Daniel Malden, who twice in successive years 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 on several of his 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 21, 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."
Here he lay till six o'clock, then sent for a smith, who knocked off his irons, and took them away with him for his pains. Then he asked for his wife, who came to him; but while they were at breakfast, hearing a noise in the yard, he made off, and took refuge at Mrs. Newman's, "the sign of the Black-boy, Millbank; there I was kept private and locked up four days alone and no soul by myself."
Venturing out on the fifth day, he heard they were in pursuit of him, and again took refuge, this time in the house of a Mrs. Franklin. From thence he despatched a shoemaker with a message to his wife, and letters to two gentlemen in the city. But the messenger betrayed him to the Newgate officers, and in about an hour "the house was beset. I hid
myself," says Malden, "behind the shutters in the yard, and my wife was drinking tea in the house. The keepers, seeing her, cried, 'Your humble servant, madam; where is your spouse?' I heard them, and knowing I was not safe, endeavoured to get over a wall, when some of them espyed me, crying, 'Here he is!' upon which they immediately laid hold of me, carried me back to Newgate, put me into the old condemned hold as the strongest place, and stapled me down to the floor."
Nothing daunted by this first failure, he resolved to attempt a second escape. A fellow prisoner conveyed a knife to him, and on the night of June 6, 1737, he began to saw the staple to which he was fastened in two. His own story is worth quoting.
"I worked through it with much difficulty, and with one of my irons wrenched it open and got it loose. Then I took down, with the assistance of my knife, a stone in front of the seat in the corner of the condemned hold: when I had got the stone down, I found there was a row of strong iron bars under the seat through which I could not get, so I was obliged to work under these bars and open a passage below them. To do this I had no tool but my old knife, and in doing the work my nails were torn off the ends of my fingers, and my hands were in a dreadful, miserable condition. At last I opened a hole just big enough for me to squeeze through, and in I went head foremost, but one of my legs,
my irons being on, stuck very fast in the hole, and by this leg I hung in the inside of the vault with my head downward for half an hour or more. I thought I should be stifled in this sad position, and was just going to call out for help, when, turning myself up, I happened to reach the bars. I took fast hold of them by one hand, and with the other disengaged my leg to get it out of the hole."
When clear he had still a drop of some thirty feet, and to break his fall he fastened a piece of blanket he had about him to one of the bars, hoping to lower himself down; but it broke, and he fell with much violence into a hole under the vault, "my fetters causing me to fall very heavy, and here I stuck for a considerable time." This hole proved to be a funnel, "very narrow and straight; I had torn my flesh in a terrible manner by the fall, but was forced to tear myself much worse in squeezing through." He stuck fast and could not stir either backward or forward for more than half an hour. "But at last, what with squeezing my body, tearing my flesh off my bones, and the weight of my irons, which helped me a little here, I worked myself through."
The funnel communicated with the main sewer, in which, as well as he could, he cleaned himself. "My shirt and breeches were torn in pieces, but I washed them in the muddy water, and walked through the sewer as far as I could, my irons being very heavy on me and incommoding me much."