BUSHRANGING DAYS RECALLED.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 845, 28 May 1910, Page 4

BUSHRANGING DAYS RECALLED.

An unexpected echo of the Australian bushranging days of evil memory was heard in the Ballarat Court a few days ago, when a quiet-lookiug individual named John Franklin Dermoody pleaded guilty to being drunk and disorderly. In consideration of a lengthy abstention from any breach of the law, he was discharged. The presiding justice’s casual query, “Anything known previously against this man ?” brought the reply, “It is nearly forty yerrs since he was before this Conn.,’ and thereby hangs an interesting tale. Thirty-eight years ago, when Dermoody was only twenty, he and the notorious Captain Moonlight and four other prisoners made a sensational escape from Ballarat gaol. Captain Moonlight, who had been committed on a charge of breaking into a bank at Egerton, and Dermoody, who was alleged to have committed robbery at Clunes, planned the escape for the night before the criminal sessions. The lour others were awaiting trial for petty larcenies. Dermoody was employed in the gaol kitchen, and secreted a butcher’s knife, with which, by the simple process of hacking out a couple of bricks, he opened up communication with the adjoining cell, occupied by Moonlight, About i a.m., as prearranged, Moonlight pulled the night-bell in his cell, and when the warder arrived he found Moonlight bent double jwith simulated pain in the stomach. At Moonlight’s suggestion the warder went away to obtain some hot water to relieve the pain and Dermoody at once forced the lock of his own cell away, the butcher’s knife having served to cut through the sheet-iron lining of the door. When the unsuspecting warder approached with the hot water, he was seized by the two men, and carried to the kitchen, where be was gagged and bound with a blanket to the cook’s table. Captain Moonlight and Dermoody then set free the four other prisoners, and all six escaped by means of a rope and a stool, with which they scaled the high wall and lowered themselves to the roadway. Moonlight, who was the son of a clergyman, and had himself been a lay reader, was recaptured, and in later years he was hanged at Darlinghurst gaol, Sydney, for murder. Dermoody, who is fifty-eight, and an American by birth, is still hale and hearty, and does not look his age. To a representative of the Melbourne Age be stated fie and Moonlight, whose real 12 was Scott, received twelve ... ’ imprisonment for the prisuti break* ing episode. He also professed his intention of giving up drink and trying to lead a new life, but he failed to live up to bis new ideal, and was arrested the same night on a charge of being drunk and resisting the police.