Early in 1961, an MI6 officer, George Blake, came under suspicion for spying for the Soviet Union. He was arrested, tried in a closed court at the Old Bailey and sentenced to five terms of imprisonment for 14 years – the maximum for the offences. To some surprise, the judge ordered three of the offences to be punished consecutively, sending Blake to jail for 42 years, the longest term given to anyone in Britain at the time for a non-life sentence.
Five years later, Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London and managed to get to East Germany and then to Moscow, where he lived until his death at the age of 98 last year. More than two decades after his escape, it emerged that the plot had been very much an amateur endeavour, instigated by Sean Bourke, an Irish prisoner whom Blake met in The Scrubs. Bourke had enlisted the help of two peace campaigners, Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, who were also serving time in the prison.
The escape became a famous case and while Bourke could not be extradited from Ireland for his role in it, both Randle and Pottle were arrested and tried at the Old Bailey in 1991. Neither claimed any support for the Soviet Union, indeed one of Randle’s earliest nonviolent actions was an attempt to cross the Austrian border to Hungary in 1956 to support passive resistance by Hungarians to the Soviet occupation. Rather, both Randle and Pottle’s concern was with what they felt strongly was the inhumane treatment of Blake by the British legal system. Theirs was a position argued effectively in court and the jury found them not guilty, the decision immediately being labelled that of a ‘perverse jury’.
