Execution: A Guide to the Ultimate Penalty (32 page)

‘She was turned off the ladder, hanging by the neck for the space of almost half an houre, some of her friends in the meantime thumping her on the breast, others hanging with all their weight upon her legs, sometimes lifting her up and then pulling her doune again with a sudden jerk, thereby the sooner to dispatch out of her pain; insomuch that the Under-sheriff, fearing lest thereby they should break the rope, forbad them to do so any longer.

The body was carried in a coffin into a private house and, showing signs of life, a lusty fellow that stood by, thinking to do an act of charity in ridding her of a painful life, stamped several times on her breast and stomach with all the force that he could. Then Dr Petty, a professor of anatomy, coming in with another, they set themselves to recover her. They bled her freely and put her into bed with another woman. After about two hours she could speak many words intelligently, and five days later she was up; within a month she had recovered, and went to her friends in the country, taking her coffin with her.’

A lucky, if badly bruised lady!

Very often there were two or more victims to be hanged, the existing procedure using the ladder being such that they could be hanged only one at a time. Production, or rather extinction, was speeded up considerably when the horse and cart superseded the hurdle as a transport for, once under the gallows, up to ten victims could be roped to the beam, and then a quick slap on the horse’s flank by the hangman would ensure the rapid departure of the steed and cart, leaving the felons swaying and gyrating in unison.

The scene often resembled a theatre performance, especially when, on arrival on the scaffold, the condemned man demonstrated his bravado by indulging in witticisms. One victim, Paynes, guilty of murdering six people, kicked the prison chaplain out of the cart and then pulled his own shoes off, saying that he’d contradict the old proverb and not die in them! Wife-murderer William Borwick looked critically at the rope, and commented that he hoped it was strong enough, because if it broke he’d fall to the ground and be crippled for life!

Others waged sarcastic with the executioner. As the hangman, Jack Ketch, was positioning the noose about his neck, James Turner sneered: ‘What, dost thou intend to choke me? Pray fellow, give me more rope! What a simple fellow is this. How long have you been executioner, that you know not where to put the knot?’ And spying a pretty girl at a window, he blew her a kiss as the cap was being pulled over his face. ‘Your servant, mistress,’ he called as the rope tightened.

Two murderers, Milsom and Fowler, having accused each other in court of being the guilty party, continued their violent altercation on the scaffold. There, they were kept apart by another murderer, John Seaman, who was placed between them. It is reported that Seaman’s last words were: ‘It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever been a bloody peacemaker!’

Some felons endeavoured to calm obviously jittery hangmen. James Murphy, seeing that the executioner was not his usual efficient self, said reassuringly: ‘Now, then, you’re trembling – don’t be nervous, or you’ll bungle it!’ Other condemned men were, hardly surprisingly, bad tempered. Eating his last breakfast, murderer Charlie Peace exclaimed: ‘This is bloody rotten bacon!’ Later, in the lavatory, he shouted to an impatient warder: ‘You’re in a hell of a hurry – who’s going to be hanged, me or you?’

Jocular or bitter comments there were, but some also of pathos. Tom Austin, asked by the chaplain whether he had anything to say before he died, looked at the crowd and replied: ‘Nothing, only there’s a woman yonder with some curds and whey, and I wish I could have a pennyworth of them before I’m hanged ‘cos I don’t know when I’ll see any again.’ And robber John Biggs complained to the crowd that ‘I never was a murderer, unless killing fleas and suchlike harmless little cruelties fall under the statute. Neither am I guilty of being a whore-master, since females have always had the ascendancy over me, not I o’er them. No,’ he went on, ‘I am come here to swing like a pendulum, for endeavouring to be too rich, too soon.’ And swing like a pendulum he did.

If the crowd savoured wit or sarcasm on the scaffold, they thoroughly enjoyed the moments when violence was directed at that figure of abuse, the hangman, especially when he could not retaliate – as when a young Irish girl, Hannah Dagoe, arrived for her execution. She had caused mayhem all along the route, struggling and protesting, and, as the cart came to a standstill beneath the gallows, she wriggled out of the rope that bound her, and, pulling off her gloves, bonnet and cape, threw them to a friend of hers.

This infuriated Thomas Turlis, the hangman, such garments being some of the perquisites that went with the job, but even worse was to follow: on attempting to pinion her arms again, she struggled with him, kneeing him so viciously that he all but fell out of the cart. Desperately, he managed to tie her hands again, ignoring both her taunts about his inability to do his job and the delighted cries from the crowd as they encouraged Hannah to redouble her efforts. Out of breath, the woman stopped for a moment and, as Turlis dropped the noose over her head and took up the slack around her neck, a sudden paroxysm of rage overcame Hannah. Instantly, she turned and, pushing him to one side, hurled herself out of the cart, to die instantly as she fell, thereby cheating the hangman and achieving a quicker demise than otherwise.

Apparently, the ability to dispatch ten victims at once did not really keep up with the rising crime rate and so, on 1 July 1571, the ‘triple tree’ was brought into use. Also known as the three-legged mare, the three-legged stool and the deadly nevergreen (because it bore fruit all the year round), this was a triangular gallows with three uprights joined to each other by cross-beams, thereby making it possible to hang up to 24 malefactors at the same time, eight on each beam.

