Prison Break - True Stories of the World's Greatest Escapes

by Paul Buck

  We have already seen Alfred Hinds at work in the Law Courts. His ploy when escaping from prison on two other occasions was to ride on the backs of existing escape plans, and thus to avoid additional offences being lined up against him, all in order to boost his campaign to prove he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Both escapes are linked together because they are part of the same process. All emanate from this man masterminding both his own defence case and his escape plans from the nerve centre of his cell.

  Hinds made his first escape from Nottingham Prison in cahoots with the robber Patsy Fleming. Hinds’ agenda was to publicise his case against being fitted up over a jewellery robbery at the Maples department store in London. He was admittedly a small-time criminal, but he refused to take it lying down. After two years of incarceration, his appeal had been turned down, his petition to the Home Office dismissed. He only had recourse to one further option: to escape as a means of publicising his position.

  Hinds’ reasoning was that, in order not to leave himself open to a further charge for the escape, he would claim he was just responding to an opportunity: “I must not commit one crime in order to prove that I was innocent of another.” If he didn’t tell people he was planning an escape (which amounts to conspiracy), did not offer violence to a prison officer in the course of escaping, or perform any technical actions like making a key or drawing a bolt, then he was not, strictly speaking, responsible for the breakout. If another prisoner breached those same conditions, all Hinds could be accused of was ‘escape from lawful custody’ – which is not a criminal offence, just an offence against prison rules.

  Patsy Fleming had reputedly planned a solo escape, but was happy for Hinds to help him achieve it. On 25 November 1955, during evening association when no one was looking, Fleming went through the grille door for which he had made a key, leading down to the stokehole. There he opened the flap on the coal chute and crawled up into a small well beneath a grating, for which he had to undo a padlock, before going out into the prison yard.

  On the first night, the plan failed. Fleming came back covered in coal dust and had to be rushed to the washroom. The key for the padlock at the grating did not fit. The man responsible for making the soap impression had fluffed it, but would not admit to a bodged job. The next night, the escape method was repeated – though Fleming took along a hacksaw blade to get through the padlock, that process adding an extra ten minutes. Most importantly, eyes and ears had to be kept open to ensure that no one grassed, as the previous night’s failure would have indicated an ongoing escape attempt to more than just the handful who were previously in the know.

  This second night, Fleming went through the grating into the yard. He crossed to the workshop with intent to enter via the window, using a cramp to widen the bars. Then he discovered that the cramp was not strong enough. Instead, he climbed on the roof and broke through a wire-meshed fanlight to reach the two doorframes Hinds had made in the workshop, which could be fitted together to make a ladder. Unbolting the door, he propped them against the wall and went over. He had to rip a barbed-wire link fence from the ground, creating a gap to get through. Then there was only an eight-foot wall to climb over, aided by a plank of wood, before he paused for breath in the shrubbery of a private garden.

  When Fleming had passed through the first grille, it was to be wedged with paper to stop it coming open. This happened, but only after Alfie Hinds had indicated he was following him down, once another inmate on lookout had seen from his cell that Fleming was in the yard, having broken through the grating. As Hinds saw it, he had followed in Fleming’s footsteps.

  The first Fleming knew of Hinds joining him in the escape was in the garden, when he heard a voice behind identifying himself. It was too late to argue. Fleming took Hinds along to meet the lorry that was picking him up. Hiding between orange boxes, they went through a roadblock and later transferred to a car, where they changed clothes and were driven to London. Hinds was provided with a mac and trilby to cover his prison uniform. Fleming would be caught three months later, on his home patch in the East End.

  At least, that is the generally accepted story as taken from Hinds’ published accounts.

  He gives the credit for the escape to Fleming, making it appear that the other man was in control. But today, despite getting on in years and having never read Hinds’ book, Fleming can still recall enough to make one understand how Hinds wrote the story to suit his own purposes. In fact the whole escape was planned and staged by him, with Fleming invited along. “I’d known him for ages,” Fleming says. “I wouldn’t have got away without him.”

