Immaculate Credentials

Article from the Guardian on Eric Allison, a man who had 'immaculate credentials' for a job as prison correspondent. 

Eric Allison, Guardian’s prison correspondent, dies at 79

Former inmate, who claimed to be only man to escape from Strangeways, joined paper at 60 and worked to expose cruelty of prison system

Eric Allison, who became the Guardian’s prison correspondent aged 60 after spending much of his life in jail, has died. He had been recently diagnosed with secondary bone cancer and was 79.

Allison, who claimed to be the only man to ever escape from Strangeways prison in Manchester, joined the Guardian in 2003 after serving multiple jail terms for fraud, theft and burglary. He got the job after answering an advert in the paper, which said a criminal record was no bar to application. He impressed the then-editor, Alan Rusbridger, with his passion for fighting injustice and his stylish way with words. At his interview he promised that he would go straight if given the job – a vow he kept throughout his 19-year Guardian tenure, despite frequent grumblings that his first job was much better paid.

In what he called his second career, Allison wrote widely across the Guardian, exposing cruelty in the prison system and particularly in young offenders’ institutions. He formed a long working partnership and firm friendship with feature writer Simon Hattenstone, a fellow Mancunian (though a Manchester City fan, when Allison was always United). Earlier this year the two investigated the number of prisoners dying on remand, and in 2016 they exposed how the government had approved brutal restraint techniques which could kill children in jail.

Their work on the abuse of children in Medway secure training centre contributed to the security giant G4S being stripped of its contract to run the children’s prison. In 2011 the pair’s investigation into sexual abuse at Medomsley detention centre led to Operation Seabrook, one of the largest single abuse inquiries in the UK, with more than 1,600 former inmates coming forward to report allegations of abuse. Allison and Hattensone won an Amnesty media award for their work on the story.

Much loved in the Guardian’s Manchester office, where he was based throughout his journalistic career, Allison enjoyed reminiscing about the old days when not raging against the system. He was particularly proud of escaping from Strangeways – now HMP Manchester – using a forged bail warrant. No one else had ever managed such a feat, he always claimed.

He was out of jail when the Strangeways riots took place in 1990 but egged on the prisoners from the street using a megaphone. He went on to co-author a book on the protest, which gave him the confidence to believe that he may one day get paid for writing.

His first conviction came when he was a heavy-smoking 11-year-old, though he insisted that was merely the first time the police caught him. By 14, he was in jail, serving four months for stealing a chewing gum machine. He learned early that prison in England doesn’t work – a fact that nagged at him throughout his life as he used his journalism to fight for a system that doesn’t just punish but also rehabilitates.

The youth detention centre he went to had no improving effect on him, he recalled in an interview to mark the start of his Guardian job in 2003: “It was supposed to be a short sharp shock. Never worked. All it did was make you fitter. Virtually everybody I saw in that detention centre in ‘57 I’ve seen on my travels through the system. Every single one.”

Allison arrived at the Guardian unable to use a computer, having bypassed the technological advances of the 90s because he was serving his longest stretch – seven years – for breaking into a bank in Manchester and stealing cheques worth a million pounds.

That final job also involved the forgery of Giro cheques. He would say that the counterfeits were so convincing that the government was forced to withdraw the real ones from circulation, because post office staff could not tell the difference between “ours” and “theirs”.

He had an atlas-like memory of England’s geography, and would often claim to have visited every village big enough for two post offices (it only made them worth a visit if he could commit cheque fraud in at least two). He adored walking in the Peak District and was soppy about his dogs – latterly two Romanian street mutts, Nellie, named after his mum, and Prince.

He came from what he always called a “very straight family”. His father, after leaving the army, was a jack of all trades and his mother brought Allison and his three older brothers up in their home in Gorton, east Manchester.

Released from prison for the final time a few days before the new millennium dawned, Allison initially thought of his freedom as a sabbatical from crime. But as his writing career progressed he felt duty bound to stay on the right side of the law. Occasionally old pals would try to tempt him back to his old ways but he was determined to live a life without crime.

Rusbridger said he decided the Guardian needed a prison correspondent because so little was known about what goes on behind the jail walls. “It was a wild idea to hire an ex-con to be the Guardian’s prison correspondent but Eric was the perfect choice. He had immaculate credentials (16 years inside a variety of institutions) and a long track record of causing trouble. He promised to go straight if he got the Guardian role – though he complained that journalism paid poorly compared with crime (with more stress),” said Rusbridger.

“Over the years he campaigned, reported, advocated and investigated on behalf of the underdogs he knew so well. He cast a steady light on a world successive governments would rather were kept in the dark. Prisoners knew they had a reliable witness on their case. My suspicion is that Eric was probably not a world-class bank robber. But he was a class act as a late-life journalist and it’s so sad that his unflinching concentration on an under-reported world has been lost.”

