Gentleman Johnny Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
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Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 63 - Gentleman Johnny
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It is 1924. 18 year old Yonas Ramanauskas is in borstal.
It’s harsh, it’s punishing. Which is convenient since it’s a punishment. The idea of borstal being some kind of reform school for bad boys was some laugh and Yonas came out of prison - let’s face it, that’s what it was - with a new outlook on life and a new name.
He was the son of Lithuanian immigrants, brought over to break a strike of Lanarkshire clay miners in 1901; and so he was born in Glenboig where his father still worked in the pit. And that was the plan for Yonas. Grow up, go to school, jack school in, get away down the pit and dig clay to put food on the table.
It wasn’t difficult. People needed their Glenboig bricks and the clay for those bricks needed digging.
His father died when he was 8 years old. That made things a wee bit more difficult but despite being what most people would politely term ‘a wee toe-rag’ he managed to get through school, left at 14 and dutifully went down the pit where he was trained in the use of explosives because what 14 year old boy can’t be trusted with dynamite?
With very little work in the village for anyone unable to hit the pits, the family - Yonas, his mother and two sisters - headed for Glasgow, ending up in the Gorbals where thousands of returning soldiers and the lack of need for wartime production had triggered a depression. It wasn’t just in Glasgow - right across the country things weren’t going well at all as exports plummeted to half of their pre-war levels and unemployment rose as high as 17%.
But that wasn’t really going to be a problem for Yonas… because Yonas had turned to crime.
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This is Scotland. A podcast about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park.
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Anyone who says crime doesn’t pay is lying to you - because if it didn’t pay then there wouldn’t be any criminals. Getting caught is what doesn’t pay.
And that’s where we find Yonas, three years after being incarcerated, he was now going by the name Johnny Ramensky and had undergone one hell of a glowup.
In order to deal with the harsh conditions he had become a bit of a gym rat and by the time he left borstal he was one hell of a gymnast. In fact he used to prove it by using his talents to ‘escape’, turning up in sealed off areas of the institution and giving the guards a fright.
This is where the story pitches into left field and I tell you that Johnny Ramensky went on to win gold at the 1924 Olympics in Paris, right?
Aye, right.
Johnny went straight back to burglary, and suddenly found himself the darling of the underworld of Central Scotland. Because not only could Johnny scale walls, leap from rooftop to rooftop and generally do whatever a spider could… Johnny knew how to use explosives.
Because what 19 year old burglar can’t be trusted with gelignite?
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Sometimes in romantic films there’s a flourish of music when the two leads meet and some unspeakable chemical reaction takes place. Love at first sight, I think they call it.
But for Johnny it wasn’t a woman… it was a safe.
The flourish of music? An explosion. Little more than a firecracker bang among the bundles of wet rags wrapped around it.
And the door sighed open… and Johnny Ramensky was in love.
He could pick safe locks too, of course, but there was something special about packing gelignite in there and running to safety as it gave up its secrets.
But all this mucking about with explosives and whatnot came with a newfound code. No private homes get targeted, no open businesses, and most importantly - nobody gets hurt. He even posted pension and savings books back to their owners.
They started calling him Gentle Johnny after that.
But Gentle as Johnny might have been, he was very good at getting himself caught. He thought it was part of the game. If you get caught, you get caught. You take it with good grace and get on with the prison sentence.
So between his release from borstal and getting married to his beloved Daisy in 1931, he was back inside another two times. Just before his release from Barlinnie, three months before his wedding, he climbed a 60 foot drainpipe and sat on the roof in protest at being moved from his favoured prison in Edinburgh… they were nicer to him there.
He tried to go straight when they let him out. It didn’t take.
He ended up back inside, sentenced to hard labour in Peterhead Prison. Nobody had ever escaped from Peterhead Prison.
So in November 1934, in the middle of a blizzard, Johnny Ramensky became the first person to escape from Peterhead Prison. He got 22 miles before they found him.
He was in and out one or two more times - you start to lose count a bit - before he got another 5 year stretch in 1938. He took it with his usual good grace and wrote to the prison governor to inform him of an unexploded charge hidden in one of the uncracked safes… nobody gets hurt.
