Day the SAS stopped a riot at the prison known as the Hate Factory
‘They filled my pockets with lighter fuel’ ‘The parapet was slippery after the rain’
THE shadowy figures moved silently in single file along the roofline of the prison block, anxious not to alert the mutinous prisoners barricaded below to their presence. It was not long until daybreak and the elite SAS unit were acutely aware that time was running short for the hostage at the centre of their audacious rescue mission.
Prison officer Jackie Stuart had been held captive for five days with no food or water, ever since D Wing at notorious Peterhead Prison had erupted into a violent riot on September 28, 1987.
Beaten, stripped, and tortured, he had also been dragged by his captors through a hole in the prison roof and paraded with a chain around his neck like a noose. Brandishing a hammer, they threatened to set him on fire and hurl him 70ft to the flagstones below in full view of a growing Press pack.
With the police helpless beyond the prisoners’ barricades, 57-year-old Mr Stuart was at the mercy of 50 of Scotland’s toughest and most desperate men – murderers, rapists and gangsters – who now held sway with their makeshift knives.
The ringleaders were three of Scotland’s most infamous prisoners: Malcolm Leggat, then 24, serving life for murder; Douglas Matthewson, 30, a lifer who had murdered a former beauty queen; and Sammy ‘The Bear’ Ralston, 25, an armed robber and gangland thug.
Mr Stuart’s only hope lay with the men of the SAS, among them Sergeant-Major Peter Ratcliffe, a veteran of SAS operations in Aden and the Falklands, who could never have imagined that his skills would be put to use quashing a Scottish jail riot.
In his memoir, The Eye Of The Storm, Ratcliffe vividly recalls his role, saying: ‘Police and prison authorities stood helplessly watching in the unwinking gaze of the media.
‘Exhausted, ill and terrified, Mr Stuart – who had six grandchildren – beseechingly stretched out his arms to the watching Press and pleaded for help.
‘The hard men of Peterhead simply laughed at him.’
Thirty years on from his terrifying ordeal, which has been brought to life in a new exhibition of photographs, Mr Stuart recalled this week how he became embroiled in the fracas. It started when Leggat stabbed another officer, Bill Florence, in retaliation for being placed on minor report that morning. Mr Stuart wrestled the knife off the prisoner before realising that the ‘whole hall joined in’.
He added: ‘Events just spiralled from there. Because one of the group of inmates could best be described as erratic, there were times when I was unsure how it would all unfold. My focus throughout was to try and keep everybody calm and save inflaming the situation even more.’
Both guards were taken hostage by a group of prisoners as the others set about wrecking the prison hall. Mr Florence was released after a day because of his injuries but the gang held on to Mr Stuart. He was repeatedly beaten and taken on to the roof.
He said: ‘They got a big chain off a punching bag and put it round my neck and dragged me about the roof. They filled my pockets with lighter fuel and said they would set me alight if they didn’t get what they wanted. It never came to that. It was all threats.’
Eventually, Mr Stuart was locked in to an attic area, where his captors could gain access to the roof. He said: ‘They made me lie on the floor and beat me with table legs.’
Peterhead Prison, widely known as ‘The Hate Factory’, had a reputation as a powder keg. The austere Victorian building, where the warders once carried cutlasses and later wore body armour, was overcrowded and had no sanitation in the cells.
There had been a riot the year before and prisoners, many of whom were from the Central Belt, also complained about being placed in the North East, far from friends and family. Facing long sentences, they had little to lose and vented their frustrations in an explosion of brutality.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, angered and shocked, had watched Mr Stuart’s ordeal on television at 10 Downing Street. She telephoned Scottish Secretary Malcolm Rifkind. He and the chief constable of Grampian Police requested military help, stressing that neither prison staff nor police thought the siege would end well.
For 24 hours, the politicians dithered. The pitfalls were obvious. While the SAS had successfully stormed the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980 – again before the TV cameras, thus making their Who Dares Wins motto a household phrase – unleashing the military on a civilian problem was a dangerous card to play.
But as all other options were ruled out and the warder’s plight became acute, the decision to send in the soldiers was finally taken.
At Stirling Lines, the SAS HQ outside Hereford, Ratcliffe had just given his commanding officer a lift home and had accepted the offer of a quick drink. ‘As I was leaving, I joked, “See you in half an hour”. He said, “I hope not”. I drove home to find the phone ringing. It was on.’
He was soon at RAF Lyneham, Wiltshire, where two SAS Range Rovers – fitted with uprated engines and suspension, long-range radios and racks for assault rifles – were driven straight on board a Hercules transporter. In just over an hour, the team landed at Aberdeen’s Dyce airport.
Under police escort, the 4x4s sped to Peterhead, where camera crews and photographers were camped at the prison gates with telephoto lenses trained at the roof of D Wing.
