The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (32 page)

The training lasted until mid-July, and then the pilot went to reconnoitre suitable landing strips; the getaway driver then worked out the various obstacles that each might present. Eventually, Frenchy decided on a disused airfield around eighty-five miles from the prison which would meet their needs. At that point, he sent Wilson a message via the same prisoner: “Keep awake on August 12. Frenchy says four soft friends will be visiting you.” “Soft” in this context meant they would be using minimal violence, and not carrying guns, something about which Wilson had been concerned. If firearms were involved in the escape, then it could have serious repercussions.

On the designated day, Wilson went through his normal nightly routine, eating his supper of bread and cheese and drinking a cup of cocoa. After lights out at 9.30 p.m., he waited patiently in his cell the same one that had been used by KGB spy Gordon Lonsdale before he was traded with the Russians. Frenchy and his team were assembling outside the prison in a Ford Zodiac car and a converted petrol tanker.

Shortly before 3 a.m. on 13 August 1964, the two mountain men and the locksmith ran across to a builder’s yard that adjoined the walls. With dark-blue raincoats hiding the ropes they needed, black trousers and trainers, they were as invisible as they could be. Using a small ladder borrowed from the yard, they quickly scaled a low iron fence beside the wall, dropped their equipment and donned black stocking masks. A rope with a grappling iron was thrown to the top of the wall, and once it was secure, the locksmith ascended. After checking all was clear, he hauled up a special mountain ladder on the end of the rope, then fixed a second rope to the wall, which he dropped on the inside. The two mountain men followed to the top of the wall, and secured a second ladder and third rope to the top. The radio operator then climbed the wall, and pulled up all of the apparatus that was on the outside.

While Frenchy monitored the police wavelengths for any signs of the alarm being raised, the two mountain men, the locksmith and the radio operator ran across the prison yard to the bathhouse door at the end of Wilson’s wing. It was the work of seconds to pick this and get inside. The quartet hurried down to the main door into the prison wing, went through, and then hid in an alcove. As soon as the guard on duty, Mr Nichols, passed them, he was disabled, tied up and gagged by three of the team while the locksmith went to Wilson’s cell. It took him eight minutes to crack the lock, rather longer than he had anticipated.

Wilson could hear the work, and was ready for his visitors. He only had prison uniform, so he was provided with a black sweater, a balaclava helmet, dark trousers and running shoes, which he quickly donned, and followed the four men back out into the yard. A few minutes later he was over the wall, and was being ushered through a flap in the side of the main tank of the petrol carrier. Waiting for him were mattresses, pillows, blankets and an electric torch.

The trip to the airfield took about an hour and a half. From there Wilson was flown to a villa in northern France. Frenchy took the mountain men, the radio operator and the locksmith away in his car, and paid them off. A couple of days later, Frenchy joined Wilson in Paris, and the two of them began a peripatetic existence around France.

In England, the authorities were baffled by the escape. “This is so abnormal that you just cannot cater for it,” said the secretary of the Prison Officers Association. Roadblocks were set up on the three motorways running through the Midlands; Liverpool airport was especially watched for any sign of the fugitive. Hundreds of police officers and tracker dogs tore the city apart looking for him. But there was no sign – although that didn’t prevent Chief Superintendent Tommy Butler, who had been responsible for the arrest of the Great Train Robbers, from following any lead.

Wilson and Frenchy spent some months together before eventually parting company in Italy. Wilson was anxious to be reunited with his wife and family, and after travelling around the world looking for a new home where they could be safe, he settled on a place near Montreal, in the Canadian province of Quebec. The family spent sixteen months in Rigaud before Butler caught up with them. Wilson was taken back to Britain and remained in prison until 1978. He was shot dead at his Marbella villa in 1990.

