‘A single-file walk on a wet ledge 70ft in the air’ The siege of Peterhead Prison
As the jail becomes a museum, inside the daring SAS mission to save a hostage on its roof
TIME was running out for the hostage – and the police knew it only too well. His captors dragged him through a hole in the roof of Peterhead Prison and paraded him with a noose around his neck. Brandishing a hammer, they threatened to hurl him 70ft to the flagstones below.
With the police helpless beyond the prisoners’ barricades, it seemed on that muggy October day in 1987 that all hope was gone. But then, only a few yards from D Wing, where some of Scotland’s toughest and most desperate men now held sway with their makeshift knives, two Range Rovers and a police van pulled up. Hope had arrived.
The vehicles carried the SAS counter-terrorist team. One member was Sergeant-Major Peter Ratcliffe, already a veteran of SAS operations in Aden and the Falklands.
But for a twist of fate, he could well have been one of the prisoners in the jail. Growing up the product of a broken home in Salford, he had skirted the edge of crime. Having dodged a train fare returning home from seeing his beloved Manchester United, he managed to avoid a court case and a life of petty crime, dead-end jobs and jail by joining the Parachute Regiment.
There, he was among the few to pass the notoriously tough selection course and earn the elite SAS sand-coloured beret.
He would serve in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, the Falklands and Iraq – but could never have guessed his skills would be put to use in a jail riot in Scotland.
At Peterhead, three of Scotland’s most notorious prisoners held out defiantly, threatening to kill their hostage, 56-year-old warder Jackie Stuart. The ringleaders were men with nothing to lose: Malcolm Leggat, 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.
Ratcliffe recalls: ‘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.’
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 had warned Home Secretary Douglas Hurd that the position was extremely serious and that neither the prison staff nor the police thought the siege would end well.
Ratcliffe says: ‘They requested military help – and by military they obviously had in mind the SAS, especially given the Prime Minister’s well-known regard for the regiment.
‘Both Hurd and the Director of Special Forces – a senior officer whose identity is shielded – were dead set against sending us in, however, claiming that to do so would set a precedent for future prison sieges.
‘For 24 hours after Thatcher’s call to Rifkind, it had been an off-and-on situation as to whether the SAS became involved.’
The pitfalls for the politicians 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 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.’
The SAS counter-terrorist unit is known as Special Projects (SP) and each of the regiment’s elements – or Sabre Squadrons – cover SP duty on a rota basis. The 40-strong SP unit is split into two teams, Red and Blue. Red would handle Peterhead.
Red Team headed for RAF Lyneham, Wiltshire, where a Hercules transport already had all four of its propellers spinning. Two SAS Range Rovers – fitted with uprated engines and suspension, long-range radios and racks for assault rifles – were driven straight on board. In just over an hour, the team was at Dyce, Aberdeen.
Under police escort, the 4x4s sped to Peterhead. Ratcliffe recalls: ‘Camped at the front gates of the prison were television crews, press photographers and journalists. The cameramen had their long-focus lenses trained on the roof of D Wing.
‘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 sub-machine 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.
Calling the Army in for a civilian problem is no small matter. There are all sorts of checks and balances, built up over centuries, to prevent a government using the military to seize control in a coup.
Thatcher, Hurd and Rifkind all had to talk to the Civil Service before discussing the siege with the SAS.
Ratcliffe says: ‘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 at the same time 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 around, the rebellious inmates were dragged from the room they had barricaded and were pulled down the iron stairs from one landing to the next. The prison officer was led to safety.
Ratcliffe’s own memories of the action are still clear: ‘I had been tasked, with another guy, to go through the door on the first-floor landing. When the explosives blew the hinges off the door, I charged in.
‘It was extremely difficult to see anything because of the gas and smoke. I was still on the first floor when our guys brought Mr Stuart down the stairs. 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.’
Ralston, the armed robber, was amazed by the SAS. He said: ‘They were small, with English accents, but they were fast. We didn’t know it at the time but they were deadly.’
A subsequent civil court case saw the soldiers facing allegations of brutality. From behind a 7ft screen to protect his identity, a trooper code-named Soldier T told Lionel Daiches, QC, that he had used his baton to strike the forearm of a prisoner who came at him with a knife, and then thrust the baton upwards towards the man’s face.
But the SAS man denied hurling the prisoner from the attic area to the floor ten feet below with the words: ‘You’re going for a spin, pal.’
There were lurid tales of men in black grabbing prisoners and deliberately running them into the jail’s metal landing supports. But Ratcliffe was not called to give evidence and the case ultimately failed.
Looking back, he reflects: ‘Peterhead is a typically forbidding Victorian-built prison. Strung between each landing were wire nets put there to break the fall of any prisoner who tried to kill himself by jumping off one of the walkways.
‘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 would 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.’
Meanwhile, Mr Stuart was examined by the prison doctor and reunited with his wife. His captors were locked up in top-security solitary cells.
The SAS men 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.
‘It was a Saturday and I was looking forward to getting some sleep – but 15 minutes after getting in, the phone rang. It was the captain of the Army squash team, who wanted me to play a game in Portsmouth that afternoon...’
Seven months later, when the three ringleaders of the Peterhead riot appeared in court, they were sentenced to a total of 27 more years in jail. The Peterhead Prison staff still had not been 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.’
Meanwhile, Ratcliffe can look back on a job well done: ‘I may have lost my squash game the next day – but the self-styled hard men of Scotland’s toughest maximum security prison turned out to be about as tough as newborn kittens when faced with really hard men from the SAS.’
‘Job done, we slipped quietly out the back’