Peterhead (8 page)

Some will tell you that the pain of Campbell’s hunger strikes were on occasion eased with an occasional bar of chocolate or biscuit smuggled to him. You will always find a cynic or two around even in a prison. But if the idea of the hunger strikes were to keep his name in the press then it worked. If lacking in food himself, he provided the newspapers with a rich diet of controversial stories.

As well as turning away any unappetising prison food offered to him, Campbell was busy planning action in the European Court of Human Rights in connection with alleged interference with his mail and other infringements, and won compensation of £250 from the authorities, who were judged to have allowed him to suffer an attack of bed bugs in his cell. Nor was that Peterhead not guilty verdict on the charge of punching an officer the end of that matter. He pursued a claim for damages through the courts and in the autumn of 1989 he was awarded £4,000 against the then Secretary of State for Scotland, Malcolm Rifkind. TC had claimed £40,000 but after three days’ evidence a civil jury made the lower award. They said that they were satisfied that Campbell had sustained injuries from the “wrongful action of prison officers.” It was admitted on behalf of the Secretary of State that Campbell had suffered a ruptured bowel for which he needed surgery in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, and that the injury had happened when a number of officers were in his cell.

It was claimed that Campbell had suddenly struck the officer when he told him of the suspended visits. A violent struggle took place in which Campbell and other officers fell together in a heap on the floor. Campbell claimed he was beaten with riot sticks and stamped on. The attacked officer, who was by then retired, said in court that the attack on him was “out of character” and that Campbell had later apologised. He said that Campbell was not involved in the escape bid that had sparked the trouble. A prisoner gave evidence that he had watched through the “Judas hole” in his cell door as warders with sticks beat Campbell.

It is interesting that the officer said that the attack on him was out of character. Way back around the time of his trial for the Bankend Street fire, some of Campbell’s associates on the streets had said he was unpredictable – at one moment chatting pleasantly over a pint and then suddenly turning aggressive. A short fuse goes with a life of crime. One day in the company of a celebrated Glasgow hard man I remarked how well we were getting on and he growled, “You have not seen me when the red mist comes down!” The mist that descended on Campbell that day when he heard the bad news of a cancelled family visit was nothing like the grey-white kind that so often flows in from the North Sea to wrap itself round the prison. It was a very bright red.

For Campbell, long years in prisons including the Barlinnie Special Unit lay ahead. There were to be more hunger strikes, more legal battles, more stunts to bring attention to their claims of innocence. Eventually in 2004 the convictions of Campbell and Steele were quashed. So ended the saga of a couple of Peterhead’s most recent caged innocents.

Few would, or could, disagree with the statement that Peterhead has in its time held the worst of criminals Scotland has produced – murderers, armed robbers, razor slashers, rapists, paedophiles, the irretrievably wicked, and the scum from the slums of the country’s great cities. But in an ironic twist of fate it was also for years home to a great patriot and war hero, a man now sadly drifting into forgotten memory, John Ramensky. As “Commando John Ramsay” this boy of Lithuanian descent, who was born in the coalfields of Lanarkshire and grew up in the Gorbals, did his country great and courageous service during the Second World War. But he also wrote himself into criminal history as the most remarkable escaper ever to scale a prison wall in Scotland. Five times he fooled his many Peterhead guards and used his athletic skills to break out of what some would regard as a tartan Alcatraz or Devil’s Island. No wall was too high, no lock too secure for this Peterhead legend. The background maketh the man and Gentle Johnny Ramensky was a career criminal who earned his nickname for his acceptance of his fate when his collar was felt by the cops and he normally went gently off to court to take his medicine. He also had the perfect CV for a wartime saboteur and safebreaker.

His early years hardened him for what was to come. His father had come from Lithuania in the late 1890s along with other experienced miners from Eastern Europe. These hard tickets had been hired by Lanarkshire mine owners to help break strikes in the Scottish coal and clay fields. The Scottish mining communities naturally did not take at all well to the newcomers and Johnny grew up in an area where there was bad feeling between Scots and Eastern Europeans. This gave him something of a chip on his shoulder that would last a lifetime.

