WATCH: ‘Hanging with Frank was my first serious film’ – Grim tales from Barlinnie Prison’s execution chamber highlighted in new BBC series

A new BBC series called Inside Barlinnie features archive footage of the prison’s execution chamber from a film one of our journalists made in the 1990s.

David G Scott is a senior reporter with the John O’Groat Journal but previously made documentaries, some of which went on to be broadcast and win major awards.

He recalls how his short film called Hanging with Frank came about and his memories of the now-demolished gallows and adjacent death cell where prisoners eked out their final days.

Though I had been playing around with cine cameras since my school days and went on to study film at university, my first serious project came about in the 1990s after an article in The Herald newspaper piqued my interest.

‘Gallows to be axed: End of line for death suite at Barlinnie’ read the headline back in 1995. I knew there was potential for a documentary to be made about the destruction of the facility and how that in itself was a powerful statement.

I wrote to the governor of Barlinnie Prison and was eventually invited to meet him. Taking along experienced cameramen, John Harper and David Byrne, we talked about the nature of the project and he agreed to it on the condition that it would be a “serious film”.

After a few recce trips, a chance remark from our escort, staff training officer Mick Feeny, really upped the ante when he talked about a retired prison officer who sat with some of the condemned prisoners during their final days.

Frank McCue turned out to be the main drive of the film and eventually lent his name to its title, ‘Hanging with Frank’.

Though in poor health at the time, Frank was delighted to share his memories of working as a deathwatch officer at the facility in the 1950s. One of the most notorious individuals to end his days on Barlinnie’s gallows was serial Killer Peter Manuel who was hanged in 1958.

Frank related stories of his time sitting in the condemned cell with the prisoners and how he would play draughts with them and conduct small talk to try and keep them from thinking about the execution chamber which sat a few yards away on the opposite side of the landing. “We talked about anything at all except the obvious,” he says at one point in the film.

In Hanging with Frank there are shots where inmates can be seen on the landing above where the filming was taking place and though it is still a working prison its days are numbered. After 142 years HMP Barlinnie is closing its doors. Nicknamed ‘The Big Hoose’, the prison is Scotland’s largest jail and houses over 1400 inmates in five huge halls.

The execution chamber was demolished between 1997 and 1998 and my film catalogues this process as well as highlighting the unmarked graves where the condemned men lie at the back of D Hall. Toilet facilities had been put in for the first time and pipes ran through some of the graves which had been dug up.

Frank showed how the prison officers escorting the condemned man would walk a few paces across the gallery and through the doors into the execution chamber. They'd stand on planks placed over the trapdoors and hold onto safety ropes dangling from the ceiling to stop them from falling down with the prisoner.

There had been various instances in the past of prison guards and assistant executioners falling through the trapdoors with the condemned man.

They steadied the man as the executioner led the way onto the scaffold and the assistant helped buckle his wrists and feet with leather straps when they reached the correct position on the trapdoors.

A signal from the assistant to the executioner sent the man on his downward journey to the basement below where the mortuary slab awaited. The positioning of the noose was crucial for a clean break between the 2nd and 3rd vertebrae leading to instantaneous death.

Frank told me he would sit with the famous state executioner Albert Pierrepoint after executions and have breakfast while the body dangled for the requisite hour. The prisoner was then pulled back up, the noose removed and then he was lowered back down with other ropes to the basement room again where he was stripped and laid on the mortuary slab.

“The body belonged to the state so it was buried within the prison grounds,” he recalled, adding that relatives were not allowed to visit the grave site or send flowers.

Barlinnie Prison is now earmarked for closure. The three-part series made by Friel Kean Films, which started this week, delves into the most controversial episodes of the jail’s long and troubled history as well as giving a compelling insight into life inside the prison now, for both inmates and staff.

Frank McCue, the ‘star’ of my documentary, passed away around 20 years ago but he lives on in the clips used for Inside Barlinnie.

Hanging with Frank footage has also appeared in various broadcast documentaries over the years and won ‘Best Documentary Award’ at the Reel to Real Festival in 1998. It was also selected for the Edinburgh Film Festival that same year.

Shot entirely on 16mm grainy black and white film stock to evoke a moody and vintage look, the documentary has been deposited in the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive as a unique document of the grim facility.

All episodes of Inside Barlinnie are available to view on iPlayer at: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m0023r11/inside-barlinnie

The three-part series started on October 8 and runs for two more episodes.