It was on our fourth day in Pretoria Prison that we decided to tell the comrades about the money we’d brought in. Before our arrival we’d decided to wait until we had ‘sussed’ everyone out before revealing our secret: we did not want to have someone go straight to the authorities with the information. But it was soon obvious to us that the comrades were not sell-outs. They conducted themselves with integrity, seemed to be united and there were no obvious antagonisms. As Denis appeared to be the most senior of the prisoners we decided to tell him first. He would be able to advise us when or whether the others should be told and how and where to hide it. To avoid losing all our cash if it went wrong, we decided that Stephen should reveal his stash first; if it worked out OK then I would reveal mine later.
During the pre-breakfast walk up and down the tennis court Stephen broke his news to Denis.
Predictably Denis was amazed and excited; probably a bit suspicious too. But that was to be expected for it must have seemed a bit odd to an old lag to have a four-day-old prisoner come sidling up to him and claim to have a couple of hundred Rand stashed away in his guts. After Denis had recovered his composure, Stephen asked him for advice on how to hide the money.
Probably thinking it the best thing to test Stephen’s credentials, Denis offered to take the money and hide it himself. After all, if Stephen had been given the money to trap Denis, it would have been a bit difficult for the authorities to claim that he’d been sitting with it for the previous 15 years.
Denis took the money and concealed it inside a spare tube of toothpaste he had in his cell. To us this seemed a bit dicey but he assured Stephen that as far as he could remember his toothpaste had never been violated. Denis also spread the news among the other comrades.
A few days later, after deciding with Stephen that it was safe to do so, I too approached Denis.
We were walking in the yard and when I revealed my secret he came to an abrupt halt and stared at me in astonishment. What are these new guys up to, he must have been thinking. Money in prison, as he knew full well, is used for three things only: bribery, smuggling and escaping.
Three hundred and sixty Rand would have seemed a lot to any prisoner at that time, but to Denis it must have sounded even more as he had never had a chance to come to terms with current notions of inflation. In his amazement at the revelation he could do no more than advise me to do the same with my money as he had done with Stephen’s. The toothpaste tubes turned out to be good hiding places: as long as the money was kept in them it was never discovered.
In the course of our first days Stephen and I discussed with each of the others the question of escaping. This did not raise their suspicions as escaping is the most natural thing for prisoners to talk about, especially new prisoners. All the comrades said that they had of course thought about escaping, but none of them came up with any concrete or viable ideas of how they thought it could be done. This amazed and disappointed us as we had expected them to have some pretty thoroughly worked out plans, or at least some good ideas, as some of them had been in captivity for a long time. It made us think that perhaps we had been naive in imagining that we would be
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able to escape from one of South Africa’s most secure prisons. Perhaps we really would have to serve our full terms. The thought was demoralising in the extreme.
Denis in particular had given the question a lot of thought and had attempted an escape while in detention just before he was sentenced. The only time a collective escape had seriously been considered, many years earlier when the comrades were at Pretoria Local, the first prison in which they were kept, it had been betrayed by one of the prisoners, Raymond Thoms. Thoms was the only white political prisoner who was thoroughly broken by the prison experience. He went a bit mad and started narking on the others, who naturally sent him to Coventry. He committed suicide some time after his release.
Denis himself considered the chances of getting out of the prison to be fairly good but did not hold out much to getting away from the prison, off the terrain and out of the country without outside assistance. Naturally, any thinking he had given the problem involved making an exit via the prison yard, but he could only offer suggestions, not a thoroughly worked out plan. He, quite understandably, appeared to accept that the security situation around the prison might be thoroughly sewn up.
I approached Alex separately because he appeared to be a little aloof from the others.
Surprisingly he was not aware that we had brought money in with us. I told him of the money, how we’d brought it in and what we’d done with it, but did not say that our intention was to use it for an escape. Later that same day he came back to me and said that if any escape plans were being hatched he would definitely like to be one of the chickens.
His response singled him out from the others, none of whom drew the conclusion that we had brought the money in for the specific purpose of escaping. I asked Alex if he had any bright ideas how an escape might be pulled off, but he didn’t have any. He did point out, however, that whatever plans were contemplated they would all involve the making of keys. How we could make these he didn’t know as there were no obviously suitable materials around out of which to make them. I said to him that I had been thinking of making a key out of wood but he rudely rejected this idea. The giant prison locks, he insisted, would require keys of a much more robust material to turn them. I believed otherwise.
