Peterhead (10 page)

He died there less than twenty-four hours later. Somehow or other in every prison the inmates quickly learn what is going on. No newsletters are handed out but any event of significance soon spreads throughout the jail. Willie Leitch remembers that the whole place fell silent when news of Johnny’s death got around. “Even the mice must have known something was wrong,” he told me.

Gentle Johnny’s final resting place is Lambhill Cemetery in Glasgow. I visited it with his great-grandson, Haig Ferguson, and his great-granddaughter, Kendal, two youngsters Johnny would have been immensely proud of, and we felt sadness that there was nothing in this almost derelict, vandalised and melancholy place to pay tribute to one of the most remarkable Scots of the twentieth century. His headstone, like hundreds of others around it, lay toppled over in lank grass, the green dulled by polluted city air. Johnny Ramensky was called by some a common criminal yet he was a man who, before he died, had managed to capture the public’s imagination and affection. And a man who played an extraordinary role in the fight against the Nazis.

Johnny’s life change came about when he served in Italy with General Lucky Laycock’s commandos after volunteering to join the army. No doubt his ability as an escaper played a role in attracting the attention of the Secret Services and eased his way into the commandos, turning him temporarily from criminal safebreaker to war hero.

As earlier recounted, when in Barlinnie he showed his climbing skills, his head for heights and the agility to scale prison walls. But he did not break out from the Glasgow prison and when in Lightburn Hospital he did not take advantage of his surroundings to do a runner and avoid a return to his cell. In Peterhead he was unsettled, bored and felt he was victimised. So he thumbed his nose at the authorities with frequent escapes and became a nightmare for his captors. At one stage it was joked that visitors should first check whether he was inside or outside before they called on the prison.

In his five escapes he never managed to travel more than a few dozen miles from the prison before recapture. This I suspect was largely because the escapes were symbolic, a way of making a protest that generated headlines rather than a desire to head away from the prison to a life on the run. Each escape was its own reward. If ever a man was in the category of what the prison authorities describe as high escape risk it was John Ramsay – aka John Ramenski, aka Johnny Ramensky, aka Yonus Ramanauckas.

The record book says it all:

November 1934 – Twenty-nine hours at large

August 1952 – Recaptured the following day

February 1958 – Recaptured the following day

October 1958 – Recaptured the following day

December 1958 – Around nine days at large

The only other prisoner to come near his record is a John Burnside, who managed to get over the wall five times from different Scottish jails – but “only” three times from Peterhead. So Johnny can, most would agree, claim to be the Great Escaper.

The details of his various escapes give an intriguing insight to life in the prison before and after the Second World War. It took more than gymnastic skill to get out of Peterhead. In the early ’30s one prisoner had, as recounted earlier, made an escape from a quarry work party and was shot by a guard as he tried to run for freedom, but Johnny managed to get out from inside as it were. It was a remarkable feat. To make it at all possible you have to consider the construction of the prison. The walls were made from thick stone blocks that inevitably had little ledges, handholds and footholds that could assist a climber. You only have to look at the many mountaineering books with photographs of sheer rock faces worldwide that have been conquered by climbers to see that some of them look impossible to scale, but it can be done. These days most prison walls are smooth, any possible holds cemented over and the wall topped with barbed wire. And nowadays the weak point in holding prisoners is the travelling to and from courts and jails by car and van, but the old walls of Peterhead, first erected in the 1880s, could be climbed by a brave expert – and in Johnny’s first escape that is what many think happened.

