The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (29 page)

From the prison yard, Ramensky was able to scale the prison walls, and once outside at 4 a.m., he stole a children’s bicycle, which he replaced with an adult one from the Glenugie distillery a few minutes later. At 5 a.m. he was seen five miles from Peterhead, heading down what is now the A90, on the same route that he had followed eighteen years earlier. Unfortunately for him, although he succeeded in remaining free for forty-six hours, he was picked up at Balmedie, ten miles south of Ellon, where he was found the previous time.

Ramensky was released in 1955, but once again found it difficult to remain out of prison, sent for a ten-year stretch this time by Lord Carmont, who told him, “You have shown that you are a menace to society. Any sentence of less than ten years would be useless.” At the start of 1958, he made the first of his three escapes from Peterhead that year.

On a cold January morning, Ramensky made a spur of the moment decision to go, taking advantage of laxity on the part of the guards supervising the queues for breakfast. He got through a skylight, then up a gas pipe onto the roof. From there, he headed down to the yard, broke into a shed, and borrowed a ladder! This he placed on top of a bin, and was just able to reach the stonework at the top of the wall. Hoisting himself over, he made a run for it – but he was spotted by men working at the distillery. It meant that Ramensky only had a twenty minute head start, and this time the police spared no expense. Tracker dogs were used, and the Aberdeen market was disrupted by checkpoints that were set up around the city.

Ramensky was much closer to home. Rather than set out south as he had done previously, he remained in Peterhead, hiding on the roof of a local school, and then wandered around the town in a warder’s uniform that he had found in a shed near the prison. However, with all the publicity surrounding the escape, he wasn’t destined to remain free for long, and twenty-eight hours after he had left the prison, he was back behind bars.

He inspired another prisoner to try to make a run for it. John Spence Gilmour escaped from a working party in the turnip fields near the prison on 18 June 1958, but was spotted and quickly recaptured.

Nine months later, Ramensky was back on the loose. He got out onto the roof and over the wall on a Friday night, but the now fifty-three-year-old safe-cracker was finding it harder to evade pursuit, although he did stay free for forty hours this time. He was found by a seven-year-old boy in the hayloft at his father’s farm. As the boy’s father went to the prison to get help, Ramensky tried to make a getaway, but he was barefoot and bleeding. Near the distillery, he surrendered to police.

Christmas 1958 saw Ramensky’s final escape attempt, although he kept his own counsel as to how he was able to stay on the loose for nearly nine days. According to James Crosbie, he had actually stayed hidden under the floorboards of the doctor’s office in the sick bay while everyone was looking for him outside the prison, with food provided for him by another convict. However, he came out of his hiding place too quickly, and was caught when he asked a lorry driver for a lift, not realizing that the man was a former warder at Peterhead! After Ramensky jumped out of the back of the lorry, the driver reported his passenger to the authorities. He was also spotted by a number of other people in the area, and was picked up by the police. Ramensky never admitted who, if anyone, had helped him.

After that, Johnny Ramensky was watched around the clock, with six officers specifically tasked with monitoring him. He didn’t get out of Peterhead again until he was officially released. After further spells in prison, he died in Perth prison in 1972. His funeral was attended by hundreds of mourners.

Although Ramensky was by far the most famous escaper from Peterhead, he wasn’t the only one. As James Crosbie recounts in his anecdotal history of the prison, there were many different attempts. Crosbie himself was caught red-handed with a hacksaw blade working his way through the bars of his cell.

Some were doomed instantly to failure, such as the time when a prison warder was stabbed in the back with cutting shears but still managed to hit the alarm bell to summon the riot squad. That didn’t deter the perpetrator, robber William Varey, who tried again later in 1985, using an imitation gun to lock seven warders in a cell. Four years after that, he was able to cut through the prison’s double perimeter fence and stay on the run for two days, eventually getting caught around twenty-five miles from the prison.