Ratcliffe recalls: ‘To avoid being spotted by them, we left the vehicles out of sight and went in the back, picking our way along the fence flanking the houses where the warders lived.’
Each man carried a green canvas holdall, containing a respirator, black leather gloves, fireproof black overalls, rubber-soled boots, a 9mm Browning Hi-Power automatic pistol and a Heckler & Koch MP3 9mm submachine gun, plus body armour, ammunition, a riot baton and personal radio.
Explosive charges, stun grenades, more ammunition and ladders were stealthily ferried in using the same route. Ratcliffe recalls: ‘The commanding officer’s plan involved a total of 16 SAS men.
‘The prisoners had taken over three floors of D Wing and the warder was held hostage in a barricaded cell beneath the roof.
‘Four of our men were to climb out of a skylight in another part of the prison and then creep along a narrow brick parapet, 70ft above the ground, in the dark – which took some nerve.’
The men would have to walk in single file while trying to avoid being spotted by prisoners locked up in another wing. To make matters worse, it had rained and the parapet was slippery.
The SAS men on the roof were to ease themselves through the hole the prisoners had made in the slates and then crash through the ceiling into the room where it was believed the hostage was being held.
Simultaneously, explosive charges would be detonated to blow metal doors on the wing landings off their hinges.
Ratcliffe recalls: ‘In the prison gym, we put on our equipment and were told no firearms were to be drawn unless absolutely necessary. CS tear gas and stun grenades would do most of our work for us. Silently, we got into position.
‘But, as the guys edged along the slippery parapet, they were spotted by prisoners in B Wing. They shouted warnings to the hostage takers. On the radio, the commanding officer said, “Standby, standby... Go!’’. It was exactly 5am and in we
went. The prisoners didn’t know what had hit them.
‘The moment the stun grenades exploded and the CS grenades released their fumes, the fabled hard men of Peterhead were no longer in the game. Indeed, they never had a prayer from the moment we were called in.’
It was all over within three minutes. Reeling, the rebellious inmates were dragged from the room and pulled down the stairs from one landing to the next. The prison officer was led to safety.
Ratcliffe, who went through the door on the first-floor landing, remembers seeing Mr Stuart being brought down a staircase: ‘He was wearing a donkey jacket and was utterly bewildered.
‘He had been sitting at a table in the cell beneath the roof when our guys burst in, and it was obvious he didn’t know what was happening. Other teams cleared any remaining resistance from the landings. It was all over bar the shouting.’
Mr Stuart recalled that the first he knew he was being freed was when one of the inmates landed on top of him. He said: ‘He must have got the gas and stun grenades first. I only saw one SAS man. I just said to him that I was the officer.
‘I was in prison clothing and he accepted that, but he’d probably had pictures of me and the prisoners beforehand.’
At the time, Peterhead Prison staff were not told officially who had ended the siege. One prison officer remarked, in a masterful piece of understatement: ‘Some unidentified gentlemen came and took the matter to a conclusion.’
Those same gentlemen had returned to the gym in the darkness, still managing to keep away from prying cameras. Ratcliffe says: ‘There was no point in advertising our presence, especially with the Press and TV being there. We slipped quietly out the back gate, the same way we had arrived.
‘The entire operation had taken less than an hour, from our arrival to our departure – no wonder, as we learned later, Margaret Thatcher was said to be pleased. Six hours later, thanks to a helicopter, I was back at Hereford, having been involved in another piece of the regiment’s history.’
A subsequent civil court case saw the soldiers accused of brutality. One trooper denied hurling a prisoner from the attic to the floor ten feet below with the words: ‘You’re going for a spin, pal.’
There were lurid tales, too, of men in black deliberately running prisoners into the jail’s metal landing supports. Ratcliffe was never called to give evidence and the case ultimately failed.
Looking back, he says of Peterhead: ‘It was one of the most horrible places I’d ever seen. If I had spent any time banged up there as a prisoner, I’m certain I’d have been up on the roof myself. D Wing was a shambles. The prisoners who had rioted earlier had made a good job of wrecking it.’
Mr Stuart’s captors were locked up in top-security solitary cells. Seven months later, when the riot’s three ringleaders appeared in court, they were sentenced to a total of 27 further years in jail.
Mr Stuart, meanwhile, was examined by the prison doctor and reunited with his wife. He took just six weeks off work, retiring two years later.
The prison closed in 2013, but reopened last year as a museum. Mr Stuart has returned, to recount his experiences to visitors and guide them through a new exhibition of photographs from the riot.
Now a sprightly 87, he remains sanguine about his captivity. ‘I could always speak about it and that was a good thing because there was no help from psychologists in those days,’ he said.
‘Everybody’s different – other people handle things differently. I’m just determined and thran; I don’t like to get beat at anything.’
He added: ‘It’s in the past – I never thought it would come into the news again. I’m just an ordinary guy. Once it was done, it was done.’