The newspaper reports of the time are short on detail but they do point out that Ramensky was a man of great physical strength and cunning. The anger generated by the refusal of the authorities to allow him to attend the funeral of his wife back in Glasgow had also given him a steely determination. The timing of the escape was not wisely chosen, however, as November in North-East Scotland is a time of bitter cold, strong winds off the North Sea and long periods of rain, sleet and snow. But to Ramensky the weather was not a factor – he simply wanted to get out at any time in any conditions. He would show the authorities what he was like. He was dressed in a prison suit of brown moleskin with long trousers and a battledress-style jacket. Instead of the good pair of boots he would have needed outside in the frequent snowstorms, he wore light black shoes. The escape was made between six and seven in the morning when the place was busy with the hustle of serving breakfast to hundreds of cons. A fellow prisoner told me that in the enquiry into how he had got out it was postulated that he had simply hurled himself up the outside prison wall as far as he could go and hung silently there by his hands for a half hour or so, unseen by any passing warders, before finally clambering further up the rough wall and over the top. No ladders or grappling ropes were found anywhere near the scene. It was an astonishing demonstration of raw climbing skill and determination – though it should be pointed out that some of the warders were incredulous that he could have escaped that way, and you will still get some who tell you that in his escapes he hid in the empty sacks of a coal lorry rather than climb the walls in what was to become a legendary way.

However, what happened next was an early example of what was to happen during later escapes. Johnny may have put a great deal of planning into his actual breakouts but little on what to do once he was on the outside. This first escape sparked a massive manhunt. Farms were searched by the cops who were out in force, road junctions watched and hundreds of folk going about their business were quizzed. He managed to reach Ellon, where he encountered a problem. The bridge there, over the river Ythan, was blocked at both ends and was under scrutiny by a posse of lawmen. There seemed no way to get to the other side unseen, but the determined Ramensky made it! He crawled under the bridge and swung his way, undetected and Tarzan-like, on the metal and stone framework to the other side. Once over the river he found a hiding place in a garage loft to wait for the cold darkness to descend. After a few hours he was on the move and he swam and stumbled across the near-frozen waters of a tributary of the Ythan, heading for another village, but he was finally spotted in a field near Foveran.

The police gave chase across open ground. There was only one ending to this and after almost two days without food the quarry was weakened and stricken. He had an iron bar in his hand but surrendered without violence, and it was said that he even joked with his pursuers. It all added to the legend of Gentle Johnny. By now you suspect that a prison meal, however basic, and a cell with a blanket looked more attractive than another night in the dark and cold.

The determination behind his next escape was likewise fuelled by a feeling that he was hard done to by society in general. It came in 1952 when he was back in Peterhead. He had on ending his previous Peterhead sentence in 1943 volunteered to join the army and play a role in the defeat of fascism. There is a myth that he was freed from prison early on condition that he helped the war effort with his safe-blowing expertise. Not so. Documents held in the National Archives show clearly that he served his sentence and then joined up. Aware of his skills, the authorities were quick to recognise his use to the commandos as a saboteur as well as a safecracker. So he joined up and did training in the hills of Lochaber and won himself the right to wear the famed Green Beret.

His ability to be of help to the war effort should not be underestimated. For a period after training he toured army establishments, lecturing on how to break into highly-guarded establishments and how to open safes that contained secret plans and other useful information. It is somewhat ironic that a man who forswore violence, despite a lifetime of crime, was trained by the army in the black arts of combat, armed and unarmed. How to kill silently was a vital part of the good commando’s armoury.

The great commander Lucky Laycock – tasked by Churchill to create the commandos – admired his skills and bravery and was responsible for recruiting him. After training Ramensky was parachuted behind enemy lines to fight with Italian partisans and to break into safes belonging to Rommel and Goering. On demob he got a warm letter from Laycock thanking him for his war efforts. These two were, as they say, unlikely bedfellows but there seems to have been a real sense of friendship between them. This friendship was typical Ramensky, for he also became close to the Peterhead governor J. I. Buchan despite being a total “pest” to the prison service with his constant letters of complaints and his penchant for going over the heads of his Peterhead jailors to politicians and to those at the top of the prison service in Edinburgh. Another friend who got postcards from him during the war was the aforementioned top Aberdeen cop John Westland, who had, as we saw, on occasion helped put him behind bars!

A former Aberdeen journalist, Harvey Grainger, remembers his father, who also worked for the
Press and Journal
in the 1930s, telling him how Ramensky used to return from an escape or one of his adventures in the commandos with a wee present or two for friends in the police. There was some sort of psychological bonding going on. Jim Ironside, a former officer in Peterhead, told me that Ramensky even on occasion sent a Christmas card to “The staff, HP Prison Peterhead.” Maybe that is not so surprising, as Johnny often referred to various prisons as “my second home.” But it was pretty surprising – not many old lags keep their jailors on their Christmas card list!

