It is nearly 60 years since, as the Guardian reported at the time: “The 30-year prison sentence which Ronald Arthur Biggs, one of the Great Train Robbers, began 15 months ago was abruptly placed in suspense yesterday afternoon when he was allowed out to exercise in the yard of Wandsworth prison, London. With three other prisoners he disappeared over the 20ft-high wall while his guards, obstructed by men still on exercise, watched helplessly.”
The reporter Tony Geraghty added that, like the train robbery itself, “this operation was characterised by panache and flamboyance”.
While reports this week are less likely to suggest that “panache and flamboyance” were involved in the flight of Daniel Khalife from the same institution, it will certainly go down as a remarkable prison escape.
Biggs managed to stay on the run for 35 years before returning to London from his hideaway in Brazil to serve out the remains of his sentence and dying in 2013.
But incidentally, it was in Wandsworth prison – “the hate factory”, as it was always known to inmates – where Biggs first met his fellow train robber Bruce Reynolds, back in the 1950s.
Remarkably, the pair helped a fellow prisoner, Ted Blair, escape in exactly the same way as Khalife this week.
In those days one prison job was chopping up kindling wood for government offices and packing them into delivery vans.
As Reynolds described it in his memoir, The Autobiography of a Thief, Blair “clung to the underparts of the van and dropped off directly outside the Home Office. It was a nice touch.
“Of course he was nicked within a few days, lying asleep at his home. In spite of the belting he received on his return to Wandsworth, he had done his thing and beaten the system. It was a victory for all of us.”
Reynolds’ son, Nick, has just authored an audiobook, Fugitive! On the Run With Britain’s Most Wanted, which recounts his and others’ experiences of a life in hiding, which he says is, in the end, the real test of escaping.
He described the latest episode as “audacious, given the nature of the charges faced” but the question, he said, was how long Khalife could stay at large.
Probably the most prolific British escaper was Walter “Angel Face” Probyn, who got out of no fewer than 16 different penal institutions in the 1950s and 1960s, winning himself the nickname “the Hoxton Houdini”.
He once told me: “You don’t need a lot of patience to plan an escape, because you’ve got nothing else to do. It’s a labour of love, something you really enjoy doing. It’s like a hobby.”
With the late armed robber John McVicar, he escaped from Durham prison, as featured in the 1980 film McVicar.
Why are such escapes so rare? Paul Buck, in his book, The E… List: Notorious Prison Escapes, quoted Alfie Hinds, who escaped from three high-security prisons in the 1950s: “The vast majority of prisoners are resigned, if not content, to do their bird. Some will escape if the chance is handed to them on a plate but all they want is a brief taste of freedom; for instance, the chance to spend a few days with their wife or girlfriend.”
Some, like Probyn, did it for the sheer hell if it.
The prewar safe-cracker Ruby Sparks, when he escaped from Strangeways, even left a poem in his cell: “The cage is empty / The bird has flown / I’ve gone to a place / Where I’m better known.”
One momentous escape was that of George Blake, who was serving 42 years for spying for the Soviet Union, but who made it out of Wormwood Scrubs in 1966.
He was helped by two peace activists, Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, who believed his 42-year sentence was excessive. Blake made it all the way to Moscow, where he died in 2020. Randle and Pottle were acquitted of aiding the escape by an Old Bailey jury in 1991.
While most escapes tend to be “up or under” – up over the wall or under a vehicle – there was a memorable aerial escape in 1987. John Kendall and Sydney Draper fled Gartree prison in a hijacked helicopter. Kendall was caught 10 days later but Draper stayed on the run for more than a year.
Over the years all escapes have become much rarer. In 2012, John Massey, a sprightly 64-year-old, understandably attracted a lot of attention by climbing over the wall of Pentonville prison because he wanted to visit his ailing mother. He was recaptured within two days.
Scotland has its own tales of memorable breakouts. Johnny Ramensky, a safe blower who was released from prison during the second world war to use his skills against the Nazis, was the first man to escape from Peterhead prison, an event recalled by the singer Josh MacRae in the Roddy McMillan song Let Ramensky Go, which noted that the prison was a fortress and its walls were “thick and stout … But it couldnae hold wee Johnny when he felt like walking out”.
The latest escape seems unlikely to be recalled in a folk song.
Duncan Campbell is a freelance writer who worked for the Guardian as crime correspondent and Los Angeles correspondent. He is the author of If It Bleeds (2009), The Paradise Trail (2008), The Underworld and That Was Business, This Is Personal
• This article was amended on 11 September 2023. An earlier version misspelled Mike Randle’s surname as “Randall”.
