The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (4 page)

Operation Vesper was put into effect. A cordon was established around the Maze and border patrols were stepped up to find any of the IRA men who were trying to slip through to the south. It was, as one police officer told
Time
magazine, “like trying to corner a pack of wolves”. Prisoners tried to hijack vehicles: fifteen of them including Gerry Kelly and Bik McFarlane stole cars from a local farm, but when one of them failed to move sufficiently quickly, three of them appropriated a sports car from a young lad, who they then had to ask how to operate it!

Around half of the original group from H7 were recaptured within twenty-four hours. Three had never made it off the prison site in the first place. A group of prison warders followed some of the escapees through a hole in the fence that they had torn, out in the fields towards the river Lagan, finding pieces of discarded prison officer uniform along the way. Fired up by the news that at least one of their colleagues had been killed, they ran on the IRA men’s trail, joined by RUC officers. As the Army and RUC set up a checkpoint on the road, the warders started to investigate along the banks of the Lagan, and spotted bubbles coming up from behind some reeds. Bobby Storey and two others were caught there; Sean McGlinchey was apprehended a few minutes later. They had been free from the Maze for a mere half an hour. Storey was released in 1994, but rearrested in 1996 on other charges. Although he has been accused (under parliamentary privilege) of being head of intelligence for the IRA, he now lectures on the Maze escape.

None of the escapees was able to meet up with the assistance that had been provided for them by the IRA GHQ; upon hearing the news of the way the break out had unfolded, they had quietly disappeared. Some escapees were caught at roadblocks, others found in the fields and nearby towns by the searching Army and RUC patrols. Patrick McIntyre and Hugh Corey held a fifty-five-year-old woman hostage in her home in the foothills of the Mourne Mountains, twenty-five miles south of Belfast, and held out for two hours before surrendering.

Others made it considerably further. Bik McFarlane, with a group of seven others, took a family hostage at a farmhouse, and eventually they were all able to make a clean getaway when McFarlane persuaded the woman of the house not to reveal their presence. Rather than allow the IRA men to take her oldest child hostage to ensure her silence, the woman, and the rest of her family, swore on the Bible that they would say nothing for seventy-two hours. They kept to their word. McFarlane requisitioned materials from the house, and told the owner that she could collect recompense from Sinn Fein headquarters in Belfast. Then he and his group made their way along country roads at night to south Armagh, a republican stronghold where they were able to meet up with IRA colleagues and be smuggled across the border.

Gerry Kelly and his group made their way to Lurgan, and were able eventually to make contact with republican sympathisers there. One of them, a former prisoner at the Maze, allowed them to remain hidden in his home, in the place where he had previously secreted an arms cache. The men – joined by chance by another group of fugitives – remained hidden there, using coffee jars when they needed to urinate, and only coming out for vital bodily functions, which didn’t, unfortunately for them, include showers. They were eventually freed from their new prison and smuggled across the border.

Kelly and McFarlane assumed new identities and went to live in Europe, continuing the struggle on behalf of the IRA. They were arrested in Amsterdam in January 1986, and eventually deported back to Ireland on 3 December. When they were returned to the Maze, the same senior prison officer who had been on duty on the day of the escape was waiting to escort McFarlane to his cell. He was released from the Maze on parole in 1997, but was charged the following year with offences relating to a kidnapping that took place in December 1983. That case collapsed when the prosecution evidence was ruled inadmissible, and McFarlane received compensation from the Irish government. He is now a voluntary worker for Sinn Fein.

Kelly was released in 1989 and went into politics. He was part of the team involved in negotiations with the British government between 1990 and 1993, as well as those leading to the Good Friday Agreement. He is currently the Sinn Fein party spokesperson on Policing and Criminal Justice.

Of the other prisoners, three were killed on active service with the IRA, and some battled extradition for years, until the Good Friday Agreement led to the withdrawal of the requests. According to a BBC documentary in September 2008, one of the escapees has not been heard of since May 1983.

The “great escape”, as it was inevitably dubbed, wasn’t the only flight from the Maze, but they were few and far between. Some of them were as doomed to failure as the IRA man who had put together a costume of cabbage leaves and was going to crawl out of the compound disguised as a row of cabbages. On 10 August 1984, Benjamin Redfearn was crushed to death while trying to escape in the back of a refuse lorry. In March 1997, a tunnel was found complete with electric lighting – it had got beneath the perimeter wall of H7 and was only eighty feet from the main wall. On 10 December 1997, Liam Averill was smuggled out of the prison dressed as a woman, as part of a group of women and children attending a Christmas party; he evaded capture until given amnesty in 2001.

