Shepton Mallet Prison, Somerset

The sedate Somerset market town of Shepton Mallet is probably best known for being the nearest place of any size to the site of the popular Glastonbury music festival. But lying to the east of the high street is a complex of stone buildings whose purpose was altogether less joyous. As I approached it on foot, the first thing that struck me – struck the fear of God into me, if I’m honest – was its perimeter wall of grey limestone whose height I could only guess at (which I later discovered to be at least 35 feet). This forms the outer rampart of Shepton Mallet prison. I was feeling the force field of a place that for centuries was a byword for human misery.

When it closed in 2013, after nearly 400 years in continuous use, Shepton Mallet had been the oldest working gaol in Britain. Within its walls some terrible things have happened. Hard labour and poor diet broke the toughest of men, military prisoners were hanged and shot with scant regard for legal process, and there was even, at one point, a human treadmill – a grim motif of hopelessness. But, as I was about to find out, the human spirit also found ways of soaring free of its dark precincts and barred windows.

When I travelled down to Somerset, plans were in the pipeline to turn former HMP Shepton Mallet into luxury apartments. Soon it will become a hard-hat site as the cramped cells are knocked together to produce spacious living areas and the old yards are landscaped with greenery. In the process much historical evidence will inevitably be lost or obscured. Thankfully the developers had granted me special access before so much as a brick of the old prison had been touched.

The freedom to explore its corners and secrets provided me with a rare opportunity to reveal the fascinating history of this particular gaol. But there was a wider context, expressed in Nelson Mandela’s dictum that ‘no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its gaols’. Shepton Mallet may have been one of the smallest gaols in the country – accommodating only 189 prisoners when it was decommissioned – but its story reflects the way in which Britain has punished its criminals over the centuries.

Full disclosure at this point: I have a recurring nightmare. I’m in prison, banged up in a tiny cell, and I have no idea by what miscalculation or misdemeanour I ended up there. I have visited jails briefly a few times to see friends – I was an MP, after all – but the idea of being in one still fills me with anxiety. Exploring the cheerless reaches of Shepton Mallet, then, was not going to be easy. Would the experience of spending time in a place of incarceration, of getting to understand something of the reality of human lives deprived of freedom, help me to sleep easier – or intensify the nightmare?

First impressions were not promising. I wasn’t sure whether I was imagining it but, standing in the central courtyard looking up at the rows of cell windows, I fancied there was still a stench of ‘bird’ about the place, a mingled aroma of slop buckets, tobacco and despair. The old signage was still there: ‘No inmates allowed in yard unless under escort’ (will they keep these signs in the new residential development, to add a ‘heritage’ flavour?). The layout was classic cell-block architecture dating from the late eighteenth century. To the north was the entrance and administration block. On the other three sides and rising to three storeys, A, B and D Wings, with C Wing lying to the south.

All this I could take in reasonably calmly. Going into one of the wings was a different matter. Inside, galleried walkways were built around a central atrium, with lines of cells set back on the walkways. Taking a deep breath I climbed the stairs to a gallery and stepped into a cell. Inside there was a bed frame, a lavatory bowl and a washbasin. I rough-measured its extent: ten paces by five. I banged the door closed and immediately wondered how long I could resist the temptation to fling it open again. A couple of minutes was all I managed. Of course I was free to do this. What would it have been like to have had that freedom taken away? To have been locked up here for most of the waking day?

I couldn’t answer such a question. Prisons are by definition closed environments. They do not surrender their secrets easily. And unless you have experienced life inside a prison first-hand you cannot begin to understand what it must be like. To help me in my task of uncovering the darker truths of Shepton Mallet I had arranged to meet on site a number of experts and witnesses to prison life who knew the reality of being incarcerated at Her Majesty’s pleasure. One of them had served a life sentence, much of it here at Shepton Mallet. His name was John Gunn (known to all and sundry as ‘Ben’) and he had lived in a prison cell for thirty-two years.