Other prisoners were able to elude capture for a decent length of time. Edward Joseph Martin set a record for his time away from the prison in 1955, staying free for thirty-one days. Murderer Donald Forbes, who had killed a man while on parole for murder, stayed loose for six days before being captured in Edinburgh after going over the wall on 31 August 1971. He tried to run again two years later, but was caught in the act. Manuel Cohen escaped from the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary on 2 October 1976 when he was transferred there from Peterhead while suffering from jaundice. Since he realized he was very easy to spot because of the distinctive yellow skin colouration caused by the disease, he holed up in a house that was rented by three nurses. He held them hostage overnight but they were able to persuade him to let one of them go to buy some food and cigarettes. She, of course, went straight to the police, and he was returned to custody.

In 1997, murderer Thomas Gordon was helped by local youths to escape from the Peterhead Cottage Hospital when he went for a physiotherapy appointment. One guard was sacked over the incident; Gordon was caught at Euston station in London when he was recognized by a resident of Peterhead town who had seen the publicity.

Despite Scottish leader Alex Salmond describing Peterhead as “the jewel in the crown of the prison service” and claiming that “Peterhead prison has an international reputation and to close it would be a disaster” in 2002, the demolition of parts of the prison began in February 2012, with a new facility set to open in 2014.

Sources:

Daily Record,
16 September 2010: “Inmates dub Peterhead prison ‘Colditz’”

HM Inspectorate Of Prisons HMP Peterhead Inspection: 30–31 March 2005, published June 2005

Jeffrey, Robert:
Gentle Johnny Ramensky
(Black & White, 2011)

“Peterman”: “Four Examples”:
http://www.peterman.org.uk/four-petermen.htm

Glasgow Herald,
19 June 1958: “Peterhead Prison Escape”

Glasgow Herald,
4 October 1976: “Police capture escaped prisoner in students’ flat”

Glasgow Herald,
5 October 1976: “Escaped prisoner in court”

Glasgow Herald,
21 October 1989: “Police recapture Peterhead prisoner”

Hansard, 12 December 1950: “Peterhead Gaol (Escapes): Oral Answers to Questions – Scotland”

Glasgow Herald,
5 March 1997: “Guard sacked after Peterhead escape inquiry”

Crosbie, James:
Peterhead Porridge
(Black & White, 2007)

Many of those involved in the struggles in Ireland regard themselves as participants in a war, striking a blow for freedom against the oppressors. If they are captured (or interned), they see it as their duty to escape so they can continue the fight, much the same way that prisoners of war did during the Second World War. When the IRA began its border campaign in the mid-1950s, many of those arrested in the Republic of Ireland were sent to an internment camp at the Curragh, in County Kildare.

Amongst them was J.B. (Joe) O’Hagan, who, fifteen or so years later, would go on to feature in one of the most daring escapes on Irish soil (see
chapter 29
). He had joined the IRA aged eighteen, and was interned in Belfast’s Crumlin Road Jail for the majority of the Second World War. Although the decade following the end of the war was comparatively peaceful, he was happily recalled to active duty in December 1956. As Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams said at his funeral, O’Hagan “was an example of a physical force republican who was prepared to support and exhaust other means of struggle. He saw armed struggle as a means rather than as an end, but he never ceased to be an unrepentant republican and to work always for the establishment of an Irish Republic based on national rights for the people of this island.” There were nearly two hundred internees in the Curragh, many of whom were itching to get out.

Unfortunately for O’Hagan, he wasn’t as important in the pecking order as he would later become. When O’Hagan and another member, Charlie Murphy, was chosen by the IRA’s camp staff to work on an escape, the army’s General Headquarters (GHQ) Chief of Staff instructed that a different pair of internees should use the route being planned. With so many IRA members interned, the leadership knew that they needed some of their most experienced men back in the struggle. Dáithí Ó Conaill and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh were to be freed first. Although Ó Conaill was only twenty at the time, he was a rising star within the IRA. As second-in-command of the Pearse Column, he was involved in the raid on the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s (RUC) barracks at Brookeborough in January 1957, and had served six months in Mountjoy Prison. On his release from the Dublin jail, he had been rearrested and sent to the Curragh.

