Lord High Executioner
An Unashamed Look at Hangmen, Headsmen, and Their Kind
Acknowledgments
There are a great many people to whom I owe my thanks, people who have helped me with one aspect of the work or another. Among them I would like to thank Kildare Dobbs, David Mason, Scott Tyrer, Dominique Roydon, Bill Gladstone, Gerald Owen, Eric Wright, Diane Francis, John Fraser, Vittorio Frigerio, Prof. Jim Jackson (Trinity College, Dublin), Martin L. Friedland, John M. Beattie, Jerry G. E. Bentley, Jack McLeod, Carolyn Strange, Rona Abramovitch, Hubert de Santana, Dudley Witney, James Carley, David Stafford, Jeanne Canizzo, Meg Taylor, Archie Campbell, Jonathan Freedman, Elizabeth Legge, Asa Zatz, Douglas Fetherling, the Greek Tourist Bureau, the staff of the Conan Doyle Room at the Metro Toronto Public Library, and many other individuals and institutions, whose names, for the moment, are stuck in my failing memory, for their help and encouragement throughout this project.
I would like to thank Frank W. Anderson, the author of Hanging in Canada, for the clippings from the Manitoba Free Press (1899 and 1900) and correspondence with the author in 1972. I owe a similar debt to Prof. Michael Millgate for sending me clippings and chapbooks relating to the execution of Martha Brown at Dorchester in 1856.
My wife, Janet Hamilton, who has encouraged and sustained me, also deserves my thanks, as do my agent, Beverley Slopen, and Anna Porter and Cynthia Good, the publishers, respectively, of my non-fiction and of my fiction, without whom I would be a drag on the remaining social services of this country. Throughout the process of the making of this book they have at various times noted the fact that I have become a glutton for punishment.
Introduction
Behold the Lord High Executioner
A personage of noble rank and title—
A dignified and potent officer,
Whose functions are particularly vital!
Defer, defer,
To the Lord High Executioner!
—W. S. GILBERT
By and large, executioners have not been personages of noble rank and title. In fact almost every society has counted them among the lowest of the low. True, there have been dynasties of headsmen in France and hangmen in Britain, a kind of parallel aristocracy where the first-born inherited the mantle of office from his father along with a certain dignity that goes with it, but most executioners have come from the same ranks as the criminals they executed and the policemen who enforced the laws—that is to say, from the lower-middle and working classes. Their functions may have been vital—few more so—but they were hardly dignified officers of the court. Pariahs, every one of them.
Logically, a case can be made for the social acceptance of the functionary who carries out the sentence of death. He is, after all, merely an extension of the law courts. If no one condemns or stigmatizes a hanging judge, why should the technician who carries out the law be shunned? In The Mikado, Pooh Bah, the portly Lord High Everything Else, explains how it is that the status of executioner stands so high in the town of Titipu:
… Our logical Mikado, seeing no moral difference between the dignified judge who condemns a criminal to die, and the industrious mechanic who carries out the sentence, has rolled the two offices into one, and every judge is now his own executioner.
That may have been all very well for the town of Titipu and the topsy-turvy world of Gilbert and Sullivan, but in the world beyond operetta there are claims to be made for the executioner as an important functionary in the legal system. Honest hangmen have for centuries resented being looked down upon by the rest of society. After all, many thought of themselves as the benefactors of society.
The question of whether the public has a right to treat the hangman as an outcast was actually contested in a court of law. It was a judge, not a jury, who had to decide the question. The English Law Journal of 28 July 1926 describes the case of a man who, arriving in Norwich on the eve of an execution, was taken by a bystander for the hangman and thrown into a duck pond by the mob that quickly collected. All the while, the first irate citizen shouted: “You are Jack Ketch!” The mob echoed: “You are Jack Ketch, the hangman!” Let me allow Louis Blake Duff to take up the story at this point:
The victim consulted his lawyer and decided to sue the man who had called him the hangman. The defence claimed the allegation could not possibly be defamatory.
“The executioner,” said the defence lawyer, “is a public official, necessary to the security of the State, and it is no more a libel to describe a man as a hangman than to say he is a judge.”
The judge listened to this argument and in the very teeth of it awarded damages. So the outrageous prejudice against the hangman has invaded even the bench whose faithful necessary servant he is. To say the least, it is hardly sporting.