It had been a delicate negotiation, persuading him to come back to a place that held such terrible memories and I was a little apprehensive about meeting him face-to-face. He was, by all accounts, a thoughtful, articulate person, but because our lives had taken such divergent paths I wondered if we would find any common ground. We met in the shadow of that perimeter wall. The nickname Ben, incidentally, originated in his prison days when he grew a beard so long and shaggy that somebody likened him to the character Ben Gunn in Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure novel Treasure Island. He was clean-shaven now, wore a fedora and cut a self-possessed figure. But he admitted to feeling overwhelmed on his return to the institution that had deprived him of freedom for so long.

‘It’s not a happy place,’ was the first thing he said to me. ‘If you live here you try to make it work, create some sort of meaning in a meaningless environment. But it’s a place of pain. We were all murderers, rapists, the most horrible people.’ Shepton Mallet, in Ben’s time, was for category C life prisoners. The ‘C’ meant they were ‘unlikely to try to escape’, but ‘life’ indicated they were guilty of the most serious crimes. Ben’s crime was as serious as it gets: ‘Murder,’ he confirmed, adding, ‘I had a fight with a mate of mine. He got grievously injured, died a couple of days later. I pleaded guilty. Off I went to prison for life.’

This was another thing I had to confront – my instinctive revulsion at meeting a person who had committed the ultimate taboo and taken a human life. But from the outset I found it hard to square my preconception of a murderer with the measured man who stood in front of me. The idea had been for Ben to take me to his old cell where he would fill me in on the background to his case and share some insights into his personal experience of serving time for more than three decades. But as we walked towards his former wing he became visibly distressed. ‘People lived here but people also died here,’ he said. ‘A couple of suicides. Friends of mine.’ We agreed that I should leave him while he gathered his thoughts and feelings. When we resumed our conversation later in the day he would reveal an astonishing side to his story that made me see him in a completely new light.

For now, I continued my exploration of the prison. Behind the wall of an office in the old gatehouse, workmen had recently discovered a cell dating from the prison’s seventeenth-century origins as a ‘house of correction’. I stooped to clamber through the hole in the outer wall and found myself in a claustrophobic stone chamber where I fought to suppress a feeling of rising panic. The house of correction was effectively a human dustbin where minor criminals, indigents and vagrants were confined and set to work with the aim of ‘correcting’ their behaviour. Men, women and children were all thrown together in a cell like this, in conditions that, even by the standards of the day, were appalling.

In the early 1770s the prison reformer John Howard (whose name was later adopted by the Howard League for Penal Reform) inspected Shepton Mallet and may well have entered this very cell. His description of ‘emaciated, dejected’ inmates ‘expiring on the floors, in loathsome cells of pestilential fevers and the confluent smallpox’ was entirely imaginable to me as I stood there with sweat breaking out on my neck. I couldn’t wait to get out and stand again in the fresh air, looking up at what Oscar Wilde, in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, called ‘that little tent of blue/Which prisoners call the sky’.

Partly as a result of Howard’s criticism the prison was enlarged and improved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1823 a treadwheel was installed, worked by prisoners sentenced to hard labour, which was used to grind corn in a mill on the other side of the prison wall until 1890. The treadwheel was dismantled and the mill knocked down long ago, but a history of the prison, compiled by a former Shepton Mallet prison officer and librarian, Francis Disney, contains a list of those sentenced to hard labour who would have been put to work on the treadwheel. It includes a reference to sixteen-year-old John Head in 1842. His crime? Stealing two cows’ tails.

This may seem a far cry from the more enlightened penal philosophy of the modern era, with its emphasis on rehabilitation and education (however patchily provided), but the regime at Shepton Mallet more than a century later wasn’t exactly a vicar’s tea party either. It was in the days when the prison served as a ‘glasshouse’ – a military prison and detention centre – and the toughness of its inmates was matched only by the brutality of a system designed to keep them in check.

