by Paul Buck
In 1958 Probyn was in HMP Maidstone. “Maidstone is the only prison I’ve been to where prisoners regularly tried to escape and were chased round the prison by the screws but were not caught and remained unknown. It was the only prison I’ve been in that bears any resemblance to the comedy-film version of prisons.” One prisoner he mentions “was cutting it a bit fine”, sitting on top of the wall, joking and jeering about the holiday he was about to take, before disappearing. He reappeared not long after on crutches, still joking, but with both ankles broken.
Probyn got away from an outside working party at Maidstone in 1958, after his girlfriend had written that she was worried her children would be taken into care. In his efforts to move quickly, he took short cuts across allotments and climbed a fence, only to find himself in the local army camp amidst the officers’ quarters. After he made his way down to the River Medway, he was determined this time not to get his clothes wet, as he had so many times during earlier escapes. Taking off his clothes, he fastened them with his belt to his head whilst he swam across, only for them to fall sideways at the last minute. As he noted, once you are wet you must keep moving to raise your body temperature and help dry out your clothes.
His capture this time came as the result of an act of stupidity. He was upset at the way the press made him out to be a dangerous gunman, and tried to arrange a meeting with a Daily Mirror reporter. It became a trap, and the police met him instead, followed by another front-page photo-splash and glorification of the event the following day.
Once in Wandsworth Prison, he swallowed carbolic soap in small balls to raise his temperature and feign the symptoms of appendicitis. He was taken to St James’s Hospital in Balham, but was away through the hospital window, despite being barefoot and in pyjamas, after the nurse approached with a needle to knock him out for an emergency operation.
HMP Dartmoor had the characteristics of Alcatraz or Devil’s Island, except that it was not surrounded by sea but by the moors. Though it was relatively easy to climb over the walls (the place was crumbling, footholds abounded and no rope or hook was really necessary, according to Probyn), or indeed to escape from working parties, everyone was afraid of the terrain and the climatic conditions of the moors themselves. If you kept to the roads, you were picked up. If you ventured off the roads you fell into a bog, or went around in circles, particularly in the pitch darkness of night.
Probyn had to depart anyway, because by this time he had married Beryl and heard, via others, that she was being pestered by an ex-boyfriend who had come out of prison. She tried to stop Walter from escaping, telling him to serve out his time, but nothing would shake him, she recalls. So they planned out the details together, but things moved quicker than intended:
“We went down to visit and Wally didn’t know they were letting him out the same day, working outside. When we left the prison we didn’t know until we got home that he had escaped.”
Probyn had been sent out with a working party on 24 August 1964, to repair prison officers’ homes at Princetown. He hoisted a bag of plaster onto his shoulder and walked down the street. Prisoners were not allowed to walk around in town unaccompanied, but who would show concern if a prisoner was lugging a bag of plaster?
It was foggy, which offered another advantage, for he had a compass with him that his wife had smuggled in on an earlier visit. When he was out of the town he dropped the bag and set off towards the moors. The fog made good cover for moving around, but it also meant he came across other working parties quite suddenly and was almost caught. At one point, as Beryl recalls today, “he made a friend of a police dog and it was running along with him.” Probyn always had a close affinity with animals.
Another time he went straight into a bog and had to carry on covered in mud. Though roadblocks were set up, visibility was short and, with no food or drink, he clung to his northeast trajectory, resting by day, walking by night. He made Porton after five days, where he was able to phone his wife’s cousin.
“I found out on the news. But I’d already told him exactly what to do,” recalls Beryl. “I said give yourself about four days to get away from the moor before you make any phone calls. I was up there with my cousin waiting on the phone call … He phoned and reversed the charge … I said to him, when you phone up your lorry’s broke down. I shall say to you, ‘Oh, you again, ain’t it about time you got yourself a decent lorry? What you doing to these lorries?’ I was having a go at him in case the operator was earwigging. And I says, ‘Where are you this time?’ He was in a little tiny village, God knows … Porton. That’s where we picked him up. ‘Stay where you are and we’ll get to you as quick as possible.’ And I also said to him, ‘Whatever you do, don’t steal nothing in the way of food or anything.’”
