What are the links?

  Beau Geste and Dartmoor Prison

You may find it hard to think of a link between the classic film, and the hardest Prison in the UK, but if you look there is a strong link.

Dartmoor Prison is an open prison, which means the men are free to wander as they wish, as it houses some of the toughest criminals in the UK. You may wonder why such men have so much freedom? The answer lies in the location and surroundings of the prison. The prison is set in some of the harshest countrysides in the UK, if you recall the scene at the end of The Hound of the Baskervilles where the prisoner is trapped in the mire, that is how Dartmoor is. If you are not a local or don't have a guide, you won't be loose on the moor for long.

If you do escape. and make it across the mire, the nearest village is Launceston over 25 miles away, and as it's small a stranger stands out.

There has only been one successful escape from prison, which was in December 1966 when Frank Mitchell was sprung by the Kray twins.

Reggie Kray later said this was their biggest mistake; though Miller was strong, he was also running on a short fuse and prone to use the ax at the slightest slur, which became a problem. He was killed a few weeks later at their behest.

By now, the link to Beau Geste may be visible. The fort in the film is situated in the middle of the desert, with nowhere to run if you wanted to desert. As the sergeant said, at the end of the movie March or Die "If you run the desert will kill you, if not the legion will hunt you, and if they don't I will hunt you down."

This brings me to what I refer to as my Beau Geste moment. This relates to an incident during my time in Germany during my Royal Air Force days.

To set the scene - we were on an exercise, which is used to determine how you cope under varying circumstances. I was on guard when I was told that the establishment I was guarding had been destroyed, and we were dead. I took this time to have a break, being in a gas mask makes you sweat very much. I was having a puff on a cigar when an officer asked me why I wasn't guarding the shelter. I replied I'd been told we were dead, and his reply was "Go back to your section to be redeployed."

I thought, "What is the point of having these rules if you're going to bend them to suit yourself?" It was at this point I recalled the final scene of the film when the Foreign Legion is propping dead bodies on the ramparts to try to hold off the Arabs.