A coal bin in a dusty corner of a prison workshop, used to store fuel for steam-powered machinery, is a relatively sophisticated hiding-place for contraband, given warders’ likely reluctance to thoroughly search it. Nevertheless, during a routine search in early 1923 assiduous warders burrowed through the bin and discovered lengths of rope and wire, and a homemade hook for scaling the walls — strong grounds for presuming that an escape attempt was planned. The case was made stronger still because the man charged with the attempt, a 35-year-old ex-seaman named Tom Westlake, had a lengthy record. Since 1915 he had stolen a succession of pleasure yachts and taken them on long voyages, on one occasion right around the South Pacific.1 For that theft he was sentenced to five years and declared a habitual criminal.
Westlake, however, flatly denied all knowledge of the escape apparatus and offered a novel defence. He had no need of such equipment, he told Magistrate Pointon, because if he wanted to escape from the prison he could do so easily without the use of such aids. He entreated the magistrate to give him the opportunity to demonstrate the truth of this claim and, remarkably, this request was granted.
The following morning the workshop filled with an intrigued but sceptical audience that included Pointon (accompanied by his fox terrier, Peter), the prison superintendent, a number of warders and several representatives of the press. The vertical bars across the window were inspected and found to be securely set in concrete, and six-and-a-quarter inches (about 16 cm) apart. Westlake, described as a dark, medium-built man, was led in between two warders, and stripped off his brown uniform jacket to reveal ‘a slim body and wiry arms’. He jumped onto a table standing beneath the window, slipped one foot through the middle pair of bars, followed it with his left arm and then his head. ‘It was all done so quickly that the eye could scarcely follow the movements,’ wrote a reporter from the Auckland Star. ‘For a second the prisoner was there between the bars, then there was a short gasp, a rapid twist of the body and — heigh presto! — he was free!’ Westlake showed his audience how he could then climb onto another building, ‘with my foot on that ledge, catch hold of that drainpipe, swing up to the roof and across to the top of the wall. Then I’d be out!’ The magistrate was clearly impressed, and pronounced that he would give the defendant the benefit of the doubt and dismiss the charge against him. This was a humiliating outcome for the prison officials, and they assured assembled reporters that ‘steps will be taken to alter the bars on this window, making egress impossible’.2
Although generally averse to press publicity, the Mount Eden administration recognised that it sometimes needed to counter damning reports of prison conditions from recently released inmates like the conscientious objectors. In 1919, therefore, the Auckland Star was invited to tour the prison. The resulting series of articles provides a strikingly partisan picture of the institution in the immediate postwar period. ‘The first impression,’ wrote the Star’s man after his escorted tour, ‘was that of scrupulous cleanliness in the cells, in the corridors, in the kitchens, in fact everywhere.’3 The building’s interior was likened to ‘the engine-room of a large steamer or battleship with its polished steel rails and companionway’.4 This agreeable image ignored the sanitation facilities, which remained mired in the past. Every inmate’s first task after rising to the 6 a.m. bell was to place their tin chamberpot in the passageway, where two of the least fortunate men emptied it into a ‘slop-bucket’, a cut-down 44-gallon drum slung from a pole carried on their shoulders.5 This drum was occasionally dropped or overturned, creating an unpleasant duty for the man charged with cleaning that section of floor.
The one-man cells, known as ‘peters’, were furnished with a canvas hammock hung from two heavy ropes running from wall to wall. Four blankets were issued — five in winter — and remand prisoners also received sheets and a small locker to keep certain luxuries not permitted to convicted men. Every cell was scrubbed daily by assigned inmates, although long-serving and life-sentence men preferred to clean their cells themselves in their own time.6 The cells were lit until 9 p.m., by gas in the older wings and electricity in the newer, enabling inmates to read the library books or weekly newspapers now supplied to them. They were also allowed to receive ‘reputable newspapers or magazines’ from their friends, to read and write one letter each week, and receive a weekly visit from up to three people at a time.7 One especially prized privilege was the weekly allocation of an ounce of tobacco. Inmates were permitted to smoke in their cells only after dinner, and to prevent smoking at other times they were issued with a single daily match. Real experts, however, could subdivide the match to provide an astonishing number of unauthorised smokes.8
Each Saturday half-holiday a complete change of prison-made clothing, including such luxuries as a woollen singlet, underpants and socks, was handed out, and every man was required to take a cold bath. Wearing the same clothes and remaining unwashed for a week while toiling outdoors in an Auckland summer was clearly unwholesome even for labourers, and critics of the system asked prison superintendent Jim Dickison how he would find such a regime. He admitted ‘it would not be altogether to his taste’, and a twice-weekly bath regime was later introduced.9
The inmates themselves ‘look well and fit’, the Star reported, ‘and in many cases put on weight during their sentence because of the wholesome diet and regular hours, combined with physical exercise, which is given every morning’.10 The menu, however, was limited and monotonous. As in the past, the only substantial meal was served at midday when the inmates returned from their morning’s work. No dining room had been provided in the men’s quarters, so this lunch was eaten in their cells. Food prepared in the kitchens was served in individual, two-tiered tin ‘dixies’, with boiling water in the lower compartment to keep the meal hot. Meat, supplied as whole carcasses from the Waikeria prison farm and butchered on the premises, was now roasted as well as stewed, while men without teeth could usually expect mince.11 Fish was available on Fridays for Catholics, and any left over was eagerly consumed by those of other faiths or none. The tea and porridge served at breakfast and dinner included a ration of sugar, salt and pepper, and the loaf supplied daily to each inmate was made alternately of white and wholemeal flour, and from the mid-1920s baked on the premises.12
Those who failed to thrive despite this diet could be treated in the prison hospital, described by its administrators as the equal of any in Auckland.13 Its facilities did not, however, extend to humane and competent medical staff, and every inmate who reported sick was assumed to be malingering until their condition was serious enough to require in-patient treatment. As in the past, no special help was given to those with mental illnesses apart, perhaps, from spells in the ‘silent cell’. Its heavily padded walls were lined with canvas stuffed with horsehair, and violent prisoners were placed there until they became quiet enough for staff to manage them. The injustice of confining severely mentally ill people in this way was apparent to all, but no better solution was available. A convicted murderer named Kit Matthews was admitted to the prison in 1921, with his death sentence reprieved on the grounds of lunacy. When questioned about the propriety of treating an insane man as an ordinary prisoner, Justice Minister Ernest Lee replied that ‘Matthews was a man who should never be let loose on society’, and offered the supposedly reassuring prediction that he would die in the prison ‘within a comparatively few years’.14
From the early 1920s, in addition to the evening literacy classes provided by the schoolmaster (a post held, in the following decade, by a PhD from Yale), individual inmates could undertake more advanced study by correspondence.15 They had to pay all fees themselves but were permitted a desk and an extra hour of light in their cells at night. Engineering, navigation, signwriting and accountancy were subjects especially encouraged by prison staff, and at least one inmate learned Arabic.16
Amid the thriving economy of the 1920s, several new cottage industries were introduced to make more effective use of the prison workforce. The workshop where the agile Tom Westlake was employed, and where the escape equipment was found, produced soap from animal fat supplied by the Waikeria prison farm. The traditional products of the quarry were expanded to include building blocks, ferro-cement telegraph poles and roofing tiles. These were supplied to government departments faced with a postwar population boom, and the blocks were eventually used in such sturdy public buildings as Newmarket School.17 Both building materials and inmates were employed in constructing new staff houses in the vicinity of the prison. These included a two-storey house in Clive Road made in solid stone for the deputy superintendent. The construction work, electric wiring, plumbing, plastering and other finishing was all carried out by inmates under the supervision of prison officers.18
Similar attention to the economic value of prison labour is evident from the other industries introduced. In almost every case the output of the work met the needs of the prison and of other state institutions. The tailoring shop made inmate uniforms for all North Island prisons, as well as for patients and warders in its mental hospitals. The uniform at Mount Eden itself comprised ‘white moleskin trousers and rough grey jackets. Since nothing was tailor-made … penal yard at assembly time was a gathering of identikit mannikins.’19 However, prisoners hoping to look respectable on their discharge could, for a fee, have their own clothing made or mended by the tailors. The heavy boots issued to inmates were also made on the premises. Each night they had to be placed outside cell doors in case their laces were used to attempt suicide.20 Mailbags, hammocks, tin pans, brushes, coir mats decorated with patriotic emblems — all were produced within Mount Eden’s walls, for its own needs and to sell to other state facilities.
