Wakefield's grey ghost - Tony Cunnane's Afterthoughts

Written on 29 May 2009

Wakefield’s New Hall Women’s Prison and Young Offenders Institution, situated a few miles west of Wakefield in rolling Pennine countryside, has been in the national media in the last couple of days. Apparently 41% of the inmates find it easy to buy drugs inside the prison. Narcotics regularly arrive in the post – unchecked. A survey by HM Prison Inspectorate also found that 10% of drug-addicted prisoners actually develop their problem after arriving at the prison. Staff cuts mean that officers are unable to carry out proper searches of cells or inmates. My Dad, a Prison Officer for all his working life, spent most of 1940 to 1946 at New Hall and must be turning in his grave.

There was little incentive for the prisoners to escape, especially once the war had started in 1939. Had any prisoner absconded, it would have proved very difficult to remain free for long. The local population, exhorted every day by the Government on the wireless, in the newspapers, and on advertising hoardings around the towns and villages, to be on the look out for enemy paratroopers, spies and Fifth Columnists, would certainly have reported any single men they didn’t know. To make any escapee’s job more difficult, they had no identity cards and being unable to produce one when one when challenged would have looked very suspicious. Perhaps an even more important consideration was that once re-captured they knew they could expect to be drafted into the Army and sent straight off to the war zones. All in all, the prisoners doubtless considered they were better off remaining within the relative comfort and safety of New Hall Camp for the duration of their sentence.

Official transport between Wakefield Prison and its satellite during the war years was mostly in a large enclosed lorry painted in battleship grey. It was a well-known vehicle in the villages along Denby Dale Road between Wakefield and Flockton where the inhabitants referred to it as the ‘Grey Ghost’. This was because many of its journeys were made in the dark, in the early morning or late evening, when its grey exterior merged into the background of ‘blacked-out’ tree-lined roads. Travelling very slowly, essential in those conditions, the lorry made little noise and could appear out of the darkness with little warning - as I often discovered to my cost when out cycling along Denby Dale Road. The vehicle was used to transport prisoners to and fro and to deliver farm produce from the prison to a food depot in Wakefield. Of course, the prisoners always had to be escorted so Prison Officers’ shifts at New Hall Camp were timed to coincide with the Grey Ghost’s routine runs. This was very convenient for Dad because he could be picked up and dropped off right at the end of our street and he normally went to Wakefield Prison only once a week to collect his pay packet or if he was detailed for escort duty.

After the war, Dad was sent to open up another ‘prison without bars’ – at Leyhill in Gloucestershire - read about that here.