by Paul Buck
McNamee, McCotter and Russell took the Home Office to court, stating that, once apprehended and handcuffed, they were beaten with batons and repeatedly punched and kicked. Russell stated that whilst one officer sat on his back and arms, lifting his head back, another kicked him in the face. The officers claimed that injuries were sustained in the rough and tumble of escape, shinning the rope or falling from the wall. None of the escapees had resisted arrest.
Whilst such claims are regularly made by escapees after capture, let alone at other times within their custodial period, this time the penal establishment was shocked to find that the prisoners were believed and the officers were not. Evidence that should have been available to refute their claims had gone missing – in particular, the recording of the perimeter fence during the contentious period, as well as videotapes which could have shown how their injuries occurred, plus information from the Category A prisoners’ log books. The prisoners were awarded damages in the High Court in January 2001.
On 3 January 1995, an escape from Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight had the effect of increasing security in British prisons. On that day, three high-security prisoners escaped with ease. Matthew Williams, Keith Rose and Andrew Rodger had slipped away from a keep-fit class in the prison gymnasium. Using a replica key, they opened a back door and walked a hundred and fifty yards to the workshop where they had earlier prepared a ladder. After assembling it, they took cutters and made for the perimeter fence, going through it and climbing over the wall with their twenty-five-foot ladder. It was two hours before they were missed, time enough to have left the island by ferry or boat. However, they were discovered five days later living rough in a garden shed nearby. Their intention had been to steal a small Cessna plane from a local airfield, as Rose was an amateur pilot.
Later that year, in June, Keith Rose was able to phone in live from his new jail in Full Sutton, near York, to tell BBC Radio 4’s The World at One programme a thing or two – such as how they copied the key from the prison’s governor, who had a habit of waving keys under their noses wherever he lectured them. He also acknowledged how easy it was to build a ladder, and indeed how easy the whole operation had been. Rose said that they took their inspiration from the escape at Whitemoor a few months before. He also noted how surprised they were not to be missed within fifteen minutes. Their only problem, he recalled, was outside the prison, when they failed to steal a plane. By phoning out to a live BBC radio programme, he also demonstrated how easy it was to do something that a Category A prisoner should not have been able to accomplish.
As has already been stated, the Great Train Robbery owes its stature not only to the crime itself, but also to its afterlife, particularly the escapes by Charlie Wilson and Ronnie Biggs. Biggs, as most know, was a small fish in the actual robbery, but his escape from prison, and his very public world-media profile, has moved him gradually towards the endgame of returning freely, in ill health, to his motherland – to be incarcerated in Belmarsh Prison, as some form of last-ditch stand by the forces of law and order to underline that crime doesn’t pay.
Though Wilson had already accomplished an audacious escape in August 1964, Biggs was to add to the tally in an equally unusual way. He had the good fortune to meet Paul Seabourne, an experienced escapee, inside Wandsworth Prison. Seabourne was about to finish his sentence and agreed to engineer the escape from outside. The idea was to plant a furniture removal van outside the prison, with a hinged platform that could be raised from its roof and brought up the necessary five feet to the height of the wall, from which rope ladders could be dropped when the inmates were on exercise in the yard. Biggs instructed his wife to provide the finance, £10,000 from his ‘Train’ earnings.
Biggs’ accomplice was Eric Flower, whom he had met earlier in Wormwood Scrubs, and with whom he had tried to escape at that time, though both were caught chipping a bar out of a window. As Flower was awaiting his appeal, he received daily visits and could pass messages back and forth.
Within a few weeks of his release, Paul Seabourne had everything ready, and on 8 July 1965 the escape was set in motion.