From 1921 prisoners received two forms of payment for their obligatory 44-hour working work, both of them very modest and not immediately available for their own use. Each working prisoner could earn up to eight shillings a day, equivalent to about half the national average pay rate. Half of this sum was deducted at source for the costs of their upkeep, and the remainder was paid to approved dependants — children, wife or mother.21 A revised version of the old system of marks for good conduct and industry provided a tiny additional income. From the fourth month of their sentence all prisoners, regardless of classification, could earn between sixpence and eightpence a day (equivalent to about three dollars today). During their sentence they could draw on this accumulated sum only to contribute to the cost of their education. The remainder, less any marks cancelled for poor conduct, was handed to them on their release.22 Under both systems, inmates earned the same daily amount regardless of the type of work performed. Even more dismaying for the prisoners, their earnings were stopped if they were unable to work due to sickness or injury, although the hazardous nature of dynamiting and other quarrying activities meant that incapacitating injuries were frequent.23
Other overheads from the prison’s industries were kept as low as possible. Mechanised equipment was slowly introduced to the quarry, and to the bootmaking, tailoring and several other workshops, but the general working conditions were far worse than those considered acceptable by free labour. An inspection by Auckland Justices on a winter’s day in 1935 found that ‘[t]he conditions under which the men are continuously busy washing blankets, mail bags, and clothes are, to say the least of it, no better than those of 50 years ago’. The inmates were not supplied with rubber boots and were unable to keep their feet dry. ‘Apart from the men’s own welfare, it does not seem good business to compel them to work under conditions which no Government inspector would tolerate in a commercial factory.’24
It may therefore have come as a welcome change for a dozen good-conduct prisoners when they were assigned in 1925 to travel to Rangitoto Island in Waitematā Harbour to cut roads and walking tracks out of its solid lava rock. For the next nine years, gangs of up to 20 spent months at a time on the lovely uninhabited island, building a road around the foreshore and up to the summit, and creating seawalls, shelter sheds, a tennis pavilion and a swimming pool.25 They were housed in a camp of portable huts, equipped with woodstoves but no electricity, sited near the main wharf and shaded by pōhutukawa trees. Three warders accompanied them, and the public was assured: ‘There is no fear on the part of the officials that the men will misbehave.’26 On at least two occasions, however, prisoners succumbed to the temptation to creep away after nightfall and make for shore in a stolen dinghy. With no telephone, the warders had to resort to waving frantically to the naval signalman at Devonport, who then contacted the prison for a search party.
The introduction of new and marginally more skilled forms of industry made little difference to the daily routine for most Mount Eden inmates. The quarry and its associated activities of stone-breaking and gravel-crushing still employed more than all the others put together, as it had since the prison opened in the 1850s, when its quarry was the only one in Auckland. As the dynamiting and rock-breaking ate progressively into the slopes behind the prison buildings, the flat land created was turned into small garden plots that eventually produced almost all the vegetables, apart from potatoes, served for the midday main meal.27
The expanding range of prison industries was proudly cited by politicians and officials as evidence that Mount Eden was slowly evolving a reformative as well as a punitive function. ‘In general,’ claimed one report, ‘the change has been in the direction of providing work for every prisoner, of teaching him a trade, and making him self-supporting when his term is up.’28 This inspiring vision did not stand up to analysis. Prisoners were typically assigned to work in skilled trades such as carpentry and electrical work only if they had experience in these fields before their sentence. Those with skills in less demand might, however, be permitted to practise them in their own time, and the New Zealand South Seas International Exhibition held in Dunedin in 1925 featured examples of their personal handiwork, such as ‘a desk made of figured red pine, containing some exquisite inlaid and veneer work’.29
The most telling rebuttal to the claim that Mount Eden prepared its inmates for a good job on the outside came from its own superintendent, Mr Ironside. On his retirement in 1920 he admitted that while some men picked up skills in the prison, ‘few of them profited by it. The inevitable question, “Where did you learn your trade?”, when the man left gaol and went to a union or an employer, was a hurdle to be faced by the prisoner.’30 In truth, the work carried out in the prison was dictated above all by the economic and practical demands of the institution and of the wider community. During the economic depression of the early 1930s the government sought to cut costs in every area of the prison budget, including the weekly tobacco ration issued to all inmates. It instructed the Waikeria farm to add tobacco to the crops it produced, and the fresh leaf was dried, cured and cut at Mount Eden. Within a few years the tobacco requirements for the entire prison service were met in this way; instead of an annual cost to the Prisons Department of more than £1000, by 1934 ‘the Department was actually in credit on the sale of its surplus leaf’.31
Other prison industries fared less well, even given the advantage of low labour costs.32 For many years competing businesses such as private quarries had complained of undercutting by the prison, which had come to rely on the sale of its road metal to local authorities as a crucial line in its administration budget. It sold its products at well below market rates and justified this on the grounds that the taxpayer was spared an equivalent portion of the total costs of imprisonment.33 During the worst years of the Depression, however, mass unemployment, drastic price-cutting and bitter commercial competition meant that even the subsidised prison industries struggled to find a market for their products. Cash-strapped government departments could source institutional footwear and clothing at rates even cheaper than Mount Eden’s, and the prison was forced to drop its prices.34 Unsold road metal piled up in the quarry, as neither local authorities nor private contractors could afford it.35 The resulting shortfall in the prison’s annual budget was met, at least in part, by cutting back on conditions that may have taken decades of patient effort to achieve.
