The reputation of Newgate was not merely a matter of aesthetics. In the more than seventy years since 1782, when the building was finished, no convict had ever escaped. And this was hardly surprising: Newgate was surrounded on all sides with granite walls fifty feet high. The stones were so finely cut that they were said to be impossible to scale. Yet even if one could manage the impossible, it was to no avail, for encircling the top of the walls was an iron bar, fitted with revolving, razor-sharp spiked drums. And the bar was also fitted with spikes. No man could get past that obstacle. Escape from Newgate was inconceivable.
With the passing months, as the guards grew familiar with the presence of little Willy, they ceased to watch him closely. He was not a difficult prisoner. He never broke the rule of silence, never spoke to a fellow inmate; he suffered the “cockchafer”— or treadmill— for the prescribed fifteen-minute intervals without complaint or incident; he worked at oakum-picking with no surcease. Indeed, there was some grudging respect for the reformed aspect of the little man, for the cheerful way he went about the routine. He was a likely candidate for a ticket-of-leave, a foreshortened sentence, in a year or so.
Yet at eight in the morning on that Monday, August 28, 1854, Clean Willy William had slipped to a corner of the prison where two walls met, and with his back to the angle he was skinning straight up the sheer rock surface, bracing with his hands and feet. He dimly heard the chanting of the crowd: “Oh, my, think I’m going to die!” as he reached the top of the wall, and without hesitation grabbed the bar with its iron spikes. His hands were immediately lacerated.
From childhood, Clean Willy had had no sensation in his palms, which were thickly covered with calluses and scar tissue. It was the custom of homeowners of the period to keep a hearth burning right to the moment when the chimney sweep and his child assistant arrived to clean the flue and if the child scorched his hands in hastening up the still-hot chimney, that was not any great concern. If the child didn’t like the work, there were plenty of others to take his place.
Clean Willy’s hands had been burned again and again, over a period of years. So he felt nothing now as the blood trickled down from his slashed palms, ran in rivulets along his forearms, and dripped and spattered on his face. He paid no attention at all.
He moved slowly along the revolving spike wheels, down the full length of one wall, then to the second wall, and then to the third. It was exhausting work. He lost all sense of time, and never heard the noise of the crowd that followed the execution. He continued to make his way around the perimeter of the prison yard until he reached the south wall. There he paused and waited while a patrolling guard passed beneath him. The guard never looked up, although Willy later remembered that drops of his own blood landed on the man’s cap and shoulders.
When the guard was gone, Willy clambered over the spikes— cutting his chest, his knees, and his legs, so that the blood now ran very freely— and jumped fifteen feet down to the roof of the nearest budding outside the prison. No one heard the sound of his landing, for the area was deserted; everybody was attending the execution.
From that roof he jumped to another, and then another, leaping six- and eight-foot gaps without hesitation. Once or twice, he lost his grip on the shingles and slates of the roofs, but he always recovered. He had, after all, spent much of his life on rooftops.
Finally, less than half an hour from the time he began to inch his way up the prison wall, he slipped through a gabled window at the back of Mrs. Molloy’s lodging house, padded down the hallway, and entered the room rented, at considerable expense, by Mr. Pierce and his party.
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Agar recalled that Willy presented “a ghastly aspect, most fearsome,” and he added that “he was bleeding like a stuck saint,” although this blasphemous reference was expunged from the courtroom records.