PRISONER ESCAPES FROM DARTMOOR

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25736, 23 February 1949, Page 5

PRISONER ESCAPES FROM DARTMOOR

(Special Correspondent N.Z.P.A.) LONDON, February 21. Dartmoor warders are puzzling over what is described as one of the most amazing escapes in the long history of the prison. It was made by 31-year-old Victor Harold James, who. though he weighs nearly 12 stone, and measures 38 inches round the chest, squeezed himself between window bars only 63in apart. James, who was free for 13 hours before he was recaptured, said on his return to prison that he took off all his clothes, greased his body with some ointment he had secreted, and forced his way through the bars in a large window overlooking the courtyard. He then dropped 10 feet to the courtyard and, using a rope made of his bedclothes. to which he had attached a steel hoop, climbed the 25-foot wall round the outside of the prison. He wandered about on the moor for several hours and then stole a black overcoat from an inn. He was walking along a road on the outskirts of the moor when a police inspector who was passing in a car recognised the prison trousers underneath the stolen overcoat and forced James to surrender.