The number of women inmates at Mount Eden had dropped sharply after a special women’s prison opened at Addington in Christchurch in 1913 and a women’s reformatory in Wellington seven years later. When a new women’s wing was provided at Mount Eden in 1923, barely half of its 24 rooms were initially occupied. Each of these was sparely but tastefully furnished with a wire bedstead, wardrobe, table, mirror and chair, and some small personal ornament. The new quarters even included a communal dining room.36 For some reason, the women qualified for an addition to the standard ration — a serving of pudding after the midday meal three times a week. These, however, were token privileges in light of the women’s very vulnerable and often harrowing circumstances. An especially distressing event occurred in 1921 when the charred body of a newborn male was found in the furnace of the laundry-room boiler. Matron Jane Poulton suspected the mother was inmate Flora Waite because of her recent unusual behaviour. She confronted Waite, who confessed that the baby had been born in her cell a few days earlier.37
Institutional domestic work such as laundering was invariably carried out by women inmates like Flora Waite, as it had been since the days of the Stockade. The only items they did not have to wash were the prison’s own woollen blankets, since these were too heavy for women to manage when wet. ‘These unfortunates live in a deadly monotony of routine washing and darning, perhaps all day,’ noted a member of the newly formed Howard League for Penal Reform.38
An active New Zealand branch of this organisation was formed in 1924 by the eccentric Christchurch poet and suffragist Blanche Baughan, after she encountered the work of the parent body in Britain. Baughan was pre-eminent among a postwar generation of resolute penal reformers, mainly female, who insisted that prisons should be judged on their record of rehabilitation, and not on the economic value of inmates’ labour. She visited prisoners, especially but not exclusively women, throughout the country, offered them temporary accommodation in her house after their release, and in a stream of writings urged compassion for those with mental illnesses and physical addictions. When she encountered a likeable Mount Eden inmate who attributed his lengthy prison record to a fondness for outwitting the police, Baughan encouraged him to turn his talents to writing detective stories and applied to the Prisons Department for permission to publish them.39
Reflecting the general population of the Auckland region, a wider range of races and cultures was found among Mount Eden’s prisoners in the years following World War One. Asian inmates, previously rare, and usually sentenced for drug or gambling offences, became more common. Pacific Islanders, especially Samoans, arrived after conviction for serious offences in their own countries. Most of them were young, spoke little or no English, and found the cold and loneliness exceptionally difficult.40 The most notable of these was the young high chief Tamasese, leader of the Mau movement campaigning for Sāmoa’s independence from New Zealand colonial control. He was held for six months from late 1928 for resisting payment of a greatly resented poll tax.41 Sāmoa’s colonial administrator, Colonel Allen, insisted that the term for this relatively minor offence would be served in New Zealand. Tamasese ‘is not a criminal but a spoilt child’, blustered Allen, and ought to be ‘subject to real discipline for a few months’.42 Tamasese’s followers believed, with good grounds, that their leader had been sent out of his country ‘to give him an extra dose of punishment among strange people and strange surroundings’.43
The chief was seasick for much of the voyage to New Zealand and was admitted to the prison hospital on his arrival. Although it was high summer he found the cold unbearable, and in a letter to his wife, Ala, said he feared he would die by the winter.44 The following month Ala and their three children arrived in Auckland to be near him, and visited the prison whenever possible. Ala found it ‘very strange and unnatural … that they should be compelled to converse in a foreign language and also to have to obtain permission to greet or embrace one another in their own native fashion’. Their young children spoke no English, and although officially prohibited from speaking to their father in their own language they ‘could not be restrained’ from doing so.45
Tamasese struck a commanding figure in his radiant white lavalava with a blue bowtie and purple rosette, the colours of his political movement. The blatantly political character of his arrest, and his distinguished manner and appearance, meant he was befriended in prison by some of Auckland’s leading citizens, who found him to be ‘a pleasant, mild-mannered man with a perpetual smile’.46 When his sentence was due to expire, Colonel Allen attempted to extend it but could find no legal grounds to detain the prisoner any longer.47 A vocal crowd of about 40 local supporters gathered outside the main gates to celebrate Tamasese’s release in June 1929. Their cheering was echoed by a gang of prisoners working near the stone-crusher, who had an elevated view of the welcome party. Six months later, the unarmed Tamasese was shot and killed by police while leading a Mau march in Apia. He was then about 28 years of age.48
Also evident among the work gangs and in the exercise yards was a growing number of Māori prisoners. Before World War One there was never more than a handful of Māori serving time for non-political offences, but the wave of urbanisation that arose after the war drove thousands of Māori from isolated communities into Auckland. The proportion of those who entered its prison gates closely tracked the tribulations of the economy, and the number of Māori inmates doubled between 1928 and 1932, the worst years of the Depression. ‘This growth of crime among the younger Maoris, particularly in the North Auckland districts, is a disquieting feature,’ stated the Prisons Department’s 1933 annual report. ‘Probation has proved to be largely futile, as this form of treatment is regarded by natives as equivalent to “getting off,” and when on probation any constructive supervision is difficult to apply, as these offenders laze round the pas under conditions of indiscipline and idleness.’49 A succession of magistrates noted with disapproval ‘the large number of native prisoners’ but could neither account for nor suggest solutions to it.50 The great majority were put to work in the quarry rather than in more skilled activities, perhaps in recognition of their rural backgrounds.51
Herbert Thatcher, a young Auckland unemployment activist, encountered a group of young Māori while serving a three-month sentence in 1933:
While I was there some Maoris were sent in for stealing sheep and sentenced to various terms from a fortnight to three months. They claimed they had killed and eaten the sheep because they were starving at the pah. They kept to themselves in the exercise yard and played many Maori group games such as the stick game or games played with the movement of the arms or hands. They seemed to think that the ‘Mount’ was a ‘Kapai boarding house’ but as they came from the north they missed the company of their friends and were pleased to get home again.52
By the 1930s, Arthur Hume’s residual influence on the prison’s internal layout had decreased to the point where a number of communal cells, known as association cells, had been created. These housed from three to 12 men each (two-man cells were out of the question, since they might encourage homosexual activity), and inmates with good-conduct records competed fiercely for the opportunity to transfer to them.53 One, known as the ‘old men’s home’, was described by the Herald as reserved for ‘aged derelicts whose place is not really prison. They do no work, but potter about.’54 Herbert Thatcher ‘had rather a jolly time’ in his association dormitory. ‘On Saturday evenings we would start a “sing, say or pay” evening, when each prisoner in turn would recite, tell a story, sing a song or pay a forfeit (usually tobacco)’, followed after lights-out by a community singsong until the warders intervened.55
Although visiting performers gave an occasional concert from the 1920s, the only regular public events at the prison were the Sunday church services, which were consequently well attended. Anglican and Catholic services were now held in succession in the prison chapel, and various other faiths, including the Rātana faith followed by Māori, held their own services in other corners of the building. During chapel services women were seated in the raised rear gallery, out of sight of the men on the floor.56 The male-voice prison choir was a longstanding prison institution, much remarked on by visitors who admired the quality of their singing. The rest of the congregation also joined in lustily but were known to use this opportunity to make illicit communications with each other by matching their words to the rhythm of the hymns.