Johnny’s father died when he was eight and he and his mother moved to Glasgow’s Gorbals. But there was plenty of time before that at school in Lanarkshire’s Glenboig for him to feel prejudice and be at the end of barbs about foreigners and “Poles.” Schoolkids and adults used the term as a general derogatory adjective for the incomers, ignoring the fact that many came from other countries like Lithuania and Romania. This was particularly annoying to proud Lithuanians, who reacted as Scots would to being called English!

The feeling of difference from the other kids playing in the muddy fields of Lanarkshire was underlined by the names. Johnny’s real name was Yonus Ramanauckus, but a schoolteacher arbitrarily changed it to the easier to remember and pronounce Ramensky – though the newspapers often called him Ramenski when his criminal career was at its height. On joining the army in the ’40s he changed his name to Ramsay to avoid any further taunting as a foreigner. But to the Glasgow papers and the Glasgow cops he was always Gentle Johnny Ramensky.

Over the years the antagonisms between the two communities in industrial Lanarkshire eased as Scots began to understand that the imported “scabs” had themselves been victims of persecution. Indeed many of them were Jews and Catholics fleeing religious ill-treatment and possible conscription to the Russian army. Others were simply seeking a way out of desperate poverty. When you work shoulder-to-shoulder with a man deep in a dark and dank mine hewing coal or spading clay, there is always a grudging respect that comes from the acceptance of shared danger. But the story of Johnny Ramensky, hero and criminal, also shows that the experience of early days can leave a lifelong mark.

Many a mother has appeared in court to tell judge or sheriff that her boy would have been fine if he had not fallen into bad company. It is unknown if Mrs Ramensky, installed with her family in the infamous Gorbals did that, but it was an excuse that Johnny himself, a man who all his life had a plausible explanation for bad behaviour, used often. He expressed it eloquently in a poignant note, now in the Scottish National Archives, written in Barlinnie in 1951:

Each man has an ambition and I have fulfilled mine long ago. I cherish my career as a safe-blower. In childhood days my feet were planted on the crooked path and took firm root. To each one of us is allotted a niche and I have found mine. Strangely enough, I am happy. For me the die is cast and there is no turning back.

That is as remarkable fifty words or so as you will ever read of a criminal writing about his career. The “crooked path” is real enough, as is his acceptance of a way of life that cost him almost half a century behind bars. His intelligence and sense of reality shine out from his words. It is interesting, too, that he does not mention his heroism as a commando or the undoubted great service he did for his country. The modesty and lack of boastfulness is as striking as it is typical.

A few years ago I went to do some research in and around his childhood home in Glenboig and on a bitter snowy February day I sought the warmth of the fireside in the local pub and the chance to talk to some of the Glenboig natives about the area’s most famous son. The young bucks at the bar had barely heard of him, but in the darker corners the older locals talked freely of the man and his reputation. One told me of a return visit Johnny had made to that very bar many years ago to meet up with old friends from school days and when he worked in the local mines. There is still a strong Lithuanian community in the area. Neatly turned out, he looked more like a successful businessman than an infamous criminal. Naturally he was the centre of attention since in these days his name was often splashed across the front pages. On that occasion he drank sparingly, as was his habit, enjoying his fame in a quiet way. But there was no boasting, no playing the big man. No tales of heroism behind the enemy lines fighting with the Italian partisans against the Nazis. He was, as the little note above suggested, a man comfortable with himself. Playing the “wise guy” in a pub was not his style.

Somehow, despite the troubled childhood, he had absorbed a goodish education and was well able to express himself. But that crooked path beckoned and he was barely in long trousers before his collar was first felt by the Glasgow “polis.” Minor offences led to more serious burglary and Barlinnie. But even then a certain decency shone through. It was this decency that helped create the nickname Gentle Johnny. Though part of Glasgow’s gangland he was not really a gangster or a violent man. He operated as a sort of freelance specialist opening “sardine cans,” as his robber mates called safes, to order for the gangsters themselves. They lacked his skill with explosives and locks, and they were happy enough to pay Johnny well for his services. He did not duff up old ladies to steal their shopping money or pinch their purses. Quite the opposite. It is on record that when after a burglary he examined the spoils and found such as rent books and pension books he popped them in an envelope and went to the post office and returned them to their elderly owners. Jewels and cash, mind you, were a different matter and he had no worries about relieving the wealthy of their worldly goods. But without violence.