The car was already prepared with food, drink and clothes, so his rescuers set off immediately. They arrived in the early hours, parked the car, lifted the bonnet and made the agreed signs. Nothing happened. “The twat, he’d fell asleep. And all of a sudden I see this thing coming over the hedge. Frightened the life out of me. We stripped him naked and made a bundle of all his dirty old clothes, put clean clothes on him, give him a drop of brandy and sandwiches we’d took with us.”
As they drove back they cleaned him further, doused him in deodorant as he smelt so bad, and fed him warm tea from a flask. Then they put him on the floor in the back, with Beryl and her cousin resting their feet on him.
This freedom lasted seven weeks. When he was taken back to Wormwood Scrubs he was badly beaten, receiving a broken arm that had to be operated on later as it was never set properly. Nevertheless, even in this condition he found a way to attempt an escape, but hadn’t the strength to pull himself up the rope and over the wall with effectively only one arm.
His next trip was to the far north, to HMP Durham, where he immediately set about the cell windows – not cutting through the bars, but chiselling with a flattened and sharpened serving spoon handle at the cement around them. His new hobby became papier mâché modelling; besides making masks which he kept in his cell, it held his bars in place after a night’s work. Though Probyn was physically fit enough for the escape, which required descending the wall with a rope, crossing barbed wire halfway down, then climbing a drainpipe and crossing more barbed wire, with the outer wall still to scale, his fellow escapee did not have the same strength and became stuck. Probyn climbed back up to release his rope, only to fall three floors and jar his spine badly.
When John McVicar, another robber, came to Durham’s maximum-security E-Wing, he was determined to escape but wasn’t sure whether he would find anyone serious enough to join him. Meanwhile, Probyn had discovered, when walking barefoot, that parts of the floor were warm and, when he stamped his feet, he could hear parts that were hollow. He knew that a hot water pipe system ran beneath his feet and, discovering a space behind a wall in the shower room, decided to investigate and see if it was a sealed-up chimney shaft.
Probyn brought in wire from the workshop concealed in his hamster cage, which he carted back and forth, pretending to mend its broken wheel. He also fixed chisels to weightlifting equipment, all of which went through the metal detectors without question. Whilst McVicar made a noise with the weights, Probyn chiselled away in the showers, filling his handiwork with papier mâché at the end of each session and covering it with emulsion paint. He was excavating through a small hole, removing bricks from the other side, a kind of keyhole surgery escape procedure. What fooled everyone, not only officers but inmates who knew an escape was in progress, was that no one could see it. Everyone searched the outer walls; no one thought that an inner wall would lead anywhere.
Debris was removed by wrapping small amounts in newspaper and pushing it around the bend in the toilets, to prevent blockage. Eventually, they worked down and broke into the ventilation shaft under their floor. When they made a hole that was big enough, Probyn went down to check out the lay of the land, using a rope to climb back up. He worked out that a bar had to be cut on a grill
e and a lock on the gate, and both then readied so that no one would know until they made their escape.
Probyn had done nine tenths of the digging work, whilst McVicar had been responsible for the lookout and the weightlifting distraction. They were almost caught when Probyn was making a rope in his cell as an officer walked in. “Effrontery is all one has in prison to rely on,” so Probyn handed him one end, finished a stitch on the other and said thanks, asking the guard if it would be strong enough to hold a twenty-pound weight. The officer agreed, and left the cell.
Another time, Beryl made a surprise visit. “I nearly got him caught ’cos I went up there to visit without telling him. And the screws were running all over the wing looking for him … and he was digging underneath.”
