by Paul Buck
Sheppard’s third period of confinement was thanks to Jonathan Wild, who plied Lyon with brandy in Temple Bar in order to discover his whereabouts. Sheppard had enjoyed three months of liberty, robbing coaches and breaking into shops. Wild could not allow him to continue to operate outside of his control, and so sought his arrest.
Sheppard was tried and found guilty of one of three charges of theft laid against him. He was sentenced to death. Imprisoned in the putrid smelling hellhole that was Newgate, he gained a stay of execution by the method he knew best: escape.
Newgate itself was as likely to kill you before you made it to the gallows. Walking past the place, one could easily be urinated upon from on high, or be the recipient of a chamber pot emptied from a window. Visiting times were rather liberal though, for the ratio of guards to prisoners was high, and thus sex, gambling, food or devices such as tools were more accessible than might be imagined. That said, during Sheppard’s stay the pendulum was swinging towards a stricter regime.
When he was visited by Lyon and her friend, Poll Maggott, Sheppard loosened an iron bar in the hatch where visitors talked to the incarcerated. Whilst they distracted the guards, he slipped his slight frame through the gap in the grille. Dressed in women’s clothes that his accomplices had brought with them, he was away.
Sheppard’s freedom was short-lived. After an offence in Fleet Street, he was pursued by a posse, captured on Finchley Common and returned to Newgate – though not without an attempt to make a run for it, right at the entrance to Newgate itself.
Such was his fame that the queue to visit him was formidable. If they could pay the keeper, they could enter. Writers like Daniel Defoe came to speak with him; artists like James Thornhill came to draw him. But escape was not going to be quite so easy this time.
After a file was discovered, Sheppard was moved from the condemned hold to a strong room, the ‘Stone Castle’, “with my legs chain’d together, loaded with heavy irons, and stapled down to the floor.” He thought it “not altogether impracticable to escape, if I could but be furnished with proper implements,” but he was watched too closely.
One day, free of jailers, he looked around the floor and saw a small nail within reach, which he used to open the big horse padlock from the chain to the staple in the floor. Whilst alone, he would unfasten himself to stretch his legs. He was caught before he could resume his position one time, and thus felt obliged to show the jailers how he could open and close the padlock at will. They provided him with handcuffs to make it more difficult. He moaned and beseeched them not to bring such dread to him, whilst secretly knowing “that with my teeth only I could take them off at pleasure.”
Within the hour he had released his cuffs and put them back on again. He even bloodied his wrists to gain compassion from the turnkeys, and any of the visitors or ‘spectators’ – which worked, as he was rewarded with quantities of silver and copper. Many of the visitors were wealthy and female, and would endure the stench to look at the prisoners. But what Sheppard wanted most was not money but a crowbar, a chisel, a file, and a saw or two.
His fourth escape occurred on the night of a disturbance next door in the court, after the enraged Joseph Blake had jumped his guards and slashed Jonathan Wild’s throat with a small knife after Wild gave evidence against him. Wild was almost killed. He was certainly fortunate to survive, but, whilst he was recuperating and not paying attention to his trade, his world started to fall apart. This attack was the beginning of the end for him.
The distraction of the uproar gave Sheppard the signal to make his move, for he was under constant observation by his turnkeys until then. This was to be his greatest escape. On the next day, Thursday 15 October 1724, at 2pm, various officials visited and checked his restraints. After they had left, “just before three in the afternoon I went to work, taking off first my hand-cuffs; next with main strength I twisted a small iron link of the chain between my legs asunder; and the broken pieces prov’d extream useful to me in my designs; the fett-locks I drew up to the calves of my leggs, taking off before that my stockings, and with my garters made them firm to my body, to prevent them shackling.”
He then made a hole in the chimney, up near the ceiling, and, using the broken links, wrenched out a transverse iron bar which effectively became his crowbar. He went up the chimney to the ‘Red Room’, which had not been used (or even opened) for seven years; there he worked on the lock’s nut and soon had it off, opening the door. He also found a large nail to add to his collection of implements. But the door from the Red Room to the chapel was harder. “I was forc’d to break away the wall, and dislodge the bolt which was fasten’d on the other side.” This created such a noise that Sheppard was surprised not to be discovered.
