Saxby spills the beans on chokey

On a warm evening in July the guest speaker at our monthly meeting was David Saxby, best known in Chappist circles as a purveyor of his own range of tweeds as well as high-quality vintage menswear at a shop on Fulham High Street (Old Hat, now no longer there). The subject of his talk, however, was Prison: How to Enjoy It. A few years ago Saxby was up before the beak for tax fraud, for which he was given two and a half years, of which he served six or nine months. For much of that time he was in an open prison (in fact he suggested that he was transferred rather sooner than he should have been, owing to a clerical error). He filled us in on aspects of prison life, such as the poor quality and quantity of food, leading many to pilfer vegetables from the greenhouses. (He also mentioned half-inching a chess board from the library, all suggesting he left chokey more of a criminal than when he went in.) Rather to my surprise, the first half of his talk was actually on how he came to be banged up in the first place—all a misunderstanding, of course, and the result of HMRC blundering and belligerence. (What's that they say about prison—"Everyone's innocent here"?) We were also treated to some forceful observations from the floor as Mike Reynolds insisted that David's time was nothing compared to Mike's own sojourn in borstal in the 1960s.

Many thanks to David for sharing these insights into an experience that most of us (fingers crossed) will never have. You can see a video of his talk on our YouTube channel at newsheridanclub.co.uk/watch and see more photos from the evening in this album on Flickr.

(Left) David Saxby kicks off; (right) Luigi Sbaffi, who is a carabiniero latterly assigned to security at the Italian embassy, will be going back to Italy next month, so he played up to his ambassadorial image by giving everyone some Ferrero Rocher