Founded 1980
Chair:
Secretary:
Treasurer:
Graham Smith
Jan Thompson
Graham Mumby-Croft
Home
Geoffrey Lister who died recently in Lichfield was one-time Director of the Midland Region of the Prison Service and a member of the Prison Board of England and Wales. As a governor of long-standing, he believed that even-handedness, consistency and the professional integrity of staff at all levels was the key to good prison administration. He greatly valued staff participation but was saddened by the excessive growth of union power which he saw as distorting the purposes of imprisonment He was of liberal persuasion but always a realist. He valued security and good order but never compromised on the importance of rehabilitation. He cared deeply both for staff and prisoners and took pride as a governor in never having had a major disturbance in any of his establishments.
He was born on the 20th February 1925, at Lightcliffe, a village near Halifax, and was educated at the local Church of England Elementary School, Hipperholme Grammar School, Leeds University and the London School of Economics. As a young man, he was much influenced by the church and on leaving school, he trained briefly for the priesthood
at the Hostel of the Resurrection in Leeds.
In 1943 however, war service intervened, and he volunteered for the Indian Army as a Schoolboy Officer Cadet from the University Training Corps. He was commissioned from the Officers Training School, Bangalore and after further training at Kakul on the Northwest Frontier and the Airborne Forces Depot at Chaklala he became a Captain of an Air Dispatch Platoon. In 1944/ 45 at lmphal and Akyab in Burma he played a significant part in the supply by airdrop to
units of the XIV Army in their advance from Imphal to Rangoon. He was mentioned in dispatches. After the war, he moved back to India where he commanded a detached platoon at St Thomas Mount Airfield, Madras and was the last British Officer to serve there prior to Independence.
On demobilisation he returned to Leeds University and in 1950 was one of their first graduates in Social Studies. In the same year, he was appointed an Assistant Governor in the Prison Service and early in his career gained experience in closed and open Borstals at Portland and Hollesley Bay Colony.
He was next seconded for further training at the L.S. E. where he completed a course in Applied Social Studies under the direction of Dame Eileen Younghusband. This was followed by a spell as Deputy Governor at Hull Borstal, a particularly difficult assignment where the establishment took some of the most problematic inmates in the Borstal system. In 1959, he was promoted and appointed Deputy Governor (Training) at Wakefield Prison, where he came under the influence of Alan Bainton, one of the most outstanding governors in the Prison Service. He greatly enjoyed his Service there and was instrumental in creating humane visiting arrangements and courses of pre-discharge training for prisoners, two of probably the first such initiatives in the system.
In 1962 he was appointed Governor of Pollington Borstal which he ran as a therapeutic community using group counselling techniques. He remained there for over five years until he returned to Wakefield to become Deputy Principal of the Prison Service Staff College. There he introduced recently developed observation and classification procedures to the Prison Service and also took part in promoting group counselling within the member countries of the Council of Europe.
In 1969 he was made Governor of Maidstone Prison and in the ten years
that followed, was successively in charge of Hollesley Bay Colony, Stafford and Albany Prisons. The Iatter was a Dispersal Prison and contained an appropriate number of high-risk prisoners. There was also a group of I.R.A. prisoners who presented somewhat unusual problems. At that time the prison was also experimenting with the use of electric unlocking which tended to undermine staff confidence, a problem which eventually he overcame.
He then spent two years as head of P7 Division in Prison Department Headquarters, a division with personnel responsibilities, including promotions, postings and training for staff· of the Prison Service. One of the more notable developments for which he was responsible was the setting in train of programmes for what came to be known as Control and Restraint Training. For the last four years before retirement he was Director of Midland Region and for many years represented the United Kingdom on a Council of Europe Committee on prison regimes.
He retired from the Prison Service in 1985, but he continued to be actively involved in prison matters. On a number of occasions, he directed Extended Interview Boards for the Civil Service Commission, selecting candidates for appointment to the governor grade. In 1990 he headed an investigative team establishing the facts of the riots at Strangeways and other prisons in support of the Lord Justice Woolf lnquiry. More recently he acted as an adviser, evaluating the tenders for the market testing of the Wolds and Strangeways Prisons. He never supported the widespread privatization of the Prison Service but believed that there was much to be learnt from the process which was of value.
It was, however, as an adviser to the governments of Mauritius and
the Seychelles that he derived his greatest satisfaction in retirement. In
Mauritius over two years he revised the conditions of service of the prison staff, advised prison management and project managed the building of a new Remand Prison. In the Seychelles, he responded to a request from the Archbishop of the Indian Ocean to help a prison service where one of the prisons was run by the military and had been criticized by Amnesty International. Over a period of six months, he established good relationships with the appropriate authorities, brought about change and left them with a detailed report outlining the way forward.
In Lichfield where he spent his last years, he was a member of PROBUS
one time chairman and active within the Lichfield Festival Association.
For twelve years he was a member of the Guild of Stewards of Lichfield
Cathedral and on the committee of Newton's Trust. As a younger man, he loved walking and cycling and of recent years he played golf regularly. In 1950 he married Grace Cartwright, who pre-deceased him by a number of years, and he leaves behind two daughters.
This contribution gratefully received from Grenvil Barnard - Who luckily attended the memorial service for Geoff and supplied a copy of the order of service which I have adapted and used for this tribute to a colleague.