On 28 October 1968, Probyn and McVicar took their leave of their cells, taking Joey Martin with them. Martin had only come onto the wing the day before from Leicester, where he’d organised an escape plan. For both Probyn and McVicar, the joke of Martin escaping within a few hours of his arrival was irresistible. Charlie Richardson had earlier blackmailed his way into the escape plot as soon as he heard about it. Both Probyn and McVicar were adamant he was not coming with them because of his unpleasant demeanour and reluctance to contribute financially to a previous plan. They agreed to “blot him out” – though of course they omitted to tell him that. They were more concerned that Richardson would blow their escape in its final days than that the guards would discover them.
Martin went to look at books in the cell that served as a library and stood guard, whilst McVicar ran the rope out the library window and tied it. It would hang there unnoticed for two hours. Back in the shower room, they went through the hole, down the shaft and through to the cellar, finding their way to the grille and gate Probyn had prepared on the earlier test run. Once out, they used the rope they had planted to climb onto a plastic roof. It was a noisy affair, and unfortunately attracted the attention of inmates and staff alike – particularly Richardson, who was miffed to have been excluded and loudly yelled abuse.
With staff alerted to their overhead flight, it was not long before Martin was caught, though Probyn and McVicar managed to continue. On the roof of the courthouse they parted company. Probyn forced a trapdoor and went through the roof, into a court building, where he was cornered.
Outside the building, prison officers gathered. Two hours later, when staff gained entry, Probyn was sitting patiently in the waiting room. It was his last escape bid. From then on, he served his time up to release. Nothing was going to be made easy for him. In spite of the system’s determination to prevent him from being anything but a recidivist, he started to read more widely, in sociology and law.
“It was the point where I changed my tactics of survival from escape to something more political.” He wanted to lead a useful existence once he was free. In his autobiography, Probyn talks about arriving at Leyhill open prison and finding it a culture shock – as if they wanted him to walk out, so that they could lock him up all over again. He quietly refused, showing restraint and self-discipline, which the system probably claimed as its own success. Suddenly he was allowed out into the woods, alone, to clear the undergrowth, and to rediscover nature.
McVicar had continued across the roofs, eventually dropping down into the gardens of a row of terraced houses. Though he was chased by police, he made his way through the town until he reached the River Wear. “The sheer physical power of my running conquered my fears. This is what fitness is finally about – pulling it out when everything is at stake.”
At one point, on waste ground, he fell and sprained his wrist. He also lost a shoe, and kicked off the other. He swam the river, and then later, after a rest in various yards and gardens, tried to leave the city by swimming downriver. It was bitterly cold, and he didn’t make it too far. For three days and nights he kept moving, with the rain barely relenting. He was hungry and thirsty, but he managed to get out of Durham and make it to a small town, Chester-le-Street, where he was able to phone his girlfriend and arrange to be collected by two men.
McVicar remained free for almost two years. On 11 November 1970, he was recaptured in Blackheath at a flat above a dress shop. “[I had] gained two years of freedom, during which I learned to love things I had forfeited before I even knew I wanted them.” Since being released in 1978, he has worked as a journalist and commentator, after running through his life again in the book McVicar by Himself and its film adaptation, with himself portrayed by Roger Daltrey.
There had been an earlier escape by tunnelling from Durham in March 1961, when Ronnie Heslop, a soldier awaiting trial for stealing, dug his way out of his cell over a period of four days after removing a ventilation grille, using a teaspoon and kitchen knife as tools. His flight across the court roof led him to the river, which, like McVicar, he swam to get out of the city. He was recaptured six weeks later.
An escapee like Probyn can be likened to a hamster, or similar small mammal, finding its way out of a cage. This image also brings to mind Pentonville Prison during its rigorous Victorian regimes. Every morning the prisoners were taken to chapel, where each had their own separate pew. It was boxed much like an animal stall, with high walls so that inmates could not contact each other. Only the chaplain, perched on high, had an overview of the congregation bobbing up and down as they knelt to pray, or stood to sing. One time, a prisoner named Hackett did not pop up again. When the chaplain, looking across the sea of two hundred and fifty stalls, saw a gap, he sent the warder to open the box. It was empty. Hackett had lifted the floorboards and vanished. For some weeks he had been working at the boards, after studying the chapel from outside. He had noticed there was a gap in the outside wall for ventilation, which he suspected he could squeeze through if he could reach it from within.
