The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks

by Paul Simpson

  There was little time to lose: after six prisoners escaped from Wormwood Scrubs earlier in 1966, extra precautions were being taken, with thick steel netting added to the windows. They were already installed in A and B Halls, and Blake knew that once these were in place, his plan was foiled. A couple of days before the escape, the panes of glass were removed, and the iron crossbar broken then put back in place with tape. All Blake had to do was kick it.

  The weather started to turn bad on the afternoon of 22 October, but although this would make conditions on the roof and the wall more treacherous, the reduced visibility would be very helpful. At 5.30 p.m., Blake answered his name on the evening roll call. At 6.15, he spoke to Bourke on the walkie-talkie and confirmed that the Irishman was set; another prisoner then kicked out the bar, and Blake slid out through the window, just as the prisoners started to return from watching the film. Blake reached the roof of the passageway, and let himself carefully down to the ground.

  Hiding in the shadows, well aware that an inspection and headcount were due very soon, Blake started to worry when Bourke told him to hang on, as he had hit a snag. (It turned out that it was a courting couple who had chosen exactly the wrong place to grab some privacy; Bourke put his headlights on them until they went.) A few minutes later, he sent the ladder over. It was made of rope with size 13 knitting needles strung together to form the rungs: strong enough to take Blake’s weight, but light enough to be easily thrown. Blake scurried up the ladder to the top of the wall, unnoticed by the prison officers in their observation booths at its end. Beneath him he could see Bourke’s car, and the Irishman there with his walkie-talkie hidden incongruously inside a pot of pink carnations. Blake lowered himself until he was hanging by both hands, and then when Bourke told him to drop, having put his flowers down by the side of the wall, Blake let go, moving in mid-air to prevent himself from landing on top of his rescuer. Unfortunately that meant that he landed badly, and as he hit the ground, he broke his wrist. Bourke bundled him into the car, and headed off down the road at high speed – and hit another car!

  Blake’s escape was spotted at 7 p.m., although there wasn’t initially the massive outcry that might have been expected. The deputy governor called the nearby Shepherds Bush police station to let them know that they had lost “one of their chaps” over the east wall of the jail, that it was probably Blake, and he was in prison grey uniform. However, by nine o’clock the hunt was on: ports and airfields were being watched; police teams with dogs were searching the area around the prison; the embassies for countries from the Iron Curtain were under increased surveillance.

  The papers went wild with speculation, with everyone from the KGB to the IRA to the British Secret Service themselves suspected of responsibility. Reports came in that Blake had been spotted on a plane landing in Sydney, Australia; he was also ‘‘seen’’ in the South of France and Bermuda. The government, stung by the various escapes, set up an independent inquiry into prison security, headed by Lord Mountbatten of Burma. This would eventually lead to major changes within the prison system. Help was even offered by the Institute of Psychical Studies, who thought they could find him in a couple of days: “It would be of interest to our research into a process of locating individuals by a method of map divination (akin to water diviners) if we might include the case in our current programme of readings,” their letter said. “Should you feel disposed to give the method a trial please could you forward us the necessary sample (a few hairs from the man’s hairbrush or a well-worn shower cap).”

  George Blake must have wished that he had insisted on his rescuers approaching the Russians for help. It very quickly became apparent that Sean Bourke had no real idea what he was doing. The day after the escape, Blake’s picture was plastered everywhere, and the “safe” house that Bourke had set up was nothing of the sort: in fact it was a single room in a house with shared facilities, where the landlady came in to clean weekly. When it was obvious that Blake needed medical attention for his wrist, Bourke suggested going to the local casualty department, not really thinking through the consequences of the country’s most wanted man turning up in an A&E department. However, Michael Randle was able to find a doctor who would help a man who was “allergic to hospitals”!

  Quickly moving from the not-so-safe house, Blake went from one temporary home to another. One friend of Pottle and Randle’s was willing to host the fugitive, but after a few days pointed out that his wife was having therapy. Since she was under instructions to tell her therapist everything, she had talked about Blake staying there. Unsurprisingly, he got out speedily.

  Within a few days, it wasn’t just Blake who had to be kept hidden: the police were also looking for Sean Bourke, who having used his own car as the getaway vehicle, then left it where it could easily be found (and if the police had any difficulties, incredibly, Bourke rang them himself to say where it was). Bourke was desperate for people to know what part he had played in the great escape: he even went in to a police station at one point to check that his picture was displayed. Blake, Pottle and Randle realized that they would need to get not just the KGB agent but his erstwhile helper out of the country.

  Bourke had originally promised that he could get hold of passports, but now with the police on his tail, he wasn’t able to get in touch with his underworld contacts to do so – if indeed they even existed. Pottle and Randle had come up with an intriguing idea: change Blake’s skin pigmentation, using a drug called meladinin, so that he could leave disguised as an Indian or an Arab. Blake wasn’t that keen on the plan, as he wasn’t sure that once changed, his skin would revert to its natural hue; there were also potential side-effects from the painkilling medication he was taken for his broken wrist. The idea was dropped, as were discussions of smuggling Blake into the Soviet Embassy.