The most notorious of those inmates were the Kray twins, whose murderous proclivities dominated the narrative of crime in post-war Britain. They have generated a veritable cottage industry of books, films and articles – much of it having only a passing acquaintance to the truth. So, to find out what really happened to them at Shepton Mallet and the influence it had on their subsequent lives, I turned to a journalist and author who actually knew them. Readers of a certain age will remember Fred Dinenage as a children’s television presenter and a newsreader, but Fred also worked with the Kray twins on their autobiographies. When we met at Shepton Mallet he offered to take me to the one place in the gaol of which the Krays had fond memories, explaining on the way that ‘they came here a couple of young, tough tearaways and nine months later they left as fully accomplished gangsters’.

In 1952 Ronnie and Reggie Kray were a couple of jack-the-lads from London’s East End with a few professional boxing fights under their belts and several convictions for violence. National Service, the conscription of young men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, was made compulsory in 1949, but when the nineteen-year-old Krays received their call-up papers for the Royal Fusiliers they decided that army life was an irksome distraction they could do without. So they went on the run, were apprehended and detained several times (assaulting several policemen and soldiers along the way) and were eventually sentenced to nine months in the glasshouse at Shepton Mallet, followed by a dishonourable discharge.

‘Within these walls they met some very interesting characters,’ Fred told me. The Krays’ future life of crime, violence and murder was not preordained, even if it would be hard to imagine them settling down in Bethnal Green as pillars of the local Rotary Club. But the company they kept in the Shepton Mallet glasshouse surely had a huge influence on the way they turned out, for their fellow inmates included violent young criminals from the seamier sides of cities throughout Britain.

Among them was the south London gangster and torture specialist Charlie Richardson, whose National Service had been cut short by a court martial for assaulting an army medical officer. The regime at Shepton Mallet was so harsh, said Fred, that even apprentice hard men like Richardson and the Krays were intimidated by it. But Ronnie found light relief in the unlikeliest of places.

Fred led me into a two-storey, red-brick building attached to the south side of the main block and said with macabre jocularity, ‘Welcome, Michael, to the topping shed!’ We were standing in the chamber that housed the gallows on which wartime prisoners were executed by hanging. It was built during the Second World War, when the US military ran the prison – a period I shall come on to presently. After the war the execution chamber was converted into offices and the gallows boarded up. But everyone knew it was there. Fred indicated some loose floorboards in the centre of the room on the first floor and invited me to lift them up. Beneath was a piece of chilling archaeology – the square aperture where the trapdoor of the gallows had been.

‘The Kray brothers were absolutely fascinated by this – particularly Ron, who had a macabre sense of humour,’ explained Fred. ‘He thought how nice it would be to pretend to be hanged here. And they persuaded a friendly officer, one “Doc” Holliday, to allow them in … Noose around his neck. Dropped him – with Ronnie of course holding on very tight [to the rope] so he didn’t hang himself. He thought that was very funny, in fact he said to me it was the only light moment of their whole time here.’

Now I’m no criminal psychiatrist, but the fact that Ronnie Kray’s idea of respite from the brutality of the glasshouse regime was to play-act his own death by hanging is hardly indicative of a well-adjusted human being. The Krays were barely into their twenties at this point but the die was cast. Within a short time of their release from Shepton Mallet the twins had bought the Regal Billiard Hall on the Mile End Road in London’s East End and embarked on a life of crime based on protection rackets and violent intimidation. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that in the immediate post-war years the Shepton Mallet glasshouse was effectively a finishing school for hoodlums.

A decade earlier the prison had fulfilled a very different and totally unexpected role. My next interviewee, local historian Fred Davis, was waiting for me in C Wing with a black-and-white photograph that looked frankly uninteresting on initial inspection. It showed two men apparently sorting through files. But when Fred said matter-of-factly that ‘here we’ve got Mr Johnson and another archivist handling the Domesday Book’ and then confirmed that the photograph was taken here in Shepton Mallet prison, I was flabbergasted. It turns out that as well as functioning as a detention centre for the American military, the prison had become a place of safekeeping for some of Britain’s most important national documents that dated back over 1,000 years. The archivist in charge of them, Harold Johnson, had moved his wife and family here during the war and Fred had subsequently received the photographs he was now showing me from Mrs Johnson.

We were joined on C Wing by the historian Richard Taylor, who has written a book on this extraordinary and, at the time, highly classified episode. ‘It was fairly clear from May 1939 that war was a very real possibility,’ he said. ‘The documents from the National Archives were all in the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane in London. A single bomb could have destroyed the lot of them.’ The decision was taken to remove them to secure facilities in the regions. Among them was Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire. But Shepton Mallet was reserved for the most precious material.

‘Three hundred tons of documents were brought to Shepton Mallet prison,’ said Richard. ‘It’s in the middle of nowhere, a long way from any likely German bombs. They had to clear thirty miles of shelf space. They loaded them up on trucks which were so heavy that they all kept breaking down. And then they filled the cells.’ The former women’s prison, now C Wing, was given over to box upon box of letters, official papers, charters, deeds and notes pertaining to the most significant figures and events in our nation’s history.

They included the Little and Great Domesday Books of 1086, the logbooks of HMS Victory, dispatches from the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and that notorious piece of paper waved by Neville Chamberlain when he returned from meeting Adolf Hitler in 1938 to declare ‘Peace for our time’. They were, as Richard said, ‘more than just records, they were part of what makes us in Britain British’. And the most valuable and iconic was undoubtedly the document known as Magna Carta.

Richard took Fred and me to the cell where Magna Carta was stored and we stood there in a kind of reverent silence. ‘I think a certain magic gets left behind when you know a great person has been in a particular place, and that’s also true of a great document,’ he said. Drawn up in the reign of King John in 1215, Magna Carta introduced the idea of a right to a fair trial and no detention without due process. The hefty tome stored here (one of four extant copies) was an early blueprint of human liberty and as such embodied some of the very values we were fighting the war to defend.

Magna Carta and the rest of the priceless hoard were not simply dumped here and locked in for the duration, like some incorrigible lifer. They were supervised by Harold Johnson, whose wife Fred knew. ‘There are some wonderful stories about his family,’ said Richard. ‘They set up a little swing for his daughter. His son had a model train set and ran the railway track around the gallery. They made, by all accounts, quite a cosy little home here.’

From 1942 the Johnsons shared their ‘cosy little home’ with ‘the useless dregs of the great American Army that had come to the United Kingdom from across the sea’. The quote is from The Dirty Dozen, the 1965 novel by E. M. Nathanson that inspired the 1967 film of the same name starring Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson. The ‘dozen’ men are a bunch of renegade American soldiers awaiting execution or lengthy prison sentences, who are recruited for a presumed suicide mission behind enemy lines. Nathanson called the fictional military prison where these ne’er-do-wells languish ‘Marston-Tyne’, located it in Somerset and based it on Shepton Mallet, which for the latter half of the Second World War served as a guardhouse and disciplinary centre for the US Army.

The United States had formally entered the war against Nazi Germany in December 1941. In January 1942 American servicemen and equipment began arriving in the UK as part of a military build-up that eventually brought more than 1.5 million US soldiers and airmen to these shores. Under the USA (Visiting Forces) Act of 1942 they were subject to American military justice during their stay and one of the principal centres for the administration of that justice was Shepton Mallet gaol.

It was handed over to the US military in 1942 and staffed by American personnel until the end of the war. Eighteen US soldiers were executed here – nine for murder, six for rape and three for both offences. And of the eighteen, ten were black and three Hispanic – disturbing figures when one considers that nine out of ten US soldiers were white. But it’s the story of an African-American serviceman who escaped execution that I was particularly interested in, for his case served to highlight wider issues of class and race which still reverberate today.

On 25 May 1944, as Allied forces across the south of England geared up for D-Day (on 6 June), thirty-year-old Private Leroy Henry, a truck driver from St Louis, Missouri, appeared before a court martial at a US Army Camp in Wiltshire. The charge was that on 5 May he had raped a thirty-three-year-old woman in the village of Combe Down near Bath. According to the alleged victim and her husband, both of whom gave evidence at the court martial, the couple were in bed, asleep, on the night in question when the accused had knocked on the door and woken them up.

