Heritage Recovery Home Page

A NOTE ON JOHNNY RAMENSKY AND THE SHOOTING OF

GEORGE COFFY KYNOCH.

Following the publication in 1994 of Over the Wall: True stories of the Master Jailbreakers, the author, J.P. Bean received a letter from a reader, one Donald Sinclair, a man then in his 70's, who felt moved to castigate Mr Bean for his description of Peterhead contained in an account of the escapes of Johnny Ramensky from the prison. The author had never been to Peterhead and relied upon the descriptions he encountered in reports of Peterhead. The one which struck a wrong chord for Mr Sinclair was 'The Dartmoor of the North'. Mr Sinclair's letter provided some of the little bits of colour that give human dimension to the cold formal details more easily collated.

Mr Sinclair's role as quartermaster for the local Home Guard during the 1939-45 war has brought us an interesting tit-bit concerning the Governor of this prison and Johnny Ramensky, the legendary safe blower — legendary because it is now difficult to sort truth from fiction, so many having colourful stories concerning his nature and life. Governor James Ivory Buchan, being Commander of the Local Home Guard, required Mr Sinclair to come into the prison daily to receive military orders. On one of those occasions the Governor proudly displayed a cigarette box Johnny sent him from 'Active Service'.

Johnny Ramensky was a man with a national and even an international profile. Referring to others with Johnny's record it would be correct to say he was infamous, but Johnny has been accorded by many of those who served on the opposite side of the law, the 'famous'. Johnny was a hero. When Johnny died in 1972, having collapsed in Perth Prison while serving yet another sentence, he was accorded an obituary in every national newspaper.

During the 1939-45 war Johnny was picked up at the prison gate on his release and taken off to train with the commandos for deployment behind enemy lines, applying his criminal skills to the national interest, acquiring codes books, maps, orders, anything that might be of use to the war effort. He broke into Rommel's safe in North Africa and then advanced up Italy with the army, breaking into safes in newly captured areas. The Governor's cigarette box was undoubtedly 'spoils of war'.

Donald Sinclair's letter also gave details of an aspect of the tragedy that was the death of George Coffy Kynoch, an escaping convict shot dead by Guard Edward Whyte in 1932. One might have assumed that Guard Whyte would have been held in some regard for having done his duty, but among some at least, that was not the case. Donald Sinclair used to cycle to the local school with Guard Whyte's son, William, and recounts how William was given a bad time, mocked and abused for being the son of a man who "killed a con". Most of the prison staff's children went to that small school so it would seem that despite the enquiry finding that the Guard had simply performed his duty, some adults must have been commenting negatively for the children to pick up that lead. Children ............... little demons of the playground jungle, monsters mobbing the vulnerable, identifying victims and tearing into them tenaciously