New Hall Camp Open Prison, Flockton, Wakefield
From about 1941, Dad was detached from Wakefield Prison to Britain's first 'open prison', near the small village of Flockton in the Pennine foothills about seven miles west of the city. New Hall Camp, which was made up of 65 acres of woodland and about 10 acres of arable land, had opened in 1936 and was used as an overflow for Wakefield prison. The camp buildings were made of timber, the roads were rough tracks through the woods. Only trustworthy prisoners were sent to New Hall Camp because it would have been very easy to escape had they wished to do so.Once the war started, the camp effectively became a farm where the prisoners could be usefully employed in providing dairy products, bacon and pork from their own pigs, and a wide range of vegetables to ‘help the war effort’. Dad told us that the prisoners at New Hall found conditions, though primitive, far superior to those within the main prison. They had plenty of work to do to occupy their time instead of being locked up in tiny cells for 20-plus hours every day.
The image on the left was taken for a magazine article about New Hall Camp and shows my Dad bidding inmates 'good night' in one of the huts. It looks just like the barrack huts I lived in for my first few years in the RAF 15 years later.
There was, in fact, 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 anyone who looked suspicious. To make any escapee’s job more difficult, they had no identity cards and being unable to produce one when one when challenged would certainly have looked 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 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 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, presumably, because many of its journeys were made in the dark in the very early mornings when its grey exterior merged into the background of ‘blacked-out’ tree-lined roads. Travelling slowly, very necessary in those conditions, the lorry made little noise and could appear up out of the darkness with little warning. The vehicle was used to transport prisoners to and fro, and to deliver farm camp to a food depot in Wakefield. Of course, the prisoners had to be escorted so Prison Officers’ shifts at New Hall Camp were timed to coincide with the Grey Ghosts’ 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.