For many years the chapel’s remarkably accomplished organist was a one-time bandleader and man-about-town named Eric Mareo who, in happier times, had lived just a short distance from the prison with his wife, Thelma, and their two children. In 1936 he was admitted to a condemned cell on a charge of murdering Thelma, and after several trials steeped in sensational evidence of transgressive sex and drug-taking, his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Mareo spent 13 years in the prison’s north wing among other long-sentence men while his many supporters battled to overturn a verdict they insisted, with strong support from forensic experts, was unjust.57 On several occasions this consummate musician with a previously unblemished record was given hope for an early release but his case was deferred each time, for reasons that included the outbreak of World War Two. With his health failing, Mareo finally left Mount Eden in May 1948. He told his lawyer that he had been well treated by the staff there, the superintendent in particular appreciating his excellent service in directing the prison choir.58 After just a few weeks of freedom Mareo remarried, and it is an indication of how the prison had changed during his time there that his bride was the first physiotherapist to have joined its staff; she had met him as an inmate and patient.59
The circular walking tracks in the exercise yards, where inmates tramped daily in single file, are clearly visible in this 1930 aerial view of the prison, looking north towards Khyber Pass Road and Newmarket. NEW ZEALAND HERALD
The chapel was the only large common room in the prison and was used during the week for a variety of other purposes, including debates among inmates or lectures by outside speakers.60 The films that had become the dominant cultural form in the outside world did not enter Mount Eden’s walls until 1931, when Balaclava, a British historical epic about the Charge of the Light Brigade, was screened to a rapt audience of 400 in the chapel. Many of the men had been admitted to the prison during the silent-movie era and had never before seen a ‘talkie’.61
During overcrowding emergencies, the chapel was also used for inmate accommodation. In 1925 it housed hundreds of striking seamen who had arrived in Auckland on British liners to find their employers in Britain had slashed their wages by almost half. Wildcat strikes then ‘swept across British steamers wherever they happened to be across the seven seas of the world’.62 For taking part in such a strike, almost 300 men crewing on ships berthed in Auckland were sentenced to up to three months’ imprisonment. Mount Eden’s chapel and schoolroom were hastily lined with mattresses to accommodate them. While local union officials negotiated with shipowners on their behalf, the strikers sprawled there with nothing to do but smoke and page through the tepid works in the prison library, mostly donated by churches or charitable institutions and accordingly emphasising ‘temperance and penitential themes’.63 The mariners were not permitted to go out to work and were sent to one of the exercise yards when other inmates returned to their wings for the midday meal, presumably to avoid any contagion of their dangerous views.64
The government, meantime, was wracked with anxiety that similar strike action by local unions might damage the country’s agricultural export trade. A New Zealand branch of the Communist Party had been founded a few years earlier and was believed to be cultivating influence in the union movement.65 Police surveillance of local communists was heightened, and during the final weeks of the 1925 Homeboat Strike, as it was called, the two leading members of the tiny New Zealand Communist Party were sent to Mount Eden for the rare crime of sedition. Banned literature had been found in the homes of the party’s president, Oswald Bourbeau, and its secretary, Evan Thomas. Bourbeau, a printer by trade, was also charged with printing the party’s newsletter, described in court as ‘a document encouraging violence and lawlessness’. Both men had previous form for offences of this type and each was sentenced to several months.66
The prison chapel in 1931. NEW ZEALAND HERALD
Punishment for offences committed while in prison could now be imposed only by Visiting Justices rather than warders, and was usually limited to stretches of no more than three successive days on bread and water, with the offender confined to his regular cell and only occasionally held in the ‘dummy’, or punishment cell.67 The dummy contained nothing but a wooden plank bed with a raised headrest for a pillow. Only three blankets were provided, a severe penalty in the winter months, and even these were removed during the day. All reading matter except the Bible, and other privileges such as tobacco and visits, were forbidden, and exercise was restricted to a lonely half-hour in the adjacent execution yard.68
Reverend George Moreton, the prison chaplain throughout the 1930s, told the New Zealand Herald that ‘the dummy knocks the fight out of any man … If he stays long enough he begins to break out in sores produced by the rubbing of the concrete; after four days he’s either a murderous maniac or a broken piece of humanity — most men are broken.’69 Another long-serving chaplain, Reverend E. C. Budd, supported Moreton’s claim that solitary confinement ‘tended to produce insanity’ among the prison’s inmates.70 However, Superintendent Ironside defended the policy of bread and water and the dummy on the grounds that ‘it was invariably successful with obstinate prisoners’. Yet even this noted disciplinarian felt no regret at the possibility of losing his former authority to impose floggings and other forms of corporal punishment, since these ‘never did any good anyway’.71
Ironside’s pragmatic view on corporal punishment was not shared by the local Labour MP, Henry Mason, who told the House in 1928 that it was the job of the Prisons Department to ‘imprison, to flog or to hang, not to care for a man in any other way’.72 At that time no flogging had taken place at Mount Eden for several years, so Mason may well have approved when the Supreme Court inflicted this punishment on two hit-and-run thieves in 1932. The judge described their carefully planned daylight attack as ‘a crime of the gangster type’ and ordered each man to be given 12 strokes of the cat-o’-nine-tails on top of their prison sentences.73
Mason’s hard line was exceptional even by the standards of his day, and ran counter to the postwar trend for modest improvements in conditions at Mount Eden. The growing number of prison reformers pointed out the deeper truth: in spite of small gains, the prison’s facilities and rehabilitation record were inferior to those in comparable countries and even to those of newer prisons elsewhere in New Zealand. After decades of entreaty, inmates around the country were now better segregated according to type and severity of offending, and a new generation of prisons was being designed for specific inmate types. ‘Sexual perverts’ (a category that included those convicted of homosexual activity) were held at New Plymouth, where they received treatment from medical and psychiatric specialists. Most short-sentence and low-risk inmates were sent to prison farms, women mainly to Addington, and young people, whenever possible, to borstal or probation.74
These institutions all recognised the necessity for reform as well as punishment. ‘Only ignorant, unreasonable people clamour for a useless, expensive and wasteful penal severity for all alike,’ declared Dr Mildred Staley, secretary of the New Zealand branch of the Howard League for Penal Reform, in 1927.75 Mount Eden remained the archaic exception, the entirely punitive destination of last resort for the most dangerous offenders, and two years later it could be officially described as the ‘only purely penal prison in New Zealand’.76
This was an inherently contradictory situation: the country’s largest and most expensive prison was following a rigid punitive regimen while the country’s penal legislation was directed towards reforming prisoner behaviour. Back in the brief heyday of Justice Minister John Findlay in the first decade of the century, the sentence of reformative detention had been established to encourage prisoners to develop habits of industry and good conduct in the hope of breaking their patterns of re-offending. Each inmate sentenced in this way was nominally considered on an individual basis for good behaviour and the promise of future betterment. A Prisons Board assessed their sentences quarterly and had the power to release them at any point, regardless of the length of time still to serve.