In the chapel Sheppard climbed over the iron spikes, breaking one off for his purposes, and opened the door on the inside by stripping the nut off the lock, as in the Red Room. In the ‘leads’, the rooms under the tiled roof, another door impeded his progress with its strong lock. All the time he was working in pitch black, “and it being full dark, my spirits began to fail me.” But his spirits held, and, in less than half an hour, with the help of the nail and the spike, he wrenched the box off “and so made the door my humble servant.”
A little further and another door blocked his passage, “being guarded with more bolts, bars and locks than any I had hitherto met with.” He could hear the clock at St Sepulchre sounding 8pm. The box and its nut would not move, but he attacked the fillet of the door until the lock’s box came off the main post. One further door into the lower leads, which was bolted on the inside, opened with ease. He clambered up to the higher leads and went over the wall. Then he realised that it was quite a drop – around sixty feet to the ground. Fearing that he might dislodge something and attract attention if he leapt to the adjoining property, he decided to return all the way back to his cell and retrieve the blanket. This he fixed into the wall with a chapel spike, before dropping onto the roof of a neighbouring house.
By now it was 9pm. The shops were still open, as was the garret door that opened onto the leads. He stole softly down two flights of stairs. His irons made a small clink, which was heard by people who thought it was a dog or cat. He then went back up to the garret and rested two hours, before going down again as the neighbour’s visitors were leaving. Within the hour he became determined to go, first tripping and making a noise before he made a rush for the street door “which I was so unmannerly as not to shut after me.”
Now free, he took a route through Holborn and Gray’s Inn Lane into the fields; at 2am he came to Tottenham Court, taking refuge in an old barn where cows had been kept, to rest his swollen and bruised legs. He discovered he had between forty and fifty shillings in his pocket.
It rained all day Friday, but that evening he ventured out and found a little blind chandler’s shop where he obtained some food and drink. He rested again through Saturday and Sunday, trying with a “stone to batter the basils of the fetters in order to beat them into a large oval, and then to slip my heels through.” He was discovered by the master of the shed, but told the sob story of being an unfortunate man sent to Bridewell for fathering a bastard child, who had now made his escape. Though he drew sympathy, the man wanted him gone. Sheppard put his trust in another man he came across, offering him twenty shillings if he could get him a hammer. This man, a shoemaker, had a blacksmith for a neighbour and brought tools along. “That evening I had entirely got rid of those troublesome companions my fetters, which I gave to the fellow, besides his twenty shillings, if he thought for to make use of them.”
Damaging his clothes to appear as a beggar, Sheppard had a square meal in Charing Cross, overhearing tales of his exploits from those gathered there. And so it was the next day; wherever he went to eat or drink, or mix with the crowds, all he heard was talk of his escape. He sent word to his mother, who visited him in a lodging he took and begged him to leave “the kingdom”. But Sheppard was a true Londoner and had to remain close.
He broke into the Rawlins brothers’ pawnbroker shop in Drury Lane. Though he disturbed the occupants in the next room, where they slept, he talked as if he was not alone, “loudly giving our directions for shooting the first person through the head that presum’d to stir”. Thus he left with his booty, appearing the next day “transform’d into a perfect gentleman”, and then ventured with his new ‘sweetheart’, Kate Keys, back towards Newgate to a public house, to become “very merry together”. After driving past Newgate Prison itself in a hackney coach, that evening they all drank brandy with Sheppard’s mother in Sheers’ alehouse in Maypole Alley, near Clare Market.
In his own words (the rest of the account quoted here was probably ghost-written for him by Daniel Defoe – author of Robinson Crusoe, and more especially Moll Flanders, which uses Newgate as a location), signed just prior to his death on 16 November 1724, he continued, “and after leaving her I drank in one place or other about the neighbourhood all the evening, till the evil hour of twelve, having been seen and known by many of my acquaintance; all of them cautioning of me, and wondering at my presumption to appear in that manner. At length my senses were quite overcome with the quantities and variety of liquors I had all the day been drinking of, which pav’d the way for my fate to meet me; and when apprehended, I do protest, I was altogether incapable of resisting, and scarce knew what they were doing to me.”
