Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Malden, Daniel
MALDEN, DANIEL (d. 1736), prison-breaker, said to have been born at Canterbury, was bred a postilion, but had served for a time in the navy and been discharged previous to his adoption of street robbery as a profession. He was condemned in the early part of 1736 for stealing a large parcel of linen at Islington, and ordered for execution on 24 May, but on that morning he contrived to escape. Acting on a hint from the previous occupant of his cell, he raised one of the floor planks, using the leg of a stool as a lever, and dropped into the cell beneath him, which was on the ground floor. Then he got through the bars into the pressyard, and thence, by way of the chapel and the ordinary's house, on to the roof of the prison. Traversing the roofs of several adjoining houses, he got finally into the garret window of an empty house, ‘late a pastrycook's in Newgate Street’ (Hooker, Weekly Miscellany, 29 May 1736), and wrapping his irons close to his legs ‘with rags and pieces of my jacket, as if I had been gouty or lame,’ he went ‘out at a kitchen window, up one pair of stairs into Phoenix Court, and so through the streets to my home in Nightingale Lane’ (Ordinary's Account of Executions, November 1736). Early in June he was retaken in Rosemary Lane. He was now bestowed in the ‘old condemned hold,’ and doubly loaded with irons. A keeper named Austen left him his rations on the night of Sunday, 13 June, ‘when he seemed to be very well secured.’ A few hours later he managed to effect his second and most remarkable escape. Having worked (by means of a knife which he had secreted) through the staple to which he was fastened, he used it to burrow through his floor. When he had made a practicable opening, he dived down head first through the funnel, in which he narrowly escaped sticking fast, into the main sewer of the prison. Though still encumbered by chains weighing nearly one hundred pounds, he made his way along the sewer. Newgate runners were at once let into the sewer to look for him, and found the bodies of two persons who had been smothered in trying to escape. But Malden, after remaining forty-eight hours in the sewer, eventually got out in a yard ‘against the pump in Town Ditch, behind Christ's Hospital.’ There he was in great danger of detection, but he finally reached Little Britain, where a sympathiser gave him a pot of beer, for he had ‘torn his flesh in a terrible manner,’ and was in a most exhausted condition, and procured a smith to knock off his fetters. Malden again lingered about London, was heard of in Rosemary Lane, and on 26 June was reported to have been taken at Reading (Craftsman, 26 June 1736). He subsequently, however, made for Harwich, by way of Enfield, and passed over to Flushing, where he was nearly persuaded to take foreign service, but preferred to return to England ‘to find his wife.’ In September ‘the noted Daniel Malden was taken at Canterbury,’ where he seems to have found employment as a groom or jockey. Akerman, a noted runner, brought him up to London on 26 Sept. He reached the capital handcuffed, and with his legs chained under the horse's belly, yet guarded by thirty or forty horsemen. The roads and streets were were lined with spectators anxious to see a criminal so notorious. He was henceforth chained to the floor of his cell in Newgate, and constantly and closely watched. Brought into court to be re-sentenced on Friday, 15 Oct., he begged hard that he might be transported, having ‘worked honestly at Canterbury, and done no robbery since last June.’ But he was hanged at Tyburn on Tuesday, 3 Nov. 1736; his body ‘was carried to Surgeons' Hall’ (Hooker, Weekly Miscellany, 6 Nov., and The Old Whig, 4 Nov.) Malden's escapes are the more remarkable because Newgate had been ‘strengthened’ after the notorious exploits of Jack Sheppard.
[Griffith's Chronicles of Newgate, i. 314 sq.; Read's Weekly Journal and Hooper's Weekly Miscellany, 1736, passim; Caulfield's Portraits of Remarkable Persons, iv. 67–9; Gent. Mag. 1736, pp. 230, 354, 550, 681; Evans's Cat. of Engraved Portraits, p. 220.]