His early days in Barlinnie and Saughton were on relatively short sentences before long years in Peterhead came his way as a result of some serious safebreaking in Aberdeen. But one Barlinnie escapade was a dramatic demonstration of the skills that were to stand him in good stead as an escapologist when in the North-East. Bored in jail and resentful about being taunted by his fellow prisoners, mostly from the Glasgow slums, who dismissed him as a wee “Pole,” he decided to show them what he could do. Throughout his career he had a true head for heights that could have made him a celebrated Alpinist or circus performer. Outside the jail he was at home on slippery rooftops on dark nights, fearless and, as the cliché has it, cat-like. So one afternoon in the Barlinnie prison exercise yard, on a whim he pulled off his boots, broke away from the escorts and shinned up a rone pipe to emerge high on the roof of the great prison. There he passed an hour or so pleasurably inviting the screws to throw him up a boiled egg or two and walking the roof ridge, high above the yard, like a tightrope walker.

In the 1920s, Barlinnie was overlooked by the tenements of the east end and soon, in the streets with the best views, hundreds gathered to watch the action behind the high walls. Johnny gave them a show to remember. The governor was not happy and prison officers were sent up ladders to coax him down. On their way up they met a fusillade of slates. Next a fire hose was tried in an attempt to dislodge the star of the show. It only added to the sense of farce as, unused for months, it was perished and the officers rather than the prisoner got a soaking. Even one of Johnny’s best pals in the prison, a character known as Wee Tommy Clark, was sent up to try to talk sense into him. Johnny told Clark, a lifelong friend, that he was up for a breath of air and might stay a day or two! And the prison chaplain, the Rev. J. McCormack Campbell, was no more successful at persuading him down. Eventually the governor himself took to the ladder and the star climber finally agreed to return to his cell. But it was hunger rather than sweet words that did the trick. A point had been made, even his fellow cons who sneered at him as that “wee Pole” were impressed.

It was all a bit of a laugh. But doing time in Peterhead was less amusing, and here Johnny used his way with words and his compassion to good effect. He had had a narrow scare in the Bar-L in 1930 when he was taken ill with pneumonia and only the prompt action of the prison medic saved him. The doc ruled he was too ill to be treated in prison and he was sent to a nearby hospital, where he recovered. It was a lesson he never forgot and played a part in a long-running battle he had with the Peterhead prison authorities.

In Peterhead his escapes became legendary and are detailed later in this chapter, but in his early years it was prison food and the medical treatment doled out to his fellow inmates that motivated him to go to war with the authorities. Throughout his prison career Johnny was something of a jailhouse lawyer and a friend to cons who did not have his writing skills, skills that were accompanied with a questioning attitude that made him friends as well as enemies in his years inside. Although he had left school at fourteen he was a fluent writer and coherent in argument. He would pick up pencil and paper to plead the case of any con he thought was getting a rough deal and in the Scottish penal system in the 1930s and ’40s that meant almost everyone.

He arrived in Peterhead in the early 1930s and it is interesting that the man responsible for his arrest for a safe-blowing in Aberdeen, Superintendent John Westland of the Aberdeen CID, became a lifelong friend. Johnny, like the famous Glasgow Godfather Walter Norval, seemed to regard prison officers and policemen rather like the other side in some sort of criminal game. They did not take it personally. Johnny bore Mr Westland no grudge.

Hardly in the jail, he swiftly started on years of letter-writing. Letters of complaint and special pleading become almost a hobby for many long-term prisoners. They have the time to enter into lengthy correspondence, though many a governor could do without the time-consuming demands of their annoying “pen pals.” Johnny’s first concern was the treatment of prisoners taken ill in their cells and ending up in the prison hospital. These unfortunates lost their meagre prison wages and with that the chance to buy wee treats like fruit, biscuits or sweets. Johnny wrote forcibly to the governor, pointing out that such “little comforts” were especially important during convalescence.