That afternoon, Biggs and Flower were lingering in the prison yard with the escape-risk prisoners, wearing their yellow fluorescent patches, when, at 3:10pm, Seabourne and an accomplice, Ronnie Black, appeared at the top of the wall with ladders and shotgun cover. Not only did Biggs and Flower see their arrival, so did some officers. However, they were prevented from reaching the wall by two other inmates, Johnny Sullivan and Brian Stone, who had been paid by Biggs to impede the guards. Biggs and Flower went up the ladders and over the wall, dropping through the van roof onto a pile of mattresses. Then they shot out of the van and into a waiting car, driven by Ronnie Leslie.
As with the best-laid plans, things did not go quite right. Two other inmates, Robert Anderson and Patrick Doyle, took the opportunity presented by the ladders. Seabourne had intended to torch the van and, though he had started to soak the mattresses with petrol, the addition of the two newcomers delayed matters and the vital toss of the match never happened. Both Seabourne and Leslie left their prints and were later caught.
The escape had been planned for the day before, but was called off at the last minute when it started to rain suddenly and the prisoners were not allowed out to exercise. Seabourne had already come to the area and, not wishing to waste his trip, made a tour of local phone-boxes, disabling them to prevent the possibility of unhelpful emergency calls to the police the next day. Only after the fact did they discover that the prison had no direct link to the local police, and guards had to dial 999 like anyone else. It was twenty minutes before any police arrived on the escape scene.
By that time Biggs and Flower had reached safety in Dulwich, having switched from their Zephyr to a Cortina, and then given Anderson and Doyle the use of the Cortina to continue on their way. It broke down and they split up. Anderson went to Atlantic Machines, off Tottenham Court Road, where one of his friends, former escapee Patsy Fleming, had told him to make contact if he ever needed help. Anderson turned up at Atlantic spread-eagled across the bonnet of their van. He was taken in, given a change of clothes and some money. (Stanley Baker, the celebrated film actor, was there at the time and contributed appropriately.) ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser took Anderson to his mother’s for the night, and the next day drove him out of the heat of London to Glasgow. Anderson remained free for seven or eight months.
Biggs and Flower moved on smartly in order to limit the number of people who knew of their whereabouts. After a few temporary accommodations, including a stay in a flat in a high-rise block in south London, where Freddie Foreman says his sister-in-law cooked and cleaned for them, they were taken to London Bridge and hidden in the hold of a freighter destined for Antwerp, where a yellow DAF drove them to Paris for plastic surgery.
Flower was picked up in Australia in October 1969, but Biggs had already moved on. By the time he was discovered, a whole string of circumstances had made his life into a media circus. Ever hopeful, the officers in the mailroom at Wandsworth had kept his chair and unfinished mailbag waiting for him, even after they stopped sewing bags for the Post Office.
The previous three cases commanded headlines. But for each that does, there are many others that are buried or lost for one reason or another (including attempts that do not quite succeed). Which is not to say that those involved are not grateful, for having your face in the public eye is not exactly helpful when you are trying to become invisible.
Whilst Wilson and Biggs gained notoriety for their escapes, other Great Train Robbers also made attempts. One such was made by Tommy Wisbey and Bobby Welch, along with Joey Martin and six others at Leicester Prison in 1968. It involved the construction of a ladder that could be slotted together. Because the inmates were not able to measure the distance between the walls, they joked with the warders as to what they divined as the distance, saying they were having a bet. It appears the warders even paced out the distance for them, though it turned out to be not acc
urate enough. The ladder was fine for the first wall, but when they tried to run it across as a bridge to the second it fell short by a few inches. By then the alarm was raised, and they were stuck at the top of the wall.
Kevin Brown was the leader of an attempt to break out of Wandsworth in 1990 by hijacking a JCB loader. Work had been going on at the prison for a few months in the spring, laying a new path in the sterile area: the piece of ground between the inner fence and the perimeter wall where no inmate is allowed to set foot, where the dogs patrol. As a result there was a civilian presence and equipment being brought in on a daily basis. One such piece of equipment was a JCB. The idea was to hijack the vehicle and take it straight through the wall. The ideal time would have been during exercise period, when the refuse party came through to collect the bins from the mailbag shop, requiring the gate to be opened. “The plan needed plenty of bottle and a bit of luck for it to succeed,” as Razor Smith wrote in his autobiography.
