Prison Break - True Stories of the World's Greatest Escapes. Paul Buck
his cell for Wilson to land on terra firma outside the walls.
There are separate versions of events from here on. The first is that he was taken to a flat not far away, where they stayed for two days while arrangements were made by phone to move on the third day to a London safe house. Another account has it that they drove directly to London down the M1 and Wilson went to ground in a flat in Knightsbridge, where he remained for some months. His carer was not one of Wilson’s known associates, which could be asking for trouble given the police pressure on his obvious contacts, but was connected to Charlie and Eddie Richardson. Many of the London villains didn’t want to know where he was hiding, as it gave them “a kind of responsibility”, as gang boss Joey Pyle later noted.
One of the more romantic escape stories that was spread around suggested that, once outside Winson Green, Wilson climbed into an adapted petrol tanker with two of his rescuers and reclined on mattresses whilst they were driven to a deserted airfield, from where he was flown to Northern France in a small plane.
Though the guard came round and was freed by 3:20am, reporting the escape to the orderly officer, they didn’t report it for a further thirty minutes as they believed the intruders were still in the building and might attack them. The other guard on C-block had actually gone down to the kitchens to start cooking the breakfast porridge, leaving the five night staff who patrolled all the wings effectively locked in without a pass key.
The police were roused, not through any emergency system but via a direct call at 3:50am. They arrived at 4am and had to wait at the main gate until someone with keys could let them in. By then Wilson was well away. It was a few hours before a full alert was in operation and the traffic scrutinised.
Wilson’s copy of the Daily Sketch, with the photos and story of his breakout splashed across the front page, was delivered to his empty cell the following day.
On the other side of the world, Bruce Reynolds, the leader of the Great Train Robbers, still not arrested at that point, said that when he saw the headlines, “His success filled me with pride. We’d finessed the Establishment yet again.”
Charlie Wilson had taken leave of prison life not by breaking out, but by others breaking in to open his cell door. This seemed to be a first, at least in modern times. Once again, the whole world was laughing. No one knew precisely how they had obtained duplicates of the keys, other than through a corrupt officer at the prison. Only half a dozen master keys existed and they were closely guarded. It was said that traces of soap were found on one, signifying that a copy had been made from an impression in a bar of soap, though other reports claim this wasn’t so.
The escape had hit a sore point, and the police search for Wilson was not going to die down quickly. He grew a beard and, by the end of the year, realised his only way to regain anything akin to a normal life was to go abroad. In March 1965 he left from Dover, catching a channel ferry to Calais, masquerading as a schoolteacher on a hitchhiking holiday. He was collected by car in the French port and driven to the South of France where, a couple of months later, his wife and one of his daughters joined him in a villa at Ramatuelle, near St Tropez. That was to be the start of his foreign adventures, until his capture in Rigaud, a suburb of Montréal, just under three and a half years later by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
After he had finally served his sentence, Wilson moved with his wife to a town near Marbella in Spain. He died bloodily in 1990, gunned down by a young visitor sent to assassinate him. Not long after, the drug dealer who is believed to have issued the contract was himself shot down, in a bar in Amsterdam.
The idea that others should come into a prison to collect an inmate resonates with earlier times, as we will note with the cases of Jack Sheppard and Bonnie and Clyde, both from different eras. Our notions of the American Wild West, as seen in countless films, include the associates of jailed men marching into the sheriff ’s office with guns drawn to rescue them from their cells. Even the John Dillinger story has an angle on this method.
In modern times, such approaches have to be a bit more sophisticated. With that said, going over a wall into a prison is not an unheard of event. There are stories of people going over to leave tools hidden in the prison yard for their friends inside to collect, or to deliver drugs. There are recent accounts of prisoners going out for a ‘pub crawl’ and then climbing back in to sleep it off, or, in one case, of a prisoner getting so drunk that he couldn’t manage to get his leg back over the wall. There are even stories of burglars scaling the wall into Brixton Prison to raid the staff officers’ club – more than once! A further twist will appear later, when we look at the notorious French criminal and escapee Pascal Payet …
It is only to be expected that our gadget-laden world will provide ever more powerful and sophisticated surveillance cameras to maintain watch over those imprisoned – along with superior designs of locks and other fastening contrivances that make it difficult for duplicate keys to open them. And that’s not to forget sensors that can pick up slight vibrations, ideal for use at night.
The job of the escapee is rarely an easy one, particularly for those in the most secure prisons, or ‘prisons within prisons’, as some are now styled. But it has always been the case that a prisoner in transit is passing through the penal system’s weakest link, whether being taken to prison in the first instance, transferred from one prison to another, or transported to court for an appearance. The prison system itself inadvertently presents this enticement via its own policy of unsettling prisoners by continually shifting them from one prison to another, providing greater potential for escape than is perhaps necessary. Of course, there are also instances when prisoners themselves engineer a day out in court just to take advantage of that weakest link, making a bid for freedom in the most fundamental way.
Such an occasion attracted attention in May 1966, at the time of a spate of escapes. The government of the day ordered a report by Earl Mountbatten into what it saw as an intolerable situation, which recommended a mass of improvements to prison security. The escape in question was hatched in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight by John McVicar, whom we will encounter again in his role in another major breakout. The Parkhurst inmates knew that if they caused an incident (in this case one prisoner stabbing another), it would require them being taken before Winchester Assizes on the mainland.
This is indeed what happened, and on return from their day out, thirteen convicts (nine of whom were involved in the plot) set about seven prison officers and escaped. The authorities had received a tip-off that an attempt would occur, but the likelihood pointed to it happening at Portsmouth, where they would take the ferry back to the island. Police had been deployed around the terminal for just such an eventuality but they had it wrong, for it happened as the coach passed through Bishop’s Waltham.
The prisoners had three improvised keys with them. Ten of the men who had been handcuffed in pairs freed themselves. The other three were joined to prison officers. On a signal, the freed men jumped up, most going for the guards whilst another went for the driver to take control of the steering wheel. As the coach ground to a halt, the door was opened and nine men took off.
The police escort behind them radioed for help, and two policemen quickly multiplied to one hundred and twenty personnel, along with dogs and an RAF helicopter. Seven prisoners were rounded up within a few hours, and another one a couple of days later. Only two got clean away, McVicar being one of them. He had all summer to stretch his legs before being recaptured.
And yet, despite such machinations, there will always be room for the opportunist to seize the moment. John Bindon, the villainturned-actor (Poor Cow, Get Carter, Performance), who helped give the ‘hardman’ archetype its cinematic image in 1970s Britain, recounted how, in his earlier days, he was being transferred by prison bus from one borstal to another, along with his friend Alan Stanton.
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