Month by Month
Rachel just misses a massive earthquake in Chile, learns more about Arthur Koestler’s prison experiences and admires John Hirst’s calmness under fire.
[image: Tim Robertson (centre) Chief Executive of the Koestler Awards with author Michael Scammell (left) and Gary Monaghan Governor of Pentonville Prison]
The South American country of Chile, sandwiched between the Pacific and the Andes, is not on most peoples’ map of the world, unless they followed the case of its disgraced leader, General Pinochet. But Chile is a wonderful country, where I’ve been for three weeks in January and February. I was researching for a new book that I hope to write about an extraordinary woman travel writer, Maria Graham, who in 1822 found herself on her own in Valparaiso after her husband, Captain Graham, died as their ship rounded Cape Horn. In Valparaiso she met the dynamic Admiral Cochrane who, although British, had just defeated the Spanish as head of the Chilean fleet. It’s all fascinating stuff, particularly when you throw in a serious earthquake which destroyed most of the buildings in Valpo and along the coast.
I didn’t discover much about contemporary prison conditions on this visit – although one Chilean friend told me she was asked to donate 50 pots of hand cream to the local women’s prison and was very impressed to get back some extremely warm ‘thank you’ notes. But on my return, I thought of the earthquake again when Dame Anne Owers, our redoubtable Chief Inspector of Prisons, told me that the only good thing about the horrific Haitian earthquake was that it had thoroughly destroyed the Haitian prison. She described it as the absolute worst she had ever seen. When I asked her what was the second worst, she only hesitated a moment before suggesting the women’s Death Row wing in Texas prison.
I met Anne at the launch of a biography of Arthur Koestler by Michael Scammell (Faber & Faber £25). Many of you will know his name as the founder of the Koestler Awards but few could imagine the amazing life he lived - I was going to say ‘survived’ - before coming to England during World War II. Born in Budapest to a middle-class Jewish family, he was partly educated in Germany but eventually fled university to British occupied Palestine where he hoped to join the Zionists and work in a Kibbutz.
When this didn’t work out - he always was better with words than manual labour - he wangled a job as a journalist with a German newspaper. Abandoning Zionism for Communism, he visited Stalin’s Russia and in 1936 set off to report on the Spanish Civil War. He soon found himself in a Seville prison where, although having good sanitation (much better than Pentonville, as he later commented) men in neighbouring cells were regularly led out to be executed. He never knew if he would be next. He wrote, ‘A cell door cannot be shut except by being slammed to. It is made of massive steel and concrete, about four inches thick, and every time it falls to there is a resounding crash just as though a shot had been fired. But this report dies away without an echo. Prison sounds and echo-less and bleak.’
In the years following, he was imprisoned in a France occupied by the Germans, joined the Foreign legion, arrested again, and when he escaped to England became suspect again and was put into Pentonville. His great novel, Darkness at Noon, written while he was incarcerated in France, was published while he was incarcerated in London. These frightening experiences gave him a personal sympathy for prisoners and set him inexorably against the death penalty.
In the 1950s he initiated the National Campaign for Abolition of Capital Punishment. This followed the hanging of the subnormal Derek Bentley and the innocent Timothy Evans, followed by the shocking case of Ruth Ellis, a young mother who killed her lover in a jealous rage. To encourage a change in the law, he wrote ‘Reflections on Hanging’ which prompted his collaborator and wife, Cynthia, to comment, ‘We were living in a world of gallows and gibbets, creaking and groaning with the bodies of criminals’. In 1962, he established the Koestler Awards, giving a thousand pounds a year for ten years.
Michael Scammell’s admiring portrait of Koestler, as a writer and political thinker of near genius, doesn’t attempt to disguise his deficiencies as a man. His sexual approaches were often violent and led to accusations of rape, although he had a vast amount of willing lovers and women who remained close friends. He drank too much, argued too much and was boastful and deceitful. Scammell blames this (as did Koestler) on his mother, who gave him too little love as a child. Certainly, he was a tortured character who at the age of seventy-seven, committed suicide in a double pact with Cynthia.
At the launch of the biography, which was hosted by Tim Robertson, Chief Executive of the Koestler Awards, a gentler picture was painted by Ariane Bankes, vice-chair of trustees and Koestler’s niece by marriage who, as a teenager, enjoyed inspiring conversations with him. A friend of mine whose father played chess with Koestler, remembers at the age of nine being taken by him to see the Festival of Britain’s firework displays, then being fed sausage and biscuits by candlelight. Koestler, himself, resolutely refused to have children and didn’t acknowledge the one who existed.
Those of you who want to know more about Arthur Koestler’s amazing life will have a better chance if you’re in Pentonville Prison. The governor of the prison, Gary Monaghan, was presented with a copy in remembrance of Koestler’s time there. Monaghan promises it will be in the reference section of the library.
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I got back from my travels too late to attend the Prison Reform Trust’s February 8th conference called Barred from Voting - the right to vote for sentenced prisoners. Juliet Lyon, the PRT’s director assures me it was well attended with talks from Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty, Bobby Cummines from Unlock and Paul Tidball, President of the Prison Governors’ Association, among others. It was also well covered in the press, if not always favourably. However I did catch ex-prisoner and Inside Time writer John Hirst making a valiant appearance on the Alan Titchmarsh TV programme. The audience were of the sort who prefer booing and shouting down anyone they disagree with rather than listening. I admired John for staying calm under fire, putting the case for prisoner votes and, in my view, making the hang’em-shoot’em-flog’em brigade look extremely childish. To be fair, Titchmarsh himself seemed open-minded.
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Issue : September 2010
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£2bn Cuts
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