by Paul Simpson
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 Camper Escape
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.
Blake was tried in secret at the Old Bailey, and charged with five separate offences. He was found guilty of them, and sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment for – each three of the terms to run consecutively. This forty-two-year sentence was the longest ever handed out by a British court and, according to the headlines in the newspapers at the time, represented a year for every agent he had betrayed. (This seems highly unlikely as it probably underestimated the damage that Blake caused, no matter what Blake may claim.)
The forcibly retired spy was sent to serve his sentence at Wormwood Scrubs, which had stood in West London since its completion in 1891. According to one of the men who helped him escape, anti-nuclear campaigner Michael Randle, Blake was held up to other prisoners as an example of how to do your “bird”: if Blake was dealing with a forty-two-year stretch with equanimity, those with much less time to go should behave.
The Home Office were genuinely concerned that Blake might try to escape: papers recently released under the Freedom of Information Act show that warders were told to listen to his conversations with visitors, and a letter from his wife discussing the colour of the carpet was regarded as a potential code. “We are wondering whether this is an attempt to pass a message,” a prison report in 1963 noted. “From our point of view clandestine communication between the Blakes might well be very damaging indeed.” MI5 were supposed to be keeping an eye as well: when one scheme came to light in May 1964, then-head of MI5 Roger Hollis noted that the source was someone with “a history of mental instability” who was “incapable of dissociating fact and fantasy”.
In 1965, there were claims that a plot was under way to land a helicopter in the prison grounds to rescue Blake, more than six years before this method of jail-break was successfully tried. The prison governor who looked into it commented, “Blake’s letters to his wife tend to continue to be forward-looking and uncomplaining and he devotes himself energetically to academic studies. The whole thing is somewhat James Bondish.” Blake did complain about some of the stories that were run in the papers about him: “Am I throughout my prison sentence to remain at the mercy of anyone who for reasons best known to himself, spreads stories about me?” he wrote to the Home Office after an article had appeared in the tabloid The People which stated that another prisoner had nobly foiled an attempt by Blake to escape. On this occasion, his complaint was backed up by one of the prison governors.
Although there was general revulsion at Blake’s activities – or at least, those which the government permitted to be reported in the papers – there were some who felt that the forty-two-year sentence was too harsh and savage for a man who was apparently acting patriotically, even if his patriotism was directed towards a foreign country. “I do not see why this should be a crime in itself, to go against patriotism. Should a German have hesitated more than any other nationality to assassinate Hitler?” one correspondent wrote to the Home Office, requesting Blake’s sentence be reassessed.
Those feelings were shared by some of those who served their prison time alongside Blake, including Michael Randle, Pat Pottle and Sean Bourke. Randle and Pottle were founders of the Committee of 100, a British anti-war group set up in 1960 after discussions between members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Direct Action Committee to foment civil disobedience and non-violent resistance against nuclear bombs. The Committee had been seen as a threat by the government, and after a protest at the US Air Force base in Wethersfield, Essex, six of the leaders were sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for conspiracy and incitement under the Official Secrets Act. Bourke was serving a seven-year term for “using Her Majesty’s mails for transporting an infernal device” – sending a bomb to a detective sergeant who had accused Bourke of an unnatural relationship with a young man.
During their time inside, they had come to know Blake – Bourke edited a prison magazine to which the spy was a regular contributor – and came to feel that his sentence was unjust, and that trying to help him to escape was simply a decent human response. Blake himself, despite the attitude he was displaying to the authorities, had not given up on the idea of escaping: in his autobiography, he notes that he regarded himself as being like a POW, with a duty to escape.
Contrary to the belief of many in the immediate aftermath of the escape on 22 October 1966, the KGB played no part in the escapade. Blake claims that this was because he knew they wouldn’t risk a major international scandal if it went wrong; the others concerned stated that they didn’t want any involvement with the hated Soviet Union. They were helping George Blake, human being sentenced to rot inside a British prison, not George Blake, KGB agent. While they served their terms, Pottle and Randle offered to help Blake in any way they could, and kept in touch after their release.
Bourke himself was coming towards the end of his sentence at the end of 1965; he had behaved himself while behind bars, and was under consideration for the hostel programme. This meant he would spend the last nine months of his term working in an ordinary civilian job, and sleep in the hostel, connected to the prison. Blake approached Bourke and asked if he would help him escape. The Irishman didn’t care that Blake was both an Englishman and a Communist; Blake was his friend, and he told him he would do his best.
A good line of communication was vital between Bourke, who would no longer be able to go inside the prison, and Blake, stuck on D Hall with the rest of the lifers
. Since work was being carried out on the hostel by inmates from D Hall, a trusted friend was used as a go-between. Almost immediately Bourke’s unreliability began to become obvious: he was also communicating with another prisoner, Kenneth de Courcy, and at one point the messages became mixed up. De Courcy got a letter with details of the escape attempt, but agreed to keep quiet, as long as he was kept in the loop about developments. To Blake’s eternal gratitude, de Courcy never breathed a word, even though he could have probably gained some valuable time knocked off his own sentence if he had betrayed the spy.
To prevent a repetition of the error, Bourke arranged for a walkie-talkie to be smuggled into the prison, which operated on a frequency that wouldn’t be monitored by the police. The only problem with that, as Blake found out when another prisoner came in to warn him urgently, was that it could be picked up by the ordinary radios that some of the other inmates had in their cells. “Fox Michael” and “Baker Charlie” had to be very careful about their conversations after that.
Around the same time, Bourke got back in touch with Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, and told them that he needed some financial help in order to arrange George Blake’s escape. They were happy to help. With the money, Bourke bought a secondhand car, and found a small flat near the prison. When Bourke had completed his prison term, and was released from the hostel, he returned to Ireland, apparently for good – but then returned to the UK under a false name.
The escape was set for a Saturday evening, when the majority of prisoners and guards would be away from the Hall, watching the weekly film show. Blake had taken advice from one of the experts on breaking and entering at the Hall, and chosen to leave through one of the large gothic windows which overlooked the yard. These windows were comprised of small panes of glass, divided by cast-iron frames. Every other panel swivelled open to act as an air vent, but on their own, were too small for a man to squeeze through. However with the iron strut removed, a gap eighteen inches by twelve was created, just about enough room for Blake to squeeze through. Once through there, it was a short jump to the roof of a covered passageway, from which Blake could jump to the ground. Then it was a fifteen-yard dash across to the outer wall; Bourke would then throw a rope ladder over for Blake to climb. Once out, they would drive away before the prison guards had a chance to catch up with them.
