The Tower's last prisoners

Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, was the Tower's first recorded prisoner in 1101 and its first escapee: he got his guards drunk, climbed out of a White Tower window on a rope smuggled in with the wine, and rode for the coast. Eight hundred and forty years later, in August 1941, a German spy named Josef Jakobs, who had broken his ankle parachuting into Huntingdonshire, was court-martialled and shot by a firing squad at the Tower's miniature rifle range, seated because he could not stand. He was the last person executed here. Three months earlier Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, had been held in the Queen's House for four days after his flight to Scotland. Through the war the Tower was closed to visitors, its lawns dug for vegetables, its moat an allotment, its buildings a collection centre where prisoners of war were interrogated before going to camps. A plaque near the rifle range remembers Jakobs.

Read the full story

The Tower was never built as a prison. It became one because it was the strongest building in the kingdom and belonged to the king, and for eight hundred years anyone the crown wanted kept safe, or kept quiet, could be put inside it. The list runs from kings of Scotland and France to bishops, queens, poets, forgers and, at the very end, spies.

The first, and the first to leave

The first recorded prisoner was Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, the financial enforcer of William Rufus, locked up in the White Tower in 1100 by the new king, Henry I, who needed a scapegoat. In February 1101 a cask of wine was delivered to him. Flambard shared it generously with his guards, and when they were asleep he took the rope that had come coiled inside the cask, tied it to a window column and let himself down the outside of the keep. His friends were waiting with horses. He got to Normandy and was eventually reconciled with the king. He was the Tower’s first prisoner and its first escapee, and he set a standard for ingenuity that nobody quite matched until the Countess of Nithsdale six centuries later.

The long middle

Most of the famous names belong to the Tudor and Stuart centuries, when the Tower was the state prison and Tower Hill the state scaffold. What is less well known is how the prison faded. From the eighteenth century the Tower was increasingly a garrison, an arsenal, a mint and a public attraction, and prisoners became rare. The last execution on Tower Hill was the beheading of the Jacobite Lord Lovat in 1747. By Queen Victoria’s reign the prison rooms were curiosities shown to visitors.

The two world wars brought it back. In the First World War eleven German spies were shot at the Tower after courts-martial, in the rifle range in the outer ward. And in 1939 the fortress closed its gates to the public, its armour was packed away, its Crown Jewels sent secretly to Windsor, and the buildings around the White Tower became a Prisoner of War Collection Centre where captured enemy personnel were held and questioned before being sent on to camps. Wounded prisoners went to the Old Hospital Block; others were held in the New Armouries, where the café is now. The moat was dug up for vegetables. On 5 October 1940 a bomb blew apart the North Bastion and narrowly missed the White Tower; a Yeoman Warder and a woman resident were killed in the raids.

May 1941: the deputy Führer

On the night of 10 May 1941 Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, flew a Messerschmitt alone to Scotland and parachuted into a field, apparently hoping to negotiate peace with people he imagined were willing. He was brought south and, for four days from 17 May, held in the Queen’s House on Tower Green, the same Lieutenant’s Lodgings where Guy Fawkes had been questioned and Lord Nithsdale had put on a dress. He was then moved to a series of safer houses and spent the rest of his life in custody.

August 1941: the last

Josef Jakobs was a German soldier, a dentist by training, who was dropped by parachute over Huntingdonshire on the last night of January 1941 with a radio, forged papers and a ration book. He broke his ankle landing, lay in a field all night, and in the morning fired his pistol to attract attention. Farm workers found him. He was tried by court-martial as an enemy combatant, not in a civilian court, which is why his sentence was carried out at the Tower rather than in a prison. On the morning of 15 August 1941 he was taken to the miniature rifle range in the outer ward, seated in a chair because of his ankle, and shot by a firing squad of eight Scots Guards. He is buried in an unmarked grave in Kensal Green. He was the last person executed at the Tower of London.

A small plaque near the site records his name and the date. It is not on any tour, and most visitors walk past it. It is the end of a story that began with a bishop and a rope.