This is the first version of 'Billy's Museum" and is still a work in progress stage.
Billy Hull was the longest serving security prison officer (twenty-five years) at the notorious Maze/Long Kesh prison, situated outside Belfast, Northern Ireland. Against prison policy, Billy collected items relating to various individuals, incidents and occurrences. On his retirement Billy made a museum which has never been seen by the public.
I was very interested in keeping the history of the prison alive. So when things happened I took it upon myself to collect it, I took it upon myself, items that were found on searches, items that were turned up outside belonging to the prison. I put these all away under lock and key. My instructions from the powers to be was destroy it, no evidence, everything must be destroyed. But at the back of my mind I kept saying ´It’s terrible that things like this should be destroyed, it should be kept. So I kept them, and I kept them locked away in one of the compounds in Long Kesh, for fifteen years. And I kept changing the locks so that nobody could get into it. And in the end the prison’s starting to wind down and being really interested to put the stuff on show I took it upon myself to approach a new security governor who had just arrived at the Maze - this was Steve Davis –I asked Steve if he would give permission to bring out the stuff that we had hid in the Maze. He allowed a building, which was called the laundry, the old laundry building inside Long Kesh to be used for to put on a demonstration. And I was given the time for to do that, I was in my element then, this was me really going to war on what I had collected over the years. There was a lot of other people [who] had kept stuff, and when ever they heard that I had stuff, they were saying `Billy, I’ve got stuff in this store, and `I’ve got stuff in that store`. `Billy there’s stuff upstairs in an old cloke room`. And the army boys who had been guarding the prison for all those years had found stuff and they didn’t know what to do with it so they stored it, and in the end they said; `Well look sure Billy can have it and he’ll look after it`. So I ended up acclimating all the bits and pieces relating to everything that went on in the Maze in the thirty odd years it was running. And we put it on display in the laundry and as you well know when you first seen it you couldn’t believe your eyes. That was my achievement in coming out of the prison service to leave behind something that it a piece of history and hopefully it’ll taken and past on for generation to come it’s some thing that will never happen again. Billy Hull, March 2003.