Close to midnight on Sunday, August 10, 1952, Johnny Ramensky sprang into action within his Peterhead prison cell.
As if in a classic movie scene, he cunningly laid a dummy in his bed to fool his wardens before managing to escape the confines of his cell.
The exact method of escape is still not known to this day, though it’s strongly suspected his talent for lock-picking provided the means to his freedom.
Once free, Johnny crept his way to the prison roof and then dropped to the yard below. His athleticism and talent for climbing put him in good stead as he sprinted across the yard, scaled the 18ft perimeter wall of the prison and escaped into the night.
It would be a full 47 hours before Johnny would be caught by the police. He evaded detection by immediately heading south on a bicycle, clearing the Ythan bridge before daybreak. From there, he went to ground in a cornfield until night fell the following day – his military training kicking in, as he fed on fruit and food scraps to sustain his strength.
But for the infamous ‘Gentle Johnny Ramensky’, who had made a strikingly similar escape 18 years previously, it wasn’t long before he was recognised by two blacksmiths from Menie Smithy who promptly alerted Constable Lamb of the Balmedie police station.
What followed was a frantic pursuit on foot across the fields and towards the coast. But alas, for Johnny, the ground softened beneath his feet, and he quickly became stuck in a bog.
“Well, well,” he said in a resigned manner, as quoted in the Press and Journal on the Wednesday, “Ah’m tae’en at the same place as last time.”
This was the second of five prison breaks Johnny Ramensky made during his near half-century behind bars. As with his other escapes, he took his recapture in good humour and without resistance – his intelligence and non-violent nature giving rise to his “Gentle” moniker.
Combined with his firm patriotism and heroic deeds fighting the Nazis alongside the Italian partisans during World War II, he was held in high regard within the hearts of the north-east’s people, in spite of his penchant for criminal acts.
“You can’t help but admire the man,” says Robert Jeffrey, author of the newly-published book: Peterhead – The Inside Story of Scotland’s Toughest Prison.
“Johnny wasn’t run of the mill. Whenever he made court appearances in Aberdeen, people would gather outside and shout ‘Good Old Johnny’.”
HE WASN’T A GANGSTER
Johnny was born Yonus Ramanauckus in April 1905 at Glenboig, a mining village in North Lanarkshire. His upbringing was not an easy one. The son of Lithuanian migrants, he and his fellow eastern Europeans were not made particularly welcome by the Scottish mining community, who viewed them as strike breakers.
With the early death of his father, Johnny (then eight) and his mother soon moved to Glasgow’s Gorbals, and it wasn’t long before he began to fall in with the wrong crowd.
By his early teenage years, Johnny began committing minor offences, which led to serious burglaries and then short stints in HM Prison Barlinnie, north of Glasgow, and Saughton prison to the west of Edinburgh.
His talents lay in safe-cracking, and he operated as a freelance specialist for hire within Glasgow’s gangland.
As was to become his chiefly-known characteristic, he was never violent, even though many of his contemporaries on the ‘crooked path’ were.
He was even known to return rent and pension books to their owners via post when he discovered them among the spoils of a burglary.
“The thing about Johnny was, he wasn’t a gangster,” says Robert, who has written extensively about the gentle-hearted crook.
“He just worked for the gangs. And his whole character, even if you disregard his heroism in the war, was that he was not out of the mould of a Glasgow prisoner. And this really came through in the concern he had for the health of his fellow inmates.”
JAILHOUSE LAWYER
While Johnny spent most of his life behind bars, and was consequently renowned across the country as a nuisance for his jailers, he struck up strong relationships with his prison wardens and governors.
In 1930, for example, he laid high praise at the feet of the Barlinnie prison medic for making the quick decision to hospitalise Johnny when he took seriously ill with pneumonia.
However, this was a kindness which was not often afforded prisoners during his early years in Peterhead prison.
After a particularly large spate of safebreaking in Aberdeen in the early 1930s, he was imprisoned in Peterhead for more than 10 years, leaving behind his first wife in Glasgow.
“Peterhead has been through several eras,” explains Robert.
“A novelist couldn’t have invented a more basic prison, particularly in the years running up to the First World War. But even in the 1930s, where Ramensky was first imprisoned, the regime was very hard and Johnny had many legitimate complaints. He felt very strongly that the prisoners were not getting proper medical treatment.”
This grievance, along with the poor food provision for inmates, led to his de facto career as a ‘jailhouse lawyer’ and champion for his fellow prisoners.