The Maze prison was closed in 2000; H7 was demolished in November 2007. A monument to the hunger strikers still remains in the Free Derry area of Bogside, and some of the original Maze buildings have been given listed status.

Sources:

BBC Northern Ireland, September 2008:
Breakout
(interviews with Bobby Storey, Bik McFarlane, Gerry Kelly and Courtney Campbell)

BBC News, 8 February 2010: “Maze Prison buildings to keep listed status”

BBC News, 16 March 1998: “The Maze – home to paramilitaries”

The Guardian, 5 April 2007: “Thirty years on, the Maze reveals a secret”

The People, 14 September 2003: “Maze Escape Party Row”

BBC News, 8 December 2006: “Go ahead given for kidnap trial”

New York Times, 4 December 1986: “Dutch Extradite Two I.R.A. Fugitives”

BBC On This Day: “25 September 1983: Dozens escape in Maze breakout”

Hennessey, Sir James:
Report of Inquiry into the Security Arrangements at HM Prison, Maze
(HMSO, 1984)

McKane, William:
Unpretentious Valour
(C R Print, 2008)

Hayes, Paddy:
Break Out!
(O’Brien Press, 2004)

Edinburgh’s Old Tolbooth, immortalized in the works of Sir Walter Scott, stood as the town’s jail for over 250 years, next door to St Giles’ High Kirk. Its forbidding presence stood as a warning to the good folk of the Scottish capital, who would flock to the platform on its west side to witness the public hangings and beheadings, and regard the impaled heads above its doors, which could stay in place rotting for all to see for years. Now all that remains of the building, which was torn down in 1817, is a mosaic in the ground that marks where its doorway once stood, and even now, nearly two centuries later, it is still common to see people spit upon it in disdain.

It deserves its foul reputation. Many who entered the Tolbooth died there, either at the hands of executioners or illness and disease. As Scottish Advocate Depute Lord Cockburn wrote in
Memorials of his Time,
published in 1856: “A most atrocious jail it was, the very breath of which almost struck down any stranger who entered its dismal door; and as ill-placed as possible, without one inch of ground beyond its black and horrid walls. And these walls were very small; the entire hole being filled with little dark cells; heavy manacles the only security; airless, waterless, drainless; a living grave. One week of that dirty, fetid, cruel torture-house was a severer punishment than a year of our worst modern prisons – more dreadful in its sufferings, more certain in its corruption, overwhelming the innocent with a more tremendous sense of despair, provoking the guilt to more audacious defiance.”

And defiant they were over the centuries. While some sought to escape the embrace of the Maiden (the proto-guillotine that was used as a form of execution), or being stepped off a ladder to hang before the crowds, by taking their own lives, others found ways to flee the prison altogether.

It was definitely in the interests of the prison keeper, known as the “gudeman” of the Tolbooth, to keep them within the confines of the building: if a prisoner were to escape and remain at liberty for more than twenty-four hours, then the jailer was liable for a fine of £40 sterling, a hefty sum in those days, and if the runaway had been imprisoned for debt, the jailer also had to settle that! If prisoners were caught within the twenty-four-hour period, then the responsibility for the fine was theirs. To that end, the keeper was instructed to check every single cell (known as apartments) twice daily for any signs of escape, and to ensure that they did not receive any tools to help with that.

Various abscondings from the Tolbooth are recorded, some memorable for their method, others for the people involved. One of the first comes from April 1600, a mere forty years after the Old Tolbooth became the prison, and was one of the most ingenious, if not totally successful, escape attempts in the jail’s long history.

Robert Auchmutie was a barber-surgeon, who had been arrested for killing James Wauchope in a duel on St Leonard’s Hill. He had some alchemical knowledge, and was aware of the destructive properties of what was then called aqua fortis, better known today as nitric acid. Feigning illness, Auchmutie claimed that he needed the window of his apartment covered to provide darkness, using his cloak to keep both the light out and prying eyes away from the aqua fortis’ work on the bars. All seemed to go well, and Auchmutie arranged with his apprentice to wave his hand when the town guard was out of sight. Unfortunately for him, the waving was spotted by the guard who prevented Auchmutie from climbing down a rope to his freedom. He became a victim of the Maiden shortly thereafter.

