Prison escaper George Wilder being handcuffed in a police van. Photo / Supplied
Prison escaper George Wilder being handcuffed in a police van. Photo / Supplied
Mount Eden Prison has housed some of our nation's most renowned criminals, including serial escapee George Wilder.
The gloomy Victorian structure has accommodated conscientious objectors and political prisoners, including Rua Kenana, Tim Shadbolt and briefly, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, the French agents responsible for blowing up the Rainbow Warrior.
Now, a new book by historian Mark Derby, goes inside the prison walls to share its secrets. "Disorderly" women, debtors, drunkards, the mentally ill, petty thieves (some children) and hardened criminals were once thrown in together in what was an all-purpose lockup.
There have been daring escapes, riots, hunger strikes, floggings and suicides. Hangings, some of them botched, took place in the prison yard up until 1957. Many prisoners are buried there. The bodies of five Māori men, hung in May 1866 and buried in the exercise yard, were exhumed and reclaimed by their elders in 1989.
It's often been a political and social hot potato and the problems of Mount Eden also drove prison reform. In this extract from his book "Rock College", Derby tells of the prison's most notable escapes.
Imaginative and well-organised inmates upheld Mount Eden's tradition of escapes, notably in February 1961 when Trevor Nash, halfway through a seven-year sentence for a huge payroll robbery, simply strolled out of the engineering workshop where he was working.
The workshop stood outside the perimeter wall but was surrounded by a three-metre barbed-wire fence — in which a hole had been conveniently cut. That night Nash became the first prison escaper to have his likeness shown to the nation on their black-and-white TV screens; previous escapers had been seen by the public only through the meatsafe grille of fuzzy newspaper photographs. Despite this unprecedented level of exposure, the nerveless safe-cracker remained at large for a record five months, longer than any other maximum-security fugitive before him.
A notice for escaped prisoner Trevor Nash. Photo / Herald Archive
He was recaptured in Melbourne in July, smartly dressed and with his hair dyed but still apparently recognisable to a passing off-duty detective.
The following year, quarrying activities ceased permanently, bringing an end to more than a century of rock-breaking at the prison. The impetus for this decision seems to have been a misjudged explosion that sent a rock through the window of an adjacent Auckland Grammar School building, but prison staff were relieved that a weak link in the institution's security system had at last been eliminated.
Handcuffed to Detective Sgt T W Irving, Nash is taken into the Auckland Central police station on his return from Australia. Photo / Herald Archive
The quarry had given intending escapers a route outside the perimeter wall, as well as opportunities to acquire gelignite and detonators for more spectacular breakouts. In the final months before the quarry was shut down, Jim Shepherd - the banker for Australasia's most notorious drug cartel, the Mr Asia syndicate - was back inside Mount Eden and had gained a reputation as a skilled safe-blower.
Two other inmates showed him blasting materials they had acquired, and asked for instruction in using them: "I primed the gelignite for the sticks, and told them how long they'd got before the explosive went off. That'll never happen again. Things were pretty hectic back in those days."
Once its quarrying operations came to an end, Mount Eden changed permanently in ways both obvious and unforeseen. Fragmenting the mount's basalt rock faces had been the defining daily activity for most inmates since the prison opened, and supplied the administration with a significant stream of income to offset running costs. The ritual of forming work gangs and marching them to and from the quarry was central to the prison's routine.
After the quarry's closure, some inmates were still given training in the tailoring, bootmaking, engineering, plumbing or carpentry workshops, or assigned to duties around the prison itself, but large numbers of active young men now spent hours every day milling around cramped, wire-enclosed yards whenever they were not confined to their cells. In place of the rehabilitation programmes introduced under Horace Haywood's superintendence and largely removed under his successor's, a new Act extended remission of sentence from a quarter to a third for inmates whose conduct had been exemplary or who had "during his sentence performed some outstanding act of service".
Det. J Davey opens the door of the car to allow Nash. Photo / Herald Archive
In the early 1960s the overall inmate population was changing in other ways that did not bode well for the institution's peaceful functioning. The chronic overcrowding of the previous decade was somewhat relieved when lower-security accommodation became available at the Waikune and Rangipo prison farms.
But as the number of young and short-sentenced inmates dropped as a consequence, Mount Eden's exercise yards were increasingly dominated by long-serving hard men. The kingpins no longer exercised the same degree of authority over other inmates, and were replaced as the most respected and feared figures in the prison hierarchy by notorious criminals and high-risk escapers who spent much of their time in the back basement, the dimly lit detention unit at the end of the east wing.
A thin blue seam down the side of their trousers and a white patch on the back of their jackets distinguished the occupants of this unit from other inmates, and most of them wore it as a badge of pride.
Serial prison escapee George Wilder. Photo / Herald Archive
From late 1962 the "back basement" housed a national celebrity, perhaps the best known and most widely admired criminal figure in this country's history. Then aged 25, George Wilder was a wiry whippet of a man, a skilled bushman with jug ears, a sly grin and an instinctive contempt for authority.
For a felon with such a remarkable reputation, his crime sheet was distinctly modest — a few thefts, burglaries and car conversions (he favoured Jaguars), but no suggestion of violence or other very serious offences. What distinguished Wilder from other petty criminals, and earned him a cell in the back basement, was his apparently irresistible urge to make a break for the outdoors and remain there for considerable periods undetected.
