PRISON BREAKERS

Shannon News, 21 September 1926, Page 4

PRISON BREAKERS

' MEN WHO STEAL AWAY. MANY INGENIOUS CONTRIVANCES. Escaping from a modern prison is a task that might present difficulties even to Jack Sheppard himself, yet , many instances prove that it can still be done (writes David Neville in the “Daily Mail.”) Only a few months ago two men, who were .working, clad In painters’ overalls, on the roof of Pentonville Prison, dropped down from the roof into the street and walked off calmly, quite unsuspected, into the crowded sireet, one of them contriving to remain at large for more than six months. At Dartmoore, too, where the convicts work in gangs outside the prison, dashes for liberty usually short-lived, are not uncommon. A year ago five men broke away at once. Many of. the most ingenious of would-be prison breakers, however, have been foiled at the last moment moment by sheer bad luck. The principal difficulty to be faced is, as a rule, the disguising of the tell-tale prison garb until it can be discarded and something less conspicuous obtained. A convict at Lewes hit upon a most ingenious method of circumventing this a few years before the war. The walking-race craze was then at its height, and the spectacle of a pedestrian clad in cotton vest and shorts and wearing canvas shoes with a number pinned on his breast excited no comment. The convict, therefore, ■with, the help of the scissors, canvas, needle, .and thread supplied to him for making mail-bags in his cell., removed all the, broad arrows; from, his undervest and pants, afterwards sewing up the cuts and cutting the latter down into walking “shorts.” In addition he made himself a pair 7 of canvas shoes and a number to hang upon his chest. While at exercise he collected flints little by little until he had filled his pillow case with them, and to this he attached a canvas rope which he had made. His plan to throw this up so that it caught between the spikes of the boundary wall. Unfortunately far him it fell short, dropped on his head, and stunned him. Another, a gymnastic instructor, swarmed up a drain pipe in broad, daylight, and trusted to a clear start and his fleetness of foot to evade his pursuers. He was, however, unlucky enough to meet something he could not hbpe to out-distance in the shape of a string of race horses from a neighbouring training stable whose lads soon drove him to the hopeless refuge of a tree. Yet another patiently picked away the mortar separating his cell roof from a loft above, replacing it daily with moistened bread and scattering what he had removed, mixed with breadcrumbs, to the sparrows while he was at exercise. He too however, though he escapee from Ms cell, got no further than the prison boundary wall .