In their version of events the American had said he was lost and asked for directions to Bristol. The woman put a coat on over her nightdress and walked down the road with him to point the way. When they were some distance from the house he pulled a knife on her and ordered her to climb over a wall into a field, where he raped her. Henry pleaded not guilty, claiming that he had arranged to visit the woman for sex and that after they had had sex they had fallen out over the fee – she demanded £2, but he was only prepared to pay £1, which was the amount they had agreed on two previous occasions.

The prosecution produced a signed confession, which Henry claimed he had not read and had signed only after being beaten by the military police. Despite the lack of corroborating evidence and the woman’s improbable explanation for her behaviour in following a complete stranger out into the night, the jury of eight officers – seven white and one black – found him guilty. Henry was sentenced to death by hanging and the sentence was to be carried out at Shepton Mallet prison.

At this point it looked as though Private Henry would be just a footnote in history – another name to add to the list of military prisoners executed at Shepton Mallet after hasty trials of dubious rigour. But as he awaited his fate in one of the condemned cells in that red-brick chamber, a grass-roots campaign for his release was organized, which has much in common with the social-media campaigns of the present age.

Many people in Bath who read the details of the court martial were disturbed by the guilty verdict. They knew the supposed victim worked as a part-time prostitute, and some of the residents of Combe Down had seen the soldier and the woman drinking together in a local pub. People were, furthermore, well disposed towards African-American servicemen, who had travelled far from home to defend our freedoms, and indignant at the blatantly discriminatory treatment to which they were often subjected – for example, being hauled out of English pubs and dance halls by ‘snowdrops’ (US military police) enforcing the same ‘Jim Crow’ segregation laws that then prevailed in the southern states of America.

Cecil King, the publisher of the Daily Mirror, observed the situation shrewdly in an entry in his personal war diary, written the day after the Henry verdict: ‘The feeling is fairly common that Negroes are nicer and better behaved than the ordinary Yank. So there is some indignation when Negro soldiers are condemned to death for raping English girls. In the most recent case [of Leroy Henry] the evidence would most certainly have resulted in an acquittal in an English court. In the far more numerous cases of rape or murder by white American soldiers, the punishment, if any, is of a wholly different order of severity.’

A local baker and his daughter started a petition urging a review of Private Henry’s conviction. It was circulated in the Bath area and printed in the local paper, gathering 33,000 signatures in a short space of time. The story received widespread coverage in Britain, and in New York the campaigning organization known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP) took up the soldier’s cause. On 3 June 1944, the NAACP sent a telegram to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the most senior figure in the US Army and Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces for Operation Overlord, asking him to order a stay of execution for Henry and a review of his case.

Eisenhower, despite having the small matter of the invasion of occupied Europe on his plate, did more than that. On 17 June he ordered that the death sentence be revoked due to insufficient evidence. Three days later he exonerated Henry completely and ordered that he return to his duties. A newspaper report headlined ‘Back to duty after quashed death verdict’ appeared on 22 June, less than a month after the court martial and less than two months since the incident took place.

In the heat of wartime a potential wrong had been righted as speedily as it had been made. And it was all down to the strength of public feeling and the power of the press which, for once at least, had been deployed to good effect. I found Leroy Henry’s story as reassuring as it was surprising. At a time when segregation laws in the United States oppressed millions – and would continue to do so until the 1960s – an African American gained justice here despite his colour. I would have expected the British public of the 1940s to be more inclined to racist attitudes than today’s society – certainly indifferent to the guilt or otherwise of just one foreign soldier in the midst of war. But a sense of common justice won the day and saved a life.

There doesn’t seem to have been much common justice in the case of Ben Gunn. While I was visiting other parts of the prison and uncovering its rich layers of history, he had been spending time alone here, coming to terms with being back in the institution where he had been locked up for so many years. I had arranged to rejoin him in the courtyard so we could go together to his old cell, B3/30. He seemed much more composed now, having done some exploring for himself. ‘There’s a fireplace in the corner of the wing office which had been covered up,’ he said excitedly. ‘I didn’t know it was there. It means there’s a shaft all the way to the roof, which we may have been interested in …’ We entered B Wing, where he had lived, and climbed the metal stairs to the third landing. As he approached his former cell, number 30, he began to breathe deeply. ‘Just seeing it, just being here,’ he explained. I asked him how long he would spend locked up each day. ‘Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen hours, depending,’ was his reply.