Ó Brádaigh was even more senior. He had joined Sinn Féin in 1950, aged eighteen, and was appointed to the Military Council of the IRA four years later. He led a raid on a British Army barracks in Berkshire in August 1955 which obtained huge quantities of firearms and ammunitions for the IRA, and when the border campaign began, he was in charge of training one of the four “columns” (the armed units carrying out the IRA strikes), and, like Ó Conaill, had raided RUC barracks. While serving a six-month sentence in Mountjoy, he was elected as a Teachta Dála (member of the Irish Parliament) for Sinn Féin, although like his fellow TDs, he refused to sit in anything other than an all-Ireland parliament. Once his sentence was over, he too was rearrested and dispatched to the Curragh.

The plan was moderately simple: during a football match, a blanket was smuggled out and placed on the ground near the perimeter fencing. The spectators then kicked pieces of grass over it to disguise it, and the two escapees crawled underneath it. They had previously prepared dummies which were put in their beds, so the guards’ headcount would be correct. As an extra precaution, to make sure that the guards who were checking the perimeter fencing for any signs of disturbance were distracted, a very nice cap was left on the ground. Ó Conaill and Ó Brádaigh waited until nightfall, then cut their way out of the camp. When the prison guards started enquiring about the ownership of the cap, rather than setting off all the alarms, the other IRA men knew that their comrades had succeeded. Ó Brádaigh became the first TD to go on the run since the 1920s. The following month, he was elected as Chief of Staff, a position he would hold twice in his career; he later became leader of Republican Sinn Féin, from which he retired in 2009. Ó Conaill became IRA Director of Operations but was shot and captured in 1959; he shared Ó Brádaigh’s view of the struggles against the British, and joined Republican Sinn Féin when it was founded in 1986, five years before his death.

Although there were some in the camp who believed that internment wouldn’t continue for much longer, Joe O’Hagan and the younger IRA members were determined to get out to become part of the fight once more. It was clear that the movement was suffering because increasingly inexperienced, if still enthusiastic, youngsters were having to carry the burden. He and others decided that they would take the risk that the Army soldiers guarding them would open fire if they tried a mass breakout.

Despite not receiving official sanction from the camp escape committee, O’Hagan and over thirty of his fellow internees made a break for it on the afternoon of 3 December 1958. They dealt with the guards in the yard and cut through the wire fence. As they had hoped, the ordinary soldiers didn’t open fire on them, but the sergeant in charge did, using his hand gun to try to disable the escapees by shooting them in the legs. The soldiers also had no compunction about using less lethal force: ammonia grenades were chucked at the escaping prisoners, and Joe O’Hagan, who had gone back to help one of his friends who had got caught up in the barbed wire, fell victim to the gas. In the end, though, sixteen men were able to get away from the Curragh.

Those counselling patience were right; internment was lifted in March 1959, and O’Hagan and his compatriots were free to continue the campaign.

Sources:

Robert W. White,
Ruairí Ó Brádaigh: The Life and Politics of an Irish Revolutionary,
(Indiana University Press, 2006)

Paddy Hayes,
Break Out! Famous Prison Escapes
(O’Brien Press, 2004)

An Phoblacht,
3 May 2001: “Unassuming and mighty man laid to rest”

An Phoblacht,
29 April 2001: “JB O’Hagan dies”

Over two decades, audiences watched the adventures of Dr Richard Kimble – firstly, on television in the 1960s, with David Janssen playing the man who had been framed for his wife’s murder, and then thirty years later when Harrison Ford took on the role, pursued by the implacable Tommy Lee Jones.
The Fugitive
was popular because viewers identified with the wrongfully imprisoned doctor who took desperate measures to prove his innocence. As the TV series ran, a real-life fugitive kept breaking out of prison for pretty much the same reason: Alfred George Hinds was keen to prove that he wasn’t guilty of the jewellery robbery for which he received a twelve-year sentence in 1953. And although Alfie Hinds’ escapes weren’t as spectacular as the train wreck featured in the movie version of
The Fugitive,
they baffled prison officers for some considerable time.

Alfie Hinds was a crook; that, he never denied. His father was a thief who had died while receiving ten lashes of the cat o’nine tails for his part in an armed robbery, and young Alfie was brought up in a children’s home, from which he ran away aged seven after receiving harsh treatment at the hands of those in charge of him. He drifted into a life of petty theft, and was sent to Borstal in the 1930s; he was drafted into the Army during the Second World War, but he deserted.