Alongside Probyn, who had to face some of the greater problems of contemporary security, we have to place Jack Sheppard, the master of the art of escape in his day. Sheppard earned his fame as the escapee from Newgate Prison, which housed the holding cells for people awaiting execution at Tyburn. In a life that only stretched to twenty-three years, Sheppard was a notorious robber, burglar and thief, and an even more notorious escapologist.
His time and place was early eighteenth-century London. Sheppard won wide admiration not only for the audacity of his escapes, but also for the skill with which he accomplished them. His downfall was mainly due to one man, criminal-turned-thief-taker Jonathan Wild. Sheppard did not like Wild and, by choosing not to fence his spoils through Wild, set himself on a perilous course that ended at ‘the Tyburn tree’.
Any thief-taker was anathema to Sheppard, who believed that they deserved the same fate (the gallows) as any thief, instead of financial rewards. Wild was also double-dealing as a receiver of stolen goods, which granted him control and power.
Sheppard’s first prison escape was not his own; he was the architect of the escape of another, a simple but audacious affair. He had taken up a personal and working partnership with Elizabeth Lyon, known as Edgeworth Bess, a prostitute and skilled pickpocket whom he had met in a tavern, the Black Lion, off Drury Lane. Not long after, in 1723, she was caught and taken to St Giles’s Roundhouse. When Sheppard went to visit her, he was refused entry by the beadle. His response was to knock the man down, break open the door and walk off with his mistress, Lyon, on his arm. Right from the off, Sheppard was gaining credentials among the criminal fraternity, particularly with ‘women of abandoned character’.
Sheppard’s own first confinement, in April 1724, and his subsequent escape attempt were also at St Giles’s Roundhouse, where a magistrate had placed him for burglary. He was on the top floor. Sheppard gave his first effort a poor mark. “I had nothing but an old razor in my pocket, and was confin’d in the upper part of the place, being two stories from the ground; with my razor I cut out the stretcher of a chair, and began to make a breach in the roof, laying the feather-bed under it to prevent any noise by the falling of the rubbish on the floor.”
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bsp; Realising that a tile had fallen on a man passing in the street below, and that a crowd was gathering, Sheppard worked faster, ignoring the falling debris, lowering himself into the neighbouring churchyard with his blanket and climbing a wall. Though he was still clad in irons, Sheppard joined the crowd briefly. It was noted that he participated in their excitement, pointing up at the shadows and saying he could see the escapee. Then he departed. He had spent barely three hours within his cell.
The second confinement and subsequent escape occurred in New Prison, Clerkenwell. Lyon had also been locked in with him when she visited, suspected as his accomplice in pickpocketing a watch and believed to be his lawful wedded wife. They were housed in the Newgate Ward, the most secure cell. Or so it seemed.
But it was only a matter of days before they were out. Sheppard’s friend and working companion, the robber Joseph Blake, passed him a file and other implements when he paid a visit. They filed through their manacles, with Sheppard’s burdened by extra weights and double links, cut through a bar from the window and, using sheets and petticoats knotted together, lowered themselves to the ground. The makeshift rope was attached to the remaining secure bar, and Lyon went first – only to find they had landed in Clerkenwell Bridewell, the adjoining prison. Using gimlets and piercers as footholds, they climbed the twenty-two-foot enclosure at the gate to make their escape. This feat was quite extraordinary, as it should be noted that, whilst Sheppard was fairly small at five feet four inches, slight, nimble and deceptively strong, Lyon was a rather large and buxom woman.
The broken chains and bars were preserved by the jailers to commemorate the feat. Sheppard’s earlier years as an apprentice to a carpenter had given him a good knowledge of the tools of the trade, as well as a great skill with locks. He still worked as a journeyman carpenter when he wasn’t thieving (one might say when he wasn’t in jail, but time actually spent there was negligible due to his escapes).