In the cell Ben crouched on the floor by the old bed frame and I perched on the edge of the frame. The bald facts of his case are that he pleaded guilty to his friend’s murder and was sentenced to a minimum of ten years in gaol. But the authorities kept pushing back his release date and his sentence came to seem never-ending. As time passed it wasn’t so much the physical barriers that intimidated him as the apparently insurmountable wall of that sentence. ‘If you’re serving a fixed term, every day you can tick another day off, you know you’re one day closer to your sentence ending and you can go home,’ he said. ‘With a lifer you could be there forever. You just don’t know.’

At this point Ben revealed a crucial detail of his case that put everything in a different light: he was just fourteen years of age at the time of his friend’s death. ‘We were both in care. He was my room-mate in the kids’ home. I happened to be holding a piece of wood. He didn’t. He died.’ The killing, he said, was entirely unintentional. ‘I didn’t mean to cause serious harm. But I did. As soon as I realized I went to the police. Phone box, nine nine nine. We went from there. He died a couple of days later.’

There was silence in the cell while I digested this information. My initial reaction was that Ben seemed remarkably free of self-pity despite the circumstances of his life at the time. He told me that his mother had died when he was nine, which was why he was living in a children’s home when he committed the offence. Such institutions could be notoriously difficult environments in which young children received little affection and had no defence against exploitation and abuse by adults. He was also terribly young to have been convicted of the offence of murder.

He was, however, well above the age of criminal responsibility – the age under which children cannot be charged with and convicted of a crime. In England and Wales, this is fixed at ten years old (the age at which Robert Thompson and Jon Venables became the youngest murderers in English history when they killed the toddler James Bulger in 1993). In Europe the average is fourteen years old. But Ben did not seem interested in ‘blaming the system’. ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘Life and circumstance can lead you to a situation. How you deal with those circumstances – that’s you. I killed my mate. Guilty. That’s that.’

The most notorious juvenile killer in British criminal history was Mary Bell, who as a ten- and eleven-year-old strangled two toddlers in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1968. She was found guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and served twelve years. As a bewildered young teenager, Ben was advised to plead guilty to the charge of murder. ‘That was my barrister’s advice,’ he told me. ‘I first met my barrister fifteen minutes before I went into court. He came into the cell, said, “I’m your barrister, you’ve left me nothing to do, you’ve got to go up and plead guilty.” So I went up and pleaded guilty.

‘I wasn’t looking at the legal subtleties – the difference between, say, manslaughter, which would have given me a six-year fixed sentence, or a life sentence which turned into thirty-two years. I didn’t realize any of those things. But it’s not something I’ve argued over, it really isn’t. I know there is a legal argument to be made but I’ve never made it.’

If Ben was philosophical about his murder conviction, he expressed strong views about prison itself. A prison sentence is supposed to fulfil a variety of functions – among them to both punish and rehabilitate offenders, deter crime, and protect society by removing criminals from it. Ben had a different way of looking at incarceration. The system, he said, was ‘for making everybody else feel better’. He had worked out that it had cost the taxpayer £1.4 million to put him away for over three decades – ‘but I don’t think you got your money’s worth’. And I, as a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, would have to concede that his point was well made. He also identified a paradox at the heart of the system: ‘You can’t have punishment and rehabilitation simultaneously. You can’t punch someone in the mouth and give them a Band-Aid. You can’t hurt and heal.’

Questions of crime and punishment have exercised many minds down the centuries, from Plato in ancient Greece to the prime minister whose Cabinet I served in. Reflecting on the criminal justice system in 1993, John Major suggested that ‘Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less.’ Was Ben a victim of such an approach? If he was, he disarmed me with his lack of bitterness. Having spent a lengthy sentence (years that took him from child to adult, bypassing all the productive and exciting milestones of a person living an averagely fulfilling life on the outside) in a world measuring five paces by ten, he has unequivocally accepted responsibility for his crime even though he was only fourteen years old when he committed it. At the same time he will always doubt what good it did him, what the point of it all was.

