George Howard loved to blow up safes and hated being locked up for it

George Howard was good at breaking out of jails, but not very good at staying out.

Howard, a career thief who loved to use gelignite to blow the doors off safes, was involved in two of Victoria's most notorious prison breaks in the 1940s.

He busted out of Beechworth and Pentridge in incidents that confounded prison authorities and sparked at least two major inquiries.

After 75 years, the details of his trial for breaking out of Pentridge have been made public after being unsealed by the Public Records Office of Victoria.

They show Howard's desperate attempts to avoid more jail time, representing himself in court and cross-examining the very police who arrested him.

And if the court transcripts are anything to go by, he was much better at blowing up safes and escaping from jail than he was at arguing his case in court.

Falling in with 'extremely bad characters'

George Howard quite literally had a rap sheet as long as his arm.

His first prison sentence came at the age of 16 for breaking into a shop and stealing.

He would spend much of the following 30 years in and out of prison, racking up 15 convictions in three states for crimes that ranged from riding a train without a ticket up to robbery with explosives.

He would have been the perfect person to write a guide book to the nation's prisons, having spent time in jails in Melbourne, Geelong, Ballarat, French Island, Beechworth, Bathurst and Adelaide.

Going by the alias Jack Armstrong, he was part of a gang that police believed had blown 14 safes in Melbourne over a two-month period in 1927.

With investigators closing in, the gang stole a car from Footscray and drove across the border into NSW, raiding shops and warehouses in Orange and Deniliquin.

When police finally caught up with them in Auburn, in Sydney's western suburbs, one of the gang reportedly threw gelignite at the arresting officer.

Police said they found enough explosives in the gang's possession "to blow up a battleship".

Howard was asked by police where he had sourced the sticks of gelignite the gang had used in the robberies.

"They were in the car when we got in," he replied. 

The episode highlighted two things that would become recurring themes in Howard's criminal life; his fondness for explosives and his implausible explanations for where he got them.

On that occasion, he was sentenced to two years in jail, with the judge describing Howard and his crew as "extremely bad characters".

'Genius' escapes from Beechworth and Pentridge

Fifteen years, six convictions and multiple safe explosions later, Howard was declared a "habitual criminal", which meant he could be detained "at the Governor's pleasure" in prison.

He found himself in Beechworth Gaol with no prospect of release, which was a situation he did not relish.

In July 1947, Howard and seven other inmates escaped from Beechworth.

According to newspaper reports, Howard made a skeleton key out of metal in the prison's blacksmith's shop and used it to open the cell doors of fellow inmates.

They then overpowered a guard and locked him in a cell.

The breakout was one of the biggest in Victoria and was not discovered for more than seven hours. An immediate inquiry was launched.

Freedom lasted just three days for Howard. A police officer spotted him sitting on a footpath in Wodonga eating raisins which, it turned out, he had stolen from a local shop.

This time, he was locked up in Victoria's biggest and most notorious prison, Pentridge, which was also not to his liking even though three of his brothers were also in the same jail.

One morning, in April 1949, prison warder William Palmer was doing his rounds when he came to Howard's cell.

"I went to cell No. 123 and tried to open the door with a key — it failed to open when I put my shoulder to it," Palmer said.

Howard's escape was daring to say the least.

He had hacked a hole in the floor of his cell with a table knife and lowered himself into the kitchen beneath his cell with a rope made from strips of blanket.

From there, he removed the kitchen door from its hinges to get outside the building, pushed a wheelbarrow to the jail's inner wall and climbed over.

He then used the blanket rope again, with a weight attached to one end, and threw it over the bottom rung of a ladder which was attached to the outer wall, several metres above the ground, climbed over and jumped six metres to the ground.

All of this without being seen or heard by guards, who were known to shoot prisoners who tried to escape, and without breaking his ankles on the jump to the ground.

The disappearance certainly took the prison hierarchy by surprise as Pentridge was considered virtually impossible to break out of. Again, an escape by Howard sparked a major inquiry.

Prison guards told newspapers that Howard was a good prisoner with "a genius for planning".

But the Inspector General of Prisons, A.R. Whatmore, said Howard had only managed to escape because "he was desperate, cunning and had spent so much of his life in gaols that he could anticipate the cycles of changing routine and make plans".

Whatmore described Howard as "not clever, but daring" and said he was an "incorrigible trouble-maker and safe blower beyond hope of reform".

It may have seemed like a harsh description, but nothing Howard did following his escape contradicted the words of the prison boss.

Not a genius in the courtroom

After just 36 hours of freedom, Howard was spotted by a police officer drinking at a hotel bar in Northcote. When he was apprehended, police found gelignite and detonators in his pocket.

Howard represented himself at his trial. His familiarity with the justice system might have made him good at escaping from prison, but it did not make him a good lawyer.

He accused police of taking advantage of his drunken state and tricking him into confessing that he had stolen the explosives from a quarry at East Brunswick.

He claimed he had found the explosives in a park in Fitzroy and put that explanation to the arresting officer at his trial.

"Would you consider it possible for a person to find explosives?" Howard asked.

"Quite possible," the officer replied.

"Quite possible?" pressed Howard.

"Yes," the officer replied, "but not in Fitzroy."

Howard's argument that he did not break into the quarry was not helped by the fact that he had taken officers to the quarry himself, shown them the window he broke to get in, and told them "I broke the window and got in".

He claimed not to remember any of this because he was drunk at the time of his arrest. 

Addressing the judge and jury, Howard disputed the evidence of police and claimed he did not steal the explosives.

"Your Honour and gentlemen, the most serious aspect of this case is having in my possession explosives that I cannot account for," he said, forgetting that he had claimed he found the explosives in a park.

Howard also claimed to have an alibi, but couldn't prove it because he did not want to expose a mate.

It was a strange time for Howard to suddenly be concerned about common decency and principle after three decades of crime and it didn't work. The jury found him guilty.

In a final attempt to avoid another lengthy prison term, he wrote to the presiding judge to ask for leniency.

"Your honour, my age is 49 years and the fact of being kept locked up for four years breaks a man physically and morally," he wrote.

He signed the letter "your humble servant, G. T. Howard".

Howard's plea did not appear to persuade the judge who, in his sentencing remarks, noted the escapee's "very bad record" and the fact that he had stolen dangerous explosives.

"Stealing goods of that character for a man of your record and what you were previously sentenced for makes the crime a very serious one," he said.

The judge sentenced Howard to two years for escaping from jail, and three years for stealing the explosives — both terms with hard labour.

He was released from Pentridge in 1956 and this time managed to stay out of trouble and - most importantly for Howard — out of jail.