In our first weeks at Pretoria Steve and I carefully studied the layout of the prison to see if there were any obvious cracks in the prison’s security. From our initial observations all escape routes had their origin in the prison yard. It was reasonable to think this, for once you were in the yard the only barrier between you and freedom was the yard wall. Any other starting point meant that you were placing more barriers in front of yourself, not fewer. You could take your cell as the point of departure but once out of it you had to get out of the prison building, and that meant into the yard. There were only three entrances out of the prison building and two of these led directly into the yard. The third, the front door leading into the street, could not even be considered. The only way to get to it was by passing clean through the administrative section and opening a great many doors and gates on the way.
How to get out of the prison yard was another question. The yard gate, although it led out of our prison, opened into prison property next door – into the site of the old Pretoria Local which was about to be knocked down. This was not much good, but as the demolition progressed we thought it might begin to offer some prospects. Otherwise it might be possible somehow to get over or under the yard wall into the street. There had to be some way. We would eventually discover it – it would just take time.
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The security arrangements that had been installed indicated that the prison authorities also recognised that if an escape was to be attempted it would have to start from or go through the yard. There were searchlights that lit it at night like a football stadium, and after lockup a large, ferocious guard-dog was placed in it. The dogs were of the sort that would not have hesitated in tearing a loose prisoner apart. The pos with its armed guard eliminated the possibility of prisoners making a dash for freedom during the day.
However, we did notice a few cracks in the security: the dog was never placed in the yard exactly at lockup (4.30 p.m.) and sometimes up to an hour later; between lockup and 10 p.m.
there was no warder on the pos. This meant that if we could get out of our cells shortly after lockup and into the yard before the dog arrived it might be possible to scale a wall to get into the street. The prospects did not look brilliant but there was some hope. One thing was clear: we could not rely solely on cracks in the security arrangements to get out – we had to develop our own capabilities to exploit the weaknesses.
To be able to get into the yard after lockup, or to be able to do anything at all for that matter, we would need keys. But how could we make them? How would we get the measurements?
Between us we knew very little about how locks worked. I had only a vague idea, having once picked the back door of my parents’ home with a piece of bent wire. The giant prison locks looked more formidable than anything we’d experienced in civilian life. Still, we couldn’t allow ourselves to be intimidated by their size. Inside they were probably the same as any ordinary lock.
For many nights I sat on my bed and stared at the lock on my grille. It was completely accessible, just bolted to the frame. You could even see right through the keyhole and get your hand around to the other side of it because there was a fair space between the grille and the outer door. I had to make a key for it, but I didn’t know where to start. Since the warders never left their keys lying about for us to take measurements or impressions so there was no alternative but to work it out for myself.
I dared not tell anyone apart from Stephen that I was planning to make a key, for we had no idea what sort of response we would have received from the comrades had the subject been mooted first. We knew that it would be a different matter to announce that we’d made a key that worked.
After two weeks I decided to stop staring at my lock and to get down to the business of finding out its secrets. I lit a match to see what was inside it, but all I could see were the scrape marks against the inner faces where the key had turned. Then it occurred to me that simply by measuring parts of the lock I would be able to work out some of the dimensions of the key. By measuring with a ruler the diameter of the round part of the keyhole, I would get the diameter of the key shaft. The width of the head, or the ‘bit’ in locksmith’s lingo, and the shape of the ward cutaways in the side of the bit, I could establish by pushing a piece of paper through the keyhole and pressing it with a knife against the interior of the lock. The measurements I could then take directly from the impression on the paper.
The final and most crucial measurements were the heights and relative heights of the ‘cuts’ in the bit. These, I knew, were the working part of the key as they lifted the levers inside the lock to the correct heights so that the bolt could slide in and out. I’d noticed that there were five cuts on the warders’ keys, but as the outer two were always equal in height and the inner two always equal in depth there were in fact only three measurements I had to know.
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To find the height of the two outer cuts was the easiest: I could simply measure the distance between the outer edge of the shaft hole to the outer radius of the scrape marks inside the lock.
Once I knew this, finding the depths of the inner three cuts was made easier because I would only have to know their depths relative to the height of the outer two. Fortunately, on this first key the cuts were all of the same depth relative to each other. In other words, the middle cut was as deep relative to the inner two as these were to the outer two, the key being symmetrical so that it could be used from either side of the door.
The only way to establish the actual depths of the three inner cuts was by staring at the warders’ keys and making an estimate based on eye judgement. This might sound fantastic but there simply was no other way short of waiting, probably forever, for an opportunity to physically measure them when a warder inadvertently left his bunch of keys lying about. At every opportunity I would stare at the warders’ keys, and there were plenty of these as they derived a sense of power by displaying and jingling them in front of us.
