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Chapter 23 - Death, Commemoration, Legacy: 1947 and Beyond
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2022
Summary
Though the Prison Service can claim at least its fair share of legendary figures, Alexander Paterson stands out head and shoulders among them. Without doubt he exerted there some of the most civilizing influences of the twentieth century, perhaps of all time, and he will long be remembered as one who above all loved and understood his fellow mortals … It was truly said of him … that he ‘vitalised our penal system with the values of humanity’.
Hayes and PennTo say today that a man, and still less an adolescent, cannot be made fit for freedom in the conditions of captivity, is to utter a platitude. But it was Paterson who first said it, and who went on saying it until we had all come to accept its truth.
Time and Tide, 18th August 1951Alec Paterson died on Friday 7th November 1947 at his home in Chelsea. The cause of death, as certified by Dr R.L. Symes, was myocardial degeneration and arterio-sclerosis. He had just failed to reach his sixty-third birthday. His wife had been unstinting in her care of her ailing husband, and Barclay Baron assiduous in his attendance. He was at his friend's bedside in his last hours.
I knew this was goodbye. He was breathing quietly in the sleep from which he would not awake. Already he was in sight of the last Bridge, which each one of us must sooner or later cross alone. On the other side, it seemed, the trumpets were sounding to welcome a servant of the King of that Country where new tasks are given to those who kept faith with Him.
If there were indeed many mansions in His Father's house, then Alec's new task would surely be to turn one into an open borstal to train those imprisoned in Purgatory.
There was widespread sorrow at his passing, and an opportunity for obituarists to out-do themselves in apotheosizing ‘one of the greatest prison reformers’. He had become the third person in the Holy Trinity of penal reform, alongside John Howard and Elizabeth Fry. Once again, Maxwell eulogised the ‘practical idealist whose grasp of reality was as firm as his aspirations were lofty’, and to whose ‘imagination and inventive force almost all the schemes of penal reform which have been developed in the last twenty-five years’ can be attributed.
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- Alexander Paterson, Prison Reformer , pp. 377 - 394Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022