Above: Escapees Allan Roy Connell and Joseph James Ditroia, back in custody, 1986.

Bit of a curiosity to find a family namesake one of the few blokes to be strung up at the old Geelong Gaol.

James Murphy copped it back in 1863 for killing copper Daniel O’Boyle at Warrnambool with a hammer to the head.

My old man James was bemused by the story, myself too since it’s two-thirds of my own name. There’s always been talk of some rello bumping off a cop in NSW back in the 1800s as well but that’s as far as our serious criminal lineage seems to go. I think.

Hold on, Queensland Rat Pack copper Tony Murphy was a distant cousin or somesuch but I digress.

The old Myers Street bluestone manor, to best of my knowledge, hasn’t held any relations.

On occasion, it’s had trouble holding anyone, most notably when 22 soldiers busted out in July 1945.

Guard tower lookout, Geelong Gaol, 1993. Captured escapees in divvy van 1983.

They’d been remanded on military offences, desertion, AWOL, and mounted a lunchtime mass escape by clambering an inner wall into a store yard where they climbed ladders to hoik themselves over the five-metre-high main wall and out to the street.

They cut phone wires, slowing their pursuers’ response, and heavy road and rail footy traffic didn’t help the cops, either. Most of the soldiers basically evaporated although four were caught at Werribee’s old State Research Farm, where my grandfather worked.

Another nine soldiers escaped a couple of months later, again over the wall. They were hardly the first to cut out of the place, of course.

Geelong Gaol, 1987. ‘John’ and ‘Peter’ in their gaol accommodation, 1990.

In 1889, old lags Frederick Clarke and Christopher Farrell overpowered a warder, using a skeleton key to get to and over the wall.

In 1976, Faraday kidnapper Edwin Eastwood escaped with inmate Michael Pantic, using knives to tunnel through the walls.

Bullets were flying in two 1980s escapes, hitting a civilian car in one and prisoners Allan Connell and Joseph Ditroia on another.

All up, the gaol’s hosted some 80-odd escape bids between 1853 to 1991.

Minister for Explaining Escapes, Pauline Toner, at the gaol, 1984. Prison officer Graham Quigley and ‘Tweety’, 1991.

So there’s some irony to visits by Community Welfare Services Minister Pauline Toner, aka the Minister for Explaining Escapes, after breakouts from Pentridge’s escape-proof Jika Jika in 1983.

Some irony also in the 1994 theft from the gaol of jewellery and artwork at a craft fair. Likewise, several young girls who were accidentally locked in Eastwood’s cell at another fair.

And similarly again, in prison scenes for a TV series on Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs, the world’s best-known escaped con, filmed at the gaol in 2012. Biggs was played by actor Gyton Grantley, of Carl Williams Underbelly fame.

Monique Lewis trapped inside a gaol cell, 1994. Geelong Advertiser.

If the world seems to be shrinking, consider the closeness of the old Geelong Gaol cells with their porridge twice daily, bucket toilets, miserable ventilation and ban on cigarettes that might otherwise mask the stink.

Apollo Bay’s infamous hermit Noddy Hill, locked up for several days over unpaid fines, once demanded I write about the constipation he suffered at the prison. Lucky thing, I’d have thought.

Noddy likened himself to mass murderers Julian Knight and Martin Bryant, issued suicide threats, obsessed on the Bali bombings, World War III, holocausts and doomsday, and threatened to let off a massive ‘Bushfire Bomb Mark 3’ in the Otways.

Down the years, in between the escapes, the gaol has been a prison for men and women, an industrial school for young girls, a hospital for dying colonial prisoners and a military detention centre.

These days it’s a museum but for a long time its future has been moot. Maybe someone might take a leaf from old Noddy’s book. When he was eventually rounded up, the judge sentenced him to a nursing home.

Maybe turn the gaol into an old folks home. Then I might finally be able to get a rello in there.

Hopefully not me, of course. That’d really stink.

This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 26 January 2026.