The cockney escape artist
QUESTION In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, there is a reference to Jack Sheppard, who ‘couldn’t get free from the strait waistcoat’. Who was Sheppard? Jack Sheppard was an 18th-century thief. his spectacular prison escapes made him the most glamorous rogue in London, but his misdemeanours saw his short life end on the gallows.
he was born on March 4, 1702, in the Spitalfields area of east London, a poverty- stricken district notorious for highwaymen, crooks and prostitutes.
Sheppard was an apprentice to a carpenter and might have made an honest living, but he fell in with bad company. he took to drinking and moved in with edgworth Bess, a prostitute whose real name was elizabeth Lyon.
To fund his excesses, Sheppard became a thief and was imprisoned five times between 1723 and 1724, escaping on four occasions. his second escape ensured his celebrity.
On May 19, 1924, Sheppard and Lyon had been convicted for pick-pocketing and incarcerated in Newgate Ward, a new prison at clerkenwell. Within a week, the couple had filed through their manacles, removed a bar from the window and used their knotted blankets to clamber into the prison yard. They then scaled a 22ft prison gate to freedom. This feat made Sheppard a local hero, not least because he was diminutive and Lyon was buxom.
Sheppard made his final and most famous escape from Newgate prison in the early hours of October 15, 1724. he managed to slip his handcuffs and use a crooked nail to pick the padlock securing his chain to the floor. he used a blanket to slide down to the roof of an adjoining house and escaped through the front door, still wearing his leg irons.
he was arrested for the final time in the early morning of November 1, blind drunk and dressed in the spoils of his crimes — ‘a handsome suit of black, with a diamond ring and carnelian ring on his finger, and a fine light tye peruke [a type of wig]’. On November 16, Sheppard was taken to the gallows at Tyburn to be hanged. he had planned to escape, but the small knife he’d concealed on his person — intended to cut the ropes binding him — was discovered by a prison warder.
The character of Macheath in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in 1728 was based on Sheppard.
Aaron Moore, Hayes, Middlesex.
QUESTION Why is a gherkin called a wally? Do other foods have strange nicknames?
afTer the war, if we had any spare cash, a wally (pronounced ‘wolly’) could be obtained from a large glass jar on the shop counter for a penny. This east end term is thought to be a variation of ‘olly’, a slang corruption of the word ‘olive’.
When large numbers of immigrants arrived in Britain from russia and eastern europe at the turn of the 20th century, they brought with them a taste for pickled cucumbers. Like olives, they were sold from wooden barrels and began to be referred to as a wallies.
Interestingly, the word wally, as in an idiot, which became popular in Seventies London, might be derived from the gherkin ‘wally’.
Ken Smith, St Helens, Lancs.
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