Pierrepoint (8 page)

‘Do you know, I have just been talking to Pierrepoint the executioner who hanged the nigger this morning!’

Immediately the company became all attentive.

‘What was he like?’ one asked.

‘A big strapping fellow, just the man for the job.’ He described what Harry had been wearing and ended by saying, ‘And he was carrying a leather bag in which he keeps the rope for hanging people!’

Harry listened in amusement as the man continued with what he described as wonderful romancing, and wondered at the temptation to reveal his identity and call the man’s bluff. But he let him carry on with his tale, slipped out of the bar and went to catch his train home.

December was to be a busy month for Harry, and so brought a welcome boost to the family income. There were 11 appointments in the diary, but a number of these ended in reprieves for those condemned. The first execution was on 5 December, when he was at Worcester to execute William Yarnold, a 50-year-old army veteran with 28 years’ service. While Yarnold had been serving in the Boer War, his wife had left him and had gone to live with another man. When Yarnold returned to England his wife came back to him, but soon left him again for her lover. He discovered where she
was living, called at the house, drew out his army knife and plunged it into her back. She died a few days after the attack.

Despite a petition that attracted 6,000 signatures, Yarnold became the first man to die on the gallows at Worcester for over a hundred years.

Both Harry and assistant Ellis were also engaged for a job in Newcastle on the following morning, and once the formalities had been completed at Worcester they hurried to the station to catch the train north. Henry Perkins and Patrick Durkin were tenants at a house in Newcastle upon Tyne. On the evening of 13 July, while drunk, Perkins stabbed Durkin in the neck. He told detectives he thought the other man was going to attack him first, so it was a form of self-defence. Durkin died from blood poisoning six days later.

When Harry made his second visit of the year to Maidstone on Wednesday, 20 December, he found himself accompanied by a new assistant – William Fry. They were there to execute a 60-year-old rag-and-bone man who had followed his estranged young wife and her new lover from Kent to Bedford, where, finding her alone, he had cut her throat and left her to bleed to death in the gutter. Fry carried out his duties by all accounts without any problems but it appears that once was enough and he was never called upon again.

Harry rounded off the busiest month in his career with three executions in three days. Ellis was his assistant for all three jobs; they met up in Manchester on the afternoon of Boxing Day and travelled together to Stafford Gaol for the first execution. The people of Stafford took great interest in the hangman, particularly as the execution he was about to carry out was on a man whose crimes had horrified the county. William Frederick Edge had been lodging at a house in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire. His landlords had been Frank and Rose Evans and they had three children, the
youngest a five-month-old baby, Francis. Although he had only been a tenant for five weeks, Edge was well in arrears and was told he would have to find somewhere else to live. He had packed his belongings but asked if he could cook the fish he had bought for lunch before he left. Mrs Evans agreed to his request and left Edge in the kitchen while she went upstairs to clean. Francis was asleep on a settee and when Mrs Evans heard a noise, followed by the door being slammed shut, she went downstairs to find the baby lying dead. Edge had cut its throat so deeply that the head had almost been severed. Edge had then walked into the police station, handed over a bloodstained razor and announced that he murdered the child out of spite at being evicted.

As Harry and Ellis made their way down the narrow path that led from the railway station to the prison, the large crowd of people eagerly scanned passers-by in the hope of spotting the hangman. Harry noted they eyed him suspiciously, although no one challenged him, and it was only when he reached the heavy gate at the prison that they realised who he was.

On the way to the scaffold Harry passed a board that had been set up to punish criminals who had been sentenced to the birch or floggings. The escort told the hangmen that it had been used on the previous day and was being left in place as another prisoner was due to be flogged shortly after the execution.

Edge was wearing gold-rimmed glasses and tearfully writing a letter when the hangmen sneaked a look at him that afternoon. On the following morning he had tears rolling down his cheeks again as Harry placed the hood over his head and then pulled the lever. The hangmen made their way through the crowds outside the prison again later, but managed to avoid recognition as they caught the train to Leeds and another execution.

