\n The thugs had bolted along the 15h fairway after a violent escape from a prison coach transporting them from London to the Isle of Wight, fleeing in front of the startled women as a perspiring prison guard vainly pleaded: “Stop those men.”\n<\/p>\n
\n History does not record whether any of the players sank their putts but they phlegmatically carried on with their game, ignoring police warnings. As team captain Lucy Barber stoically observed: “It takes more than a few escaped men to stop the ladies of Liphook playing golf!”\n<\/p>\n
\n Her quip was in stark contrast to the bruising battle on the coach as guards desperately tried to foil the hardened criminals being transferred from Wandsworth Jail to Parkhurst.\n<\/p>\n
\n Old postcard featuring the golf course (Image: Echo)\n<\/p>\n
\n The headline drama on May 11, 1983, began after two convicts leapt on the one guard, putting him in a stranglehold with his handcuff chains. Others then tried to kick out the windows as the vehicle lurched through the Hampshire countryside on the A31 before they were eventually supressed.\n<\/p>\n
\n But the respite was short.\n<\/p>\n
\n As the vehicle crawled up the one-in-six hill near the Devil’s Punchbowl, one prisoner suddenly leapt to his feet and incited others to have a go – this time more successfully.\n<\/p>\n
\n “In the fighting that ensued inside the vehicle, prison officers were overpowered, their handcuffs keys were stolen and the rear emergency door of the vehicle was forced open,” a Home Office spokesman said of the fracas.\n<\/p>\n
\n Six of the 14 prisoners fled, their bid for freedom sparking one of the largest manhunts for several years. Hundreds of police – aided by tracker dogs and a Metropolitan police helicopter- were drafted in from four forces as they scoured miles of open ground in Hampshire, Surrey and Sussex.\n<\/p>\n
\n Initially it was feared two gangsters had hi-jacked a motorist into driving them to London but that was swiftly denied by the Home Office. In reality, they had tricked him into giving them a lift to Guildford on the pretext they needed treatment for injuries.\n<\/p>\n
\n “He dropped them off there and they vanished without needing any.”\n<\/p>\n
\n Two escapees were soon recaptured in the Liphook area, one after coolly posing as a police constable to bluff himself onto the town’s railway station as he claimed to be looking for the prisoners. But his luck ran out when real officers turned up and he couldn’t produce his ticket!\n<\/p>\n
\n The scene of the escape. (Image: Echo)\n<\/p>\n
\n Within 12 hours, the drama was over.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n The last fugitives were arrested – still in Liphook. They were spotted by a constable in the High Street and surrendered without a struggle. “Both men were knackered and had had more than enough,” said a police spokesman. “I think they must have been going round in circles for hours.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The thugs had bolted along the 15h fairway after a violent escape from a prison coach transporting them…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671259,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4106],"tags":[2826,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-671258","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-golf","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115831458216876115","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}