In this present time escapes are of rarer occurrence, and for many reasons. It is not that prisons are really more secure per se:—so far as construction can be depended upon, a gaol like Newgate seems as safe as stone and iron can make it:—but the principles of security are so much better realized and understood. Our forefathers trusted to physical means, and thought enough was done. To-day our reliance is placed on the moral aid of continuous supervision. An escapade like that of Pickard Smith would be next to impossible now. He would have been defeated with his own weapons. To compass his ends a prisoner must have privacy; hours of quiet undisturbed by the intrusive visit of a lynx-eyed official, and a cell all to himself. He has now the cell to himself—at least he has with him no companion felon—but he is for ever tended by an “old man of the mountain,” in the shape of his warder, who is always with him—“turning him over,” as the prison slang calls it; searching him, that is to say, several times a day, both his person and the cell he occupies. To conceal implements, to carry on works like the removal of bricks, of flooring, or of bars, is next to impossible, or feasible only through a lack of vigilance for which the official in fault would be called seriously to account. The whole system as pursued in British Government prisons even where prisoners work in the open air miles beyond prison gates or boundary walls depends on the close observance of certain principles which have come to be regarded as axioms almost with the officials. No prisoner is allowed to be for one moment out of an officer’s sight; that officer starts in the morning with a certain number of convicts in charge: he must bring in the same number on his return to the prison. Beyond the vigilant eye of these officers in charge of small parties ranges a wide cordon of warder-sentries, who are raised on high platforms and have an uninterrupted view around. A carefully prepared code of signals serves to give immediate notice of escape. A shrill note on the whistle, a single shot from a sentry’s breechloader sounds the alarm—“A man gone!” Next second, the whistles re-echo, shot answers shot; the parties are assembled in the twinkling of an eye, and a force of spare officers hasten at once to the point from whence came the first note of distress. It is next to impossible for the fugitive to get away: if he runs for it he is chased; if he goes to ground they dig him out; if he takes to the water he is soon overhauled. The cases are few and far between of successful evasion. In every case the luck or the stratagem has been exceptional—as when at Chatham a man was buried by his comrades brick by brick beneath a heap, and interment was completed before the man was missed; or when at Dartmoor, another broke into the chaplain’s house, stole clothes, food, and a good horse, on which he rode triumphantly away.
At Millbank from first to last the escapes, successful and unsuccessful, have been many and varied. Pickard Smith’s was not the first nor the last. The earliest on record occurred in April, 1831. One night about 10 o’clock it was reported to the governor that the rooms of three of the officers had been entered and a quantity of wearing apparel abstracted therefrom. Almost at the same moment the sergeant patrol came in from the garden to say that the patrol on duty in going his rounds had discovered two men in the act of getting over the garden wall by means of a white rope, made of a “cut of cross-over.”[4] Both men were on the rope, and when it was shaken by the patrol they fell off and back into the garden; but they attacked the officer, knocked him down, and then ran off in an opposite direction. The patrol, as soon as he could recover himself, gave the alarm, and presently the governor, chaplain, surgeon, steward, and a number of other officers arrived on the spot. They separated in parties to make search, while the governor took possession of the cross-over cut, which was fastened to the top of the wall by means of a large iron rake twisted into a hook. This rake was used in the ward for bringing out large cinders from the long stove. It was thought at first that, in the patrol’s absence when giving the alarm, the fugitives must have got over the wall; but the search was continued in the dark, in and out of the tongues between the pentagons, and through all the gardens. Just by the external tower of Pentagon four, the governor and chaplain, who were together, came upon two men crouching in close under the wall. These were two prisoners, named Alexander Wallie, the wardsman, and Robert Thompson, the instructor of C Ward, Pentagon five. Thompson said at once, “You are gentlemen; we will surrender to you. We will make no resistance.” But the governor being immediately joined by the other officers, it was as much as he could do to protect the prisoners from attack and assault, as the former were greatly excited. One of the prisoners was dressed in a fustian frock and trousers belonging to Warder Hay; the other had no coat, but a waistcoat and trousers belonging to some other officer.