One man who was greatly cheered by Charlie Wilson’s escape and subsequent evasion of the hunt was his fellow Great Train Robber, Ronnie Biggs. He had been sent to the prisons at Lincoln and Chelmsford between the trial and the appeal, but the day after the Court ruled that his sentence should stand, Biggs was transferred to Wandsworth, which he described as “Britain’s answer, at the time, to Alcatraz”, a place in which he had been imprisoned before.

According to Biggs’ final volume of autobiography, he refused various offers of help to escape from Wandsworth, which began arriving as soon as he was moved there. Security, though, was tight on Biggs, and it was increased after Wilson’s departure, as well as an attempt four days later to free another of the Robbers, Gordon Goody, from Strangeways. (Friends tried to get Goody out shortly after Biggs’ escape as well, but were foiled.) Biggs was moved from cell to cell, to prevent intruders from breaking him out as they had Wilson, and in the end the pressure of the intensive security measures pushed him to ask for help in escaping.

Biggs laid his plans with fellow prisoner Paul Seabourne, who was coming towards the end of his four-year sentence, and other robbers, Eric Flower and Roy Shaw. Shaw backed out when he realized how much money he would need to stay on the run, and, as events transpired, was transferred to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight shortly before Biggs escaped. Flower, Seabourne and Biggs examined all the possibilities of getting over the twenty-five-feet-high prison wall, and came up with the idea of using a furniture removal van with some sort of platform on the top – if they could come up with a way of disguising it so it wasn’t very obvious what was happening as the vehicle approached the prison.

Special Watch prisoners such as Biggs were exercised in a yard next to the main prison wall; on the far side was a service road which led to the main road. They would either go from 2 till 4 p.m., or 3 till 4, and it was down to the senior prison officer in charge that day who went when. The plan, therefore, was for Biggs and Flower to ensure that they were in the latter shift so timings could be agreed; Seabourne would arrive at 3.10, and the men calculated that it would take them half a minute to get into position by the main wall. A wristwatch was smuggled in to ensure that everything was coordinated properly.

Before Seabourne’s release, plans were fully laid. Another prisoner, Brian Stone, who owed Biggs a major favour, agreed to help distract the guards, and brought another prisoner in to act as a fellow minder. Once Seabourne was on the outside, he set the rest of the plan into motion, and through messages passed to Flower, the date was agreed: Wednesday 7 July 1965.

Although the weather looked bad, everything started off according to plan. Biggs avoided the first exercise shift by claiming he had a bad stomach and needed mild treatment in the sick bay; Flower spent time with visitors so wasn’t able to join the shift; the two minders had kept out of the way. At 3 p.m., all four were sent out to the yard, but within minutes it started to pour heavily. Despite the prisoners’ protestations, they were taken back onto the prison wing for indoor exercise.

Although annoying, this wasn’t catastrophic, as the team had planned for weather problems, and agreed simply to try again the next day. This time, it was sunny, and the plan went like clockwork. Biggs, Flower and their minders went to exercise at 3 p.m. and this time, they heard the sound of the furniture van outside the walls. A moment later, they saw Seabourne’s head covered in a nylon stocking, and then rope ladders coming over the wall. Biggs and Flower ran to the ladders as the two others stopped the guards from getting too close. With Stone’s cry of “You’re too late, Biggsy’s away!” ringing in his ears, Ronnie Biggs dropped onto the roof of the furniture van.

A hole had been cut in the roof to allow access for a hinged platform to come out, to give Seabourne the height he needed to reach the top of the wall. Inside the van were mattresses for Biggs, Flower and Seabourne to jump down onto. Two other convicts, Robert Anderson and Patrick Doyle, followed Biggs and Flower over the wall and into the van. All of them raced out of the back of the van into a waiting getaway car. They used this to go round the service road, then abandoned it in a quiet culde-sac near the prison, and took a second car. Biggs, Flower and Seabourne headed to Dulwich, and left the car for Anderson and Doyle.

