‘The prison guard was in a trance doing his job and walked right past us. It was sheer luck’
piece of paper around a dinner knife and pushed it into the lock leaving an impression to establish the depth needed for a key, while scrape marks from inside the lock determined the height.
The shape involved some guess work. “We could see the key was symmetrical with five cuts in it.We looked at it, estimated it’s about 2mm [1/8in] and made it out of wood.” A team formed a production line in carpentry classes, making the different parts against alternate grains to ensure it was strong enough once glued together. One night, Tim tried his wooden key. It didn’t turn. Thankfully, the wood marks showed where it was catching so he kept filing away until it worked.
It took two weeks but any celebration was premature as the cell’s solid metal outer door had no inside lock and could not be reached by hand through the window. Weeks of sleepless nights followed until Tim sat bolt upright. “I’ve cracked it,” he thought. “We were using the broom to measure the distance between the window and the keyhole. But why not just fix the key to the end of the broom?”
Next they spent two months perfecting a cranking mechanism as Stephen listened next door. “We all had physical symptoms.” Tim says. “My muscles constantly seized up and I would clench my fists at night. You couldn’t stop the stuff going through your mind the whole time.” Then, eventually, they heard the glorious sound of a key turning. “It had been tedious, going on and on,” says Tim. Door three was almost identical to the first and opened up the next part of the jail, the administration section. That was when the men started to believe they might make their escape, even after engineered trips to the prison dentist revealed they would have to get through 10 locked doors in total.
By now fellow inmate Alex Moumbaris (fictionalised in the film as Leonard Fontaine and played by Mark Winter) was on board. During one recce, after making dummies with their clothes to look like they were still in their cots, Tim and Alex sneaked downstairs, hiding in a cupboard as the night guard passed by on his rounds.
The cupboard had a tiny lock, which Alex could barely hold on to during that first attempt, his hands wet with sweat.
“It slipped out of his hands and swung open just as the warden came by,” recalls Tim. “We thought, ‘That’s the end of it’ but he was in a trance doing his job and walked right past us. It was sheer luck.”
The consequences of getting caught were never lost on them. They carried out longer dummy runs over several months as they cracked one lock after another. Door number 10, the external one, was deemed too risky so they left it until the night of the actual escape on December 11, 1979.
BY THAT point, some 18 months after arriving, they had more keys than the guards. “We had escaped several times up to the final door so we knew the routine,” says Tim. Fellow prisoner Denis Goldberg helped them by distracting the guards. Ironically, none of the keys worked on the final door so they smashed the lock with a smuggled chisel and screwdriver.
“It made a huge scraping, crunching sort of noise,” says Stephen.
Every passing second was agony. Finally the door opened and the men, dressed in civilian clothes, walked across the yard to freedom. They made their way to a nearby railway station and into a taxi.
The guards did not realise they were missing until the next morning. But by then they had reached neighbouring Mozambique before travelling to Europe. Officials were so confused the night guard was arrested.
The prison was later refurbished to improve security but its notoriety remains. Former Olympic hero turned killer Oscar Pistorius spent jail time there.
Tim, who went back to South Africa, got to know Nelson Mandela following the future president’s own release. He is not optimistic about the country today. “The ANC today is not the organisation that I worked for. The name has been hijacked by gangsters and corruption has set in,” he has said.
Stephen still lives in north London. But given their outrageous luck, do they ever think a higher force was watching over them?
“At the time you didn’t really think like that but looking back I do, considering the risks we took,” says Tim. “It’s like we had a guardian angel protecting us.”
As for being played by Daniel Radcliffe, he added: “He is a very good actor, and I think he’s politically motivated himself which helped. Some modern actors aren’t that way inclined, and you had to be politically motivated to play the part, that’s the only kind of actor I would have wanted to play myself.”