Saturday, December 30 marks the moment in 1962 when First Constable Leigh Gallagher arrested his violent captors.

Little-remarked on today, the case attracted national media attention in the early 60s, including in the pages of the Bendigo Advertiser.

It remains one of the most extraordinary accounts of an arrest in Bendigo's history.

Gallagher was 47 years old, with 15 years police experience, the night he spied from his police car two young men wearing white shirts and black pants, walking towards a bridge into Eaglehawk shortly after midnight, 61 years ago.

What he did not know - no-one did, at that moment - was that the pair had just escaped from Bendigo's prison (now Ulumbarra Theatre).

Graham Francis Grundy and John Neil Williams were among four prisoners who had vanished from their cells less than an hour earlier, under the cover of a heavy rainstorm.

They were two 19-year-olds who were originally from Port Melbourne and Essendon.

Gallagher stopped his car and asked what the pair were doing.

"The bigger man of the two [Williams] said he was going to see his grandmother in Eaglehawk," the policeman later told reporters, including those from the Bendigo Advertiser.

Gallagher said he knew Williams' grandmother and that they should get in his car.

The police officer had an ulterior motive. He was suspicious. As all three talked in the car, Gallagher accused the pair of lying.

That was when all hell broke loose, according to Gallagher's later court testimony.

Williams got riled up: "Don't move or I'll put a knife between your ribs," the young man said.

Gallagher retorted that "if you talk like that you will find yourself with a bullet in yours".

The copper was bluffing. He did not have a gun.

Williams flashed something that looked an awful lot like a knife and Gallagher reached for the police car's radio transmitter.

In the scuffle, an escapee pinned the officer to his seat and chopped viciously at his throat.

"He cut my breath off and I went out to it. I don't know for how long," Gallagher later said.

The abductors drove north. Williams leant over, every so often, to chop Gallagher's injured throat with his hand.

It seems today, reading accounts of what happened next, like Grundy and Williams were at a loss for what to do with their newfound freedom.

They certainly do not come across as the brains behind the prison escape. It is as if they tagged along with two other inmates (who would remain on the run for days until police tracked them down in New South Wales).

Grundy and Williams decided to head to a farm near Robinvale because the latter had once worked there and left some clothing with a farmer called W J Harvey.

Commonsense might have suggested Harvey would have been wild about two fugitives pulling up unannounced as his family slept, with a stolen police car and a hostage.

Maybe Grundy and WIlliams did not have any commonsense.

It was about 5am when they got to the farmhouse.

Williams got out and walked towards the house, where he either woke Harvey up or ran into him already up and about.

In the car, Gallagher told Grundy he had a bad cramp in his stomach. Grundy, for some reason, took this as an excuse to leave his hostage and walk towards Williams and Harvey.

This is when Gallagher crawled out of the car, opened the bonnet and ripped out its distributor.

"The big fellow [Williams] came back and threatened to kill me for doing this and we had a bit of a struggle," he said in the account he later gave to the Advertiser.

Gallagher rushed into the house, woke Harvey's wife and demanded she tell him if there were any weapons in the house.

It turned out they had a .22 rifle.

Gallagher went outside to find Williams and Grundy sitting in the police car. Evidently, they had decided there was no point running.

Grundy surrendered without a struggle.

"The big man [Williams] ... said he would rush me. I told him I would certainly shoot if he did so," Gallagher told the Advertiser.

Amid a protracted standoff, police officers arrived on scene. Harvey had called them. They had raced 11km to the farmhouse.

That was the end of Williams' and Grundy's time on the run.

In the days that followed, the Bendigo Advertiser published a front page picture of Gallagher and four of his colleagues having cups of tea, shortly after a medical check.

He spoke slowly, due to his badly injured throat. The tea seemed to go down alright, though.

Gallagher would soon be awarded a Police Valour Medal.

His attackers were not so fortunate.

A judge gave Williams a four-and-a-half year prison sentence with a minimum of three years. Grundy got three-and-a-half years with a minimum of two. The judge was more lenient than he could have been on account of the men's "youth".

"I am sorry for what I did to Constable Gallagher," Grundy told the court. "I have not had much of a home life and my parents do not care about me."

Williams did not offer any excuse for his behaviour but a lawyer said he had been an inmate of homes and institutions since the age of seven.