In February 1922 an inspired but controversial appointment was made to the Prison Commission. Alexander Paterson was the appointee. With enormous reforming zeal and unparalleled experience of working-class life, he would leave an indelible mark on the penal landscape. He was anything but working-class in origin. Born to affluence in Cheshire in 1884 he was brought up as a staunch Unitarian, and his Christian faith suffused his whole life. He went to University College, Oxford in 1902. A contemporary there, and future Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, recalls that although Paterson was ‘younger than most of those of his year he very soon became an outstanding influence in the life of the college’ owing to ‘the power of his personality’. Others testified to his magnetism, humour, originality and determination. He was a moral whirlwind.

At Oxford Paterson was deeply influenced, as had been Ruggles-Brise, by the communitarian philosophy of T.H. Green, and was easily persuaded by Dr John Stansfeld, a pioneer of working with inner-city boys in south London, to visit the Oxford Medical Mission, later known as the Oxford and Bermondsey Club, and to give it a trial ‘just for a fortnight’. When he graduated he did. Seduced at once, he stayed in Bermondsey for twenty-one years, living in a two-roomed flat in a poor tenement block, and accruing a formidable expertise in dealing with difficult and troubled youngsters, in all of whom he found ‘natural goodness’.