At the top of the tower in C Ward, Pentagon five, out of one of the loopholes near the water cistern, another cut of cross-over had been found hanging, by which the prisoners had evidently descended. On going up to the place there were found close by, a large hammer, a chisel, and a screwdriver, articles used in repairing the looms, and the large poker belonging to the airing stoves. Several bricks had been removed from one side of the loophole, leaving a space wide enough for one person to get through. To the iron bar in the centre of the loophole one end of the cross-over was made fast; the other reached the ground. The prisoners’ prison clothing was close by this cistern, and in Wallie’s pocket was a skeleton key made of pewter, which opened many of the officers’ bedroom doors. The prisoners confessed they had let themselves out of their cells by means of false keys made of pewter, and four of these were found near the place where the prisoners had been caught crouching down. The keys were partially buried into the ground. There were two check-gate keys, one cell key, and a skeleton key made of pewter.
Attempts at escape were not unknown in the interval between this and the time when Pickard Smith bewildered Mr. Nihil. But they were abortive and hardly worth recounting. It was not till years after the Reverend Governor had resigned his command that serious efforts at evasion became really frequent and successful. This was when Millbank had become changed in constitution, and from a Penitentiary had been made a depot for all convicts awaiting transportation beyond the seas. I shall have occasion to refer to this change in another volume, but will so far anticipate as to include in the present chapter some of the escapes that happened later. The prison was filled to overflowing with desperate characters; every hole and corner was crammed; there had been no commensurate increase of official staff, and therefore those indispensable precautions by which only escapes could be prevented were greatly neglected. Weak points are soon detected by the watchful prisoner, and in these days every loophole of escape was quickly explored and turned to account. That some of these convicts were resolute in their determination to get free may be believed when it is stated that one, en route from Liverpool to Millbank, offered his escort a bribe of £600 to allow him to escape. There was no doubt that accomplices were close at hand ready to assist him, but happily the virtuous officers resisted temptation.
One of the first attempts of those days was made by a man named Cummings, who broke through the ceiling of his cell. He traversed the roof of his pentagon, but could get no further. Then he commenced to sing and to shout, and by this he was discovered. A ladder having been placed for him to descend, he was secured. The prisoner himself stated that he got through the arch by means of a hole he made with a nail he had picked up in the ward. The man was evidently cowed when he found himself on the top of the Penitentiary, and declared while they were trying to secure him that he would throw himself down. He had made no provision for his own descent; his rug, blanket, towels, etc., were found in his cell untouched. He had, however, traversed the roof along one side of the pentagon.
Soon afterward seven prisoners made their escape in a body from the prison. They were lodged in a large room—afterward the officers’ mess—the windows of which were without bars; and they were able therefore to climb through them on to the roof. They took their blankets with them, and making a ladder, descended by it. The policeman on duty outside roused the lodge-keeper, to say he had seen a man scale the boundary wall between one and two in the morning, by a heavy ladder reared against the wall. All the officers were roused and stationed round the prison; while close search was made in the numerous gardens, stone-yards, etc. At half-past four, two officers came back with four prisoners in a cab. They had been tracked almost from the walls of the prison and captured at Chiswick. The other three were caught at Watford by a recruiting-sergeant and an inspector of the Hertfordshire police. They were on their way to Two Waters.
Next day a conspiracy was detected among the prisoners, who brought in coke from the garden, to escape while so employed. Almost immediately afterwards four other prisoners were caught in the very act of escaping through the top of the cell they occupied. They had broken away the lath and plaster ceiling of the cell, removed the slate slab above it, and had taken off the roof slate to a sufficient extent to allow of easy egress; their sheets had been torn up and were knotted together, and everything was ready for their descent.
