Brendan Hughes’s escape from Long Kesh Prison in December 1973 turned the prison’s most ordinary routine into a way out: concealed inside a discarded mattress, he rode a rubbish lorry through the camp and past its gates. The escape was neither swift nor clean. It depended on help from Thomas Valliday, exposed Hughes to the possibility of being impaled during a refuse inspection, and ended with him stranded in a loyalist area without the car arranged to collect him.

The plan and the prison routine

Hughes had told the police when he was captured that he intended to escape, and he meant it. Within thirty-six hours of arriving at Long Kesh the previous summer, he was already discussing possible routes with comrades. Gerry Adams considered Hughes important enough to the current phase of the struggle that he should escape before Adams himself. Yet the camp’s security made a straightforward breakout unlikely: it was ringed with barbed wire and surrounded by troops, and the few previous escapes had depended on disguises rather than force. Francie McGuigan had walked out in borrowed black robes among a visiting delegation of priests; John Francis Green later escaped through a clothes switch with his priest brother.

The rubbish lorry offered a different possibility, built around a familiar task. As an orderly, Thomas Valliday rode in the truck on its daily rounds, collecting refuse from different parts of the camp. Discarded mattresses were among the objects left beside the rubbish outside the barbed-wire cages around the prisoners’ Nissen huts. On a Saturday morning in December, Valliday lifted one such mattress onto the truck. It was much heavier than usual, but he showed no surprise: Hughes was rolled up inside it.

The plan drew on what prisoners believed about the lorry’s inspections. Before the truck left the grounds for the dump, guards were supposed to probe rubbish bags with a spear. The IRA had an intelligence network inside the prison, and information from it suggested that the guards had recently stopped doing so. Another escape, Seamus Twomey’s helicopter extraction from Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, had encouraged the prisoners, even as it contributed to tighter security. The lorry’s rounds, twice daily, seemed to offer a less conspicuous route—but one whose safety rested on uncertain intelligence.

Concealed in the load

The mattress became both hiding place and immediate danger. Hughes climbed into its centre while others rolled it around him. As the lorry moved through the camp, rubbish was periodically dumped on top. The cheap mattress was filled with sawdust, which pressed into his nose and eyes and made breathing difficult. He had brought an orange to suck for fluid and blood sugar, and kept it in his mouth as he waited, unable to see what was happening around him.

At one stop, Valliday whispered that the truck could not yet leave: it had to collect more rubbish, and a head count was due at four o’clock. If Hughes were found missing, the guards would lock down the camp and raise the alarm. Valliday advised him to get out and sneak back to his cage. Hughes stayed hidden. The lorry then entered the British Army compound, carrying him not toward freedom but into a particularly dangerous part of the camp. Sawdust irritated one eye so badly that he could not open it, but he remained still.

Near the exit, the lorry stopped again. Hughes knew the route should take it over two security ramps before turning right out of Long Kesh. Then a large spike plunged into the refuse just beside him. A second spike probed the bags on the other side. The intelligence had been wrong: the guards were still checking the load. Hughes considered giving himself up rather than risk being struck by the next thrust, and thought of his two young children back in Belfast. The lorry moved before he did. It crossed both ramps, turned right, and left the camp.

Outside the gates

On the open road, Hughes tried to cut through the mattress with a small penknife, but the blade bent. He clawed and kicked his way free instead, dislodging rubbish onto the road as he escaped the makeshift wrapping. He feared the driver might see the movement in the rearview mirror, but the lorry continued toward the dump.

At the top of Hillsborough Road, Hughes knew the lorry would make a sharp right turn followed by a sharp left. He used those turns to jump down unnoticed. He watched the truck drive away, anxious that the driver might have spotted him, but it continued on its route. The escape had carried him beyond the prison perimeter; it had not delivered him to safety.

Gerry Adams had arranged for a car to meet Hughes outside, but the lorry had taken so long to complete its rounds that Hughes missed the rendezvous. He stood caked in filth, with one eye swollen shut, and had no change of clothes or immediate getaway. Unlike the prisoners who had escaped from the Maidstone prison ship and found help in a local pub, Hughes was in the middle of a loyalist area. He had not put enough distance between himself and Long Kesh, and expected that troops would flood the surrounding area once his absence was discovered at the head count. He needed to reach the Republic of Ireland, had little time, and was now the most wanted man in Northern Ireland.

Significance

The escape’s tension comes from the gap between a plan’s apparent simplicity and the material world resisting it at every turn. The ordinary mattress becomes a cramped enclosure; the rubbish lorry, a vehicle of possible escape and sudden exposure; the inspection spike, a routine security tool with the power to turn concealment into a fatal trap. Hughes gets beyond the gates not through a cleanly executed operation but through delay, chance, and his decision to remain hidden when Valliday’s warning offered a safer return to the cage.

The episode also makes the prison’s routines legible as both constraints and opportunities. Hughes’s escape depended on the movements of the refuse truck, Valliday’s access to it, and information about the guards’ habits; yet those same routines carried Hughes into the army compound and brought the inspection spikes down beside him. The exit therefore marks a precarious change of circumstance rather than a settled end: outside Long Kesh, he was free of the camp but alone, exposed, and still in immediate danger.