The three men celebrated as they watched the news of the escape. Because there was no direct line between the prison and the local police station, it had taken time for the news to get to the police, so the search for them didn’t begin for twenty minutes. Biggs and Flower changed location frequently; Seabourne was arrested quite quickly after the escape, and received a four-and-a-half-year jail term for the escape. The two minders had an extra year added to their sentences.

Biggs and Flower were smuggled out of the country in October 1965 and underwent painful plastic surgery in Paris. They both headed for Australia, and Biggs ended up in Brazil. He returned to the UK voluntarily in 2001, after 13,068 days on the run. He was arrested and returned to prison, this time at HMP Belmarsh in South London. Ronnie Biggs was finally released from prison on compassionate grounds on 6 August 2009.

Sources:

Montreal Gazette,
6/13/20 April 1968: “My Husband, The Master Criminal”

Birmingham Mail,
24 January 2012: “CrimeFiles Prison Break Special: The Great Train Robbery”

Biggs, Ronnie with Christopher Pickard:
Odd Man Out, The Last Straw
(Bloomsbury, 2011)

Steubenville Herald, 18 August 1964: “Attempt to Free 2nd Robber Seen”

Salt Lake Tribune,
13 July 1965: “Britain Thwarts Escape of Train Thefts Convict”

The reporter for ITN’s
Reporting 67
programme was determined to leave no stone unturned in his quest to discover what had happened to the treacherous Russian spy George Blake after his escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison in October 1966. For an overview of the case broadcast early in the new year, he worked out how long it took to drive from the jail in central London to Heathrow airport, and diligently checked to see which flights would have left for Communist countries within a few minutes of Blake’s hypothetical arrival – taking into account the half-hour time required in those days between check-in and flight departure, and allowing for the fact that someone else could have checked in for him, and just handed him the ticket when he arrived at the airport. He noted that a Lufthansa flight to Germany was ten minutes late that evening so the Russian agent could have just made that with time to spare. Alternately, he could have headed for the docks, where there were around a dozen Communist-run ships, two of which were out of commission because of strike action. Or he could have hired a small boat to take him out to a Communist ship waiting in the English Channel. Or he might have headed for the embassy of the USSR, or one of the satellite states, and waited there until the pursuit had died down.

What almost certainly didn’t cross the reporter or his team’s minds was that Blake’s escape had been masterminded by a group of peace activists, and carried out by an Irishman who despite all instructions to the contrary, had used his own car as a getaway vehicle! Yet, as was first reported in an interview with the Irishman, Sean Bourke, in 1969, that’s exactly what happened – and Blake’s progress to East Germany was not exactly the most dignified, hidden inside a camper van.

Blake, whose real name was George Behar, had joined the British Secret Service in 1948, after studying Russian at Cambridge university. He was posted to Seoul in South Korea the following year but was captured by the invading North Koreans. Blake was interrogated by officers from the Russian MGB (a forerunner of the KGB), who were allowed access to prisoners of war by Chinese intelligence, and by the time he was repatriated to Britain at the end of the Korean War, he was a Soviet agent. Whether he changed sides because of natural antipathy to the British system or because he was a true Manchurian Candidate and was brainwashed by the Chinese is open to debate: in 2007, he said he wasn’t a traitor: “To betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged.”

Blake’s importance to the KGB can be judged by the fact that even though he warned Moscow about a major British and American wire-tapping operation that was being carried out in Berlin, they allowed that to proceed rather than risk blowing his cover. He was posted to Berlin, where he was in a position to betray numerous British and American operatives, as well as helping to identify the CIA’s man in Russian Army intelligence. Blake would later admit that he didn’t know exactly what he handed over to the KGB “because it was so much”.

However, his luck ran out in 1961. Polish Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Goleniewski was working as a triple agent, reporting back to both the CIA and MI6, and he reported that the Russians had a key man inside British intelligence. Blake managed to avoid suspicion initially, but when Goleniewski defected, it became clear that Blake was the traitor. He was summoned back to London from a training course in the Lebanon and arrested.