Roy Minton, divisive writer of borstal drama Scum

In his script about a British borstal, Roy Minton portrayed rape, suicide, sickening violence in which racist warders were complicit, and a full-scale riot — all in the space of 90 minutes of what is now regarded as a cult classic of British film-making.
The production of Scum witnessed almost as much destruction in its long gestation period: after raising hell with the BBC when the original television drama was banned, Minton and the director Alan Clarke bought the rights and secured funding for a film version to be released in 1979, by which point the long-term collaborators had vowed never to speak to each other again.
Scum is the story of three teenagers who are sent to a borstal. Carlin (Ray Winstone in his first role) has been transferred from another institution, where he assaulted a warder, and is a marked young man. The borstal’s chief bully, or “Daddy”, Banks (John Blundell) asserts his authority over Carlin by headbutting him. By the end of the film Carlin has used his talent for violence to supplant Banks as the Daddy. His fellow inmate Davis (Julian Firth), who is sensitive and vulnerable, is brutally raped by other inmates and then commits suicide in his cell. Minton’s indictment on treatment of young offenders ends with a full-scale riot.
A lugubrious character with a dry, laconic wit, the writer insisted that every incident portrayed in the film was based on a real event. He said that his “painful” extensive research included more than 100 interviews with former inmates, warders, governors and parents. He also regularly visited Feltham Young Offenders Institution in southwest London.
The writer was therefore incandescent when the original drama for BBC’s Play for Today was cancelled just days before its planned broadcast in 1977. The corporation’s bosses argued that even if the events were based on real life, packing so many violent incidents into one drama gave a distorted, even subversive, impression of a government-run institution.
Minton and Clarke bought the rights, secured funding and started again on a far more hard-hitting film version of Scum. They retained the core of the original cast, including Winstone, who had been cast as Carlin after being expelled from drama school and impressed Clarke with his cocksure attitude at the audition.
The resulting film, released in 1979, became notorious for its graphic scenes, including the rape of Davis and his subsequent suicide. Scum was said to have influenced the 1982 Criminal Justice Bill, which abolished the borstal system.
Minton made his name writing some 30 television plays during an era when both the BBC and ITV were more disposed to commission one-off dramas by up-and-coming writers. Minton was given a writer’s bursary by the BBC in 1968 and his plays Sling Your Hook (1969), about a Nottinghamshire miners’ charabanc trip to Blackpool, and The Hunting of Lionel Crane (1970), the story of an army deserter, were broadcast on the BBC’s Wednesday Play series. There would no doubt have been many more had Minton not fallen out with the BBC commissioning producer Irene Shubik over changes to his scripts.
By then he had teamed up with the Liverpudlian director Clarke on stories whose protagonists were often young, working-class, disenfranchised men striving in spite of the system or trying to beat it. Minton said of Clarke: “We had the same background — working class, him Liverpool and me Nottingham — and we were of the same age. And we had both got under the net into grammar school.”
Their collaboration yielded Gentleman Caller (1967), about a DHSS inspector (George Cole playing against type) in pursuit of two young men who have perfected the art of idling. One of their best was Horace (1972) based in a joke shop about a man with learning difficulties who strikes up a friendship with a schoolboy who frequents the shop to escape from his unhappy home. Fast Hands (1976) was about a young boxer exploited by a promoter, ignored by his disinterested parents and discouraged from his passion by a girlfriend who complains that he isn’t spending enough time with her.
Minton and Clarke bonded over a surreal sense of humour, often wearing wartime gas masks on Tube journeys. Their creative fuel was constant bickering, which often threatened to go too far. Eventually it did. Their partnership and friendship sundered permanently when scenes from Minton’s original script of Scum of Carlin having a homosexual relationship inside the borstal were written out by Clarke. Minton said: “I met a career criminal who had been through borstal and prison. He told me about these cavortings, very much on a public school basis — how he would have a ‘missus’ inside, just for the time inside. It extended Carlin’s character quite a lot for me.”
Minton was still proud of the film, which was shown for the first time on terrestrial television in 1983 after Channel 4 successfully appealed against a High Court action brought by the morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse.
Roy Davies was born in Bulwell, Nottingham in 1933 as one of 13 children to Harold Davies, a machinist in a factory, and his mother Eliza Anne, née Crawford. Minton recalled poverty creating a “sad and humourless household” in which he never once saw anyone smile. He said that his life began, and his creative sensibilities awakened, when he went to live with his grandmother at the age of 13.
Bright and bookish, Minton was bullied at grammar school, giving him lifelong empathy for the underdog. After leaving school he worked in a local mine and also served in the army for five years. He always aspired to a more creative life and won a scholarship to train as an actor at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Having adopted Minton as his stage name, he made an appearance in Coronation Street, but quickly realised that he preferred writing and started to devote himself to his craft full-time in the mid-Sixties.
From the beginning Minton’s scripts were pared back to the point of brutality; they were also witty, in spite of the often bleak subject matter. More often than not his characters were inspired by real people — including himself in Goodnight Albert (1968), about a young miner living with his grandmother — because he was determined, almost to the point of obsession, with writing truthfully.
This quest often led to falling out with producers, directors and commissioning editors. He disassociated himself from the film Scrubbers (1982), a follow-up to Scum about two girls who escape from an open borstal, after the director, Mai Zetterling, made changes to his script. Eventually, Minton gave up trying to write for screen and stage altogether. He wrote in 2008: “Due to the deadening, ignorant state of the powerful, I have for years refrained from putting my work in the marketplace.
Minton married Nicole Thrower in 1981, but they later divorced. His is survived by his partner Jeanette Saintflour and by two sons from his marriage, Lawrence and Thomas.
He lived mainly on a state pension in a council house in Crouch Hill, north London, with books piled up to the ceiling in every room and roll-up stubs accumulating in ash trays. He continued to write for his own pleasure, including an autobiography and four novels. He tapped away on the same 1950s typewriter despite chronic arthritis in his fingers.
Minton left a trail of uncomplimentary anecdotes in his wake from bruised collaborators, yet one friend, the Irish actor and playwright Eugene O’Hare, described him as “provocative, irreverent, shrewd, clever, wildly funny and above all deeply compassionate”.
Roy Minton, writer, was born on August 28, 1933. He died on August 17, 2024, aged 88