The 1962 Club: The Courage of His Convictions / Tony Parker and Robert Allerton

It looks like I haven’t done any of these since the 1947 Club in 2016, but I’m determined to make up for lost time. I’ve got a pile of books from 1962 and my plan is to crunch through them and if anyone gets in my way I’m afraid that’s their bad luck.

Tony Parker is one of my heroes. He was a social historian whose published work consists largely of transcripts of interviews with marginalised people. My favourite book of his is The People of Providence, which blew my mind in 2017. His first published book, from 1962, is The Courage of His Convictions, credited as being jointly by him and Robert Allerton.

At the time of Parker’s meetings with him, Robert Henry Allerton is 33 years old and in prison on his ninth conviction. He’s done twelve and a half years inside, mainly for thefts, some with a side order of violence. Parker’s intention seems to be to discover what makes a recidivist, and he does it with the aid of his trusty tape recorder. To begin with Allerton is hard to break down, his views ‘unfailingly contemptuous of everything and everybody … The Prime Minister, Terence Rattigan, Sir Stanley Unwin, even Manchester United …’ but before long Parker gets him to open up.

Bob must have been born in the late 1920s, one of many siblings in an East London family. His grandfather was a thief, his father straight. Bob muses that if his father had been a crook, maybe he himself would have gone straight. Instead, Bob’s father was a Robert Tressell-reading socialist, and seeing how little reward that brought him helped to mould Bob’s view of the world.

I made up my mind almost as early as I can remember that poverty was not going to be for me. As a child, to me poverty was a crime: the nastiest crime in the world … It didn’t matter in those days to poor people that the King was reviewing the fleet at Spithead, that the Royal Academy was holding its annual exhibition at Burlington House, that British colonial policy wasn’t all it ought to be. It didn’t matter that Sir Malcolm Campbell had broken the world’s land speed record or there was civil war in Spain. All that did matter was there was never quite enough to eat, that work was hard to find, that clothes were thin and roofs let in the rain. There was no time for anything else but poverty and what it was like.

Although sometimes Bob casually derides himself as ignorant, it’s curious that one of his motivations to get out of poverty seems to have been access to what he calls ‘the non-useful things like the arts, music, and so on’. Books are a frequent topic of conversation. You’re not three pages in before he’s contrasting his own childhood with those chronicled in the memoirs of Gwen Raverat and Siegfried Sassoon. Elsewhere he talks of his love of Wilde (‘I still rate him the tops’), Dickens, Maugham and Orwell, and of the ‘fifteen headaches’ he gave himself trying to read Ulysses. At the end of the book, Parker asks him if he has any regrets? Yes, that he stole two shillings from his mother when he was four or five, his first offence. (This is related early on, and is the most poignant moment of the book.) Any others?

I’d like to be able to read things in French and German. Every time I read a translation I’m always conscious of the fact I’m missing something, the sort of flavour of the original.

I thought, as I always think when I’m reading Tony Parker’s books, what a privilege to be given this glimpse of the internal life of a stranger; and I thought in my smug, paternalistic, middle-class way of the civilising power of literature, and so on; and, quite predictably I was brought up short.

I remember a man coming to see me once, a straight man he was, and he looked along that row of books over there on the shelves, and he said: ‘You know, it’s really amazing you should read books like this, I’m staggered I am. I should have thought you’d read paper-backed thrillers, things with lurid covers, books like that. And here you are with Claud Cockburn, Hugh Klare, Simone de Beauvoir, and Lawrence Durrell!’

You know, he didn’t see this as an insulting remark at all: in fact, I think he thought he was being honest in telling me how mistaken he was. And that’s exactly the sort of patronizing you get from straight people if you’re a criminal. ‘Fancy that!’ they say. ‘In some ways you’re just like a human being!’ I’m not kidding, it makes me want to choke the bleeding life out of them.

Bob’s got my number all right.

Moving from the books to the crime. ‘Going straight?’ Bob says at one point. ‘I never even gave it a thought.’ He simply doesn’t want to live a life free of crime, despite the increasing penalties for repeat offences. Next time he’ll get eight years: doesn’t that put him off? Not really. Deterrents have never worked for him, even in school. Occasionally he’ll try his hand at a trade, but it invariably becomes boring and he returns to stealing.

Reading Bob’s words, I was put in mind of Roald Dahl’s story ‘The Hitch-hiker’, which perhaps you know. It features a character who describes himself as a ‘fingersmith’, essentially a high-class pickpocket. In one light he appears a petty criminal, in another a highly skilled one, and the reader is both drawn to and repelled by him. Bob’s like that. The book’s middle section is almost like stand-up comedy at times, a series of sarcastic rants about the variously corrupt, self-serving and incompetent people who have tried and failed to set him on the straight and narrow. It can be hard not to smile. And the privations of his childhood, the brutality of his school life, the hideous night he spent in a children’s home that he still thinks about, his grim National Service in defeated Germany, these are things you read about with great pity. And then:

She started screaming for help, so I had to belt her. I’m not keen on using violence on women, but there’s no choice if they start making a row … I tuned up a bloke in a club with a starting-handle. It was a personal matter which had nothing to do with the Law, but they tried to make a case of it because they knew I’d been getting away with other things they hadn’t caught me for.

Here’s another thing that comes up when reading Tony Parker. It’s marvellous the way he gets people to talk, but the natural medium for this would be a documentary, not a book. Perhaps Parker’s interviewees wouldn’t be as frank if the cameras were rolling, but reading someone’s words on the page, even presented verbatim as they are here, involves loss. How would you react to Bob if you could actually hear him? What difference does the medium make?

Either way, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is one man who, for all his flaws, and very probably because of them too, should be attended.

The only thing that gets anywhere at all is kindness. It might not get far, but it’s got much more chance than anything else. I’d like to make it clear, though, that this isn’t an appeal for kindness in dealing with criminals. I think kindness is probably better for the people who are handing it out, but that’s all. As a criminal myself, it’s a matter of indifference to me whether I’m treated kindly or cruely, and neither will change me. For others – well, with kindness there is always the faint hope they might respond: but anyone who responds to ill-treatment and brutality must be solid from the neck up.

It’s also a useful source of vocabulary. Do you know why a cozzpot might reasonably object to pussy-hoisting? Well, I do.

Tags: Books, Prison, Reading, Robert Allerton, The 1962 Club, The Courage of His Convictions, Tony Parker