The guards weren’t always as on the ball as they might have been: there are numerous instances recorded of prisoners adopting the clothing of their visitors in order to gain their freedom. One of the earliest came in 1610 when Margaret Maxwell, Lady Amisfield, was interrogated by the Privy Council over the escape from the Tolbooth of her son-in-law Thomas Kirkpatrick. It seems as if a private interview between the pair was simply a ruse to enable Kirkpatrick to swap clothes with Lady Amisfield, which meant that he was able to depart undetected. She, on the other hand, was caught, and although she was initially jailed in the Tolbooth, she was eventually transferred to quarters more appropriate to her social situation in Edinburgh Castle.

A couple of generations later, the idea was equally successful in enabling Alexander Smith to flee the Tolbooth. Arrested in 1681 for his part in the rebellious Covenanter movement and his involvement with the Battle of Bothwell Brig two years earlier, Smith was able to get away from the Tolbooth dressed as a woman, although he was captured near Glasgow and returned to Edinburgh. However, as he was being taken across country, fellow Covenanters attacked the transport at Inchbelly Bridge near Kirkintilloch and freed him.

The case of Robert, fifth Lord Balfour of Burleigh, is probably the most famous case of cross-dressing being used to escape from the Tolbooth. Balfour wasn’t blessed with the most equable of temperaments and had fallen in love with Miss Anne Robinson, the tutor to his sisters. This match with someone of “inferior rank”, as the
Dictionary of National Biography (DNB)
calls her, did not find favour with his parents, who sent him travelling in Europe in the hope that he would forget her. However before he departed for the continent, Balfour made his beloved promise that she wouldn’t marry anyone else during his absence, and making it abundantly clear that he would kill her husband if she failed to keep to her word. (Some accounts suggest that Balfour simply wrote to her with the threat.)

However Anne found love elsewhere with Henry Stenhouse, a schoolmaster at Inverkeithing. Again, the accounts differ as to whether Stenhouse was aware of the danger he faced should Balfour return from the continent, but whether he knew of Balfour’s jealousy prior to the young man’s arrival on his doorstep or not, he certainly found out at that point that the lord was in deadly earnest. When Balfour learned that Anne had married, he tracked her down to Inverkeithing, and called the schoolmaster out. According to Robert Chambers’
Domestic Annals of Scotland,
Balfour told Stenhouse that he had spoken to Balfour’s disadvantage and he had therefore come to fight him. Stenhouse pointed out that he had never seen Balfour before, and was certain he had said nothing against him, but the Master of Burleigh was insistent. “I must nevertheless fight with you, and if you won’t, I will at once shoot you.” Despite Stenhouse making it clear that it was against his principle to fight duels, and that he had neither horses nor arms, Balfour shot him in the shoulder. Stenhouse died from infection twelve days later, on April 21, 1707. Despite a clever defence (described with commendable understatement by the
DNB
as “ingenious but inadequate”) being mounted at his trial at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh, Balfour was condemned to death and held at the Tolbooth before sentence was carried out.

According to legend, Balfour tried to escape twice, the second time successfully after impersonating one of his sisters, who was “very much like him in face and stature”. The first time was less pleasant, and although there is some doubt as to whether it was Balfour who was the subject of this plan, it certainly seems to have taken place to assist one felon from the gates of the Tolbooth.

The prisoner was smuggled out of the jail in a trunk, after the jailors had been suitably bribed by his family to look the other way. The trunk was transported to Leith, from where it, and its human cargo, could be dispatched to the continent. Unfortunately for the man inside the case, the porter taking it to Leith was not in on the plan, so had no idea that the trunk should be kept at any particular angle. Hanging upside down, and bumped around as the porter pushed his load to the docks, the prisoner kept quiet in case he was discovered. His luck ran out, though, when the porter met with a friend who suggested they go for a drink. The porter dropped the trunk, causing the prisoner to scream in agony. The frightened porter and his friend opened it up, to find the man unconscious within. The guard was quickly summoned and the prisoner returned to the Tolbooth.