When first appointed to the Prison Commission, Alexander Paterson had strong opinions on penology, considerable experience of the workings of the English prison system, but little knowledge of any other. What he also had was a determination to rectify this deficiency. He was insatiably curious, firmly believed in the value of comparative study, and harboured an ambition to become the expert on penal matters. He knew full well that if his project of transforming the prison and borstal systems, as yet in its infancy and amorphous, was to suc-ceed against inevitable opposition he would have to travel far and wide to acquire a detailed understanding of other systems. Thus he would be able to marshal a formidable factual arsenal which he could deploy in both offensive and defensive capacities to progress and protect his great reformatory aim.

His motto was solvitur perambulando (by travelling problems are solved). Like Howard and Fry, he was prepared to learn from other countries and to use their methods and results to challenge or reinforce his own ideas. Like them he had to see ‘with his own eyes how others have faced the same problems and tried to solve them’. During his prison career, in peace and in war, he would travel extensively in Europe, in North America, and throughout the British Empire, sometimes on official business, sometimes on holiday and at his own expense. He wasted no time. In his first three years as a Commissioner he was constantly on the move.

In August 1922 Paterson visited Germany, the first time a Commissioner had done so since Ruggles-Brise in 1905. It was also the first time that Alec had visited the country he had been fighting just four years before. Taking Barkis with him to act as an interpreter, Alec would be a John Howard redivivus, his endeavours greatly eased by the co-operation of the German authorities. Over a period of two months, he saw a large number of prisons and reformatories from Munich in the south to Berlin in the north, and from Munster in the west to Breslau in the east. On each establishment he kept copious notes which he incorporated into his thorough if idiosyncratic report. His whimsical style was very unlike bureaucratic Mandarinese.