  Eventually Pottle and Randle decided that the only way to get Blake out of the United Kingdom was to smuggle him inside a vehicle. With some money given by a woman in the anti-nuclear movement, who had inherited £1,200 and wanted to donate it to a worthy cause, they bought a Dormobile camper van, and started to make the necessary amendments, creating a compartment in the back of a small kitchen cupboard. Blake would need to remain cramped in the space for some time, and there were concerns about what would happen if he needed to urinate. After Randle approached a clinic for people with bladder problems, and they told him that they could provide a device if they were told Blake’s penis size, the traitor decided that he could hold his water as long as was necessary! In the end, he took a rubber hot-water bottle, just in case, although he quickly got rid of it when the smell became unbearable during the journey.

  After discounting Egypt, Yugoslavia and Switzerland as potential destinations, Blake chose to head for East Germany. This would mean that his friends wouldn’t need to have any dealings with communists: they could drop him on the autobahn that linked West Germany with Berlin, and be within the Western sector before Blake made contact with the East German authorities. Randle was the only person with a valid driving licence, and he and his wife decided to bring their two young sons along too, providing a perfect cover.

  They set off on 17 December 1966, heading from Dover to Ostend and then across Europe, arriving at Berlin early in the morning of Monday 19 December. The Randles let Blake out of the van not far from the checkpoint; although he wasn’t greeted with quite the exuberance he had hoped for by the guards when he presented himself, Blake was made welcome the next morning. Two weeks later Sean Bourke joined him in East Berlin: he had used Pat Pottle’s passport, suitably amended to feature his photograph, to travel to Paris, fly to Berlin, and then go through Checkpoint Charlie into the Russian Sector, where he reported to the Soviet headquarters.

  Blake has remained in Russia for the rest of his life; he was awarded an Order of Friendship by former KGB head Vladimir Putin in 2007, and at that stage was still contributing help to the KGB’s successor, the SVR. Sean Bourke didn’t enjoy his time in Moscow: he was keen to return to Ireland. He wrote
a book about the escape, which made clear the identities of Michael and Anne Randle as well as Pat Pottle, but died in his early forties. In 1989, Michael Randle and Pat Pottle wrote their own book; two years later they were tried for their part in the escape and despite the judge giving clear directions regarding their guilt, their plea that they helped Blake because his sentence was hypocritical swayed the jury and they were acquitted.

  Michael Randle still has no regrets: speaking to a BBC World Service documentary in 2011, he made it clear that he had no sympathy with what Blake did. But was it right to sentence him to death in prison for doing what both sides in the Cold War were doing?

  Fact vs. Fiction

  The Blake escape is fictionalized in Desmond Bagley’s novel The Freedom Trap, which was turned into the 1973 movie The Mackintosh Man, starring Paul Newman. It suggested that a highly organized gang called The Scarperers were responsible for the prison breaks – a world away from the reality of Bourke’s mismanagement! Simon Gray’s play Cell Mates, about the relationship between Blake and Bourke, is perhaps more famous for Stephen Fry’s departure from the original production than its content.

  Sources:

  Camden New Journal, 11 September 2008: “George Blake – The ‘Red spy’ who slipped over the prison wall”

  Randle, Michael and Pat Pottle: The Blake Escape: How We Freed George Blake – and Why (Harrap 1989)

  Blake, George: No Other Choice (Jonathan Cape, 1990)

  Ealing Gazette, 5 September 2008: “Blunders by MI5 opened escape route for Russian spy”

  Simpson, Paul: A Brief History of The Spy (Constable & Robinson, 2013)

  Life Magazine, 24 January 1969: “The Irish ‘Who’ in a British Whodunit”

  Hansard, 24 October 1966: “George Blake (Escape from Prison)”

  ITN: Reporting 67, 1 January 1967

  BBC World Service: Witness: Michael Randle

  Sean Bourke: The Springing of George Blake (Mayflower, 2nd edition 1971)

  Nothing to Lose

  He’s now a respected journalist, who lectures to prison inmates about the futility of the path they’re following. But for two years at the end of the 1960s, John McVicar was deemed “Public Enemy No. 1” with newspaper headlines screaming “Wanted Dead or Alive”. His biggest crime: not the armed robberies for which he had been sent down, but his escape from the supposedly impregnable E Wing at Durham Prison.

  McVicar had a history of escaping before he arrived in Durham. He had been able to get away from a coach taking him to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight in 1966, while serving an eight-year sentence for armed robbery. After he was recaptured and sentenced to a further twenty-three years, he led a breakout from Chelmsford Prison, which only failed – at least according to his own autobiography – because he refused to listen to advice he was given about how to prepare the rope and hook that was going to be thrown over the wall. If he had done as suggested, he and eight other prisoners would have made it, after getting through a trapdoor in the roof of one of the bathrooms and down into the yard. Instead they carried out a protest on the roof. As a result, McVicar was sent to Durham.

  Durham Prison had a pretty good record for keeping its inmates where they should be. In March 1961, when Ronnie “Houdini” Heslop dug his way out of his cell into the unlocked one beneath, using a teaspoon and a kitchen knife, and then fled into the night over the prison wall, there hadn’t been any escapes for six years. Shortly after that, Durham was designated the home for the country’s most difficult prisoners, and those deemed most likely to make a break for it.

