As I stand at the front desk of HMP Edinburgh waiting my turn to enter, I find myself reflecting that it’s been more than 30 years since I was last here. And just like before, it is football that has brought me.
I last pitched up at Saughton (to give the institution its more commonly used name) in 1993 with a squad of callow Sunday-league players to play against the prison team. Back then, prisoners in Edinburgh were afforded the rare luxury of competing in a local league. Of course, every game was a home game for them and their ground was indeed a fortress.
The 1992/93 season was the last time this prison operated an 11-a-side team playing regular games, and the decades that have elapsed without one are for good reason. A fixture towards the end of that campaign was infamously used as the perfect foil for one of the biggest ever prison breakouts seen in Scotland.
Straight out of TV’s Porridge? You better believe it. As in the 1979 Porridge film, a football match served as the smokescreen for an elaborate escape. It may have lacked Fulton McKay and Ronnie Barker, but the plot – and its aftermath – were laced with comedy and farce.
The Government and Prison Service, however, were not laughing. The escape was led by Joe Steele, wrongly convicted and imprisoned for six murders during Glasgow’s Ice Cream Wars. Steele had also become notorious for slipping out of jail to protest his innocence as loudly as possible.
Just two months before the 1993 football field break out, Steele had escaped from the same prison and secured worldwide media coverage by supergluing himself to the gates of Buckingham Palace for several hours, prompting a bemused Queen Elizabeth II to sneak a peek at her unannounced guest from behind a curtain.
Incredible, then, that so soon after his recapture Steele was not only back in the same jail but able to go on the run again with such ease…
This is a preview of Colin Leslie’s full article, published in Issue 37 of Nutmeg.
You can order your copy now to read it in full, including:
- The Great Escape, Saughton-style: Forget Steve McQueen on a motorbike – this was Joe Steele in a lorry, straight through a hole in the fence.
- Taste of freedom: how one fugitive legged it from jail and right into a chip shop queue.
- Spot the difference: the prison coach mistaken for a lag and lumped in with the cons – all because he was still in his kit.
- Our day behind bars: a grim pitch, a forbidding backdrop, and a young Mark Yardley banging in goals like he was escaping cardio forever.
- The blind-spot special: why a sneaky dip in the pitch gave Steele the green light – basically prison-break VAR.
- Fathers and Football: Mafia-inspired family bonding…but with Irn-Bru instead of espresso.
- The Saughton Redemption: proof that football can make men cry, heal families…and occasionally help someone cut through a fence.
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