On 29 June, during morning break, as the gate was opened to let the trolley through, a group of five prisoners in the exercise yard pulled masks made from the sleeves of sweatshirts over their heads and headed for the three officers on the gate, took them down, and went charging through the sterile area to reach the JCB before the alarm was raised. With a yard full of cheering prisoners, the guards protecting the civilian workers turned and fled. The civilians were petrified and froze, until two of the escapees picked up shovels and threatened them, causing them to flee too. Only the driver was left in his JCB. Two escapees jumped onto the vehicle, dragged him out and sent him on his way.
The gate was locked again and officers came running through the sterile area, batons drawn. One of the escapees was in the JCB seat, trying to disengage the hydraulic legs; the others on the vehicle, armed with shovels, swung them at the officers who tried to clamber on board. Everyone thought the volunteer driver knew how to handle the vehicle, but in reality he hadn’t a clue. He stalled the engine. He tried again, shifted it a bit, and then it promptly stalled. An officer jumped into a dump truck and drove it between the JCB and the wall, just as the JCB started to activate and move forward. Then, once again, it stalled and the engine flooded.
Reports suggest the whole place was in a panic; the watching prisoners were exuberant one minute, saddened the next, the guards confused and frightened. The escapees couldn’t be touched because of the swinging shovels, and yet they couldn’t go anywhere. Then one of the warders picked up some rubble and hurled it at the JCB, smashing its window and knocking out the driver. Within seconds a torrent of concrete was flying through the air at the escapees, hitting many of them. Razor Smith likened it to a biblical stoning.
The watching prisoners turned silent as they witnessed the escapees being knocked unconscious and set upon by the guards, like a mob in for the kill, hitting and kicking the defeated men. As the escapees were dragged away, the prisoners left in the exercise yard turned to face the forty or so officers standing there. A riot was feasible. Razor Smith relates how he stepped forward and threw one punch, and then another, until he was beaten to the ground. He had thought the others would follow, but only one joined him. He was dismayed at the “big-talking wankers” who continually mouthed off about what they would do if they had the chance. “At that moment I lost faith in prisoner solidarity.”
Kevin Brown, a career criminal, was part of a gang that became known as the Untouchables in 2001, because it took four retrials to resolve a charge of armed robbery. One of the trials was stopped because of information that he was about to take an officer hostage and escape. Earlier, he had made an attempt to escape from an armoured prison van when taken from Long Lartin to Winchester, resulting in a dead guard dog, an officer with a broken wrist and a wrecked prison van. In 2005 he was arrested in Sidcup High Street, after a robbery was thwarted by Flying Squad surveillance and a dramatic car chase that ended on the threshold of the local police station.
Several decades earlier, three prisoners who had watched the routine of an oil tanker delivery decided it would be their way out of Dartmoor Prison. Just after 9am on 24 June 1963, James Jennings, Raymond Matthews and Leslie Moore, all imprisoned for robbery, made a run from the exercise yard to the tanker as the driver was tidying up the hoses after unloading, seized the cab from him and the escorting officer and turned it round to leave. Despite stones and objects thrown at them, which shattered the windscreen, they veered past the main gate, which might have withstood a battering, and headed for an unmanned gate at the end of the football field, gaining speed as they went. The momentum carried them through the first gate, made of wood, then the second gate, made of steel.
Once they were through, they quickly sought to abandon their damaged vehicle and flagged down a passing car, hijacking it and taking off toward the town of Two Bridges. When they found the car was low on petrol they abandoned it at Soussons Common, concealed it with branches and ferns, and decided to lie low until the heat died down. However, the car had been seen in the woods, and a Territorial Army unit exercising on the moor came to help in the search, finding the escapees in the fern covering among the young fir woods.
