Free Peterhead by Robert Jeffrey Page B

this Peterhead legend. The background maketh the man and Gentle Johnny Ramensky was a career criminal who earned his nickname for his acceptance of his fate when his collar was felt by the cops and he normally went gently off to court to take his medicine. He also had the perfect CV for a wartime saboteur and safebreaker.
    His early years hardened him for what was to come. His father had come from Lithuania in the late 1890s along with other experienced miners from Eastern Europe. These hard tickets had been hired by Lanarkshire mine owners to help break strikes in the Scottish coal and clay fields. The Scottish mining communities naturally did not take at all well to the newcomers and Johnny grew up in an area where there was bad feeling between Scots and Eastern Europeans. This gave him something of a chip on his shoulder that would last a lifetime.
    Johnny’s father died when he was eight and he and his mother moved to Glasgow’s Gorbals. But there was plenty of time before that at school in Lanarkshire’s Glenboig for him to feel prejudice and be at the end of barbs about foreigners and “Poles.” Schoolkids and adults used the term as a general derogatory adjective for the incomers, ignoring the fact that many came from other countries like Lithuania and Romania. This was particularly annoying to proud Lithuanians, who reacted as Scots would to being called English!
    The feeling of difference from the other kids playing in the muddy fields of Lanarkshire was underlined by the names. Johnny’s real name was Yonus Ramanauckus, but a schoolteacher arbitrarily changed it to the easier to remember and pronounce Ramensky – though the newspapers often called him Ramenski when his criminal career was at its height. On joining the army in the ’40s he changed his name to Ramsay to avoid any further taunting as a foreigner. But to the Glasgow papers and the Glasgow cops he was always Gentle Johnny Ramensky.
    Over the years the antagonisms between the two communities in industrial Lanarkshire eased as Scots began to understand that the imported “scabs” had themselves been victims of persecution. Indeed many of them were Jews and Catholics fleeing religious ill-treatment and possible conscription to the Russian army. Others were simply seeking a way out of desperate poverty. When you work shoulder-to-shoulder with a man deep in a dark and dank mine hewing coal or spading clay, there is always a grudging respect that comes from the acceptance of shared danger. But the story of Johnny Ramensky, hero and criminal, also shows that the experience of early days can leave a lifelong mark.
    Many a mother has appeared in court to tell judge or sheriff that her boy would have been fine if he had not fallen into bad company. It is unknown if Mrs Ramensky, installed with her family in the infamous Gorbals did that, but it was an excuse that Johnny himself, a man who all his life had a plausible explanation for bad behaviour, used often. He expressed it eloquently in a poignant note, now in the Scottish National Archives, written in Barlinnie in 1951:
     
    Each man has an ambition and I have fulfilled mine long ago. I cherish my career as a safe-blower. In childhood days my feet were planted on the crooked path and took firm root. To each one of us is allotted a niche and I have found mine. Strangely enough, I am happy. For me the die is cast and there is no turning back.
     
    That is as remarkable fifty words or so as you will ever read of a criminal writing about his career. The “crooked path” is real enough, as is his acceptance of a way of life that cost him almost half a century behind bars. His intelligence and sense of reality shine out from his words. It is interesting, too, that he does not mention his heroism as a commando or the undoubted great service he did for his country. The modesty and lack of boastfulness is as striking as it is typical.
    A few years ago I went to do some research in and around his childhood