The Chronicles of Newgate, vol. 1/2Griffiths, Arthur
History
The Chronicles of Newgate, vol. 1/2
Griffiths, Arthur
Criminals -- Great Britain; Newgate (Prison : London, England); Prisons -- England; Punishment -- Great Britain
Daniel Malden, who twice, in 1735 and 1736, escaped from the condemned
hold in Newgate in a manner little less surprising, although less
notorious than Jack Sheppard, had been a man-of-war’s-man, and served in
several of her Majesty’s ships. After his discharge he took to burglary
and street-robberies, for which he was presently arrested and sentenced
to suffer death. While lying in the condemned hold, on the very morning
of his execution he effected his escape. A previous occupant of the same
cell in the condemned hold had told him that a certain plank was loose
in the floor, which he found to be true. Accordingly, between ten and
eleven on the night of October 21st, 1736, before execution, he began to
work, and raised up the plank with the foot of a stool that was in the
cell. He soon made a hole through the arch under the floor big enough
for his body to pass through, and so dropped into a cell below from
which another convict had previously escaped. The window-bar of this
cell remained cut just as it had been left after this last escape, and
Malden easily climbed through with all his irons still on him into the
press-yard. When there he waited a bit, till, seeing “all things quiet,”
he pulled off his shoes and went softly up into the chapel, where he
observed a small breach in the wall. He enlarged it and so got into the
penthouse. Making his way through the penthouse he passed on to the
roof. At last, using his own words, “I got upon the top of the cells by
the ordinary’s house, having made my way from the top of the chapel upon
the roofs of the houses, and all round the chimneys of the cells over
the ordinary’s house”; from this he climbed along the roofs to that of
an empty house, and finding one of the garret windows open, entered it
and passed down three pairs of stairs into the kitchen, where he put on
his shoes again, “which I had made shift to carry in my hand all the way
I came, and with rags and pieces of my jacket wrapped my irons close to
my legs as if I had been gouty or lame; then I got out at the kitchen
window, up one pair of stairs into Phœnix Court, and from thence
through the streets to my home in Nightingale Lane.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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