SIR EVELYN RUGGLES- BRISE : A MEMOIR OF THE FOUNDER
OF BORSTAL Compiled by Shane Leslie
To those—and they are many—who think of prison-reform as a battle between the humanitarian freelance and the reactionary official, this memoir (John Murray, 9s.) will come as a revelation. No man could have been more tradi- tional, by birth, education and environ- ment, than was Evelyn Ruggles-Brise. He was the high-grade civil servant par excellence, by taste an English country gentleman, a little grim of face and harsh of voice, a divider of the world into "damned fellows" and "damned fine fellows." He had to the full the merits of his caste ; courage, uprightness, a love of real scholarship and a fastidious loathing for all that was shoddy, both physical and mental. Himself "a damned fine fellow," he was not, one would have said, the stuff
from which reformers grow. Yet he was a very great reformer. The qualities which made him one emerge most interestingly from Mr. Shane Leslie's admirable memoir : the vision, the consuming pity, the humility of outlook and the great tenacity of purpose. Training and tradition made him an administrator of the first water. A divine spark made him one of the best friends the British prisoner has ever had. Rising from a most amateur and, incidentally, much derided begin- ning, the Borstal system remains his great memorial. He set his face against the ghastly wastage of young lives which was a dreadful feature of our penal system. The secret of his success was the divorce of humanity from senti- mentalism. The reforming iconoclast may well profit from this story of one who could build a new temple and yet revere the ancient gods.
Previous page
