Hello. This week we're talking about folk hero, and possibly the 18th century's most notorious thief
and escaper, Jack Shepherd. In his time he would escape captivity four times in the same year, and
almost escaped the noose. The fact he was a cockney, a rebel, completely non-violent, and very witty, made
him very popular with the particularly downtrodden urban lower classes of London. This is his story.
He was born on 4th of march 1702 in Spitalfields. Reportedly to a poor family, but he doesn't seem
to have had that deprived a childhood. According to the Newgate Calendar
he was put into a school in Bishopsgate Street for two years, and then apprenticed
to a carpenter. And, by all accounts, he was a pretty good carpenter and rather well behaved.
But then, after five years of apprenticeship, he discovered Drury Lane and Covent Garden with
their theatres and their bawdy houses, and their abandoned women, and in this wretched hive of scum
and villainy he enjoyed the company of plenty of those women, and one in particular who was known
as Elizabeth Lyon. Or as she was more commonly referred to Edgewood Bess. Now Bess was not a low
maintenance girl and in order to keep her in the manner, not that she had become accustomed to, but
that jack boasted he could get her accustomed to, he ended up turning to a life of crime.
Now he started out by small-scale thefts from the houses he was doing carpentry for. He'd steal rings,
silk handkerchiefs, silver cutlery items and so on but eventually he was going to get caught and sure
enough his first arrest came in April 1724, when he was entrapped by the corrupt and self-styled
"Thief Taker General" Jonathan Wilde and so began the first of many short periods of imprisonment, this
one in St Giles' Roundhouse. Now a Roundhouse is a small single occupant cell much like this one in
Hilperton here. It wasn't going to hold Sheppard for long. During the night, Shepard broke the chair and,
using the pieces, he prised away the roof planks in order to create a hole wide enough to slip through.
The noise of his escape did attract a crowd, but not before he was already out
and he used the cover of this crowd to slip away. Mingling his way into the crowd he pointed towards
the roof and the rear of the Roundhouse and shouted "look he's getting away" and when all
the crowd looked to see where Jack Shepherd may be, of course he slipped out in the other direction.
Now he enjoyed his freedom for less than a month. He was arrested again in May of 1724 picking a
pocket near Leicester Square and this time he was sent to St Anne's Roundhouse in Soho.
Now while he was there he was visited by Edgewood Bess but she was recognized as an
accomplice, and they were both arrested and remanded to New Prison Clerkenwell.
There, they shared a cell in the so-called Newgate Ward. Now within a matter of days Sheppard
had worked his carpentry magic once more, and had filed through the manacles of the pair
and removed a bar from the window. Then, knotting together the bed sheet, he lowered Bess down from
the window, and then followed himself. They then climbed over the 22-foot high prison gate to
freedom. Which is not an insignificant achievement considering that Sheppard was only five foot four.
When he was arrested again in August, the authorities were not going to make the same
mistake again. This time he had been convicted of theft well into the realms of capital crime,
in excess of 55 pounds. He was sentenced to death and he was bound to the condemned cells at Newgate
Prison. He was there for two weeks before he escaped. He escaped four days before he was
due to go to the gallows. Once again he'd loosened the bars on his cell and when he was visited by
Edgewood Bess and another woman called Poll Maggot his small frame served him well, and he could
squeeze out of the hatch that the bars had been blocking. He remained hidden from view by the two
ladies while he donned women's clothing, that they had brought in with them, and then they were away.
The guards and staff seeing just a group of women leaving the condemned cells, which was not uncommon.
The fact that there were three of them leaving, when only two of them arrived,
completely passed them by. Once again, he was not out for long though, and being a capital
fugitive led to a manhunt and a posse tracked him down while he was hiding out on Finchley Common,
and this time he was sent to a special condemned strong room in Newgate known as "The Castle".
A room so secure you didn't even need to guard it. It's just tempting fate isn't it?
Sheppard picked the locks on his handcuffs, and removed the chains.
He couldn't get out of the leg irons immediately but that wasn't going to stop him. He filed an
iron bar out of the chimney, and used that to form a hole in the ceiling to an upper floor.
Once on that upper floor, he prized several doors away from their hinges to get to the prison chapel,
and climbed out of the chapel window onto the roof. Now when he looked over the edge of the roof he
found that the drop was just too much for him to stomach, so at this point he reversed his route,
went all the way back to his cell to get a blanket, back out and back to the roof and lowered himself
down onto the neighbouring roof of a neighbouring house. Which he broke into, went down the stairs
and was away to his freedom. That's how secure your strong room was Newgate! Think about that!
But, typically, it was freedom that would last him two weeks. He kept getting arrested
because he kept going back to the same pubs and getting blind drunk, and then being discovered,
and having broken into a pawn brokers shop on Drury Lane he was once again arrested
blind drunk, and wearing all the fine clothing he'd stolen from the pawn brokers.
He was placed back in Newgate, this time under constant observation,
and just for good measure, his restraints had 300 pounds of ironwork attached to them as well.
Now while resident in Newgate he was still quite the celebrity, and the jailers charged
high society visitors four shillings a time to visit him. He was quite the money spinner.
He even had his portrait done by James Thornhill, the portrait painter to the King. But on the 1st of
November 1724 he was sent to Tyburn to be hanged. But not without one or two tricks up his sleeve.
One of these tricks was quite literally up his sleeve. He had secreted a pen knife which he was
going to use to cut the ropes. This was, however, discovered by the prison warden before he left.
His journey on the back of the cart took him from Newgate along Holborn and Oxford Street
to Tyburn. Stopping at the City of Oxford Tavern for a last pint. Along the way he
was cheered by crowds of up to 200,000 people. Roughly 1/3 of London came out to see him.
But remember, we did say two tricks up his sleeve. His last was to take advantage of his small frame
once again. Before the days of long drop it takes the condemned up to 15 minutes to die, and the
lighter the man the longer it takes to die. Or as Sheppard saw it, the longer he could stay alive. The
plan was after he was cut down, after 15 minutes, friends would claim the body take him to a surgeon
and he would be revived. However it wasn't to be. Such a celebrity was he that, fearing that he was
going to be taken to anatomists for dissection, the crowds prevented anybody actually getting close to
the body. If he wasn't dead already, and we'll never truly know if he was, this certainly prevented
any hope of reviving him, and when his friends did get to the body he was quite quite dead and
all they could do now was bury him. Which they did in the churchyard of St Martin-in-the-Fields.
Jack Sheppard would live on in popular culture in many forms. John Gay's "Beggar's Opera" is
heavily based on Jack Sheppard's life and 120 years after his death he would be the feature
of a novel entitled "Jack Sheppard". This was so popular that Victorian authorities refused to
license any play with the words "Jack Sheppard" in the title, lest it inspire people to commit crime.
That ban would stay there for 40 years as well. Now if you want further information then there
is a biography. "A Narrative of all the Robberies, Escapes etc of John Sheppard" written by Daniel
Defoe of "Robinson Crusoe" fame and you can access it in the public domain. We'll put a link to it
in the description. Read it and enjoy it. It's a great criminal caper of the 18th Century.
Thanks very much for watching, and we'll see you next week.
Bye