DARING ESCAPE FROM BRAIDWOOD GAOL.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 338, 13 July 1875, Page 3

DARING ESCAPE FROM BRAIDWOOD GAOL.

(Braidmood Standard. ) Some time on Saturday night, June sth, or Sunday morning, June 6th, a most daring and audacious escape was made from Braidwood Gaol by one of the prisoners confined therein, a young man named Patrick Campbell, or rather a mere lad, he being only seventeen years of age. On Sunday morning at the usual hour at which the prisoners are removed from their cells to the yard, about six or half-past six o’clock, the cell occupied by the prisoner was found to be vacant, a small hole in the brick wall where the ventilation grate had been placed, showing how he had made his exit. The warder, as may be well imagined, lost no time in apprising the gaoler of the occurrence, exclaiming, in doing so, that “ Campbell had gone.” The prisoner, on the day but one previous, had been allowed to go back to bed in his cell, and the gaoler’s first impression upon hearing this exclamation was that he was dead. But he Was speedily undeceived as to his destination. The implements by which he worked his way through the wall were a small carpenter’s chisel and a common table knife, These were left, with another knife, which was rusty and bore no signs of having been used. These he left on the floor of the cell, amongst the bricks and half-bricks which, after getting the grating out, he took from under it. The chisel and table-knife which he used have been identified as belonging to the gaol, and he must have picked them up, and had them secreted about his person on the Friday morning when he asked permission to retire to his cell. Consequently he had them with him during his two days’ “ illness," and there is no doubt he was not idle during all that time, and did not leave all his work in making the breach in the wall to the Saturday night when he got away. He had his bed across the aperture, and could, while lying down, easily hide what he was at from the eyes of the warders. The ventilation grating was two bricks deep above the level of the floor, and the escapee had cut away a portion of the bricks underneath and removed others, until he had made a hole just big enough for his body to passthiough. He let himself down outside to the ground by means of his blanket, which he tore in two and knotted together, at the ends, one of which he secured by a piece of wooden lining of his cell, which he had removed, and which he made fast by slipping in between the lining and the brickwork of the wall. He left his trousers and jacket and hat in the cell, but took away a suit of gaol clothes which was in the yard It is supposed he got upon the wall by one of the inside gates, which, we are informed, are all left open at night for the convenience of the warder making his rounds of inspection. But it is difficult to say whether he jumped down (for the wall is so shaped at the top as to afford him no hold to let himself down) or went along it to the tower, from which there is a ladder to the

garden outside the wall, or got loundto where the wall springs from the front of the gaol, where there is a downspout which, with the footholds afforded by the stonework, would give him a ready means of descent without risking a broken limb by jum| - ingfrom a height of 20feet. However, whichever way he got down, he managed it successfully. The night was bitter cold, and one on which the very beasts in the fields—let alone a human being unsheltered and exposed to the pitiless blast and cold driving winter rain—were to be pitied.