Murder on the Home Front (12 page)

However, although he was not a very sensitive-looking man, I did not like to stare at him too much. So I sat quietly sipping tea and listening to the conversation about juries on the one hand, the conversation about who was going to be top of the League on the other, and wondering what Sangret and the warders were talking about. It was certainly the strangest tea party I ever went to.

At length it was over, the two medical gentlemen and I returned upstairs to the court, and the jailer and the policemen began clearing away the tea things in nice domestic style. A few minutes later Sangret was back in the dock, facing Mr. Justice Macnaghten across the crowded court, and Dr. Simpson was in the witness box, telling the jury how Joan Pearl Wolfe had been murdered.

And now came an historic moment. Dr. Simpson took up a cardboard box, raised its lid and lifted out the dead girl’s skull, in order to demonstrate to the jury the fracture and the peculiar stab wounds. It was the first time a murdered person’s skull had ever been produced at a trial. All present craned their necks to see, including the judge—all, that is, save one, and that one was Sangret. I watched him, but only the merest twinge of curiosity flickered over his face.

The medical and circumstantial evidence combined made an overwhelming case against Sangret and the jury found him guilty, but rather unexpectedly added a recommendation for mercy. Why they felt he deserved mercy was a bit of a puzzler to me. The girl had not been killed accidentally, during a scuffle, for the blow to her head had been a truly savage one, delivered with full murderous intent. Nevertheless, the jury felt Sangret deserved mercy.

This plea was duly considered when Sangret appealed, but it was of no avail, and he was executed at Wandsworth a week or so later.

Dr. Simpson did a p.m. on him. He lay there on the p.m. table, muscular, well-built, his handsome skin marked only by the imprint of the hangman’s noose around his neck, and tattooed on his arm, ironically, the name “Pearl.”

CHAPTER
12

The Gentle Art of Hanging

The first postmortem on an executed person I attended with Dr. Simpson was that of the spy who sold to the Germans the information which resulted in the sinking of the famous
Jervis Bay
. This wretched man, British by nationality, was a large, flabby, plethoric-looking person, suffering from various antisocial ailments and altogether nauseating. He had been hanged at Wandsworth prison, and it was there we did the p.m. on him in the cold, old-fashioned little mortuary with the derelict bird’s nest in the roof and a pile of ancient, unvarnished coffins standing by the door—I always used one of these as a typing table.

During the course of years we did many p.ms. in this mortuary, some on prisoners who had died natural deaths, some on suicides (but suicide is very rare among prisoners), and the rest of the cases, the majority, on persons who had been judicially hanged.

Postmortems must be done on all executed persons, because on each one the coroner must hold an inquest, attended by a jury and press representatives, to ensure that the execution has been “expeditiously performed.”

All the hangings were most expeditiously performed.

The bodies used to be trundled up to the mortuary on little wooden handcarts which, as they rumbled over the rough stones of the prison yard, always made me think of the tumbrils. A scrunchy, rumbling, rattling sound the little cart made, with the tramping of feet instead of the clopping of horses’ hooves.

The dead man would then be lifted off the cart by the warders who had wheeled it, and carried to the p.m. table. He was clad in trousers, singlet, socks; no shoes. Around his neck was the deep, livid mark of the noose. Otherwise he always appeared perfectly peaceful and in many instances, I thought, positively relieved to be dead.

A condemned man is given a good breakfast, if he wants it, on the morning of his execution and before he goes to the execution shed he receives a tot of brandy—I believe he can have whiskey if he prefers it.

The execution is at nine. The law demands that the body must remain hanging for a certain stated period of time after the execution. The autopsy and inquest generally take place about eleven the same morning. As soon as the man has been executed notices of execution are pinned up on the prison doors.

There is no doubt that judicial hanging, compared with many natural deaths, is merciful. There is no strangling; the scientific combination of noose and drop jerks the head from the trunk and everything is over in a second or two. Nobody need have any doubt of the swift efficiency with which hanging is practiced in our prisons today. It is as quick, humane, and efficient a method of execution as any in the world.

It seems to me that the days of waiting in the condemned cell must be the worst part of the ordeal. The actual hanging is quickly over.

Afterward the body is buried within the prison precincts.

In fact everything is carried out just as the judge declares it shall be when he reads the death sentence to the prisoner, “that you be taken from this place to a lawful prison and thence to a place of execution, and that you be there hanged by the neck until you be dead, and that your body be afterward buried within the precincts of the prison in which you shall have been confined before your execution. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

To which the court chaplain solemnly cries, “Amen.”

I have lost count of the number of times I have watched a judge don the black cap and sentence a prisoner to death, but with one or two exceptions all the persons sentenced in these awful terms have behaved with fortitude.

Most people who are hanged die bravely, too.

Prison officials are humane; they do not gloat over executions. The police do not gloat over them. Nobody gloats over them except the great general public. The appetite of the public for murders and hangings seems to be insatiable and the press feeds and stimulates this appetite; for which I think the press is not to blame, for people buy only the kind of newspapers they want to read. As Tom Clarke started his first lecture of the first term of my year of the London University Journalism Course, “Journalism is not a bloody priesthood.” The public gets the kind of newspapers it deserves.

I have sometimes thought that if murderers were not hanged the public would not take such a bloodthirsty interest in the subject of murder, and that if public excitement were not so intense there would not be so many murders.

Of course, the English have always had a passion for murders and murderers. Shakespeare, the most popular playwright of his, or any, period, knew this and introduced killings and killers and hangmen into his plays with abandon. He knew that the more morbid scenes there were, the more audiences would flock to the theater. “Ho Barnardine, come forth and be hanged, sirrah.” And among these plays is
Macbeth
, the greatest murder play ever written, with its intensely moving and terrible scenes and astonishing grasp of criminal psychology.