  Details tumble out one after another, leaving us to fill in the other aspects. One cannot even be sure they tried to escape two nights in a row. But certainly, Hinds was down in the coal cellar alongside Fleming: “He stood on my head and killed me. He made the key for the padlock while he was there. We only had about ten minutes. Then he pulled me through.”

  There is no mention of a hacksaw blade, only of Hinds improvising his tools on the spot, using the basics he had brought with him. “The bell’s gone and they were banging up and we haven’t got out, we’re still underneath. We’re still working on that padlock.”

  Once Hinds had pulled Fleming through, and they had made their way across the yard to the carpenter’s workshop, it was Hinds who produced the key for that door. “He could make any key.”

  They took out the frames they had made to get over the wall. Hinds went up and over first. “It was such a drop,” Fleming recalls. Indeed, he had not realised how high it was until that moment. “When I got to the top, he’d gone down and … I would have broken my leg. He caught me as I went down. I would have knocked myself out coming down like that.”

  And so they made for the car that Hinds had arranged. “He had a motor waiting, a little bit away … Had a couple of suits that we put on right away as we were going along.” As if to emphasise the respect and position Hinds commanded, Fleming adds, “The geezer who helped wouldn’t have done it for me, but would have done it for Alf.”

  Hinds went his way to a cottage near Dublin, from whence he conducted his media campaign to have his case heard via his wife, Peg, at home in London. Out of necessity he started to study English law, using the National Library in Dublin. There he befriended a porter at Trinity College and started to attend criminal law lectures.

  Then, after eight months, Hinds was arrested at gunpoint. He was aghast that the law was being flouted and that he was being taken back to England without the correct procedures – particularly as, in the way he described it, he had technically not committed the offence of escaping prison. His appearance at a magistrates’ court, armed with law books, left the magistrate bemused, and he was sent to the assizes. Thus began the process of court appearances that led to the escape detailed earlier.

  Hinds’ next attempt at escape occurred at Chelmsford. As with Fleming, Hinds became part of the escape plan of Georgie Walkington – or at least that was how he wrote about it. On Sunday 1 June 1958, whilst many prisoners were at church, Walkington was supposedly cleaning his cell. He went down to the ground floor landing for a bucket of water, but his intention was to slip into a linen store and go to a hatchway, to gain entry to a passage to the bathhouse. In the linen store was an inmate who used it as a clubroom for himself and his friends to have a brew-up. Walkington persuaded him to let him go through to the double door at the end of the passageway, which he had a key for, and then out to the prison yard. He also had a key to the big gates that separated the yard from the compound.

  It was more difficult for Hinds to slip his guard. As an escape risk he was not allowed to go anywhere without one, but sometimes they were slack. He asked to go down a level to get water but the guard was reluctant to go with him, asking Hinds to tell the warder below to shout up when he had arrived. Hinds had arranged for a friend to do the honours, whilst he went immediately to the linen store.

  Hinds arrived as the storeman was bolting up behind Walk
ington. Hinds told him to open it as he was going too, catching up with Walkington as he was about to close the double doors. The two of them set off for the gates. The key didn’t fit, so Hinds had the idea of taking two wheelbarrows used for carrying coal and pushing them to the wall, balancing one on top of the other and climbing up, hooking his denim jacket on the barbed wire to help haul them up. Hinds fell and broke his glasses, but eventually they both hauled each other to the top.

  Once they were over the barbed wire, they worked their way along the top before taking the twenty-five-foot drop to a path outside. Hinds hurt his leg in the process. Walkington went on ahead, whilst Hinds worked slowly through the graveyard until he reached the waiting Morris Minor. Walkington froze and said he had forgotten how to drive, so Hinds took the wheel despite his injured leg. Using only back lanes, he made for the Blackwall Tunnel and then on to Kent to stay with a friend of Walkington, who was not pleased to see the notorious Hinds until a substantial amount of money arrived to pay for his stay. Walkington was recaptured a little later, when he returned to his former haunts in London.