In practice, prisoners committed to Mount Eden for reformatory detention were treated identically to those sentenced to hard labour, with the exception of their uniforms — the former were outfitted in blue and the latter in brown.77 In no other prison in the country was so little distinction made, and the benefits of a reformatory sentence were accordingly much reduced.78 Jasper Calder, Mount Eden’s outspoken chaplain in the mid-1920s, felt the Prisons Board also acted capriciously and often unfairly, siding with warders rather than inmates whenever their accounts conflicted.79
In late 1926 a most unusual lifer was escorted out through the massive arched gateway of the prison. Fifty-one-year-old Charles Mackay had been released after just six years of his much longer reformatory sentence, on condition that he immediately left the country. Before his conviction he had been a well-respected Whanganui solicitor and for the previous 10 years had served as the town’s mayor. It was known to his political enemies, however, that although he was a married man and had several young children he engaged in homosexual activity. On an afternoon in May 1920, a burning-eyed would-be poet named D’Arcy Cresswell called on Mackay in his office and threatened him with blackmail. In desperation the mayor fired a revolver at Cresswell, wounding him, and was sentenced to 15 years. The Prison Board’s decision to release him after less than half that period was based on evidence that his mental and physical health were deteriorating, that he had lost both his profession and his family, and that his sister was willing to accompany him out of the country to start a new life elsewhere.80 The same day he was escorted out of the prison, this shattered and ailing figure left Auckland by ship. He began a new life in Britain, working as a foreign correspondent for a daily newspaper, and was accidentally killed in 1929 during a shootout in Berlin between the police and left-wing activists.81
The tensions between the prison’s ostensibly reformist policies and its stringently penal practices were further heightened by its highly diverse inmate population. Remand prisoners, first offenders and chronically recidivist drunkards mingled promiscuously with burglars, rapists, and those convicted of manslaughter and murder. The short-sentenced and low-risk prisoners were housed in different wings from hardened criminals and exercised separately during the week, yet every category of inmate came together for most of their daylight hours on the work gangs. Inmates of all types could also mill around on Saturday afternoons in the big main exercise yard where, since no organised sports or other recreations were provided, activity was limited to playing cards or draughts, gambling, and boasting of former glories. In this way Herbert Thatcher, the political activist short-sentenced on first offence, became acquainted with ‘all classes of prisoners including “lifers” and “act men” or “dog collar men” (habitual criminals)’.82 In the yard, he learned, ‘[c]rime is discussed in all its angles, from the prisoners’ point of view … Gambling on all the current races goes on openly or at least unchecked.’83 Numerous other accounts confirm that ‘Rock College’, as it was known by inmates in this period, was ‘a university of crime’, whose syllabus offered everything from ‘the art of appealing to a judge for a light sentence’ to picking locks and blowing safes.84
Formerly a well-liked mayor and prominent lawyer in Whanganui, Charles Mackay cuts a much diminished figure in his 1920 police mugshot, after his conviction for the attempted murder of D’Arcy Cresswell. PAPERS PAST, POLICE GAZETTE, 1920
These lessons were continually put into practice by inventive inmates determined to find loopholes in the prison’s stony carapace. The mailbags sewn and repaired in one of the workshops gave an enterprising fraudster named Alfred Lamb the idea of using them to evade the censors. A postal clerk regularly delivered old bags and collected new ones, and in 1925 Lamb persuaded this remarkably naive official to smuggle contraband, including illicit letters that the clerk thoughtfully stamped and posted for him, in and out of the prison.85 More secret letters passed to and fro in 1932, written invisibly on the backs of ordinary letters in a solution of sodium bicarbonate. ‘By rubbing a warm iron over the letter the ink became visible.’86
In spite of Mount Eden’s pre-eminence as the country’s most secure prison, almost every year a few of its inmates, usually those working in the quarry beyond the high perimeter walls, would brave the shotguns of the warders and make a dash for freedom. Their prison clothing was no longer marked with broad arrows, but these escapers were almost always recaptured within hours, and sometimes within sight of those who lived or worked in the immediate neighbourhood. A 23-year-old named Seckington seized a moment in November 1929 before his morning march to the quarry and broke away in the direction of the Colonial Ammunition Company, just down the road from the prison. Warders’ whistles shrilled, their rifles cracked, and Seckington was soon cornered near one of the company’s buildings, under the enthralled gaze of its mainly female workforce. One woman found it ‘a bigger thrill than a Wild West drama on the picture screen. “Such a nice, handsome young chap, too, he was.”’87
Only the occasional escaper enjoyed more than a few days of freedom. One who did so, John Buckley, made a carefully planned overnight getaway with an associate in May 1928. The two men used a skeleton key to reach the roof of one wing, and worked along its steeply sloping edge and down a drainpipe until they reached the rounded top of the main wall. Both were injured after dropping to the ground outside, but Buckley succeeded in evading a massive police manhunt and holed up for some weeks in an out-of-the-way bay on Waitematā Harbour.88 Police surprised him at his camp and he was re-arrested without a struggle, but two months later the impetuous 27-year-old made another dash across the prison yard and scaled the wall near Auckland Grammar School. He was fleeing across open ground when a warder shouted a warning, then delivered a blast from his Snider shotgun. Buckley collapsed from his injuries but recovered in hospital, and was returned to prison as an ‘incorrigible rogue’, with three years added to his sentence.89
These frequent if generally short-lived escapes took place as the environs around the prison were progressively transformed from a rural enclave to a busy suburb. Trains, trams and cars ran within metres of the perimeter walls; houses and industrial buildings pressed against them; and the long-ago decision to site such a large, sombre and turbulent institution in that locality became bitterly regretted. Residents of the suburb found that wherever they travelled around the country, their notorious prison was the one thing invariably associated with the name Mount Eden. ‘Here we have a beautiful suburb which has to bear the stigma of having a prison named after it,’ lamented borough councillor R. J. Mills.90 The country’s Chief Justice, Sir Robert Stout, had rejoiced at the completion in 1918 of this ‘splendidly built stone prison … the finest building of the class in New Zealand’.91 Fewer than 10 years later his booming commendation was replaced by pleas to move the dank and discrediting rockpile elsewhere.
