A Lonely Prison Wall - Recollections of a serial escapee by Anthony Kee

A LARGE number of prison stories are told by the people who put the miscreants into them — the police, the judiciary and so forth; others come from the pens of the men and women who administer them, while occasionally there is a publication by an inmate (usually, former) who tells a generally interested and receptive public of experiences while 'banged up' in one of Her Majesty's hostels.

'A Lonely Prison Wall — Recollections of a serial escapee' is very different though, as the title suggests. For author Anthony Kee, while telling of his problems —and recollections of numerous penal establishments during an eight year period during the 1930s and 40 — reflects upon his serial escapes from numerous jails (he spent time in 15 in total, although often not very long), ensuring a sentence originally quite short was extended with almost monotonous regularity — escaping in those days carrying extra penal penalties in a way which it does not appear to today.

The 15 prisons he mentions lie geographically from Winson Green in Birmingham to the most famous (or, perhaps infamous) of all, Dartmoor.

The author clearly is aware of the 'Moor's' sinister image within the psyche of most folk for the front cover of the book carries a sepia picture of the forbidding, mind concentrating front entrance — assuredly the best known 'front door' to any prison in these islands. Arriving on the Moor in the middle of December, 1945, he makes it clear that the entire experience of incarceration in the bleak 18th century building amid one of Britain's most austere wildernesses was a major shock. Not that he stayed that long, soon enacting a successful escape

The problem though was that while he was quite remarkably good at getting out of jail, he was rather inept at staying out, recapture usually following soon after. This he puts down to the brashness of youth (and he was young); such lack of thought and foresight, however, was not apparent in his numerous escape plans, so many of which were successfully executed and a number of which he describes in detail — in fact he has even sketched plans of a few.

Also there are an eclectic range of photographs covering so many aspects and episodes of his life — his homes, parents, and wider family, well known landmarks and places — prisons and borstals —which had housed him often briefly and even of some of the cars the illegal acquisition of which had been responsible for his imprisonment.

There is, though, a touch of irony in his story that his first escape, at the age of 8, was not from any place of correction but from a convent boarding school, from which subsequently he was expelled; the school, its rules and regime, sounded worse than any of the prisons which housed him thereafter!

Anthony Kee writes with a clarity, directness, insight, humour and discipline which makes this book a read which grips throughout.

There is though, a further aspect which adds to its appeal — it is written with honesty and considerable generosity of spirit.

There is no sentimentality, no recrimination, no self-justification or self pity, no tale of woe; the author tells it as it was, the traumas, the many bad times, the occasional good ones which dominated a most chequered, but never dull, early life.

'A Lonely Prison Wall - Recollections of a serial escapee' by Anthony Kee, priced at £3.95 available from Dartmoor Prison Museum, Princetown.

TED SHERRELL