The Greatest Traitor

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The Greatest Traitor Page 32

by Roger Hermiston


  As Blake made his way along the landing, Thomas Culling, one of the ‘Red’ bands, exchanged a few words with him. ‘I asked him about some onions because he was in charge of the canteen, and he laughed and said, “Leave it to me.”’

  After his shower, Blake wandered through into D Hall, where a large group of prisoners were shouting and cheering at the wrestling on television. The programme was not due to finish until 6 p.m. and would thus provide a welcome, noisy distraction during the feat to come. Blake chatted briefly to prison officer William Fletcher at just after 5.30, giving him his opinion that wrestling was a farce and that the bouts were all fixed. He then brewed a cup of tea, and was making his way across the hall when he encountered prisoner Eric Tucker, who was making pancakes. ‘That smells good,’ he remarked to Tucker, who offered him some. He then went back to his cell. Everything he did had to appear normal and unremarkable.

  He knew he had about twenty minutes before the plan was put into action. While drinking his tea, he read The Times, taking in the appalling events at the Welsh village of Aberfan, where a colliery spoil tip had collapsed onto Pantglas Junior School. After a while, he put the paper down and slipped on a pair of gym shoes, placing his walkie-talkie under his sweater, and headed up to Phil Morris’s cell on the fourth landing. It was now just after 6 p.m.

  It was a few, tense minutes before Bourke called up. He apologised because he had been caught in a traffic jam and asked Blake if he was ready to proceed. ‘Yes, I am all ready,’ he replied. ‘Our mutual friend has kindly agreed to attend to the window for me. He is standing here with the jack in his hand. Can I tell him to go ahead? Over.’ Bourke agreed, and Phil Morris strode out of the cell and down to the second-floor landing. He was back in a matter of minutes, the bar on the window having been broken two days earlier and, although temporarily taped up, extremely easy to dislodge this time. Blake immediately reported back to Bourke that both bar and window were now satisfactorily removed. ‘What, already?’ came back the surprised reply. ‘Yes, you can come now, I am ready for you.’

  The decisive moment had arrived. Blake shook hands with Morris and said goodbye, tucked the walkie-talkie into his waistband and underneath his sweater, and walked down two sets of stairways to the window on the second-floor landing. As he approached his escape route, the sound of animated conversation came drifting in through the centre hall: the prisoners were returning unexpectedly early from the film show. He needed to get moving.

  The two panes of the glass window measured 12 by 18 inches, just large enough for a man of Blake’s build to squeeze through. In fact nothing had been left to chance: Blake had made a wooden frame the same size and practised squirming through it in his cell. He would be starting off 22 feet above the ground, and the weather made matters hazardous: ‘I slid through the opening in the window and felt with my feet for the roof of the passageway. I carefully let myself down the tiles, slippery from the rain which was pouring down. I got hold of the edge of the gutter, hung on to it, and dropped easily to the ground. I found myself now in a small recess formed by the passageway and the jutting turret at the corner of the hall. Pressed against the wall, it was unlikely that any passing patrol could see me, even if the weather was not driving them to shelter in a porch.’

  Blake was now just a 15-yard dash from the prison wall. That night it was being patrolled by two officers but Bourke and Blake had calculated that the patrols passed any given point along the wall roughly every twenty minutes, which allowed plenty of time between one appearance and the next for the escape to be completed. For Blake, everything so far had gone according to plan. But as he waited under cover for the signal to head for the wall, Bourke was having unexpected difficulties on the other side.

  He had been about to radio Blake to tell him to run to the wall when a pair of bright headlights turned into Artillery Road, lighting up the whole area. It was a van driven by a patrolman who had come to lock up Wormwood Scrubs Park for the night. All Bourke could do was wait so he radioed Blake to tell him to sit tight and not to worry. Five minutes later, Bourke saw the headlights reappear and watched as the man secured the barrier with padlock and chain. To Bourke’s dismay, the van crawled very slowly past his car and came to a halt. The driver got out, mumbled a few words in the direction of the back of the vehicle, and then stood just a few yards away with a large Alsatian dog on a short chain beside him. Bourke, realising his loitering had attracted attention, had no option but to drive away. ‘As I turned left into Du Cane Road I felt sure the escape had failed – not just for tonight, but for all time,’ he reflected bitterly. ‘But what else was there to do? That patrolman must now surely call the police, or at least lie in wait until I came back.’

