Brendan Hughes’s Long Kesh escape by rubbish truck

Brendan Hughes’s escape from Long Kesh in December 1973 depended on turning the camp’s most ordinary routine into a way out: a refuse lorry making its rounds. Hidden inside a discarded mattress, Hughes was carried past the prison boundary, but the operation did not end with freedom. When he climbed down from the truck, filthy and injured, he was stranded in a loyalist area, with troops likely to be searching once his absence was noticed.

The escape problem

Hughes had told the police after his capture that he intended to escape, and he meant it. Within thirty-six hours of reaching Long Kesh the previous summer, he had begun discussing ways out with his comrades. Gerry Adams believed Hughes should be the first to escape because of his importance to the movement’s operations. Yet Long Kesh was ringed with barbed wire and surrounded by troops, and earlier escapes had exploited a method unlikely to work again: men leaving in the clothes of visiting priests. After two such escapes, the prisoners assumed that guards would scrutinize any further departing holy men.

An alternative plan was to have Hughes cling to the underside of a refuse lorry. His comrades made a harness so he could attach himself to the chassis, and he practised gripping the underside of a bunk in the camp’s cages. But Hughes was still weak from the beating he had received during interrogation, and the group doubted that he could hold on until the lorry cleared the outer fence. They abandoned the attempt. The decision proved fortunate: months later, another prisoner, Mark Graham, tried a similar method, and the lorry went over a ramp, breaking his spine and leaving him paralysed for life.

The mattress plan made use of the lorry’s twice-daily rounds and of prisoners’ knowledge about the guards’ routines. The men knew that guards had previously checked rubbish bags with a spear before allowing the truck to leave, but their intelligence network inside the prison suggested that the checks had recently lapsed. That report gave the plan an opening, not a guarantee. Hughes would have to remain concealed while the lorry collected rubbish, passed through the camp and reached its exit.

Concealed in the rubbish run

On a Saturday morning in December, Thomas Valliday was doing his ordinary job as an orderly. He rode in the rubbish lorry, collecting refuse from different parts of the camp. Discarded, soiled or damaged mattresses were among the items prisoners left beside the barbed-wire cages around the half-cylinder Nissen huts. When the truck stopped beside a rolled-up mattress, Valliday lifted it onto the truck bed. Its unusual weight did not surprise him: Hughes was wrapped inside it.

The escape depended on concealing a person within an object that already belonged to the camp’s waste. As the lorry rumbled around, rubbish was thrown on top of Hughes. The mattress was filled with sawdust, which spread around him, irritating and smothering him and making it hard to breathe. Hughes had brought an orange to suck for fluid and blood sugar, and kept it in his mouth as he waited. The truck’s slow, repetitive circuit offered cover, but it also prolonged the time he had to lie unseen and endure the debris around him.

At one stop, Valliday whispered that they could not yet leave the prison: the lorry would collect more rubbish, and a head count was due at four in the afternoon. If Hughes were found missing, the camp would be locked down and the alarm raised. Valliday advised him to get out and return to his cage. Hughes stayed in the mattress. Soon he heard British soldiers’ accents and realized that the lorry had entered the British Army compound, carrying him not toward the exit but into one of the most dangerous parts of the camp. Sawdust had irritated one eye so badly that he could not open it. He remained still and waited for the truck to move again.

Past the guards and out of the camp

Near the exit, Hughes expected the lorry to cross two security ramps and turn right out of Long Kesh. Instead, it stopped just before the ramps. A spear plunged through the refuse beside him, then another stabbed bags on the other side. Hughes believed the guards had discovered him. He was about to stand and surrender, reasoning that another thrust could kill him, when the lorry started again. It crossed both ramps, turned right and left the camp.

Once the truck was moving along the open road, Hughes tried to cut through the mattress with a small penknife, but the blade bent back. He clawed and kicked his way out instead, scattering some rubbish onto the road. He feared the driver might spot the debris in the rearview mirror, but the lorry continued. At the top of Hillsborough Road, Hughes knew the route would take a sharp right and then a sharp left. As the truck made those turns, he jumped down onto the street. The lorry drove on toward the dump.

An escape without a getaway

Hughes had crossed the prison boundary, but he had not reached safety. He stood caked in filth, with one eye swollen shut. Gerry Adams had arranged for a car to meet him outside, but the lorry’s unexpectedly long rounds meant Hughes missed the rendezvous; no car was waiting. Nor could he simply seek help in a local pub. The area was loyalist and hostile, and he had not put enough distance between himself and Long Kesh. Once guards discovered his absence at the head count, troops would flood the surrounding area. Hughes needed to reach the Republic of Ireland, but he was now the most wanted man in Northern Ireland and had little time.

The escape is therefore both a successful breach and an unfinished flight. The refuse lorry carried Hughes beyond the camp, but the delay that made the concealment possible also disrupted the planned pickup. Its everyday circuit became a route across the perimeter; on the other side, the absence of a vehicle left Hughes exposed to the search he had tried to outrun. The episode’s narrow turns—from the failed underside plan, to the spear checks, to the missed car—make escape less a single triumphant break than a chain of uncertain passages, each of which could still have ended in capture or death.