In 1926 Mount Eden’s mayor had suggested that the Waitākere Ranges would be an ideal alternative site: ‘The gaol reserve would then become available for general use. It was admirably suited for factories or for business purposes.’92 Once he became the local MP, John A. Lee took up the campaign to relocate the prison with vigour, although he acknowledged that the expense meant it would be a long-term project.93 After every escape attempt, the prison’s neighbours grew more vehement in urging the facility’s removal. In 1928 the Minister for Prisons was forced to concede that if his department ‘were starting over again it would not put a prison where the Mount Eden one was’, although he defended the continuing value of the adjacent quarry both for forced labour and income.94
Many critics alleged that Mount Eden was not just poorly sited but also an archaic blight on the city and the country. ‘If ever there was a battlemented relic to prisons past it is the Mount Eden Gaol,’ announced one MP in 1929; he looked forward to the day of its closure.95 ‘Goodness knows we are none of us proud that the Prison stands where it does, or that it looks gloomy and forbidding,’ admitted the defensive Superintendent Dickison.96 By 1940, Auckland’s mayor, Sir Ernest Davis, had taken up the call to remove the prison to somewhere less visible and populous. ‘The building is not a thing of beauty, and its appearance has a depressing effect on the immediate surroundings. If the gaol were situated in open country it could be better guarded, it could be made self-supporting and it would impart an isolation influence to its inmates.’97 His council voted to urge Labour’s newly appointed Minister of Prisons, Dr Girvan McMillan, to relocate this ageing and unsightly landmark.98
Labour’s momentous election victory in 1935 had given hope to interested parties both inside and outside the prison that long-awaited changes might finally be implemented. Practically overnight, former prison inmates such as John A. Lee, Bill Parry, Peter Fraser and Bob Semple were lined up shoulder to shoulder on Parliament’s Treasury benches, and their commitment to penal reform had been signalled well beforehand.99 The Labour Party had a longstanding policy of ending both hangings and physical punishments such as flogging, and some Labour figures had shown a particular interest in Mount Eden and its inmates.
In April 1932 a peaceful protest by the unemployed exploded into violence when police batoned the protest leader Jim Edwards. The chaotic Queen Street riots that followed impelled the government to send 13 of the so-called ringleaders to jail; Edwards himself, although evidently blameless, was given a particularly harsh and repressive two years with hard labour.100 When Labour Party leader Harry Holland visited these men during their imprisonment, the Justice Minister informed him that ‘care is exercised to prevent contamination through harmful association with the more undesirable class of criminals. Those desirous of pursuing their economic studies are permitted to do so, but literature of an ultra-radical or revolutionary nature is not permitted.’101 Most of the alleged rioters were highly politicised radicals, prone to breaking out into choruses of ‘The Red Flag’.102 Jim Edwards, although the longest-serving of them all, was by contrast a model prisoner, described as ‘always affable, agreeable and pleasant to the gaol officials’, yet he spent his term isolated from other inmates and was accompanied by two warders whenever he left his cell.103 His young son witnessed this treatment during visits to the prison, and the sympathetic chaplain, Reverend Moreton, explained to the boy gently that, ‘your father is a political prisoner, and he is considered to be an agitator. The authorities apparently fear that he might incite some kind of rebelliousness among the other inmates.’104
In the short term, these stringent efforts to prevent Edwards and his fellow agitators from inciting rebelliousness succeeded in containing dissent. After the Labour victory of ’35, rumours flew among Mount Eden inmates that their longstanding grievances might finally be addressed. Soon after the election, a vehement minority hoped to jog the government’s elbow with a very public show of discontent. In April 1936, several large groups of inmates refused to carry out regular duties or return to their cells at the end of the Saturday afternoon exercise period. Police were rushed to the prison to assist its warders to restore order, and the insurgency was resolved peaceably.105 Thomas Leggett, the prison’s newly appointed superintendent, played down the seriousness of the incident, and the Inspector of Prisons arrived from Wellington to interview three leaders of the disturbance. They told him that their most pressing concerns were the unfeeling and arbitrary actions of the Prison Board and the implementation of the law declaring certain repeat offenders to be habitual criminals.106
Leggett, a particularly harsh and unimaginative superintendent, gave no weight to these arguments and dismissed the entire disturbance as ‘an incident engineered by hot-headed notoriety-seekers, whose sole object was to subvert the discipline of the prison’.107 Girvan McMillan, however, an unorthodox and energetic Minister of Prisons, had a passion for reformative policies. He made a point of meeting personally with inmates at Mount Eden and elsewhere, accompanied only by a stenographer to record their conversations, and insisted that no warders or other prison officials could be present.108 No government minister had ever gone to such lengths to investigate prisoners’ complaints or demonstrated such confidence in the value of their testimony, and his willingness to sit down with them in this way may have given the more fractious inmates further ground for believing that his government was committed to more than cosmetic efforts at penal reform.
