Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! pays tribute to former prisoner and campaigning journalist Eric Allison who died on 2 November, just a month before his 80th birthday. Most widely known as the Prisons Correspondent for The Guardian, Eric had also been a writer for FRFI since 1990 and was joint author of our book Strangeways 1990: A serious disturbance.
Image: In 2003, 18-year-old Sarah Campbell took her own life in Styal prison. For the next five years, until her own death, her mother Pauline waged a determined campaign to highlight the mistreatment of women prisoners, staging protests every time a woman died in prison. Eric dedicated himself to helping Pauline by all the means at his disposal. After her death he wrote a moving obituary for FRFI and worked with RCG comrades and the No More Prisons group to organise a protest in her memory outside Styal prison in August 2008 (Photo credit: John Moore).
RCG comrades first met Eric in April 1990 outside Strangeways prison where he was cheering on the prisoners protesting on the roof of the gaol against degrading conditions and staff brutality. Eric had been in Strangeways and witnessed the systematic beatings and neglect firsthand. As he later wrote emotionally: ‘Strangeways prison was both warehouse and factory, storing only humans and producing only hate. And there we were, watching its take-over by the, mainly young, lions of men on the roof.’
As the 25 days of the Strangeways siege drew to a close, Manchester and Bradford RCG branches continued to organise in solidarity with the prisoners who were by now dispersed to various police stations and prisons, working with their families and others to highlight how these men were being scapegoated for the principled action they had taken. Eric was a regular attender at these events, delighted to find a group that was standing in solidarity with the prisoners, frustrated that papers like the Manchester Evening News (MEN), and his future employers at The Guardian were not telling the real inside story.
Unlike many of today’s long drawn-out inquiries, the Woolf Inquiry into the uprising at Strangeways and other prisons began almost immediately. Eric attended all the Manchester sessions and as many as he could elsewhere. The first article he wrote for FRFI was a report into the Inquiry entitled ‘Odds stacked against the prisoners’ (FRFI 96 August/September 1990). From then on he wrote regularly, first following the Inquiry and later the trials of the protesters (‘Strangeways trial verdict: savage sentences’, FRFI 107 June/July 1992).
In 1991 Eric went back into prison himself for a while, and wrote from there for FRFI colourful articles describing the vile conditions, such as ‘HMP Wandsworth – top of the league of lousy prisons’ (FRFI 105, February/March 1992).
In 1993, Eric and Nicki Jameson, FRFI Prisoners’ Fightback page editor, began 18 months of work which would culminate in the publication of Strangeways 1990: A serious disturbance in 1995. This involved travelling to prisons up and down the country to speak to the men who had taken part in the protest. And not just those specific prisoners, as Eric was alive to every instance of prison brutality, every wrongful conviction or injustice, and would take copious notes, write lists, hatch plans of how an individual’s case could be highlighted or tied in with the general cause.
During this period we organised protests outside prisons such as Full Sutton and Winson Green, from where we’d received reports of prisoners being beaten in the punishment blocks, as well as outside the Home Office in solidarity with the 1994 Whitemoor escapees – who again had been badly beaten up by prison staff – and at Nottingham Crown Court, where Strangeways protester David Bowen was on trial for escape. Ever resourceful, Eric wasn’t content with the flimsy placards used by most activists and commissioned a friend who was a sign writer to produce four heavy wooden signs with slogans such as ‘Stop the Brutality’ and ‘Sack the Guilty Screws’ (the latter particularly hated by the Prison Officers Association).
Strangeways 1990 was published in 1995, on the fifth anniversary of the uprising. Eric spoke at launch meetings in London and Manchester and was interviewed widely on radio and profiled in the MEN. In 2000, Manchester-based theatre company Fink On dramatised the book, repeating this in 2010 in a new version, in which an actor played Eric as narrator.
In 2003 The Guardian advertised for a former prisoner to become a correspondent on what was initially a three-year contract. Eric’s combination of having been a guest of Her Majesty’s Prisons in each of the four preceding decades and the regular writing he had been doing since 1990 won him the position. He wrote a letter to FRFI which we published on the prison page, making it clear that although he was delighted to get the job (even though the money was not good, and crime paid much better) he was not jumping ship and would keep writing for FRFI, ‘the staunchest friend to prisoners’.
True to his word, for the next 18 years, Eric kept sending us articles and we kept publishing them. Some of these reflected the work he was doing at The Guardian, where the resources of a national daily paper allowed him to become an investigative journalist on a scale he had long aimed for. Together with Guardian writer Simon Hattenstone, he authored in-depth exposés of child imprisonment, deaths in custody, private racketeering in the punishment industry and miscarriages of justice, posthumously winning a Criminal Justice Alliance award for Outstanding Journalism. For FRFI, he also wrote about the Close Supervision Centre system, mental health in prisons and the scandal of the IPP system. Eric’s last full article for us was in 2021; entitled ‘Stop imprisoning children!’, it was an eloquent rant about a subject close to his heart.
Eric was a life-long socialist, known during his prison days as ‘Eric the Red’, due to a combination of his left-wing politics and support for Manchester United. He joined the Labour Party in the Corbyn era, but left again the moment that project was clearly over. Despite moving in some very illustrious circles, both when a fraudster and later as a journalist for a mainstream newspaper, Eric never lost touch with his working class roots, dedicating large amounts of time to supporting friends and neighbours, and for many years organising a local football team in West Gorton, where he lived with a series of beloved dogs from his last release from prison in 1999 until his death.
We send our condolences to Eric’s daughters, grandchildren, family and friends.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 291, December 2022/January 2023