The next attempt, within a week or two, was made by a prisoner who found that the mouth of the foul air shaft, to which his cell was adjacent, was not protected by bars; accordingly he broke through the wall of his cell, and having thus gained access to the shaft, would have gained the roof easily had his artifice not been discovered just in time. Two others picked the lock leading to the garden, meaning to escape in the evening; and just then by chance it fell out that the prisoner bookbinders had been long maturing a plan of escape. They had made a large aperture in the floor of their cell, which hole had been concealed by pasteboard. The whole of the party (three in number) were privy to the plot, and each descended in turn to the vault below the cell, which was on the ground floor, to work at the external wall of the prison. This, when their plot was discovered, they had cut three parts through. They had also prepared three suits of clothing from their towels, and had hidden these disguises beneath some rubbish in the vault, where were also discovered a mason’s hammer, the blade of a shears, and a cold chisel. A rope ladder had also been made for scaling the boundary wall, but it had been subsequently cut up as useless. The intending fugitives thought of making a better ladder from broom handles, to be supplied by a brush-maker in an adjoining cell, who was also in the plot. They had worked at night by candlelight. In this case it is not too much to say that the officials in charge of these prisoners were really much to blame. Had they exercised only ordinary vigilance the scheme could not have remained so long undiscovered. By the prisoners’ own confession the hole had been in existence for more than three months, and therefore the cell could never have been searched.
But the most marvellous escape from Millbank was effected in the winter of 1847, by a prisoner named Howard, better known as Punch Howard. He had been equally successful before both at Newgate and Horsemonger Lane Gaol; but the ingenuity and determination he displayed in this last affair was quite beyond everything previously accomplished.
He was sentenced to transportation, and had only been received a few days when he was removed to a cell at the top of the infirmary, part of the room called later on E Ward. The window in this cell was long and narrow, running parallel to the floor but at some height above it. The extreme length is about three feet, the width but six inches and a half.[5] It was closed by a window that revolved on a central bar forming an axle. This bar was riveted into the stone at each end of the window. In those days the prisoners used ordinary steel knives, which were given them at meal times, and then immediately removed. Howard at dinner-time converted his knife into a rough saw, by hammering the edge of the blade on the corner of his iron bedstead, and with this sawed through one rivet, leaving the window in statu quo. The whole thing was effected within the dinner hour: saw made, bar cut, and knife returned. No examination of the knife could have been made, and so far luck favoured the prisoner. As soon as the warders went off duty, and the pentagon was left to one single officer as patrol, Howard set to work. Hoisting himself again to the window, by hanging his blanket on a hammock hook in the wall just beneath, he removed the window bodily—one rivet having been sawn through, the other soon gave way. The way of egress, such as it was, was now open—a narrow slit three feet by six inches and a half. Howard was a stoutly built man, with by no means a small head, yet he managed to get this head through the opening. Having accomplished this, no doubt after tremendous pressure and much pain to himself, he turned so as to lie on his back, and worked his shoulders and arms out. He had previously put the window with its central iron bar half in, half out of the orifice, meaning to use it as a platform to stand on, the weight of his body pressing down one end while the other caught against the roof of the opening, and so gave him a firm foothold. He had also torn up his blankets and sheets in strips, and tied them together, so as to form a long rope, one end of which was fastened to his legs. He was now half way out of the window, lying in a horizontal position, with his arms free, his body nipped about the centre by the narrow opening, his legs still inside his cell. It was not difficult for him now to draw out the rest of his body, and as soon as he had length enough he threw himself up and caught the coping-stone of the roof above. All this took place on the top story, at a height of some thirty-five feet from the ground. He was now outside the wall, and standing on the outer end of the window bar. To draw out the whole lengths of blanket and sheeting rope, throw them on to the roof, and clamber after, were his next exploits. He thereupon descended into the garden below, which encircles all of the buildings, and is itself surrounded by a low boundary wall. This garden was patrolled by six sentries, who divided the whole distance between them. He could see them very plainly as he stood on the roof between Pentagons three and four. He took the descent by degrees, lowering himself from the roof to a third floor window, and from third floor to second, from second to first, and from first to the ground itself. The back of the nearest patrol just then was turned, and Howard’s descent to terra firma was unobserved. Next moment he was seen standing in his white shirt, but otherwise naked, in among the tombstones of the Penitentiary graveyard, which is just at this point. Concluding he was a ghost, the sentry, as he afterwards admitted, turned tail and ran, leaving the coast quite clear. Howard was not slow to profit by the chance. Some planks lay close by, one of which he raised against the boundary wall, and walked up the incline thus formed. Next moment he dropped down on the far side and was free. His friends lived close by the prison in Pye Street, Westminster, and within a minute or two he was in his mother’s house, got food and clothing, and again made off for the country.