  Hinds travelled back to Dublin the long way, driven by car to Liverpool, then taking the ferryboat to Belfast and the train to the Irish capital. Twenty months after his escape, Hinds was caught whilst smuggling cars from the Republic to Belfast. His hope that he would be charged and convicted only under his alias was dispelled, and he found himself back in Britain at the start of a new round of legal procedures.

  His battle with the authorities showed them he was the equal of many a well-trained QC. The system tried to beat him down at every turn, until his old adversary, Detective Superintendent Sparks from the Flying Squad, published articles in the Sunday Pictorial in which he referred directly to Hinds. Hinds saw red and smelled a libel suit, a chance to argue in court that he had nothing to do with the Maples robbery. He won his case, and in the process was deemed innocent of his original conviction. He was ordered to be released by the Home Secretary, even though the Court of Appeal refused to quash the conviction. (When does the system ever admit defeat?) He went on to become a businessman, moved to Jersey, and joined the local branch of the high-IQ society, MENSA.

  What is apparent from Hinds’ case is the close understanding he had of legal matters. At least one judge during the years of legal process made comment on his abilities and the professional use he might otherwise have put them to.

  George Blake did not make his escape from his locked cell at Wormwood Scrubs, as he was at liberty to move around the block up until the moment when he bade farewell. He was serving forty-two years for spying for the KGB whilst simultaneously working as an MI6 agent. Instead of being placed in a more secure prison, he was housed in the Scrubs, which was regarded as an easy place to escape from.

  Blake did not give the impression that escape was even on his mind. He presented himself as an amenable person, teaching other inmates French and German, and teaching those who were illiterate to read and write. Perhaps he was kept at the Scrubs because it made it easier for MI5 and MI6 to interrogate him regularly. But, as Blake was not regarded as an escape risk, it seems that, once his interrogations were completed, he was kept there because it made it easier for his wife to visit!

  If that was indeed the case, it seems remarkable. Blake was a spy who betrayed hundreds of British agents behind the Iron Curtain, perhaps causing a substantial number of deaths. It insults many other long-serving prisoners, and their wives and children, who have to trek up and down the country for years to visit their incarcerated men. It also says much about the British class system.

  Blake’s escape from prison occurred on 22 October 1966. He had befriended Seán Bourke, a murderer who was travelling back and forth from prison to a pre-release hostel. Bourke had acquired a walkie-talkie set and gave one to Blake, so that they could talk to each other once Bourke was ensconced outside in his bedsit.

  Bourke had the assistance of two others who had promised to help Blake, anti-nuclear campaigners Michael Randle and Pat Pottle. Among other things, they gave Bourke money to buy a Humber Hawk car. On the evening of the 22nd, Blake had tea, watched wrestling on television and had a bath. At 6:15pm, wearing his plimsolls, he called Bourke, who was already sitting in the car outside the prison wall. It was a rainy, miserable evening. Blake went from his cell to the landing above, and climbed through a large gothic window at one end. Two of its panes and an iron strut had been broken and fixed lightly, to allow him to make a gap big enough to squeeze through. Then he dropped twenty-two feet to the ground, landing on a covered doorway halfway down to break his fall.

  Bourke had to delay slightly, waiting for a courting couple to stop lingering and move on, before he could throw over a rope ladder with rungs made of size thirteen knitting needles. “At the twentieth rung, the one that would be nearest the top of the wall on the inside, I had wound two large knots of rope, one around each upright. These would keep the ladder a couple of inches out from the wall as it hung down and so make it easier for Blake to grip the rungs.”

  When Blake jumped down from the top he landed badly, cutting his head and breaking his wrist, though he didn’t know it at the time. It only took three minutes for them to drive to rented rooms in nearby Highlever Road. It was a full ninety minutes after he had vacated his room around the corner before he was discovered missing.