Some attributed his great feats to assistance from the Devil. But his skill lay in his use of tools and his dexterity. This time he was placed in the Middle Stone Room so that he could be watched at all times, and was also burdened with three hundred pounds of iron weights.
Naturally he intended one final escape, en route to Tyburn’s gallows. He had a penknife in his pocket, with which he intended to cut the cords binding him, and then to throw himself from the cart into the crowd, making his bid through the passages around Little Turnstile, where he knew the narrowness would prevent the horses following, and where he expected some assistance to be offered by the crowd.
But this was not to be. The knife was discovered just prior to his departure from Newgate. Of course, Sheppard could have avoided the gallows, but the price was to inform on his associates. Though he had been the victim of others who betrayed him, he scoffed at any such idea, preferring to face the death sentence. This was only to be expected. A villain he undoubtedly was, but his individualistic stand against authority and skill at escaping – and indeed his sense of humour, when one reads his written accounts – merit him an afterlife of fame.
Sheppard has been the subject of songs, poems and even plays, some as soon as he was taken down from the gallows. He was also the model for Macheath in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera; Charles Dickens used him as the basis for the Artful Dodger, and William Hogarth as the inspiration for the Idle Apprentice in his series of engravings, Industry and Idleness. At one point, it was feared that his popularity was gaining so much ground that others would emulate his behaviour. Consequently, all licences for performances were refused for plays that contained his name in the title. This fame extended beyond England. In the Wild West, Jesse James and his brother Frank signed letters to the Kansas City Star as Jack Sheppard.
Whilst Sheppard, the most famous jail escapee of all time, had made a mockery of Newgate Prison’s security, others were willing to travel to the lower depths where he had clambered upwards. In 1731, six prisoners who broke through a dungeon floor braved the nauseating filth of the sewer beneath. Two were drowned and their skeletons found later, but the others escaped. The robber Daniel Malden escaped the condemned cell in 1737 and made his way to freedom through a sewer. He fled to Europe, but returned, was recaptured and hanged.
Newgate was one of the main targets of the mob during the Gordon Riots. They first demanded the release of the prisoners. The keeper refused, then had to flee over the roof with his wife and daughter as the mob stormed the building. All the furniture, together with doors, floorboards and a collection of pictures, were piled up against one of the walls and set alight. The mob then freed all three hundred prisoners, including four footpads who were to be executed the next day. The building was burned out and had to be rebuilt.
It seems that there was an American Jack Sheppard, who worked from the 1850s onwards around New York. Though one can read of his early exploits with Italian Dave, a kind of Fagin figure, once Jack Mahaney graduated from his apprenticeship, and became his own boss, he worked under aliases that make him difficult to track. However, it is known that he was an expert escape artist, twice escaping from Sing Sing and twice from the Tombs prison in New York City, as well as others. But details of these escapes are sketchy.
Jean-Henri Latude sent the Marquise de Pompadour a box of poison in 1749 and informed her of a plot against her life, apparently all for a joke. His sense of humour proved disastrous. It was not appreciated by the French King’s mistress, and he was cast into the Bastille for fear that he was part of a political conspiracy against the monarchy. Despite three escapes, Latude spent thirty-five years of his life in prison.
His first escape was from the castle keep of Vincennes in June 1750, after being transferred there from the Bastille. He was closely watched, but had lulled the guards by always walking ahead and down the steps to the garden quickly for his recreation. They knew he would always be waiting at the bottom – until one day when he wasn’t. He had scurried down fast and walked straight out, encountering an open door in the garden, slipping past its guard and away into the fields. All his gaolers and guards that day were locked up in the Bastille for a few months, until it was ascertained they had not participated in his escape.