The routine of refuse collection is another obvious weak point of prison security. At Brixton Prison in May 1973, a dozen prisoners hijacked the refuse truck, scaring away its crew by wielding table legs and other objects as bludgeons, including what looked like a gun but was in fact a bar of soap carved and blackened with shoe polish. Once aboard the truck they drove it at the iron gates, crashing through it until the arms of the truck’s hopper caught and the escapees had to flee on foot. Cars were commandeered, but in their panic they collided into each other. When one group climbed into a van that had been left waiting, the driver forgot to release the handbrake, losing valuable time. All were recaptured, among them Mickey Salmon, Bruce Brown, Danny Allpress and Jimmy Wilkinson, who were awaiting trial as a result of statements given by the supergrass Bertie Smalls.
Another escape from Dartmoor began in the blacksmith’s shop, when two inmates realised that a high window gave them access to a boundary wall that was barely watched over. On 8 June 1988, David Meads and Terence Poole, using oxyacetylene torches from their jobs in the workshop, laboured behind a protective screen adjacent to the window and cut the bars that overlooked the walkway between the boundary wall and the inner security fence. Taking a metal ladder through the window, they ran it up the eighteen-foot wall. It was too short so they had to jump down the other side, Meads hurting his ankle in the process.
When they were spotted making for the woods, two prison officers set off after them with a dog. The dog faltered, as it could not get over a damaged wire fence because of its angle, but one of the officers continued. Unfortunately for Meads, this officer was a marathon runner, and he soon caught up with the escapee. A thorough search for Poole drew a blank until, when making a fresh comb of the area, a dog was seen sniffing at a tree right on the edge of the woods. Up in the branches sat the other escapee. He had seen the officer and, knowing he was an athlete, thought to hide out as long as it took for the search to be abandoned.
There are escapes that one would like to know more about, but for which information is in short supply, or has to be pieced together from various sources. In the 1990s, Steve Hostetler made it away from the laundry at Wandsworth Prison. Despite various attempts, no one had succeeded in escaping from Wandsworth since Biggs went over the wall.
Hostetler was able to force open the shutter door to the loading bay at the laundry and scale the perimeter wall at its lowest point. Unusually, steel shutters were the way out rather than a door and a barred gate.
Along with an accomplice, Hostetler had found a disused piece of piping and set about flattening the end in a door jamb. At the same time, they had made a thirty-foot rope from bed sheets and attached it to part of a broken swivel chair to make a grapple. One afternoon, they levered the shutters with their homemade crowbar enough to slide underneath it. It took a few attempts to get the grapple to hold on the
wall, but once it did they were up and over, dropping down the other side, although one twisted his ankle in the process. Nevertheless, they both made it to a local cab office and were driven off into the sunset.
Why should some cases get attention and others not? It’s partly to do with the media, partly to do with political sensitivities at the time. Sometimes it’s the prison staff who allow the information to spread, because it bolsters their own demands, or who, conversely, suppress the information. Thus you find that a prisoner like Ronnie Pewter, who escaped from the Parkhurst Special Security Unit in October 1991, was barely mentioned – even though he was only the second person to escape from this ‘prison within a prison’, as it was called. Long-term maximum security prisoner Charles Bronson notes that no one knows how he managed the escape: “some say he walked out disguised as a building worker, some say he climbed into the back of a lorry.” Perhaps that is why it had so little publicity; it is embarrassing to lose someone from a high-security setup, and yet to not quite know how it happened.
Some are oft mentioned but rarely written about. Back in the laundry room at Wandsworth Prison, we find Georgie Madson. Frankie Fraser and others talk about Madson as a legendary escapee, always on the lookout to grab the opportune moment. In April 1943, when he was serving a short sentence in Wandsworth, he was with some others repairing and whitewashing the laundry room roof, perched atop a ladder, when he noticed a warder come through the gate to deliver a message and go back out, closing but not locking any of the gates. Expecting him to return to lock up, they waited. Nothing happened.