I estimated the cuts to be 2mm deep and then drew a life-size diagram of the key on a piece of card. I cut it out and tried the shape in the lock. Of course it did not turn the bolt but it did not jam in the keyway, indicating that at least some of the dimensions were correct.
The key looked good on paper but how to turn it into a real, working key was altogether another matter.
In the absence of any other suitable materials I decided to try making the key out of wood. I searched the workshop for some suitably hard wood and found a number of offcuts from an earlier job carried out by the comrades. Between Stephen and me, we roughly cut out the pieces for the key from the bits of wood I’d found. There were three pieces: the shaft, the bit and the handle.
Cutting the pieces in the workshop did not arouse suspicion, as they bore no resemblance to the parts of a key. All the comrades made odds and ends for themselves and as new prisoners we had many things to make, such as stands for our shaving mirrors, boxes for our pens and hangers for our clothes.
The next step was to assemble the pieces and turn it into a key. This could obviously not be done in the workshop so we had to figure out a safe way of getting the pieces and the necessary tools up to my cell. We’d noticed that the other comrades smuggled things in the bottom of their thermos flasks, which we were allowed to take up to our cells at night with tea, coffee or soup. This seemed a good way; so one afternoon I hid a small triangular file, some
Stages of construction of wooden keys
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wood-glue and the pieces of key in the storeroom next to the workshop. At suppertime I secreted them in the bottom of my flask and at lockup took them up to my cell.
As soon as the day-warders had knocked of duty I set to work. I first rounded one end of the shaft so that it would fit into the keyhole. Then I filed a rebate in the bit and glued it into the slit in the end of the shaft I’d just rounded; into the slit at the other end I glued the handle. Finally I filed the ward cutaways into the side of the bit and the cuts into the top according to the dimensions I’d worked out.
Then I tried it out. To my absolute amazement it worked the first time. Not only did it work, it turned with such ease that I thought it had broken inside the lock. I got such a fright that I withdrew it immediately and hid it among my clothes in the cupboard. I sat on the edge of my bed with my heart pounding and my hands trembling. Soon there will be a troupe of warders marching up to my cell to drag me off for attempting to escape, I thought. I started imagining TV cameras peering down at me through tiny holes in the ceiling, hidden microphones that had heard the lock turning and secret alarms signalling the lock had been tampered with. Such are the effects of a ‘guilty conscience’.
After I’d calmed down a peculiar sense of defiance and achievement began to creep over me. It was a feeling we were all to experience many times later on, a feeling that is difficult to describe but one that anyone who has cocked a snook at authority will know.
I retrieved the key from its hiding place and tried it again. True enough it really had worked.
As the key had to be turned two full revolutions for it to be properly unlocked, I slowly turned it round once and then half the second turn. I dared not turn the bolt all the way in and swing the grille open as I feared that for some reason it might not relock. If the lock was found to be only half-locked this could be blamed on a careless warder, but there would be no way of explaining a fully open door with its bolt right in.
The next morning I took the key and file downstairs in the same way as I had brought them up.
I hid the key behind a bookshelf in the storeroom and later returned the file to the workshop. In the workshop I broke the good news to Stephen, which he greeted with such excitement that the others demanded to know what we were so happy about. But we had agreed not to tell anyone until key number two had been made – the key for the outer cell door. We thought that premature announcement might lead to us being regarded as provocateurs.
The success of the first key proved that it was possible to make keys out of wood. The reason why we had at first thought that wood might not be suitable was because whenever a warder opened a lock it was done with such vigour that we were led to believe that the lock mechanism offered a lot of resistance to turning. The opposite in fact was the truth. The vigorous turning was no more than part of the warders’ need to demonstrate their power over us. Our keys could have been made of metal, and later were as we perfected our methods, but wood had certain distinct advantages: it was readily available in the workshop; the pieces of the keys could be roughly shaped more or less openly – the warders would never have imagined that a key could be made of wood and if they had spotted one of us cutting a piece of wood it could easily have been explained away as something else; a wooden key operated relatively silently; it did not leave scrape marks inside the lock; it was easily disposable; the final shaping and measuring could be done in the cell after lockup.
Now that we had found a material out of which to make keys and had developed a method of constructing them we could proceed with the next ones until we had all we needed to get ourselves into the yard and out of it. It was not quite as simple as we had at first thought because