  During his comparatively short time in Durham, McVicar was involved in both a riot and a hunger strike, before fellow prisoner Wally Probyn alerted him to an oddity in the shower room. Probyn had escaped sixteen times from prisons during his career, and, according to McVicar, was always alert to the possibilities inherent in any situation. One of the corners of the room had been cut off – a diagonal piece of wall ran in front of where it should have been. As Probyn pointed out, nothing was ever done in a prison without a good reason: maybe it was hiding a shaft of some sort.

  Because the corner was hidden from view when the door of the showers was open, the chances of discovery were comparatively low, and Probyn dug through the bricks to discover a shaft about a foot across behind the wall. With the help of another prisoner, Tony Dunford, they then began to extract the bricks properly, using papier-mâché as makeshift mortar when they were replaced at the end of each day’s excavations. It took three weeks before they removed a complete path through to the shaft, at which point they realized they would have to descend into whatever lay beneath, since the shaft got narrower the higher it went.

  As their digging progressed, the men were approached by crime boss Charlie Richardson, who was serving a twenty-five-year stretch on E Wing. He blackmailed them into letting him be part of the escape attempt. (Richardson made a half-hearted start on a tunnel in the same showers, which was bound to get caught; if it was, the authorities would tear the showers apart, and find McVicar and Probyn’s work.) Ironically, they had been considering bringing Richardson into the scheme, since Dunford didn’t want to escape.

  They disposed of the rubble down the toilets – although Richardson came close to blowing that by trying to flush too much at one time – with the larger pieces thrown out of their windows. One close shave nearly saw the whole plot discovered: a random headcount was called when Probyn was deep within the hole, and it was only because the prison officer who eventually located him, (after he had got out, and hidden within a shower stall), didn’t notice that he was still wearing his overalls while supposedly taking a shower, that the escape wasn’t brought to a premature end.

  By the early part of October 1968, the hole was big enough to see that the shaft led into a cellar under the showers, and on 20 October, Probyn was able to drop down to have a reconnoitre around the room. After twenty minutes, he returned to explain that the cellar led to an external ventilation shaft, which ran to the indoor exercise yard. All that stood in their way was a grilled window, and a padlock on the grid at the top of the shaft in the yard. There was even a broken stepladder in the cellar that they could use to get up the shaft.

  To throw Richardson off the scent, since Probyn and McVicar no longer had any intention of allowing him or his cellmate Tony Lawrence to join the escape, he was told to get hold of a hacksaw blade to use on the bars, although Probyn in fact already had one. Probyn also prepared a rope and a hook to use for going over the wall. McVicar made a hole in the perspex in the library cell’s outer wall, which they would need later.

  On Sunday 23 October, Probyn cut through the bars and broke the padlock, leaving it looking intact. During that week, they were joined on E Wing by Joey Martin, a robber serving life. McVicar decided to invite Martin along, and the con agreed with alacrity. On the Tuesday evening, 25 October, McVicar and Martin dropped a rope from out of the hole in the library, tied to a table. After dinner that night, Martin, Probyn and McVicar went to the shower room; Richardson and his cellmate were oblivious to the imminence of the escape.

  The three men dropped down into the cellar, and made their way along the tunnel, up the shaft and into the yard. They had previously hidden dark clothes in the cellar to eliminate the chances of being spotted. They went up the rope, but running across the plastic roof gave away their presence – notably to Richardson, who realized he had been betrayed, and started to cause a commotion within the prison, alerting the guards to the escape.

  After dropping down from the roof, they ran along by the wall, although most of it was topped with barbed wire. When they reached the end of the remand wing and started to climb up onto the roof of the courthouse, next to the main gate, Martin was caught by one of the guards. McVicar and Probyn kept going, but realized that they still couldn’t get over the wall, as it was covered with barbed wire at this point. The part of the courthouse they were on was only a single storey high, but the portion next to it was ten feet higher. Knowi
ng that they were very close to being caught, the two men desperately used spikes halfway up the wall to pull themselves up.

  Probyn and McVicar were now on a flat concrete roof, and made their way towards a section that overlooked the outside. When they were spotted by the warders, they separated. McVicar jumped from roof to roof, ending up outside the prison grounds. When he could, he descended to ground level and began running.

  McVicar stayed on the run for 744 days in total. He made his way across Durham, despite not really knowing the geography of the city, and swam across the river on two separate occasions to evade his pursuers. He headed north and eventually found himself in Chester-Le-Street, around ten miles away. After calling a former girlfriend for help, he was picked up by friends from London, although not before he was chased around the streets by a couple of detectives who thought he was behaving shiftily.

  Once back in London, he reverted to his criminal ways, with Detective Chief Inspector Tom Morrison doggedly on his heels. Adopting the alias Allan Squires (the name of the first detective who arrested him), he rented a flat in Blackheath, which is where he was arrested on 11 November 1970, along with two women. He had become a well-known figure in the area, buying champagne and brandy at the local off licence and not worrying about the police Panda cars which parked nearby regularly to keep an eye on troublesome teenagers.