  Just before Christmas, Blake left for Germany in a Commer van, hidden in a secret compartment, with Michael Randle, one of the founder members of the Committee of 100 anti-nuclear action group, at the wheel. Randle believed that Blake’s sentence was “unjust”, and that “helping him was a decent human response”. When they reached Berlin, Blake walked the final few yards through the checkpoint to the East. Bourke went to Moscow later to join Blake, hoping to start a new life. It wasn’t for him, and he left for Ireland after two years.

  When we talk about the great British escapees, we think back to that master of the art, Jack Sheppard, and his escapes from Newgate. His closest modern counterpart is Walter Probyn, whom I can only cover with a selective account of his modus operandi. His own book, Angel Face, gives more detailed accounts, as well as telling of a politicisation and immersion in law books which mirrored that of Alfred Hinds. As with some others in this book, both were intelligent men who, in their formative years, were socialised into less than constructive ways of living, as each would readily admit.

  And so we also reach the practicalities of tunnelling one’s way out of prison. For Probyn’s crimes pale besides his many escapes. Set on a criminal path by unfortunate circumstances as a child, his response each time he was taken into custody was to escape, right from the very beginning. To detail all of them, even briefly, would take numerous pages, so we have to focus on the few that constitute his legend.

  Probyn was called ‘Angel Face’ by the police and press alike, much to his annoyance, in an effort to convince the public not to be deceived by his “angelic countenance”. He was ten when it all started, in 1941, incarcerated for stealing a discarded tin of peas. The violence and brutality shown towards him only made him resist all the more. At one remand home he stole a bunch of keys whilst still in the reception. Realising he couldn’t use them, he handed them to the deputy headmaster and explained he had intended to escape. The deputy head handed him his empty cup and told him to take it to the staff kitchen, where Probyn discovered the window bars were wide enough and took off.

  In his early days he was adept at escaping from police cells, often squeezing through the hatch in the cell door. He succeeded in five such escapes from Old Street police station. His method was to bang the hatch to make the catch jump, and to slide the hatch down at that precise moment. Once it was open, he could squeeze through and find the airshaft to climb up to the roof. Beryl Smith, his wife of ten years, whom he first met when they were still pre-teens, says he would also unscrew the grille of the heater in the police cell, climb in and pull it back in place. “Of course, when the law saw he was gone, they left the door open.
” His strength, she confirms, was that he always “took his time. He’s got a lot of patience.”

  By fifteen he was already incarcerated in prison. He immediately set about digging through the floor of his cell at Wormwood Scrubs with a spoon, throwing the debris out of the window into the prison garden, or taking it out to the dustbin, concealing the hole with the black wax used to wax mailbag thread from the workshop. His aim was to reach the basement beneath, where he hoped to find implements to help him on his way. After piercing the inch-thick hard surface, the rubble beneath was easy. The skill was in trying to keep the surface hole small so that it did not collapse.

  The hole became as deep as his arm, and he was ready to widen it. This never happened. He was moved to HMP Wakefield, where his attempts to saw through the bars were curtailed by prison grasses. His next stop was Rampton mental hospital in the north. Though he was not mentally deficient, as a doctor confirmed to him, he was a nuisance and an embarrassment to the penal authorities. At eighteen he was dubiously certified and incarcerated in the secure hospital. “I felt that among people who were mad, I would surely go mad before I got out.”

  Within weeks, in December 1949 he made an attempt to escape with another inmate, each shinning up separate drainpipes, climbing onto and racing across the roofs, just managing to jump a fifteen-foot gap at one point to a lower roof, until they made an outside wall at the far end. Resisting the temptation to go down quickly, they held out until they could escape into the fields. They were watched all the way, but only one guard was in a position to follow after them and he chose to pursue Walter’s companion when they split up.

  Probyn hid until nightfall in a ditch, before setting off across fields until he met the arterial road. By climbing to the top of a steep hill, he was able to jump onto a lorry when it was at its slowest and steal a lift to London. It was five months before he was recaptured.