DEEP in the bowels of Strangeways prison, unrest was stirring.
It was 1990 and Britain was in turmoil as Thatcher’s government crumbled, with violent crime at a record high and the country’s ageing prisons full beyond capacity.
The notorious Victorian Manchester prison was built to house 970 inmates, but on the dawn of April 1st 1990, it was home to 1,647 men.
Pushed to breaking point by the appalling conditions, which saw cramped cells designed for one occupied by three and acting as a bedroom, toilet and dining room, prisoners seized control, leading to the worst jail riot in British history.
In a new Channel 5 documentary, airing tonight, prison guards and inmates share harrowing anecdotes of how it unfolded during a Sunday service in the chapel.
“All hell broke loose,” says Alan Lord, an inmate who was serving time for murder.
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“You're dealing with young lads who are very frustrated at how they've been treated, so it was payback time.
“Everything was being smashed up, screws are being laid into… For a split second it was like wow, your adrenaline going, you realise… this is your moment.”
Unable to control the angry mob, most prison officers fled before reinforcements were brought in.
Meanwhile marauding lags preyed on “vulnerable” inmates, attacking sex offenders housed in a segregated wing.
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Derek White, a 46-year-old on remand for indecent assault and buggery, suffered serious head wounds and later died in hospital.
In total, 147 staff and 47 inmates were injured, while a prison officer also lost his life.
Former prison officer Alan Hall tells the documentary how prisoners told him they could see bodies “hanging from the scaffolding”.
It was this scaffolding – erected for maintenance work to be carried out on the central rotunda of the main prison block – which enabled inmates to clamber onto the roof, where they publicly staged their protest, which raged for nearly a month.
When prison staff tried to enter the building, they were bombarded by lags using bricks, tiles and coping stones as deadly missiles.
Hall recalls: “It was something like a battle, war scenes, with bricks raining down.
It was something like a battle, war scenes, with bricks raining down
“I remember seeing one officer, a slate hit him right down the face. Made a right mess of him. It was horrendous.”
Fellow prison officer Dave Taylor adds: “I just thought, how barbaric is that, that people would do that, not knowing if they were going to kill people who were underneath.”
The night before, a rumour had spread that an inmate had been beaten up by staff.
John Murray, who was being held at Strangeways while on remand aged 20, claims it wasn’t “big news” for someone to be assaulted – but this particular incident was “really severe”.
Church service turns violent
The following morning 309 prisoners attended chaplain Noel Proctor’s service.
An hour in, “ring-leader” lag Paul Taylor marched to the front, took the microphone and began to fire up the crowd.
Several prisoners removed makeshift weapons they'd smuggled in from under their clothes, and it soon became a full-blown riot.
Taylor says: “There was 300 people in the chapel and there was absolutely nothing they could have done [sic].
“You were faced with people who'd picked up fire extinguishers, and were throwing them at people.”
You were faced with people who'd picked up fire extinguishers, and were throwing them at people
As the mob took over Strangeways, lighting fires as they went, some prisoners who remained locked up began to panic.
Maggie Jones, the prison’s former hospital officer, chokes up as she recounts how inmates on the wings were “screaming” at them to save them.
Murray recalls: “All the smoke was coming into the cells over the tops of the doors. So you're in the cell going f*****g nuts, wet towels in the water buckets putting towels on you because they're filling up with smoke.
“So I was just f*****g terrified thinking I'm gonna die here, I'm gonna suffocate to death.
“I was shouting out the cell doors. I seen someone I knew, they got a fire extinguisher and they started smashing the door down and that was it then, all bets were off [sic].”
Most prisoners turned their attention to gathering supplies, raiding the kitchen of knives and fitting them to scaffolding poles to make weapons. Others hit up the pharmacy to stock up on drugs.
Sex offenders 'vulnerable'
Staff managed to evacuate 800 prisoners by 5pm – prioritising those classed as vulnerable.
“The first thought was to get the sex offenders out, because we thought if they get them, we're gonna be wiping blood forever,” says Jones.
Realising they were in control, many rioters began to relax; footage shows them drinking and dancing on the roof, enjoying a warped sense of freedom – attracting intense media attention.
“Sitting there with a bottle of wine from the church, people are just smoking joints, dressing up in priest outfits, some of us had firemen outfits on, it was like a scene out of Mad Max or Pirates of the Caribbean,” says Murray.
“It was the most bizarre fancy dress party you'd ever seen in your life.”
Soon armed riot teams arrived from other prisons and fought to take back control – soaking the rooftop revellers with high-powered water hoses.
Most inmates surrendered, but a few hung on to the bitter end.
Following the riot, Strangeways was a ruin and had to be rebuilt – costing £90million. It was renamed HM Prison Manchester.
Alan Lord served an additional 10 years for his role in the riot, while John Murray was handed an extra four.
It sparked copy-cat incidents at 20 other prisons around England and Wales, and the publication of the Woolf Report followed, which led to major improvements across the prison system.
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This included an end to “slopping out” – which saw prisoners empty the buckets used as toilets in their cells every morning.
Strangeways Riot: 25 Days of Mayhem airs on Thursday 17th March at 9pm on Channel 5.
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