Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A judge who, as Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, exposed squalor and inefficiencies in penal institutions.
On the island
Eight records
Original London Cast of Ace of Clubs
I think that the first thing I thought about when I thought about this programme was there must of course be something from Noel Coward. Free Juvenile Delinquents is written, of course, by a somewhat Tory-minded writer, I think, but nevertheless it has some profound truths, and I'm sure, I hope, that it's of interest to Michael Howard, the present Home Secretary, in this particular passage. But there it is. What the answer is to the problem which Sir Nerle describes, I really don't know.
Vienna State Opera Chorus with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein
Fidelio is really the ultimate work on prisons and prisoners and their problems. The cry to the dawn may be corny, it may be played very often and so on, but it's the real basis of what prisoners are all about, the desire to escape, to get out, to get, again what I've said, no doubt it's not unreasonable, fresh air and the call for fresh air. What sanitation the poor prisoners in Fidelio had in the depths of their cell, I don't know, and I suspect not very much. But that's against a background where I don't suppose Beethoven did either. But now there's no reason why, at the end of this century, we shouldn't have reasonable physical conditions.
I like to say that I remember from Valmouth more than anything, both Fanella Fielding and Clear Lane, both of whom meant a tremendous lot because they got across this whole adaptation of the sort of dandy books I'm talking about into music. And I learned something which most people have learned much earlier, that you can translate from one medium into another and really enhance it and make it work.
Vivian Ellis (music), A.P. Herbert (lyrics)
What I remember about him was in nineteen seventy he was eighty. And he had an eightieth birthday party given for him on a launch which went down the River Thames to Greenwich. And as it went there fell in behind it naval launches with shapely wrens standing at attention. Ships were dressed all over outside on the embankment by the Temple, as he's a barrister as well. And when we got to Greenwich, off we got, and there Allan turned round, and I think it was off the cuff, and asked Liz Webb, who was one of his guests, to sing This Is My Lovely Day.
Immigrants from Zaire on remand at Pentonville Prison
Immigrants are people who've come here to seek refuge because of political persecution at home. It takes branches of the Home Office apparently a very long time to know how genuine they are, but apparently they know more about it if they've been in prison for a year awaiting a decision. And there it is. But when I talk of remands having the horrors of uncertainty. The immigrants have this in an extreme way, and I think you can feel it in the songs that they're singing.
JerusalemFavourite
Massed English Male Voice Choir at the Royal Albert Hall
Hubert Parry (music), William Blake (words)
it's a perfect song for a tone-deaf selector, it seems to me, because it's enormously powerful, enormously straightforward, enormously emotive. I'm not a member of the WI, but I nevertheless have never heard it without pleasure. One of the reasons I suspect it always seems to come in services when I attend them in church very soon before the end, and you know very soon you're going to get out like the prisoners in Beethoven into the fresh air. But it's a a great and moving occasion, and Blake is my favourite poet, and I think Blake's Jerusalem is really my favourite noise.
Betchman to me is the poet of place, partly because I in my life have shared the places he selects Hampstead, where he was a child, Oxford, and North Cornwall. But the poet of place has chosen here a particular place to which I am very devoted, what one might think of as the sacred coast from Polzeph over Greenaway to Damer Bay, round Bray Hill, left or right, ferry across from Rock to Padsdow, and then the final pleasure, the little bookshop, the second-hand bookshop in Padsdow, which is so marvellous.
Wandsworth Prisoners and Primnico Opera
Leonard Bernstein (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics)
It brings the public in to see what's going on. It gives the prisoners a real feeling of possibility for the future.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:15Do you think the Government got more than it bargained for when it appointed you?
No, because I've also made quite a lot of favourable remarks about prisons, and all I do is to try and tell the truth. I'm not setting myself up to make devastating or critical or offensive remarks.
Presenter asks
4:35How shocked were you by what you found at Pentonville?
I was puzzled, perhaps, as much as shocked. ... Lack of sanitation, for example, the fact that you uh couldn't get water or lavatories when you needed to, I thought it was very odd in the late nineteenth century, it might have been acceptable, late twentieth century, I thought it was very strange. It was the smell that hit you, I think. It was the smell that hit me more than the sight.
Presenter asks
6:03Did you have a sense of guilt as a judge, sending people to prison without realizing what kind of life you were committing them to?
I was astounded by my attitude as a judge when I thought about it later. I knew nothing of prisons. I'd hardly ever been there. And most judges, even today, say to me, Why should we visit prisons? What's it got to do with us? Do you think they should do so, Morgan? I think they should. I think we should have a criminal justice system by which people learn what other parts of it actually do, so that if you say Pentonville, you've got a picture in your mind. So that if you say community service, you know what it means. I think that's essential in sentencing.
The keepsakes
The book
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Laurence Sterne
I read it at sixteen when I had flu, and both Shandy and I survived that experience.
The luxury
A bust of Laurence Sterne by Joseph Nollekens
I can talk to Lawrence Stern, and there's no danger of an answer.
Presenter asks
13:52Why did you never take silk?
Uh I had high blood pressure and problems later a heart attack and that was a reason for going on the bench, which I I did uh after a while, rather than take silk.
Presenter asks
19:53How do you explain the suicides that occur, especially among young men on remand? Is it because they're demoralized by being caught and uncertain about the future, or depressed by the physical circumstances?
I think there's a lot of them who are depressed by being the first time in prison and completely lost and sad, and it's a tragic business if they take their lives. One of the terrible things about our system, or lack of system, is long waits on remand. I don't know whether magistrates realise very often quite the distress that's caused by waiting for an uncertain date. Prisoners are always saying to me, I don't know when I'm going to be tried. ... They may be exaggerating, but there is a genuine worry, concern, anxiety which must be a source of the greatest anxiety and depression to people.
“I am the most impractical person in the world. I've still not mastered how to mend a plug, and I am completely useless at doing anything I don't drive a motor car.”
“I was astounded by my attitude as a judge when I thought about it later. I knew nothing of prisons. I'd hardly ever been there.”
“I think there's a big class of prisoners we don't think about clearly enough. I think they are the male prisoners under thirty who failed at school, or school has failed them, and who failed in their relationships with families and particularly with women. And what they need is proper teaching.”
“I don't believe that anybody other than a complete lunatic, and there are not very many of those in this sense, actually commits a crime in order to get into prison, because it's cosy in prison.”
“The whole point about rocking the boat is how far do you rock it. Do you rock it so that the waves just don't come in, or do you cut it short of that?”