While he had left school aged 14, he had a good education and was able to write very well. And so Johnny, in his capacity as Prisoner 3747, regularly wrote to his governors and to the Scottish Home Department, making erudite pleas for better treatment.
His anger slowly began to bubble to the surface as his own mistreatment at the hands of his captors grew, and also when a fellow prisoner died, having not been hospitalised quickly enough.
But it was in November 1934, following the arrival of news that his first wife had died, and the consequent refusal by the authorities to let him attend the funeral, that Johnny made his first escape.
During breakfast, he managed to break free of the compound, sparking a large-scale manhunt, and he was finally discovered in the same fields near Foveran 29 hours later.
His punishment at Peterhead prison was doubled following his first prison break and he became, in his own words in a letter to the Scottish Home Department “the victim of petty tyranny and vindictiveness on the part of the governor” who refused to let him progress beyond his duties at the local quarry where inmates were part of the convict labour scheme.
But thankfully, by the time he ended his sentence in 1943, Johnny had built a strong relationship with his latest governor, Captain J. I. Buchan, who played a major role in him being accepted into General Lucky Laycock’s commandos.
His skills at safe-cracking and considerable abilities as an escapologist proved of great use to the Army, and after teaching his skills to his fellow soldiers, Johnny was deployed to the front line of the war effort in Italy.
WAR HERO
“Johnny was very happy when he was in the commandos because he was given free range to use the skill he had gained as a saboteur. But he was doing it on behalf of the law. And above all he was a very proud Scot,” says Robert.
Stories of the ‘reformed criminal’s’ heroic service to the war effort soon made it back to Scotland, and built firm foundations for his public adulation – adulation which couldn’t be shaken even when his feet found their way back to the ‘crooked path’ not long after he returned to civilian life.
By the early 1950s, he was back in Peterhead prison where he successfully performed a further four prison breaks before his sentence finished in the 1960s.
He was understandably labelled an extreme nuisance and a flight risk, though his good humour and charm meant he continued to form good relationships with his captors.
His most successful and final escape came in December 1958, where he went missing for nine days. But again, he didn’t escape far, begging the question: Why did he bother escaping all those times if he never got far?
The answer to that question, Robert theorises, links back to the life-long chip Johnny had on his shoulder for being treated as an outcast as an eastern European.
Early in his prison career, while at Barlinnie, he spontaneously climbed out of the exercise yard and on to the roof, where he proceeded to lark about and throw slates at the warders. But he made no attempt to escape beyond the compound of the prison.
When he finally came down, he told the warders that he was drawing attention to himself to show that he wasn’t a “Pole” – the slang word that was often used against eastern Europeans at the time of his youth.
“My theory is, that the constant need to escape was underlined by this,” says Robert.
“It was all to prove the point that he could get out and that he was a man of substance – that he had the brains, skill and physical agility to defeat the people who were holding him in prison. That’s what drove him.”
Gentle Johnny Ramensky died age 67 in prison in November 1972 – though in Perth, not Peterhead.
His second wife, Lily, tried to keep him on the straight and narrow, but his criminal tendencies and excessive gambling proved too engrained in the man who had spent the greater part of his life either committing crimes, or behind bars.
“In the end Lily had to shrug her shoulders,” Robert explains. “She said to her friends, ‘he’s gone to his real home’. Because he became institutionalised, there’s no doubt about that. He was such a repeat offender that even at his great age when he was sent to Perth he was to be regarded as high risk of escape.”
A TRUE CRIMINAL LEGEND
With Aberdeen and Peterhead jails set to be amalgamated into the new HMP Grampian in March, and the old prison site to be demolished soon after, the stories of infamous inmates from the past are starting to disappear.
Public memory of the high adventures of Johnny Ramensky is drifting, which has driven Robert to tell his story, and those of the many notorious criminals who were incarcerated within the walls of the prison.
He fondly describes Johnny as a remarkable man, who was held in high regard by his captors and the general public. A true criminal legend with a good heart, who accepted his meagre lot in life.
Johnny’s character, Robert feels, is aptly summed up in the poignant note written by the man himself in 1951, a letter which is now held within the Scottish National Archives:
“Each man has an ambition and I have fulfilled mine long ago,” Johnny wrote.
“I cherish my career as a safe-blower. In childhood days my feet were planted on the crooked path and took firm root. To each one of us is allotted a niche and I have found mine. Strangely enough, I am happy. For me the die is cast and there is no turning back.”
Robert Jeffrey will be holding a book signing at Waterstone’s, Union Bridge, Aberdeen on Saturday, November 30, at 1.30pm.