He was one year into a four-year stretch at New Plymouth Prison when, in May 1962, he scaled a wall and disappeared into the Central North Island back country, a region he knew well. For eight weeks he evaded all pursuers before he was spotted and tracked down west of Lake Taupō.
Wilder handcuffed to Constable Cyde of Taupo. Photo / Herald Archive
He arrived at Mount Eden with a further three years added to his original sentence, and was housed in the back basement security unit. In January 1963 six of that unit's 14 cells were occupied, all by repeat escapers. Prison officers made half-hourly checks on them and turned over every cell daily, yet somehow Wilder managed to acquire hacksaw blades and a homemade key from inmates in other wings.
Overnight, working silently between the half-hourly patrols, he cut out the lock from his cell door and went around the unit offering to release his neighbours. Frank Matich, Patrick Wiwarena and Reuben Awa, all under 30, agreed to take part in the escape attempt. They crammed into his cell, Wilder relocked their doors, and they knotted sheets into ropes while waiting for a prison officer to enter the unit.
Before 6am prison officer R. Grubb, on a routine night-shift patrol, unlocked the heavy steel grille separating the detention unit from the rest of the prison. He was promptly knocked unconscious by one of the four escapers and dragged into a toilet where he was bound and gagged. Using his keys, Wilder and his mates were able to open a further grille leading to the narrow, high-walled yard where executions had once taken place, and which was now the only place where they were permitted to exercise.
By standing on each other's shoulders, the men could reach the steel mesh covering the yard and cut through it with the hacksaw blades. Clearly visible in the morning sunlight, they dodged a blast from a sentry's shotgun as they rushed for the outer wall and lowered themselves down it with their homemade ropes.
The bush hut off the Napier-Taupo Rd, where police found Wilder. Photo / Herald Archive
Wilder's three companions were picked up within days but he, as usual, took to the bush and remained at large for an extraordinary six months. During that time his reputation for resourcefulness and non-violence, fuelled by national and even international newspaper coverage, grew to mythic dimensions.
The inmates of Mount Eden cheered every new report of outwitted police search parties and jeered at their own officers, who were already humiliated by their failure to contain this homegrown Houdini. The more frustrated the police became, the more the public chose to side with this rugged and amiable outlaw.
The Howard Morrison Quartet wrote a song about George Wilder. Photo / Herald Archive
The Australian press, true to its country's convict origins, described Wilder as "something of a national hero" and "a champion jailbreaker". The folksong boom was at its height in this period, and Wilder was awarded the ultimate accolade of a satirical ballad, The Wild(er) New Zealand Boy. To an old tune, the Howard Morrison Quartet mockingly celebrated 'a restless man' who: "With Matich and two Maori blokes, went missing from the can. And George who never missed a trick, used Matich as decoy. They captured everyone except the Wild New Zealand Boy".
Finally, a tipoff sent police to a lonely deer culler's hut on the Napier–Taupō Road, where they found Wilder comfortably installed with two rifles and plenty of fresh trout and venison. Many of the public thought he had earned the right to freedom during his six months on the run. Nevertheless, he was returned to prison to serve a sentence that now extended to a daunting 13 years, longer than that imposed on most murderers.
During the early months of 1963, when Wilder was still at large, Mount Eden's superintendent, the well-intentioned but ill-fated Horace Haywood, was transferred to Paparua Prison. The move was not officially a demotion, but after eight years of presiding over executions and known to be drinking heavily, Wilder's escape may have been the final nail in the coffin of his career.
As his replacement, the Justice Department looked for someone capable of imposing strict discipline and rigid control over this crisis-prone institution. The successful candidate, Edward Buckley, had spent his entire career in the prison service and the previous 10 years as a superintendent.
Wilder, handcuffed to Constable R.J. Clarke. Photo / Herald Archive
He had a reputation for uncompromising toughness with both staff and inmates, and a grim and humourless manner that earned him the unaffectionate nickname of Black Buckley. He immediately announced a more punitive and inflexible regime than his predecessor's.
Many of the remaining inmate privileges accumulated under Haywood were withdrawn, and education and training programmes were reduced and closely monitored. Within weeks of Buckley's takeover, this sharp reversal of policy was tested by a small-scale inmate revolt. About a hundred prisoners gathered in the main yard, refused orders to form work parties, and demanded to discuss the new and harsher conditions. Buckley, whose attitude towards inmates was consistently cold and hostile, stood firm, and the protest quickly collapsed. However, few believed that this incident marked the end of inmate unrest.
Rock College author Mark Derby
Staff were at first inclined to welcome the changes Buckley introduced. They were instructed that their principal function was now the custody rather than the rehabilitation of inmates, and security systems were upgraded by improving the floodlighting of external walls and installing rolls of razor wire along the top of the perimeter.
In the top-security back basement, patrols were to be carried out every 15 minutes rather than half-hourly, and electronic locking and warning systems replaced the manual locks and keys. Staff were forced, however, to balance these advances against the deficiencies in their new superintendent's personality and style of management. Buckley was a weak character who aimed to appear powerful by shouting, abusing and bullying his officers, often within the hearing of inmates, who relished the spectacle. It was a power structure that offered little hope of reducing the existing level of unrest.
Rock College by Mark Derby
Rock College By Mark Derby RRP: $45 Out August 13 Published by Massey University Press