Allison became a well-respected authority on prisons and a passionate campaigner against miscarriages of justice. He believed fervently in the innocence of those whose cases he took up, including that of Jeremy Bamber, who is serving a life sentence for killing his adoptive parents, sister and her twin boys in 1985.

Hattenstone said of him: “Despite a lifetime of criminal activity, maybe because of it, he was the most moral man I knew. When he saw a miscarriage of justice, nobody fought like Eric to have it overturned. His work became his life. He would spend months and sometimes years working on cases that never saw the light of day in print – usually because they were legally too tricky, occasionally because editors didn’t share our faith. There were times in recent years when he became so obsessed with the Jeremy Bamber case that he could talk of little else. Eric was somebody you wanted on your side, as a friend, colleague or a victim of a miscarriage of justice.”

After leaving jail Allison managed to rent a council house in Gorton, where the Channel 4 show Shameless was soon to be filmed. In a piece for the Guardian in 2005 he wrote of his love of the much-maligned area, praising his neighbours for showing “splendid defiance of the overwhelming odds they face on a daily basis”.

Always fighting for the underdog, Allison wrote: “Perhaps perversely, the place keeps me healthily angry about injustice and the way society demonises young people in deprived areas. There is also little danger, I fancy, of feeling above my station in Gorton.”

Helen Pidd

North of England Editor

--oo00oo--

From the Guardian:-

Eric Allison obituary

Eric Allison, who has died aged 79, had two careers, both profitable in their own way. For 50 years he was a dedicated criminal; a fraudster, burglar and bank robber. For the last 19 years of his life, he was the Guardian’s prisons correspondent – every bit as devoted to exposing injustice as he had been to screwing the system when a criminal.

Eric came from a family of “straight-goers” – Alf, his father, was tiny in size and mighty in discipline, his mother Nellie (Ellen) adored him despite his lawless ways, and three brothers who would not have dreamed of committing a crime. But Eric was made of different stuff. He never made excuses – he loved the buzz, the danger, the camaraderie, the wins. He was not so keen on the losses, though he never complained about serving time for a crime he had committed. A fair cop was a fair cop.

He started young. At the age of 11 Eric discovered that he could break into his neighbours’ homes through a gap in the attic between each house. He and two friends targeted one family because they had a television and, so they thought, must be wealthy. The boys were disappointed to discover there was no hidden fortune but did come across a jar filled with pennies, shillings and even half crowns. They pocketed it and scarpered back through the attics.

One accomplice bought a pair of flippers with his ill-gotten gains. His father believed something was up as soon as he spotted them. When the boy said he had borrowed them from Eric, the father knew something was amiss. The Allisons could never afford flippers. The boy confessed, and Eric and the other two were frogmarched to the police station where his friends explained that Eric was the mastermind, and they had just gone along with it. Eric was the only one to receive a criminal record.

He grew up in Gorton, a working-class area of Manchester, where he lived throughout his life, except when serving time (16 years altogether) or on the run (roughly the same). He loved Gorton. “Proper people,” as he would say. Eric divided the world into “proper people” (the supreme compliment) and “the others”.

At 14, he received his first custodial sentence for stealing a bubble-gum machine – three months at Foston Hall detention centre in Derbyshire. Eric, tiny, slight, and with a bad stutter, had been warned to call prison officers sir. But his stutter got the better of him on his first night inside. He could not get the sir out. The officer promptly punched him in the nose in front of the police. This incident made him determined to fight for abused children in custody.

Eric briefly earned an honest crust. He saw a job for a “common waiter” and believed he was perfectly qualified because he was common. He had misread the advert which was for a commis waiter but got the job nevertheless. After a while he got itchy fingers, and returned to crime.

He specialised in fraud and robbery. Eric was an expert forger. He was not one for bigging himself up, but he did delight in telling friends that he had produced counterfeit giro cheques of such high quality that the government was forced to issue a new design. He said that if a village or town in Britain had at least two post offices (to make it worth his while), he would have done business there. He was once captured on the BBC’s Crimewatch programme running from the scene dressed as a woman. The team had thought it would be more convincing if he and his partner entered the property as a couple.

Eric took his career in crime seriously. In the memoir he was writing at the time of his death, he documented the incredible detail that went into planning a break-in at Barclays Bank in St Ann’s Square, Manchester. Eric was, as usual, the project manager. When the gang discovered they couldn’t break into the safe, they gathered information that enabled them to forge and cash two cheques for a combined value of £1m.