The first signs of change in this direction were disappointingly slight. By 1939 all prisoners were permitted to have flowers and pictures in their cells, and the regulation diet was expanded to include regular puddings and milk.109 The new government also introduced the daily broadcasting of radio programmes through speakers in the exercise yards and via headphones in the cells of long-serving inmates. Music and ‘instructive talks’ were said to be popular, but the instant reporting of racing results is likely to have been especially important to inmates who routinely gambled their precious tobacco rations.110 These authorised broadcasts eliminated a major element of prison contraband, as for years inmates had smuggled or constructed their own illegal radio sets, causing warders endless trouble to locate and remove them. One snap search after a 1932 church service had revealed ‘a perfect miniature set coiled up’ inside a Bible.111
McMillan’s efforts towards reform might well have produced more significant changes in the country’s most procrustean prison, but they were overtaken by a dramatic and shockingly violent escape in 1940 that provoked a public outcry against the government’s penal policies and savage judicial reprisals against the offenders. The ‘most daring prison break ever staged at the Auckland gaol’ took place one evening in October 1940 after the inmates were released from their cells to attend a lecture on physical training. In a sequence of actions that had evidently been carefully planned, four prisoners, one of them convicted of murder, made a savage assault on one of their warders and seized his heavy bunch of keys. Two other warders who came to his aid were attacked with an improvised weapon.
The escapers had somehow arranged for a long ladder to be placed in position in an exercise yard, and they were able to scale the outer wall and lower the ladder to the other side where a getaway car was waiting. Throughout the night more than 50 detectives and constables combed the city and suburbs, while police officers across the greater Auckland area set up checkpoints at main roads and bridges, stopping and examining every car.112 This fine-meshed dragnet succeeded in recapturing all four men after a week.113
The savage beatings delivered to the warders and the violent records of two of the escapers kept much of the population in a state of terror until their recapture, and caused fierce recrimination after it. Labour’s alleged determination to look for the best in criminals, and especially McMillan’s unconventional practice of communicating directly with them, were seen as a disastrous softening of former measures.114 Highly placed critics such as Sir Hubert Ostler, the chairman of the Prisons Board, accused McMillan himself of inadvertently encouraging prisoners to become insubordinate.115 Public outrage during the subsequent trials of the four escapers was particularly intense, as the injured warders were still in hospital, one of them in a serious condition. Twelve years’ hard labour was added to each of the men’s sentences, bringing the term for one of them up to a bleak 33 years.116 A wartime defaulter, Ian Hamilton, observed the quartet, known as the Kelly gang, when he was admitted to the prison a few years later. Grey-faced and silent, they were shepherded along the halls by several armed warders. ‘They work in a yard by themselves sewing mailbags,’ he was told. ‘They’re not allowed to speak to anyone else. Two of them have gone religious. They make little images out of bits of bread and worship them.’117
Even these conditions were not sufficient to satisfy the public that justice had been served in this case. The judge who had increased the men’s prison terms also ordered them to be flogged — an order that conflicted with the expressed policy of the wartime Labour government, which had long campaigned to abolish both capital and corporal punishment in prisons. McMillan and his Cabinet colleagues took the rare step of overruling the judge’s verdict, and asked the Governor-General, Sir Cyril Newall, to remit this element of the sentence. Sir Cyril refused on constitutional grounds, and the government’s only recourse was to delay the order to administer the flogging until it could pass a Bill abolishing both corporal and capital punishment. It did so in late 1941, just before the end of its second term, provoking further public outrage.118
The following year a small and explosive book delivered the most systematically damning critique of Mount Eden Prison’s facilities and practices then published. It could not be readily dismissed as unreliable, since it presented the experiences and views of the prison’s longtime, widely admired and internationally informed chaplain, Reverend George Moreton, who expressed himself with a bluntness not often heard from members of his calling. In A Parson in Prison, Moreton summed up the country’s entire penal system as ‘hopelessly archaic’ and Mount Eden itself as the country’s last major monument to the unmourned tenure of Colonel Hume.119 ‘The men who designed that building should have been shut in it for the rest of their lives. It’s hideous; and in an age in which responsible people are trying to approach the problem of crime intelligently, scientifically, it stands there like a brutal product of medieval ignorance.’120
Keeping fit in confined spaces is not easy, and this exercise chart was sent to Mount Eden and other prisons in 1939. ‘The men should be able to practise quite easily in their cells,’ advised Controller-General of Prisons Bert Dallard. ARCHIVES NEW ZEALAND, R16362954
On Anzac Day 1936, Mount Eden inmates refused the weekly shave on the grounds that it was a public holiday. Police were called to reinforce the skeleton staff on duty. AUCKLAND LIBRARIES HERITAGE COLLECTIONS, AUCKLAND STAR, 28 APRIL 1936
As instances of an intelligent and scientific approach, the chaplain proposed better training for prison officers, and a pay rate that would attract skilled and insightful staff into the profession. Work performed by inmates should be meaningful, reasonably remunerated and carried out in safe conditions. More classes should be provided, both in technical and cultural fields, and inmates should have sports facilities rather than the nightly routine of synchronised physical exercises under the direction of a warder. Moreton welcomed the recent provision of radio broadcasts, but he noted that ‘on five nights a week its use is restricted to “war news”, after which it is switched off … Surely it would be an improvement if talks of educational value, lectures, drama, theatre and music were placed at the disposal of men at all hours on the weeknights.’121
The response from McMillan’s successor as Minister of Justice and Prisons, Rex Mason, was swift and devastating. The minister claimed that the chaplain had revealed in his book information given to him by a prisoner in confidence, and as a result he was ‘no longer to be permitted access to the prison’.122 Moreton was given no warning and no opportunity to explain or defend this alleged breach of confidence, which he denied. ‘My criticism of the prison system has cost me my job, and those who are moved by their consciences to speak critically of the administrative policy of the present Government must be prepared to face official punishment and to place their positions in jeopardy,’ he told a reporter.123
At another time Moreton’s well-founded condemnation of Mount Eden’s treatment of inmates and his thoughtful suggestions for reforming them may have received a more measured hearing, but by 1942 the prison administration was once again struggling to cope with an influx of articulate and well-connected military defaulters. They were fewer in number than during World War One, when almost none of those resisting military service were acknowledged to be sincere conscientious objectors, but once again those who failed to share in the mood of militant patriotism were treated with greater intolerance than in almost any other Commonwealth country.
