castrations, no Kangaroo courts. The protest caused quite spectacular damage to the gaol.

Protestors did break into the pharmacy and a number of them did get off their heads. The protestors had been drenched and water-cannoned with millions of gallon of water. They had been blasted with random sound and light and buzzed with helicopters. They were tormented by truncheon-beating, taunting prison officers; “I shagged your wife last night”, that sort of thing. Prison Officers ran the riot from the authorities' side; Police rarely entered the prison, the SAS was never an issue.

Governor Brendan O'Friel believed he could retake the prison, by force, on day two. He was overruled by the Home Office in a blur of disjointed governance. There seems to have been a decision to let the inmates stew in their own juices and/or condemn themselves by their own actions. The Government might have wanted to occupy the high ground, by conducting a non-confrontational waiting game.

The late Lord Woolf and Judge Tumin conducted the report into the protest. Governor O'Friel, a Catholic, clearly believed the protestors had let him down and behaved unreasonably. Before the protest, Strangeways was a stinking, insanitary, overcrowded, brutal anachronism. Which bits of their protest could he deem unreasonable? Could it have been the ritual castration? The Kangaroo courts? The murder of 20 people? None of these things actually happened.

Reverend Noel Proctor may regularly have dropped to his knees in prayer, but he was not dropping to his knees to empty his bowels in a bucket, three to a cell. Quite how such men of Christian liberality might, themselves, have tolerated years of ritual humiliation, racism, brutality and the stink of it all is not a matter of record. I recall something that Ian Jack wrote in the Sunday times soon after the Heysel Stadium disaster, “Is it the pig that makes the sty, or the sty that makes the pig?”. I suggest if the late Lord Woolf, Judge Tumin, Governor O'Friel and the Rev Proctor were asked to answer the question in all honesty, ten years down the line, they would have to say, “the sty”, “the sty”, “the sty”, “the sty.”

©City Life.