These gallows were instrumental in bringing about a roaring trade, on and off the scaffold, for many years, until the spread of London’s buildings threatened to encroach on the site. In 1720 the chronicler Strype wrote: ‘It is reported that the common Place of Execution of Malefactors at Tyburn shall be appointed elsewhere, for the removing of Inconveniences or Annoyances that might thereby be occasioned in that Square or the Houses thereabouts.’ Not unreasonable, under the circumstances, for few of the local tenants would appreciate a working scaffold and its concomitant crowds in their back gardens. Yet Tyburn resisted all efforts to move it elsewhere, though as a concession the permanent gallows were demolished and were replaced by a portable structure, as the
Whitehall Evening Post
of 4 October 1759 reported: ‘Yesterday morning, about Half an Hour after Nine o’clock, the four malefactors were carried in two carts from Newgate, and executed on the new Moving Gallows at Tyburn... The Gallows, after the Bodies had been cut down, was carried off in a cart.’

But the blow fell on 7 November 1783, as did John Austin, guilty of wounding and robbing. The knot of the noose having slipped round from the haltering place, beneath the left ear, to the back of his neck, it took longer than usual for him to die. On that date the scaffold was transferred to a new site immediately outside the walls of Newgate Prison, a move welcomed by those in authority. No more would so many of the streets of London have to be closed to all traffic until after the hanging procession had passed by; no more would the shops on that route have their trade disrupted by the milling crowds; and a further advantage was that the area outside Newgate was negligible compared to that at Tyburn, reducing the number of spectators to a minimum and thereby making them easier to control.

The general public, not unnaturally, were not in favour of the move, nor was the noted lexicographer and writer Samuel Johnson, who expressed many of today’s sentiments, albeit for a different reason, when he said:

‘The age is running mad after innovation; all the business in the world is to be done in a new way; Tyburn itself is not safe from the fury of innovation! It is NOT an improvement; they object that the old method drew together too many spectators. Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators; If they do not draw spectators, they don’t answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the public were gratified by a procession and the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?’

In other words, why don’t they leave things alone? But because the best quarter of the city had extended to Tyburn, the triple tree was broken up and its timbers, together with those of earlier gallows, were sold to the landlord of a local tavern to use as barrel stands. Some fragments are still preserved by the nuns of the nearby Tyburn Convent as relics of those Catholics who suffered there.

Nor was that the only change, for the horse and cart were also dispensed with. Contemporary technology had come up with a new innovation for hanging people – the ‘drop’.

Tried only once before, on 5 May 1760, when Earl Ferrers was hanged at Tyburn, it consisted of a hatch, about a yard square, raised about 18 inches above the level of the surrounding scaffold boards, immediately beneath the crossbeam. It was covered with black baize on which the noble earl stood, the noose around his neck, and although the principle was correct, the practice was a flop: when the release was operated, design defects became glaringly obvious for, due doubtless to the rope increasing in length because of the victim’s weight, the stretching of the earl’s neck and joints, and the inadequate distance through which the hatch dropped, his feet still touched the boards after it had dropped. Such minor mishaps were no problem to the hangman for, as an observer recounted, ‘Thomas Turlis pulled on his legs and he was soon out of pain and quite dead in four minutes.’

The new drop at Newgate was a portable though solid structure, and was dragged out by horses from its shed within the prison, then manoeuvred into position so that it projected into the street at right-angles to the prison wall.

The scaffold was equipped with two parallel cross-beams, its platform having a set of comfortable seats for the sheriff and other officers, facing the hatch. This was designed to drop when a short lever was operated, and was 10 feet long and 8 feet wide, large enough to accommodate the ten felons who were the first to experience it, on 9 December 1783. Their executioners were Edward Dennis and William Brunskill, but their limited expertise did little to ease the slow death experienced by the ten, this being due to the fact that only short ropes, about 3 feet in length, were used. As the ropes were too short to fracture the spinal column and so bring rapid death, the victims died from slow strangulation.

This shortfall in design, in more ways than one, was to go unrectified for over 90 years. Doubtless the authorities considered that four – and sometimes many more – minutes’ strangulation was quite acceptable. In an age when people died slowly of disease, poverty and deprivation, an age in which no one had ever investigated whether any other way would bring death any quicker, four minutes wasn’t all that unmerciful – and, after all, they
were
criminals.

The other personalities on the scaffold, the hangmen themselves, are worth considering. Throughout the ages they have almost invariably had a bad press, but why this should be so is hard to divine. They were, after all, a part of the judicial process, a vital part, one could argue, for there was little point in the courts passing the death sentence if there was no one on the scaffold to do it.

By rights, then, surely, the executioner should have been entitled to just as much respect and appreciation as the policeman who had caught the murderer, the lawyer who prosecuted him and the judge who sentenced him to death? One would hardly recoil from the judge in such a case – on the contrary – so why treat with repugnance and loathing the man who carried out the judge’s orders? We don’t react in that manner to soldiers who have killed in defending their country, so why should we turn against one who has acted similarly in defending society? Admittedly, as men, many of them weren’t particularly pleasant characters, but to revile them simply because of their official position would seem rather unjustified.