The Man Who Didn't Want To Stay Locked Up

Dixie Elliot ✍ Larry Marley, who was the brains behind the Great Escape from H7 back on 25th September 1983.

In about February 1979, when a number of us were moved to a wing in H6 in an attempt to break the blanket protest by divide and conquer, I found myself in a cell with the late Willie Deek Johnston, a character in every sense of the word.

Larry was in the cell next to us, which he shared with Derry man Brian McCool.

In 1975, Larry, along with nine other IRA men, escaped from Newry courthouse, where he was on trial for an attempted escape from Long Kesh. He went on the run but was recaptured in Belfast in 1976.

I remember one day back in 1978, one of the lads returned from 'The Boards' (the punishment block) to tell us a story which had us all baffled and speculating as to what had been going on.

He told us that he heard a rumpus outside his cell and when he looked out through the side of the door he saw that the screws were manhandling three other screws into the other cells.

It wasn't too long before word reached us that Larry, Bik McFarlane and Pat Beag McGeown had tried to escape from the cages disguised as screws. They of course lost their political status and joined us on the Blanket Protest.

In 1983, two years after the Blanket Protest ended Larry helped plan the Great Escape which he didn't go on himself as he was nearing the end of his sentence.

Without doubt his murder, at the age of 41 on the 2nd April 1987, by a Loyalist gang was carried out by the British in an act of revenge for the part he played in the planning of the escape which humiliated them before the eyes of the world.

I thought that this quote, from Papillon (Henri Charrière) who escaped from a French penal colony in the 1930s after several attempts, is something we prisoners had in common, particularly during the Blanket Protest:

We're really something, aren't we? The only animals that shove things up their ass for survival.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam uasal . . .

Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.

Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie