Entertainment

Bob’s People Ed and Andy

Scottish Review Entertainment

Published 8 September 2005 · Updated 27 February 2026 · 4 min read

Listen to this article

Bob’s People
Ed and Andy

George Gunn
on the links between Chile’s trapped miners and the poor of Scotland

Also on this page:

Film
Dharmendra Singh on ‘Inception’

Islay McLeod
meets a man who captured a WMD

Also on this page:

Rear Window
Alice’s story

Part III of Alice’s story

Alice, aged 22, was sentenced to two years in prison on a charge of serious assault following an incident in which she stabbed her husband. Her baby son was four months old when she went to jail. At first she was sent to the small women’s unit at Dumfries prison (this unit has subsequently been closed), but she was later transferred for a brief period to Cornton Vale prison, Stirling. In this final instalment of her story, she told Fiona MacDonald of life in the women’s unit at Dumfries.

Because it’s just a wee unit, the female prisoners in Dumfries have a very easy time. We had to go and pick up our meals from the cookhouse and because they were cold by the time we came back, we had a kind of open-plan kitchen as part of the TV area. We would keep things like bread in there, and the girls were always sneaking bread and tubs of margarine back to their rooms. Once or twice the staff brought in cake mixes and let us make cakes. It’s just a lot nicer [than Cornton Vale]. The bad side is that there are no jobs for females, so they get a cell wage of around £3 a week, which is basically just for keeping the unit clean. Now, tobacco is £2, and they all smoke and they’ve got to get their skins [cigarette papers].
     Stamps, tea bags, sugar. If you didn’t hand them over, all hell broke loose. You have to hide everything because unless you are willing to go out and punch somebody in, and get sent to Cornton Vale where it’s all on a bigger nastier scale, whatever you have is going to get nicked. The bizarre hiding places you find for Twixes and stuff…The best one is to pull out the bottom drawer of your chest of drawers and there’s a wee gap where you can stick it all on the floor.
     Because I’m quite laid back, it was okay. What’s really bad is when you are panicking and freaking out about things and you feel you really can’t cope. It took me three months to accept my sentence. In my first three weeks I did get very, very worked up and the only way I felt I could control it and not cry hysterically, was by biting on my hand or my arm. My arms were going black and blue and the staff were keeping an eye on this. I didn’t eat much, but I don’t eat that much anyway. The meals were not always that great, and the guys [male prisoners in the kitchen] don’t know how to beat any air into a sponge, that’s for sure.
     There was one female prisoner in there who never ate one meal – not one – because she had seen another prisoner spitting in the food, and that prisoner had hepatitis. So she thought the male prisoners could be spitting in the food, and they might have anything. She lived on sandwiches and yoghurt and fruit for a year and a half.

SR Autumn 1999
Alice never returned
to prison

Islay McLeod

A series of character studies by Islay McLeod

II. Harold Hastie

Harold

Harold is a scallop fisher and coastguard. He has lived on Islay all of his life. You can’t miss his house which sits on a hill overlooking Port Ellen – complete with flagpole and Saltire.
On 8 September 2005 Harold was alerted by local fisherman John Baker to a remarkable story – he had found what looked like a small yellow submarine while out in his boat. They towed it to shore and notified the MOD. Eventually the navy admitted having lost the vessel. The men hoped to receive some form of compensation for the manoeuvre: ‘It took quite a bit of organisation to get it out of the water and haul it onto the pier’.
The nearby Bruichladdich Distillery celebrated the find with a special bottling of their single malt. The label read: ‘WMD – The Weapons Inspectors’ Distillery’.

Harold