INGENIOUS PRISON BREAKERS.

Auckland Star, Volume 198, Issue LVII, 21 August 1926, Page 36

INGENIOUS PRISON BREAKERS.

Escaping from a modern prison is a task that might present difficulties even to Jack Sheppard himself, yet many instances, such as the recent one at Parkhurst, 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 streets, one of them contriving to remain at large for more than six months. Many of the most ingenious of wouldbe prison-breakers, however, have been foiled at the last moment by cheer bad luck. The principal difficulty to be faced is, as a rule, the disguising of the telltale prison garb until it can be discarded and something lese 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, 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 hie cell, removed all the broad arrows from his under-vest and pants, afterwards sewing up the cuts and cutting the latter down into walking "shorts." In addition, he made himself a pair of canvas shoes and a number to hang upon his chest. While at exercise ho collerted flints little by little until he had filled his pillow-case with them, and to this he attached a canvas ropo which he had made. Hie plan was to throw this up to that it caught between the spikes of (he boundary wall. Unfortunately for him it fell short, dropped on his head and stunned him. Another, a gymnastic instructor, ewarmed up a drainpipe in broad daylight, and trusted to. a clear start and his fleetness of foot to evade his pursuers. Hβ was, however, unlucky enough to meet something he could not hope to out-distance in the chape of a string of racehorses from a neighbouring training stable, whose lads soon drove him to the hopeless refuge of a tree. Yet^ another patiently picked away the morfir separating his cell roof from a lofiSabove, replacing it daily with moietened bread and scattering what he had removed mixed with bread crumbs to the sparrows while h« was at exercise. He, too, however, though he escaped from his cell, got no farther than the prison boundary wall.