It’s a question that some people prefer to avoid. Discovering some of Shepton Mallet’s hidden history was making me re-examine my own thoughts about prison. Not only did the gaol fail to rehabilitate its most infamous inmates, the Krays, but it also swept them along on their life of crime. For Ben Gunn, gaol meant thirty-two years in a harsh environment that for much of the time was not conducive to preparing him for life on the outside. He was not, by his own account, a model prisoner. He questioned the purpose of being locked up and did not acquiesce easily to authority – which perhaps explains why it took so long for the authorities to sanction his release.

‘The Parole Board for over a decade was recommending a move to open prison, pending release, and ministers were overruling it,’ he said. One reason cited was that he had depression, which increased the chance of his reoffending. ‘But hang on,’ he said. ‘The only psychiatric report they had said I suffered from depression and that reduced my risk of reoffending.’ The real reason, he said, was that he was a paid-up member of the Awkward Squad: ‘It’s all games within games.’

In desperation he went on hunger strike at one point, but eventually found a way forward. To explain this latter part of his life in prison Ben took me to Shepton Mallet’s modern annexe, built in the 1970s, where the architecture of wide corridors and big windows was far less oppressive. Signs pointing to ‘Library’ and ‘Education’ reflected the purpose of this new wing. We passed a suite of rooms where prisoners used to practise their painting and decorating skills, then climbed some stairs to a series of classrooms. ‘This is my stomping ground – more specifically there,’ he said pointing into a particular room. He was grinning from ear to ear. ‘This where I met my partner,’ he said. His partner? Not for the first time, Ben had surprised me. ‘It was frowned upon,’ he admitted. ‘She was just a random woman teacher, teaching. I used to wander into her class, chat to my mates and just walk out. I was profoundly rude.’

Ben gained a degree in politics and history and a Masters in peace and reconciliation during his time at Shepton Mallet. Then, in 2007, he met Alex, the ‘remarkable woman’ who would turn his life around. They got on badly at first but when she was put in charge of the prison magazine, a project that interested him, the mood quickly changed. ‘This was our main room,’ he said, looking truly relaxed for the first time. ‘I’d sit in the corner, she’d have the desk there. We’d be passing little love notes to each other on Post-its. The whole room knew what was happening but no one said a word.’ His eyes were twinkling. ‘There was a convenient stationery cupboard.’ He took me to it – a narrow room, with empty shelves now, but perfectly big enough for their purposes.

When they were eventually rumbled Alex was dismissed, but they remained in contact and she encouraged Ben to write a blog on prison life. The first one started with this rhetorical question: ‘Where else can you sit around and pass the days chatting with people who have maimed, mutilated, molested and murdered?’ Sensing for the first time that a meaningful future may await him on the outside, Ben changed his attitude and pressed to be released. On 23 August 2012 he finally walked free and Alex was waiting for him. Since then they have remained together and he has worked as a campaigner and commentator on the prison system. Emotionally, he admitted, things have not been plain sailing but he keeps trying to do his best. ‘I just owe it to everybody to try and do a good job of life.’ He paused, then added, ‘Somehow.’

Ben and I were as relieved as each other when the doors of Shepton Mallet nick banged closed behind us to leave us back on the outside, free in body and soul. Everything I learned in there confirmed to me that prison is a terrible fate for any person, especially when the bureaucratic machinery of punishment grinds on regardless of common justice. The history of Shepton Mallet is also a microcosm of Britain’s social history. It exemplifies how public attitudes and official policy on the thorny questions of crime and punishment have muddled very gradually towards more humane practice. And on a personal level maybe I laid some ghosts thanks to meeting Ben Gunn. For he lived the reality of my recurring ‘prison’ nightmare a thousand times over, yet each day found a way to go on. He struck me as a man of rare moral insight. Not, I think, because of the prison system, but in spite of it.