George Smith was a former bricklayer but he hadn’t worked for several years, preferring to live off the income his wife brought in from her work as a chambermaid. One day, Smith turned up at her place of work and, during a quarrel, stabbed her over forty times. He was arrested in Wakefield two days later and said he had done it because she had told him she had found herself another man and their marriage was over. Loud cheers rang out from the public gallery at Leeds Assizes when the jury found him guilty. Smith was hanged at 8 o’clock as snow fell gently over the prison yard.

From Leeds, the executioners travelled on together to Derby, arriving in good time in the afternoon to catch the condemned man at exercise as the daylight faded. John Silk had been discharged from the army in 1903, having served in India and South Africa. Returning to England, he went to live with his crippled mother at Chesterfield. He treated her well and helped with her mobility problems, but he was often drunk and on these occasions, Silk frequently became violent.

On 5 August 1905, Silk was drunk and was heard in a public house to say there would be a murder done that night. He went home and got into an argument with his mother after he refused to go and get her a half-bottle of whisky. Silk went back out and returned at 11.15pm. They got into another row, this time about a lamp in the room being in the wrong place. When his mother went to move it, Silk slapped her, knocking her into the lamp, which overturned and went out, leaving the room into darkness.

Her body was discovered on the following morning: she had been battered to death with one of her crutches and a chair leg. Silk, asleep upstairs in bed, was arrested and charged with his mother’s murder. He had vowed to meet his death like a soldier and walked steadily to the gallows when the execution party arrived for him on the following morning.

A
shortage of assistant executioners following the death of John Billington, the retirement of his brother William, and the fleeting appearance of William Fry, caused Harry to persuade his brother Tom to apply for the post. Some seven years older than his hangman brother, Thomas William Pierrepoint was working as a quarryman and helping out with Harry’s carrier business when the suggestion was first put to him.

In the barn at the back of the shop that Tom’s wife ran at Town End, Harry showed his brother everything he had learned, both on the training course at the now demolished Newgate Gaol and the practical experience he had picked up from working with the Billingtons over the last four years. Tom wrote out a letter of application and following an interview with a prison governor, presumably at nearby Leeds or Wakefield, he was invited to Pentonville for a one-week training course.

The staff at Pentonville realised quickly that Tom had received expert tutelage that even they could not possibly
compete with, and it was no surprise that he sailed through the examination and practical test.

While Tom was waiting to hear if he had passed the course, Harry crossed the Pennines to execute a young soldier who had killed his sweetheart in Shaw, near Oldham a week before Christmas 1905. Katie Garrity had gone on an errand for her mother and when she failed to return home a search was organised. Her father discovered the body of his missing daughter; she had been strangled. Witnesses reported seeing 19-year-old Jack Griffiths, her former boyfriend, close to where the body was discovered. It was subsequently learned that a week or so earlier they had argued and he had struck her. She had taken him to court, where he was bound over to keep the peace. Clog marks in the waste ground close to where the body was found matched those belonging to Griffiths.

He behaved callously at his trial, accepting his fate resolutely, smiling at the judge and remarking, ‘Well I’ve nobbut to dee once, I reckon.’ The young strangler met his end bravely, asking his parents on their last visit to make sure his younger brothers and sisters went to Sunday school so they wouldn’t end up like he had. Heavy rain failed to deter a large crowd forming outside the walls of Strangeways Gaol on the following morning, as inside Jack Griffiths walked firmly to meet his fate.

The next five engagements in Harry’s diary ended in reprieves, one just as Harry was preparing to leave the house to travel to the prison, and in the meantime Tom received word he had been accepted as an assistant executioner. Although Harry had no influence to help him gain work in England, on the next execution Harry was engaged on, he was delighted to learn that Tom was to be his assistant.