  But his resolve did not waver. When the lights went green at Wood Lane, instead of turning left towards Highlever Road, Bourke turned right and then quickly drove down Westway. A right into Old Oak Common Road, then another right into Du Cane Road again, and he was back at the prison. It was now 6.35 – time was running out.

  As Bourke once more turned into Artillery Road, to his relief he saw no sign of the van, though to his horror, another car was parked in its place. It was occupied by a courting couple, who showed no intention of going anywhere quickly: ‘I had to get rid of them. One way or another, I just had to get rid of them. I got out of the car, leaned against the door, and just stood there in the rain staring.’ It worked. Perhaps they thought Bourke was a policeman, or a security guard from the hospital. Maybe he was a pervert. In any event, the girl sat up, the man straightened himself out, they exchanged a few words and then the car did a three-point turn before pulling away.

  By 6.40, Blake had been standing in the recess of the passageway for twenty minutes, and was feeling desperate: ‘I had called repeatedly but got no reply. Had he got into trouble and made a rapid getaway? Or had he got cold feet at the last moment? There was little time left before they would discover I was missing. I began to get visions of Parkhurst.’

  Then Bourke’s voice came through on the radio: ‘Fox Michael calling Baker Charlie. Come in, please. Over.’ Huge relief swept through Blake. He replied: ‘Baker Charlie to Fox Michael. Receiving you loud and clear. I cannot delay here any longer. They’re on their way back from the cinema. I must come out now. No time for explanations. Over.’

  Because of the unexpected hitches and delays, it had reached the time of the evening when the final tranche of relatives and friends started to pour in for the last hour’s visiting at the hospital. Two more cars pulled into Artillery Road, parking next to the wall. Bourke waited until the occupants had left the vehicles, but realised the road was now unlikely to be completely clear. At 6.55, he heard Blake’s voice coming through the radio in a state of great panic: ‘Fox Michael! You MUST throw the ladder now, you simply must. There is no more time! Throw it now, Fox Michael! Are you still there? Come in, please.’ Bourke responded: ‘Fox Michael to Baker Charlie. The ladder is coming over now. No matter what the consequences are, the ladder is coming over now. Over.’

  Bourke got out of the car, lifted the boot and took out the rope ladder. He then stepped on to the roof and, gripping the thick rope with his left hand, holding the folded rungs in his right, he prepared to swing. When he made the throw, the ladder successfully flew over the top of the wall, dropping down neatly on the inside with a thud. Bourke leapt down from the car, then jerked the ladder a few yards to the right to ensure that when Blake made his jump, he would not land on the top of the car. Then he waited.

  In the sweeping light of the arc lamps, Blake saw the tangle of rope fly over the wall. Stooping low, with his walkie-talkie tucked inside his sweater, he raced over to the wall, grabbed the ladder, and started to climb upwards. The knitting needles had done their job and it was a surprisingly easy ascent: ‘In a moment, unseen by the officers in the observation booths at the end of the wall but watched, I am sure, by several pairs of eyes bursting with excitement from the cell windows, I reached the top of the wall.’


  At the top, Blake realised that Bourke had overlooked one thing: he had not attached a metal hook to the ladder so that it could be planted on the wall and used to descend on the other side. Instead, he was going to have to make the drop. As Blake peered down with a quizzical expression on his face, he saw Bourke looking anxiously up at him. ‘Come on, man, come on,’ he shouted. Blake shifted along the wall a few yards to be sure he would not hit the car, and then lowered himself until he was hanging from both hands. He let go.

  In the corner of his eye, he saw Bourke make a move underneath as if to try and help break his 20ft fall. Blake, not wanting to injure his rescuer, tried to twist in mid-air to avoid the collision. Bourke stepped aside, but Blake still glanced off him as he dropped, landing badly. His head hit the gravelled road with a thump, and he felt a searing pain in his left arm. Momentarily he was dazed, perhaps even unconscious. Blood poured down his face.