And in 1941, still inside and with the threat of Nazi invasion hanging in the air, he decided that the war effort needed him. So he began to write letters to anyone with a title and a postal address.
Nobody read much beyond the first line. But someone did. Major General Robert Laycock was very interested in Yonas Ramanauskas… or Johnny Ramensky… or John Ramsay the name with which he was released from Peterhead Prison at the end of 1942.
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MIDROLL
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In 1943 Gentleman Johnny Ramensky was enlisted with the Royal Fusiliers where he spent exactly no minutes before being transferred to 30 Commando, a top secret… ish… military intelligence unit that was renowned for being dropped behind enemy lines to lift code books, documents, supply routes and other valuable information for the Allies.
To do this they would use any means necessary,
Because what 36 year old commando can’t be trusted with gelignite?
It is 4th June 1944. Rome has been declared an open city by the Italian government in an effort to avoid any further destruction by Allied bombing raids.
Miles away at Monte Cassino the Allied forces had suffered incredible losses as they tried to take a German-held monastery on a hilltop. By the time they reach Rome, they’re thankful that there’s not too much resistance.
The Germans occupying the city are allowed to withdraw as the Allies begin to advance into the city. The General in charge is hailed as a genius since he has managed to take the city with minimal loss of life and minimal damage.
Little did they know that the decision to allow the German Wehrmacht to retreat would cost thousands their lives in the weeks that would follow.
But that’s not the story. Because as the Allies roll up the road with the Italians - who had switched sides following the overthrow and public hanging of Mussolini - there’s a burglar in the German embassy.
The place isn’t empty yet, and as the remaining staff try desperately to burn or pack anything that they don’t want to fall into Allied hands, the burglar stalks the upper floors.
On the outskirts of the city artillery is falling all around, avoiding Europe’s cultural capital as carefully as they can. They’d all incurred the wrath of the Vatican and didn’t fancy it again.
The booming helps the burglar. He moves from room to room, office to office, putting blobs of something that looks like plasticine.
Cracking safes takes time and safes in embassies have failsafes so sure these aren’t safes, they’re reinforced doors to protect documents in book-rooms but it’s still cool.
And as the artillery guns crack on the outskirts of the city, in the rooms of the German embassy there are tiny little booms as each lock in turn pops open.
The door swings open and Gentle Johnny Ramensky takes whatever documents he can grab. And he disappears into the Roman sunshine, with his little team of Commandos and Partisans, as if they were never really there at all.
After the war, people came to seek him out, to ask him to help them with their pernicious plans. And most of the time Johnny would send them away since their reputation for violence didn’t meet with his approval.
Cracking safes was an art. Crime was an art and he couldn’t keep away. He was in and out of prison for the rest of his life, always caught and taken in the most understanding of moods.
He was doing his job, the police were doing theirs.
And maybe they rolled their eyes that day in 1970, on the roof of a shop in Ayr where Johnny Ramensky was trying to shimmy through a skylight to blow yet another safe.
Because what 64 year old burglar can’t be trusted with gelignite?
Certainly they all came out two years later, the detectives who had spent their time trying - and often succeeding let’s be honest - in arresting Gentle Johnny. They came to his funeral after he died of a stroke in Perth Prison.
He had spent more than half of his life in prison, escaped five times, eluded the authorities, created a legend that is so full of embellishment and assumptions that finding the real truth among the rubbish is very difficult indeed.
He didn’t steal from Hitler, Mussolini and Goering, that’s for sure. And he was still in prison when Rommel’s headquarters in North Africa were overrun. He’s the vessel into which rumour on rumour and legend upon legend are poured - and somewhere, in the middle there’s the truth.
Undoubtedly though Gentle Johnny Ramsay - the name he lived under at his death - had never hurt a fly. Apart from a police officer when he blew the night deposit safe at the National Commercial bank in Rutherglen in 1967 and ran off weighed down by half crown coins.
He punched that guy in the face, but that was mostly self-defence. Even the judge agreed.
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You’ve been listening to Scotland, it was written and produced by me, Michael Park and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
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