During the Tudor era, public executions took place on Tower Hill and beheading was the usual form of execution, with burnings at the stake second on the bill. We are told that during the reign of Mary Tudor even the public became sickened by the nonstop beheadings and burnings.

Later Tyburn became the scene of public executions. Tyburn Tree, as the gallows was called, stood roughly on the spot where Marble Arch now stands, and these occasions of public execution drew immense crowds. The condemned were driven in carts from Newgate prison—on the site of which the Old Bailey now stands—to Tyburn, and the route was lined with crowds, sometimes jeering and cat-calling, but on other occasions cheering and offering encouragement and even refreshment if the condemned were a popular figure, some celebrated highwayman, for example. Jack Sheppard, for instance, the young highwayman who escaped from prison four times before he was finally hanged, rode in positive state to Tyburn and was a national hero.

Tyburn Fair was considered a great entertainment. Peddlers and tumblers and buskers of all kinds were there to amuse the crowds before the executions took place. Men, women, and even children thronged to Tyburn with, Samuel Richardson tells us, “a kind of mirth, as if the spectacle they had beheld had afforded pleasure instead of pain.”

Boswell, who once went to Tyburn to satisfy his curiosity, describes the crowd as “most prodigious.” Scaffolds were erected all around the gallows, rather like grandstands. Boswell “got upon a scaffold very near the fatal tree, so that we could clearly see the dismal scene…I was most terribly shocked, and thrown into a very deep melancholy.”

But Boswell was considerably different from most of the other people, who flocked to Tyburn without suffering a qualm.

Hanging in those days was not the scientific matter it is today. There was no proper drop, the prisoner’s neck was not dislocated, death was not instantaneous. For some time after the prisoner had hanged he—or she—kept the crowd entertained by convulsively writhing in midair; “dancing on the air,” it was popularly called. In order to hasten the wretch’s end relatives were allowed to pull at his legs. Actually, of course, he became unconscious very soon after he was hanged and the convulsive movements were purely reflex. Neither did pulling the legs hasten death.

Sometimes relatives would bribe the executioner to cut the hanged man down quickly so that the “body” could be hurried to a waiting apothecary, who in some instances was able to revive the “corpse.”

In 1783 Tyburn Fair was abolished, much to public disgust. Public executions were now held instead outside Newgate prison. The crowds were still enormous and enthusiastic. With the great bell of the prison tolling and the crowd roaring, the prisoners were brought out to be hanged. There is a terrific description of such a morning of execution in Defoe’s
Moll Flanders
.

In 1788 a new kind of gallows was brought into use. By employing a falling trap-door a long enough drop was created to break the prisoner’s neck, so that death was almost instantaneous and the famous “dancing on the air” no longer occurred. But enormous crowds still turned up to watch.

Pirates were not executed at Newgate, instead they went to a gallows at Execution Dock, Wapping. Their bodies were afterward hung in chains, as were the bodies of highwaymen.

England must have been a gruesome place in those days. Imagine walking home along a dark road late at night and having to pass a body strung up at the crossroads, rattling a little as it swayed with the wind. Or entering a town and looking up to see a row of bloody heads impaled above the great gate. And yet perhaps these things were no more gruesome than our own photographs of the “mushrooms” of experimental atom bombs.

The last public execution took place in 1868, not a hundred years ago.

If executions became public again today, I suspect that crowds of people would attend them: those people who swarm outside a police court to catch a glimpse of a murderer, who queue up all night to hear a murder trial at the Old Bailey, who gather outside prisons at the hour of execution, in some cases creating hysterical scenes, on other occasions merely standing there as if fascinated and afterward staring at the small, bald notice of execution which is put up on the door.

As a result of the Royal Commission one reads a good deal about hanging these days. The most interesting observations on the subject that I have ever heard came from the Public Executioner, Mr. Albert Pierrepoint, whom I once met at Wandsworth prison.

We were there doing a postmortem on a murderer, a young Burmese who had kicked his wife to death. Suddenly the mortuary door opened and in came a young man in a blue suit, who stepped in briskly, gave us a cheerful smile and said, “Good morning, Dr. Simpson. If you don’t mind I’d like to take a look at my handiwork.”

We stared at him with some astonishment, whereupon he introduced himself as Albert Pierrepoint, who had just taken over the job of Public Executioner from his uncle, Tom Pierrepoint.

We had already heard quite a lot about Mr. Pierrepoint junior as a matter of fact. We had been told that the senior Pierrepoint had recently resigned because he felt he was growing too old for his work of hangman and that he had been busy training his nephew to take his place. Although the junior Pierrepoint had so far performed only a few executions he had already proved himself to be greatly and naturally skilled as a hangman.

The Pierrepoints, of course, have provided public executioners for generation upon generation past and are very proud of this family tradition.

Mr. Albert Pierrepoint, the newly appointed hangman, our unexpected visitor, was short in stature but powerfully built, with a ruddy face, a round head, bright blue eyes and a quick, cheery manner. There was nothing mawkish about him. He explained he wanted to see a postmortem because he wanted to know exactly what happened to people when he hanged them. Would Dr. Simpson mind showing him? Dr. Simpson was agreeable and demonstrated how the neck vertebrae had been severed right apart by the jerk of the noose drawing tight at the finish of the drop. Our visitor, deeply interested, asked a large number of highly technical questions.

Mr. Pierrepoint assured us that hanging is much more of an art than a science. Certainly it has a strong scientific basis, but a really first-class hangman is born, said our visitor, not bred. Hanging must run in the blood; it requires natural flair. The judgment and timing of a first-class hangman cannot be acquired; they are a gift.