  Bourke bent down, grasped Blake under the arms and dragged him along the gravel until he reached the car. As he pushed him onto the back seat, another car drove past with its headlights on. If the occupants had arrived a few moments earlier, they would have witnessed the leap from the wall.

  The rope ladder had to be left dangling.

  Bourke got behind the wheel, and drove away. Narrowly avoiding a man, woman and girl who stood in the middle of Artillery Road, he turned right into the main flow of traffic on Du Cane Road.

  On the back seat, Blake had draped a mackintosh round his shoulders and put a hat on his head. He could sense how tense Bourke was feeling and noticed that the glasses the Irishman was wearing by way of a disguise had steamed up.

  Despite slow-moving traffic, Bourke’s reduced vision and nerves led to him bumping the Humber Hawk into the car in front at a level crossing. The crash was hardly severe, but the driver nonetheless turned into the kerb to examine the damage, expecting Bourke to do the same. Instead, he slammed his foot on the accelerator and screamed away to the end of the road. He went through a light that was just barely turning green, raced along Wood Lane for a few hundred yards, then turned right into North Pole Road.

  Another couple of turns and he was in Highlever Road. Fraught though it was, it had taken no more than six or seven minutes to reach the quiet residential street in North Kensington.

  Bourke’s nerves, almost shredded by the collision at the level crossing, were now slowly settling. His plan was to drop Blake off at 28 Highlever Road while he went and disposed of the car. He switched off the ignition and turned round to look at Blake: his face was a mess, with blood streaming down from a badly cut forehead. As Blake tried to reach into the pocket of his mackintosh for the keys, he winced in pain, his wrist bent at a sharp angle just above the joint and clearly beginning to swell. Bourke at once abandoned the plan to dump the car and, instead, escorted Blake into the safety of the flat. The ex-prisoner took off his hat and coat and stood in the middle of the room in his grey prison trousers and striped shirt.

  ‘George,’ said Bourke, ‘I can hardly believe that you’re standing in this room. It is going to take me a long time to get used to the idea. It is rather like seeing a double-decker bus on top of Nelson’s Column.’

  ‘I cannot believe it myself,’ Blake laughed.

  Bourke left the flat to buy bottles of brandy and whisky to celebrate. It was 7.20. Inside Wormwood Scrubs, every prisoner would be ‘banged-up’ and the final roll call of the day was nearing completion.

  Blake was discovered missing at around the time Bourke had turned the car into North Pole Road. Upon finding Cell No. 8 empty, Prison Officer William Fletcher immediately called his colleague patrolling the boundary wall and D Wing was scoured for any sign of the escaped prisoner. While that fruitless search took place, the rope ladder was spotted, still dangling over the wall. By 7.35, Noel Whittaker had joined the search party and, when he went outside the prison wall onto Artillery Road, he soon came across a pot of pink chrysanthemums in their green wrapping paper, dumped there by Bourke. Back inside the jail, officers discovered the broken window at the south end of the wing, together with a missing metal bar. In just twenty minutes, it was all too clear how the bird had flown.

  At 7.43 p.m., a call was made to Shepherd’s Bush Police Station reporting the escape of Britain’s most closely guarded criminal. ‘This is the Deputy Governor of Wormwood Scrubs. I have just been informed by my Chief that we have lost one of our chaps over the wall. We think it’s Blake,’ Noel Whittaker explained in agitated tones.

  ‘Blake?’ replied Police Constable Stanley Frankling.

  ‘Yes, the one doing forty-two years,’ replied Whittaker.

  ‘Can you give a description?’ asked the police officer.

  ‘Not at the moment. He’s probably in prison grey. He went over the East wall. Look, I’m a bit tucked up at the moment; I’m in the middle of releasing a man. I’ll ring you back when I get more information.’

  For PC Frankling, it was a surreal moment that interrupted an otherwise commonplace Saturday evening, with its usual reports of minor burglaries and the odd incident of domestic violence. Putting his initial astonishment to one side, the police officer was instinctively cautious about Whittaker’s call because he knew that a coded message – ‘Patterson Calling’ – was in place for reporting escapes from the Scrubs, and Whittaker had not used it. At 7.50, PC Child received confirmation that the report was, indeed, authentic. Frankling then alerted the Central Information Room at New Scotland Yard.

