DARTMOOR SECRETS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 154, 22 February 1932, Page 2

DARTMOOR SECRETS

EX-CONVICT'S STORY ILLICIT NEWSPAPER PRODUCED IN PRISON. ORGANISING ESCAPES. How trouhle starts iri Dartmoor, the great gaol of England, where prisoners sensationally rioted recently, is told here in a statement to the Sunday Sun by an ex-convict now in Sydney. He hares other seerets of the cells — how an illicit "newspaper" is produced by the prisoners, how they live, and how, sometimes, they escape. "Many of the warders are good chaps, fme, big fellows, with reasonable human sympathies. A few of them are cunning brutes, sadists really, who enjoy getting a prisoner into trouble. "It is not difficult for a man who has spent years there to guess hovtr the present trouhle arose. It is always the old hands who incite the newcomers to revolt. They egg them on, and at the last nioment they leap in and save a warder' s life from the hands of their comrades — a sure recipe for a rebate on the term of one's sentence. Ingenuity. "The ingenuity of the convict is well known. One of the prisoners' jobs is making postmen's bags, and a lump of cobblers' wax is needed for this industry. When a convict earns the right to write a letter, the warder hands him a pen and a bottle of ink. Like a fiash, the convict extracts the nib, pushes it point-foremost down a crack in his cell-floor and brushes dust over it. The ink he pours into his cobblers' wax, which he has flattened out in his hand. A few twists to the wax, and the precious ink is safely bottled away. Then he waits for the warder's return. " 'Eh, wot's the use of this to me?' he asks. 'No nib in the pen, and no ink in the bottle!' "The stolen ink and nib provide him with a means for self-expression. Many of the convicts are educated men, others have views which they long to air among their fellows. Prison Magazine. With pen, ink, and a scrap of paper they can build up a smuggled literature of their own. I used to be editor of the prison magazine, an illicit production, with cartoons by convictartists and articles by convict-men-of-letters. "Several copies of that paper 'have found their way to the British Museum. "Dartmoor is situated in the wildest country in England, and is 23 miles across. The authorities have it well covered with telephone communication, and if a prisoner escapes and remains in hiding for a day, or even two days, no one worries very much — the net will catch him. Few Escape. "There have been cn1y two notable escapes. One prisc icr s a ed away for three days. At the end of the third day he broke into a cottage and sat down to a stolen supper before the embers of a fire. How was he to know, hiding by day and walking by night, that he had walked in a circle, and was back at Dartmooi', in one of the warder's cottages ? The warder walked in and arrested him. "The other escapee reached the railway and hid in a freight truck. The freight — bricks — fell on him during the journey, and his crushed body was found when the truck was unloaded.

"Whenever a prisoner escapes, a gun is fired from the gaol and a bell is rung. Householders immediately bar the doors of their cottages, but leave food outside on the windowsill. It is a Dartmoor tradition, and it saves the cottagers from invasion. Every Crumb Counts. "Convicts' fare at Dartmoor _is simple. The inmates rise at five in summer and six in winter, and get their cells spotlessly clean for inspection. At seven comes breakfast and the thin porridge that is so popular that it is 'listened for.' With it goes two ounces of bread and some weak tea — no milk or sugar. At noon comes dinner, two ounces of bully-beef, a potato, and two ounces of bread. Sometimes soup or haricot beans take the place of the bully-beef. Supper, at 4 or 4.30, again brings two ounces of bread and tea. "That is the ration of a well behaved prisoner. As behaviour falls away, so do rations. A prisoner is entitled to demand that his two ounces of bread be weighed before his eyes — and to him it is one of the most serious matters of life that he should get the last crumb of precious bread to which he is entitled. Warders Live Well. "But how well the warders live! Dartmoor has some of the finest milking cows in the world, and the warders' families can have all the milk they want for nothing. The rest goes to the Dartmoor pigs. Lord, how I have envied those pig'S, as I swilled milk to them that I was not allowed to drink myself. "There is wheat for the prisoners to cut, and a chaff mill for them to turn. The turning is made as difficult as possible in order to give them exercise. For the man who loafs there is first of all a warning, and then the lash. One warder, a huge, finely-built fellow, used to boast that he could draw blood with every stroke of the lash. So he could. "When prisoners are working in a field, Six warders with rifles cocked kneel at strategic points along the boundary. The muzzles of the rifles follow the convict reapers as they work. Mounted warders also patrol in the distance. "We have had real artists at Dartmoor, One of them rpainted frescoes round the chapel, and when his term of imprisonment expired before he completed the job, he begged to be allowed to stay on at Dartmoor the Beloved until he finished. The re'quest was granted. The Dartmoor eonviets who fired the main building will he sorry to think that they destroyed these frescoes."