100 Years Ago: The Great Escapes

Two members of the Mounted Police with their prisoner in the guardhouse on the barracks square at Lethbridge.

Galt Museum & Archives, P20071043002-005

Daring prisoner escapes—Hollywood's bread and butter for psychological thrillers—happened in southern Alberta too. Many mirrored or even surpassed the classics of the genre.

Charles Matthews was known as a "notorious horse thief." He escaped from police custody two times in less than a year. At six o'clock in the morning on a day in November 1917, Matthews was lined up for six teamsters to transport. The teamsters "marched out of the door under the very eyes of the guard," who didn't check the number of people leaving the site. Matthews had slipped away unnoticed. Authorities found and arrested him in Kalispell, Montana, and returned him to Lethbridge.

Another individual called Denyer was a trusted prisoner who looked after "motor outfits." He occasionally drove the warden's car in the prison yard for testing reasons. While testing a vehicle on a morning in June 1921, Denyer simply drove away. It was not a spur-of-the-moment decision but a deliberate plan. Before he escaped, Denyer had made sure that the rest of the vehicles were inoperable, so pursuit was impossible.

Clyde Leslie Brant deserves the title of "Lethbridge Houdini" for his escape in October 1919. The Lethbridge Police were holding Brant in temporary custody in a cell of the basement of City Hall. Brant managed to get free by simply squeezing through the opening between the top rail of the cell gate and the ceiling. He took the pillow and blanket with him and just walked out of the back door to City Hall.

The best-known local escape took place at the Lethbridge Internment Camp during the First World War. The Canadian government used the internment camp to imprison so-called "enemy aliens": civilians who had immigrated to Canada from countries that were legally at war with the British Empire. On April 26, 1916, six prisoners escaped the camp through a 34-metre underground tunnel built using handmade tools like an auger, a mallet, truncheons, a fake handgun, and a tunnel ventilation fan. They made the tools from tin cans and scrap materials. The camp guards did not discover their disappearance until the following day, and none of the ex-internees were ever found.