  The manhunt was underway.

  While police and dogs flooded into the area around the Scrubs in pursuit, a detective constable from Shepherd’s Bush was in the Gate Office at the prison with Whittaker searching for an up-to-date photograph of Blake. There was just one, frustratingly out of date, taken on 2 January 1965. Nonetheless, the picture and its negatives went off to New Scotland Yard to be duplicated and distributed across the country. Along with it would come this description of the fugitive: ‘44 years old, 5'8", proportionate build, oval face, swarthy complexion, hazel eyes, dress either a prison grey suit or blue overall’.

  Detective Inspector Lynch of Special Branch was the ‘hands-on’ investigating officer at New Scotland Yard. He began to spread the search far and wide. By 8.40 p.m., officers covering airports in the London area had been informed about Blake’s escape, along with those at the cross-channel ferry train at Victoria station. All seaports manned by Special Branch and Customs Water Guard officers were informed by 10.25. Lynch was working on the theory that the Russians had sprung Blake, so police cars were despatched to three embassy residences in Kensington Palace Gardens and one in West Hill, Highgate, to question those officials they suspected of being KGB operatives. To the same end, H.M Customs Water Guard was told to supply details as quickly as possible on all the Eastern Bloc ships currently berthed in London docks. Special attention was also paid to airfields, and anywhere else where light aircraft might conceivably take off.

  Harold Wilson, spending the weekend at the Prime Minister’s country residence at Chequers, was informed of the breakout within an hour. By 9 p.m., he had received preliminary reports from Dick White of SIS and Martin Furnival Jones of MI5, on the implications of the escape for national security.

  At 10.25, copies of Blake’s photograph were belatedly handed to the duty officer in the Press Bureau at New Scotland Yard, for immediate distribution to all press and TV outlets. Unfortunately, all the Sunday papers had been ‘put to bed’, bar one – the News of the World. The paper’s deadline was 10.15 but its editor agreed that no copies should roll from the presses until a special messenger arrived with Blake’s photograph.

  Even at this very early stage of the inquiry, Special Branch officers worried that time was against them. ‘We ran around a bit like headless chickens, trying to work out where we should go,’ recalled Wilf Knight. ‘We assumed Blake had been sprung by an Eastern Bloc country, because of the organisation and mechanics of doing such a thing, and therefore they must be ready to take him out straightaw
ay.’

  Somehow, from somewhere, Special Branch had received an unlikely tip-off that Blake was being spirited away in a harp case carried by a member of an Eastern European orchestra which had just played at the South Bank. Such was the fevered atmosphere that the story was taken seriously. At 2 a.m., as the Czechoslovakian State Orchestra checked in with their own airline to fly out of Britain, they were stopped. ‘[We] turned them over – men and women, harps, bassoons, cellos, everything. We caused quite a furore diplomatically,’ said Knight.

  Back at the Scrubs, there were scenes of jubilation as news spread by word of mouth or prisoners listened to radios in their cells. For Gerald Lamarque, the response was unprecedented: ‘The excitement in the voices I hear is unbelievable. There must have been nearer a hundred than fifty escapes in the years I have spent here, but I have never known a reaction like this . . . Blake . . . Blake . . . over the wall . . . George . . . had it away. Good old George. Cowboy yells of “Yippee”, only once or twice sheer savagery, directed against authority more than in support of Blake’s escape. “He’s fucked ’em” . . . And then, far away and faintly from the south end of the prison, singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”.’

  Sharing in the celebrations, with the feeling of a job well done, was Phil Morris: ‘It was a great strain, personally, but the atmosphere in the wing itself was electric . . . People were dancing and singing on the landings. The actual prison just ground to a halt for two days. But it was ecstatic, you know, and it couldn’t have been a bigger morale booster for people who were under the cosh at the time.’

  For Michael Randle, it had been an anxious day, and an increasingly worrying evening. He had expected Bourke to call by 7 p.m. and when, half an hour later, there was still no news, he feared the worst. He had plans to take his wife and her parents out for a meal at the nearby German restaurant, Schmidt’s, in Tottenham Court Road, and was preparing to set off when the phone finally rang.

 

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