The first objectors to arrive in Mount Eden, from mid-1941, were those who openly opposed the government’s wartime policy.124 Soon they were joined by those who resisted conscription for active service, including five young men sentenced for refusing orders at Papakura military camp.125 Others were given short terms of hard labour for breaches of military discipline such as refusing to submit to a medical examination. These military defaulters worked alongside other inmates in the prison but during exercise periods were kept segregated from ‘the ordinary criminal offender’.126 On the day of their release, many found a military van waiting beside the prison gates to return them to camp; if they did not cooperate, they faced immediate re-arrest.127
By the end of 1941, the thousands of predominantly young men who refused to submit to military orders were being sent to a network of detention camps around the country. An intransigent minority who continued to disobey orders or refused to work in the camps were later transferred to prisons such as Mount Eden. According to several studies of the detention-camp system, some of these recalcitrants were deliberately sent to prison to rid the camps of troublemakers, by, for example, giving them an order it was known they would refuse.128 They had no public trial or right of appeal against their transfer, which was often made on the word of an embittered detention-camp guard. At least five such men were held in Mount Eden by mid-1942. Another, John Bayley, was sent to the prison for escaping from his detention camp, and then spent 10 days in the prison dummy for refusing to salute the medical officer or superintendent.129 The punishment was repeated three times because he repeatedly refused to salute ‘those jumped-up damned dictators’.130
Nineteen-year-old Neil Smith unwittingly repeated the words of World War One-era conchies on the subject of the prison’s medical services. ‘Ordinary, common physical illnesses seem to be the only ones recognised in gaol, and the doctor takes a completely impersonal, unsympathetic attitude towards prisoners.’131 This doctor may also have been overworked, given that the prison was severely understaffed throughout the war as some men signed up to serve and others could not be replaced. The remaining staff were required to manage categories of inmates with which they were unfamiliar, such as 30-odd US servicemen who, according to the superintendent, gave ‘considerable trouble’ and ‘required firm handling’.132
In these strained circumstances it was inevitable that security precautions were sometimes found wanting.133 In 1944 two habitual criminals with records of violence took advantage of the manpower shortage by escaping in spectacular fashion though a hole they blew in the perimeter wall.134 They were chased across vacant land towards Mountain Road but disappeared over backyard fences.135 One of the pair, John Wilson, was at large for seven weeks before he was recaptured in nearby Kingsland with a loaded revolver. In court he pleaded for more opportunities for recreation and entertainment for himself and other long-serving inmates: ‘For eighteen months I had been closely confined with only one hour’s exercise a day.’ The judge decided an additional three years on his sentence was the best response.136
By the final year of the war, the prison’s contingent of conchies had grown in number and also in stroppiness. Some had spent four years in detention camps without trial and were inured to the various forms of punishment imposed on them. A few had escaped long enough to inform, and alarm, sections of the civilian population with their accounts of both camp and prison conditions. In February 1945, five of these men refused to parade for hard labour with the rest of Mount Eden’s prison population, and when placed in solitary next to the condemned cells refused to eat the bread-and-water rations provided. All five insisted they were genuine conscientious objectors who had been treated for long periods as criminals; they also said that in a time of an acute national shortage of manpower they were prepared to work in essential industries on soldiers’ rates of pay.137
Superintendent Leggett filed a report describing each of the men’s characters in similar terms — ‘a troublemaker and a nuisance at all times’, ‘a rebel whose presence was prejudicial to good order and discipline’, a ‘nasty type, impudent and rebellious by nature’.138 To persuade the men to abandon the hunger strike, their meals were delivered to them hot each day from the kitchens, but the plates sat untouched on their cell floors. Eventually the regulation meals were stopped on medical advice, since they would prove harmful to men who had taken nothing but water for several weeks.139 By the time one of the strikers, Harold McAuley, was admitted to Auckland Hospital, word of the protest had also reached beyond the walls of the prison and disturbed sections of the public, who asked why these men should be facing indefinite sentences.140 Bert Dallard, the Controller-General of Prisons, replied that they were acting ‘apparently in a desire to seek notoriety or to bask in the sunshine of martyrdom’.141
The hunger strike petered out undramatically as the men recognised they might be permanently damaging their health for little result.142 They remained in the prison, weakened but defiant, and were joined by more objectors sentenced for carrying out collective protests in their detention camps. Some were highly distinctive and eccentric individuals, such as a proto-hippie who had not cut his hair or beard, or worn leather, for many years.143 The rigidly traditionalist prison staff made no effort to understand principles such as these, and tended at first to treat such idiosyncracies as deliberate breaches of prison regulations.
None of the final batch of objectors proved as troublesome as a former lawyer from Christchurch named Jack Crichton. He had opposed conscription since its introduction in early 1941, and spent the intervening years in a succession of camps and prisons, isolated from other inmates to restrict his influence on them. By mid-1945, with the war with Germany at an end, Crichton decided to challenge the government’s right to continue holding him for as long as it saw fit. At Mount Eden he was swiftly placed in the dummy. Insisting that he was held without legal grounds, he refused to wear the prison uniform and was treated so roughly by warders that most of the prison’s other defaulters defied regulations in sympathy with him. He had become their de facto legal adviser, and won the admiration even of hardened criminals when, during an exercise period, he suddenly stripped naked, bundled up his uniform and hurled it over the outer wall of the yard.
Crichton remained a thorn in the side of prison officials, and several times forced them to acknowledge that their treatment of objectors was legally unsound. The Controller-General of Prisons warned Superintendent Leggett that his practice of repeatedly sending non-cooperating defaulters such as Nelson pacifist Harold Hansen to the dummy might expose him to a lawsuit. ‘It is quite possible that an action for damages against both the Visiting Justice and yourself, particularly in Hansen’s case, would succeed.’144
In February 1945, after three years in detention camps or prison, conscientious objector Harold McAuley refused work duties at Mount Eden Prison in protest at his indefinite imprisonment without the right of appeal. Justice Minister Rex Mason was unmoved, and McAuley and others began a hunger strike. Their supporters risked arrest to paste posters on lamp posts around Auckland. PRIVATE COLLECTION
As the first postwar year dawned and the rest of the country exulted in peace and victory, the Mount Eden defaulters grew ever more rebellious. Several had been sentenced ‘for the duration of the war’, and the government had made it plain that it would decide this duration. In the first few days of 1946, Jack Crichton organised a protest that quickly made the national press. After the evening lockup, slogans and wordless cries were chanted in deafening unison. ‘The war ended five months ago. We are still incarcerated without a trial,’ the men roared. ‘Their concerted “coo-ees” and prearranged choruses of complaint have echoed over a wide area beyond the limits of the prison,’ reported the Herald.145 For nights on end, nearby residents were deprived of sleep, and some complained that when they finally dropped off they were troubled by nightmares.
Superintendent Leggett must have been equally distraught. He had exhausted his legal options for punishing these men, and could now attempt to silence them only by shifting them to the most isolated precincts of the jail and sandbagging their cell windows.146 The structural defects and systemic failings of his sturdy fortress had become impossible for those inside and outside its walls to ignore