But the real tragedy of Ramensky is that with the war over he could not settle down on the right side of the law despite offers of help from prison governors, local businessmen and even some top cops who had felt his collar in the years leading up to the war. He needed the excitement of running darkened rooftops seeking ready cash. But it was that thrill that he seemed to need most. His ill-gotten gains usually went quickly on gambling. But there was always another safe to open in search of more readies to blow at the bookies or the dog tracks of Glasgow. So here he was again back in Peterhead after being nabbed blowing a safe in Cardonald, Glasgow.

His second escape, in August 1952, was not quite the mystery of the first back in the ’30s. This time he had a semi-trusted job in the prison hospital and somehow or other got out of his cell on to the roof of the prison (roofs seemed to have had an attraction for him, inside or out of jail) and then to the yard below before using his climbing skills to get outside undetected. It was thought that his skill with locks had allowed him to open his cell door. He had also cunningly laid a dummy in his bed and that fooled the staff long enough to delay the alarm being called. The hunt for him was led by Fred Shepard of the North-East counties force but the fame of the fugitive, by now burnished by the extensive newspaper stories of his war service, was such that all police forces in Scotland were alerted to the fact that he was on the run. The cops knew a man of his initiative was as likely to turn up in Orkney or Dumfries as Aberdeen. But there was no need for a countrywide manhunt – he was picked up not all that far from the prison at Balmedie after forty-seven hours of freedom.

In January 1958 he wrote himself into the record books with a third escape. But this time he took the easy way in that he had the help of a ladder to scale the walls. He was well used by now to being a sort of human fox in a chase, but this time it was a bit different – dogs as well as men were after him. A local couple had an interest in bloodhounds and a few good specimens at the ready. They offered their animals to help find Johnny, the first time Scottish police had used such dogs, which are normally associated with sniffing out escapers from jails in the American Deep South. For the police and prison authorities to use such methods in the hunt for an escaper was certainly unusual. Ramensky was making police and prison authorities look foolish, if not incompetent, with the regularity of his escapes, and so anything was worth a try.

It has to be said a charge of incompetence against the authorities may well stand up in this case. It is not a good idea to leave ladders around a prison. Again it was early morning with the staff and prisoners preoccupied with breakfast when he spotted a chance. With no one around he managed to climb a thin gas pipe he had noticed that disappeared upwards near a skylight. He was now three storeys up in a bitter cold dawn but getting to ground level outside the walls of the building was not the same challenge as getting into the loft in the first place. Dropping down a rone pipe was easier than climbing the gas pipe.

On the ground a certain lack of security was demonstrated by the fact that he could, undetected, pick the lock of a shed which contained a ladder. It was not a long one but tall enough to get him within grasping distance of the top of the eighteen-feet high wall. It was a classic spur-of-the-moment escape, not something that had been planned for weeks or months. Over the wall Johnny’s only thought was to put distance between himself and the prison, and again there was no master plan, no getaway car with a bunch of pals waiting for him.

But as he made his careful way from the vicinity of the prison searching for every spot of cover he could find, the northern morning was lightening and four maltmen from a nearby distillery saw him fleeing and raised the alarm. But to use the patois of the North-East, the distillery men told the cops that the prisoner had “jouket” them and disappeared over a dry stone wall. However, the area where he had been spotted was ideal for the bloodhounds to pick up his scent and they duly did so. But Johnny had headed off to cross the main road and when the dogs got there they became confused by all the other smells around – petrol from cars, pedestrian scents and the messy evidence of farm animals who had passed this way. The dogs lost the trail. What had seemed a good idea at the time was not, in practice, working. However, the daughter of the grieve at Dales Home Farm, less than a mile from the jail, had noticed a man she did not know in the area, though she did not mention it to her mother till some time later. Little Gladys Krowcyk, only eight, was unaware of the manhunt. The usual massive search of barns and sheds, any possible hiding place, went on – it was becoming something of a routine!