For many years he made a good living from crime, though he cannot have been quite as deft as he thought considering the number of times he was caught. His longest and last sentence was seven years, for the bank job and the giros (which, according to the prosecution, had netted £1,140,869)

Despite his size, Eric was tough. In prison, he would take anyone on or call anybody out who was acting unfairly. Over the years, he helped many fellow prisoners – with letters home, literacy and legal battles when they believed they had suffered a miscarriage of justice. He was bolshie and outspoken, and spent a considerable amount of time in solitary.

In 1981 Eric married the mother of his two daughters, Kerry and Caroline, whom he adored even though he missed most of their childhood. He wrote regularly and they visited him in prison. At times, the girls believed they had a closer relationship with their father than many of their schoolmates had with fathers who weren’t locked up. At other times, they resented him.

In her mid-teens, Caroline wrote him a letter saying he was a “selfish bastard”. It stung – he knew it was true. Eventually his wife had had enough, and they split up, though they never divorced. He remained on good terms with her to the end, and was an active, much-loved presence in the lives of his children and grandchildren in later years.

Eric escaped from a number of prisons, most famously Strangeways by forging his own bail warrant. To his regret, he was not inside when prisoners rioted at Strangeways. He supported the activists from the outside and went on to write a book about the riots with his friend Nicki Jameson, Strangeways 1990: A Serious Disturbance (1994).

Experience taught him that jail rarely benefited prisoners. It was punitive rather than rehabilitative, and often turned first-time criminals into recidivists. He met up with virtually all of “the class of ’57” from Foston Hall when serving time in later years. “So much for the short, sharp shock,” he would say. He spent much of his time in prison campaigning for a more effective system, writing letters to the Guardian and articles for Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!, the newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Group.

Eric was nicknamed Eric the Red, partly because he supported Manchester United but more because he was a lifelong socialist. When United were taken over by the American businessman Malcolm Glazer, a disaffected Allison defected to the startup club FC United.

In 2003, he applied for a job as the Guardian’s first prisons correspondent. He had never worked as a professional journalist, but the then editor, Alan Rusbridger, was taken with him. Eric complained regularly, and with good cause, that journalism was less well paid and more stressful than his previous career. On the plus side, it meant he was now being paid for saying his piece rather than being put in segregation.

He dedicated himself to writing about injustice in the prison system, whether it be women jailed for petty crimes, abuse by guards in children’s prisons or restraint techniques that could result in death. After he reported on pregnant women being transported in “sweat boxes” (vehicles used to take prisoners from one secure area to another), the government announced that in future pregnant prisoners would travel by taxi.

Eric was a proud activist journalist. He sat on the boards of numerous charities that campaigned for prisoners’ rights; he spoke frequently at events about the need to imprison fewer people and create a more humane system for those who were jailed; he supported any number of families who had unfairly lost loved ones to prison. It was exhausting and often thankless work. He rarely took holidays.

Eric was on call all the time to listen to the woes of those who sought his help. This was by no means confined to prisons. He managed a football team for young people in Gorton, helped children who were heading in the wrong direction, and loved mentoring young journalists, especially if they came from disadvantaged backgrounds. Allison always supported the underdog – literally. The last two of his many mutts, Prince and Nellie, were unloved Romanian street dogs till he took them in. As with children, he taught them manners, respect and how to love. He described his home, where he lived with the dogs, as part-kennel, part-office.

In 2007 he and I were paired together to report on the inquest into the death of Adam Rickwood, a 14-year-old boy who took his own life after being physically abused. We became the closest of friends (family, he would say) and worked as a team until he died.

Our work on the abuse of children in Medway secure training centre contributed to the security giant G4S being stripped of its contract to run the children’s prison. Our 2011 investigation into sexual abuse at Medomsley detention centre led to Operation Seabrook, one of the largest single abuse inquiries in the UK, with more than 1,600 former inmates coming forward to report allegations of abuse. Nearly all our stories came from Eric’s brilliant contacts, who were as loyal to him as he was to them.

There were many apparent miscarriages of justices he was still hoping to help overturn. He was convinced that the case of Jeremy Bamber, convicted for murdering five family members (his adoptive parents, his sister and her twin boys), was one such. He believed that the initial investigation had been botched in numerous ways, and that it was only a matter of time before Bamber would be released.

Eric’s last great escape was from hospital. He insisted on going home against doctors’ wishes, and was “on a high” spending his final days with Kerry and Caroline, and Nellie and Prince. He hoped to write a diary “about popping my clogs” for the Guardian, was planning his first ever birthday party, and desperately wanted to finish his memoirs. It wasn’t to be, though he has left enough for his family and many friends to tidy up and put the finishing touches to.

He always said journalists should remain outside the “cosy club” and it is to his credit that there was never any danger of him joining it.

Eric is survived by his wife, daughters, five grandchildren and two of his brothers, Walter and Tommy.

Simon Hattenstone