Later that day, Latude went back to Paris in search of his old friends. There he came across Annette Benoît, whom he had met just before his arrest. She tried to help, but his older friends were mindful of punishment if caught. He was recaptured within five days, as was Benoît. She only received a two-week imprisonment when she pleaded ‘love’ as mitigating circumstances.
Once back in the Bastille, Latude shared a cell with Antoine Allègre, who was incarcerated for a similar hoax involving the Marquise. Determining that escape was the only solution, they found that a chimney was the best route out, even if it was spiked with gratings and bars and the eighty-two-foot drop to a large moat was daunting. By lifting a tile, they discovered that beneath their cell was a space between the floor and the ceiling, enough to store any tools or objects needed for their escape. They set to work removing the blocking bars in the thirty-foot chimney, and making a rope ladder of around eighty feet to get down from the towers.
It took them eighteen months of working at night. They unravelled shirts, handkerchiefs, towels, stockings, breeches, anything they could to twist the threads and extend their rope. Their consumption of materials was enormous, but they managed to secure extra clothing. Inside the chimney, it took six months to clear the barriers. The ladder they constructed had a hundred and fifty-one rungs, each made from sawn fire-logs covered in cloth to avoid making any noise against the wall.
On 25 February 1756, Latude and Allègre started to prepare for their escape as soon as their dinner was brought to them at 6pm. By 8pm all was prepared at the foot of the chimney: ladders, ropes, tools, even some brandy. Latude set off first, and then everything was hoisted up the chimney. When they came out of the top, they climbed down onto the platform and took the rope ladder across to the Trésor Tower, where they fixed the ladder to a cannon and lowered it to the moat. With a safety rope attached to Allègre, Latude went down first. After all the rest of the equipment, plus a portmanteau with some clothes, was sent down, Allègre joined him. They were determined to go through the moat wall. Standing in freezing water up to their chests, they worked at removing blocks. Even after piling aside several dozen, they felt they were getting nowhere. It was almost dawn before they breached the wall, and then changed into the clothes they had brought in the portmanteau. Latude wasn’t recaptured until June.
When Latude was finally
sent back to Vincennes he was watched closely, with an extra guard added for his daily walk in the garden. One day in November 1765, there was a fog hanging over the garden. Latude turned to a guard and asked what he thought of the weather. The guard said it was bad. Latude retorted, “I myself find it very good for escaping.” And, before the guard could react, Latude was off and running. Within seconds he was lost in the fog, other guards only spotting him briefly as he sped past. At one point, with everyone screaming, “Stop! Stop!”, Latude joined in, shouting and pointing into the distance. When he arrived at the front gate, the guard was ready with his bayonet fixed. Latude slowed and quietly approached the man, whom he knew. “Your orders are to stop me, not to kill me.” Before the guard realised that Latude was too close, the prisoner had overpowered him and pushed him aside, before taking off into the fog. This escape lasted for three weeks.
In 1775 he was moved to Charenton, the madhouse, and let out a couple of years later on the proviso that he retired to his hometown. Needless to say, he didn’t obey and was imprisoned again. It was only by the chance intersession of Mme Legros, who had read of his plight, that he was given a definite release in 1784. What started off for Latude as a youthful prank ended with him a broken old man emerging from prison.
Our focus in this book has been mostly on modern times. But a few words can be added about the kings, queens, nobles and conspirators who traditionally made their escapes from fortresses and castles. These strongholds have always housed prisoners, and thus escapees. If we take the Tower of London as an example, we see that it housed prisoners of high rank along with religious dissidents. For eight hundred and fifty years it served mainly to house political prisoners. Only a few ever escaped its high walls and deep moat.
In fact, the Tower’s first prisoner was also its first escapee. Ranulf Flambard, the Bishop of Durham, was imprisoned in August 1100 for extortion in his role as tax collector. In February 1101, his friends smuggled in a rope in a wine casket. Having entertained his guards with the wine, as they slept happily he tied the rope to the window of his cell in the White Tower and climbed down, dropping the last twenty feet when the rope ran out. A ship had been arranged to carry the bishop and some of his treasure, along with his elderly mother, to a refuge in Normandy.