Sarah Ann McConnell had left her husband James in September 1905, and went to live with 38-year-old Harry
Walters in Sheffield. A few months later, following a drunken quarrel, she was horrifically battered and sexually assaulted with a broken bottle and broom handle. She died soon after; her body was discovered lying naked on the floor of her apartment. Walters denied any knowledge of the dreadful murder and even at his trial he continued to deny any involvement, although he was unable to explain the bloodstains found on his clothing. Walters had the dubious honour of being the first occupant of the new condemned cell at Wakefield. The Victorian gaol had recently been modernised and was one of the first to have a purpose-built execution chamber with adjacent condemned cells all on the same level. This had many benefits for the whole execution process. It was now just a few steps to the gallows rather than a lengthy procession across corridors and down flights of steep stairs, which were often a great ordeal for a terrified man on the very brink of death.

Harry and Tom arrived at the gaol on the afternoon of Monday, 9 April 1906, and were shown the new execution suite situated at the end of ‘C’ wing. The cells occupied a second-floor landing in the five-storey-high wing, and the condemned cell was two old cells knocked into one to allow exercise in the cell rather than outside in the common yard, which was deemed not advisable.

The two brothers were furnished with the man’s details and took a discreet look at him in his cell before heading over to the scaffold to rig the drop. Protruding from one side of the wing the gallows room was a high, green, glass-topped, purpose-made building with trap doors that filled most of the floor and which opened into the cell below. A large beam ran across the room with a chain hanging down and onto this they attached the noose. Together they rigged a drop of 6 feet 6 inches and left the rope to stretch overnight.

Wakefield hanged at 9.30 a.m. Having reset the traps, coiled the noose to the correct height and secured it with pack-thread, Tom realigned the chalk mark to indicate where the man’s feet would be positioned. After breakfast they took their position outside the condemned cell and waited for the signal to move.

Walters had enjoyed a hearty breakfast and was finishing his final smoke when the hangmen entered the cell. He offered no resistance as they secured his arms and led him the few short paces across to the scaffold. Harry had his man on the drop in seconds; Tom strapped his ankles and on a signal from the Deputy Sheriff, Harry pulled the lever. The doors crashed against the padded walls and held firm.

It was the sunniest day of the year so far and a large crowd waited outside in a hope of seeing the hangman depart, but as the local paper recorded later that evening, the hangman slipped away from the gaol as silently and rapidly as the bolts in the trap door floor slipped from their sockets.

When Harry travelled down to Nottingham in August to hang a sailor who had murdered his former girlfriend, he met up with another new assistant. William Willis was an Accrington-born man who had graduated from the executioner’s training course a few weeks earlier. Edward Glynn and Jane Gamble had been living together as man and wife for some time, but in February she left him for another man. He made threats that he would kill her if he saw them together and on the night of 3 March, as they left a Nottingham public house, he stabbed her repeatedly before fleeing.

Before his execution, Glynn made a full confession to the murder, in front of his solicitor and three prison warders. The entrance to the gallows room at Nottingham was such that once the condemned man entered he had to be turned around
on the drop so that the lever was to the left of the executioner after he noosed the pisoner. Glynn thought he was being walked off when he was suddenly moved after he had taken his place on the scaffold. A warder who had spent the last few weeks as his constant escort in the condemned cell, and had accompanied him on his final walk, burst into tears as the drop crashed open.

Tom was again Harry’s assistant when he went back to Wakefield on 9 August to execute Thomas Mouncer, a Middlesbrough butcher who had strangled his paramour after a drunken night out.

There were two dates in Harry’s diary for November: on the 13th he was at Wandsworth to hang Frederick Reynolds, who had cut his girlfriend’s throat after she broke off their engagement. A fortnight later he was at Knutsford Gaol in Cheshire, where he dispatched Edward Hartigan, a Stockport builder who had battered his wife to death with a hammer.

Willis had again been the assistant at Knutsford, but when Harry travelled down to Chelmsford in early December, he discovered that no assistant had been engaged, and for the only time in an English prison he carried out the execution alone.