Hangmen and headsmen have been in the back of our minds for hundreds of years. They are the bogeymen of our worst nightmares, the shape of our darkest fears. They stalk the subconscious in thick leather boots carrying with them the bloodstained tools of their deadly mystery. They repel and revolt us, and, against all rationality, attract and fascinate us. They have been closest to the line between life and death. The mystery and majesty of the law have been condensed into these appalling shapes. They stand at the entrance to the dungeons of our worst dreams, beckoning with their hands: “Come with me.” The executioner is at once hated and feared, and yet he may go where no man may go. He is wrapped up in our primitive selves, personifying the atavism that lives deep within all of us. To understand ourselves, it is important to face the irrational, the phobic, the taboos of the society that created this unpleasant stand-in for everyman.
In our reading, the executioner often stands just offstage in the wings. Like the deus ex machina of the drama, the headsman casts a long shadow through fiction. For instance, it is impossible to fully understand Dickens, Thackeray, and Hardy without seeing the mark of the gallows on their work.
At the same time, executioners have added to the lore of language: Derrick, a hangman from the early seventeenth century, who operated upon the legendary gallows at Tyburn, gave his name to a device for hoisting heavy objects. Jack Ketch, towards the end of the century, gave his name to the whole breed of hangmen. His very name became synonymous with “executioner.” Of him his wife is reported to have said:
… Any bungler might put a man to death, but only her husband knew how to make a gentleman die sweetly.
The crusade against capital punishment is a distinguished and long one. Throughout history there have always been a few farsighted people who were ready to lead that crusade. But it was only in the nineteenth century that signs of improvement began to appear. In Britain, the Bloody Code—the ever-growing catalogue of crimes which brought the death sentence—was trimmed of many capital offenses, and the forms of execution were consolidated: in Britain, the gallows; in France, the guillotine. The spirit of reform was in the air, of course, but sometimes it turned up in odd places. Turning the pages of Punch, the satirical magazine published in London, one finds short squibs aimed at the hangman—who in the traditional Punch and Judy show, you will remember, ends up on his own gallows. This squib is from the end of 1849:
The Gibbet Cure
It may seem astonishing that there should exist, in this nineteenth century, such a folly as that instanced in the following paragraph, extracted from the Boston [Lincolnshire, England] Herald:—
“SUPERSTITION.—On Friday last a respectable looking female, afflicted with a wen in the neck, applied at Lincoln Castle, after the execution of WARD, for leave to see the body, with a view of curing her disease; the request was very properly refused.”
It may, however, be questioned whether a man hanged is not as likely to remove a wen as to put an end to murder. The remedy has been long enough tried for the latter complaint, but without success.
In this book about our recorded legal merchants of death, I have dealt with the whole tribe of hangmen and headsmen, not leaving out the likes of Robert G. Elliott, the official executioner of New York, who “hurled into eternity three hundred and eighty-seven occupants of the electric chair.” In some places around the world, the names of the executioners have not been recorded. Like the dog that failed to bark in the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story, this too is highly significant.
This book is offered as an inspection of the men—and women!—who have done our dirty work for us. It is presented as a close-up look at the ritual of killing in the public’s name. In it I have tried to illustrate with what courage, or lack of it, many of the famous of history shuffled off this mortal coil before their time. I have examined what the agents of death thought of their craft, their victims, and themselves.
I am a strong believer in abolition, but for the most part I have tried to keep that out of the text. It is not totally possible to remove my own feelings about the subject, and I cannot assume a god-like neutrality which I do not own. My biases and opinions show throughout the book. They lend a flavor. To write with absolute neutrality would be like trying to run a car in neutral: it won’t go. But this book is not intended as a sociological, or even psychological, tome; it is literary and curious.
As a writer of fiction, I recognize that books feed on books, that new books are begotten from older ones. In this, my first attempt at non-fiction, I feel as though I am standing upon the heap of books I have been feasting upon. Not only have I consulted books directly in the way of my inquiry, but I have dabbled far afield, finding useful items that I have incorporated into my manuscript. A list of the books I have consulted is to be found at the end of this book.
When Albert Pierrepoint appeared before the British Royal Commission on Capital Punishment in 1949, he told the chairman, Sir Ernest Gowers, that in England at that time the position of executioner was a hereditary job. He was the third in his family to hold the position—his father, his uncle, and himself. “It’s in the family, really,” he said.
In this book, I would like to introduce you to “the family.”
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 Marking Out the Territory
Chapter 2 The Road to Tyburn
Chapter 3 The Ugliest of Trades: The Long-lived Bungler, William Calcraft
Chapter 4 A Man of Science: William Marwood
Chapter 5 The Reluctant Hangman: James Berry
Chapter 6 Last of the Breed: The Billingtons, Ellis, and the Pierrepoints
Chapter 7 Off with His Head
Chapter 8 The Guillotine and Its Servants
Chapter 9 Other Places of Execution
Chapter 10 Hanging in Canada
Chapter 11 The American Way of Death
Chapter 12 The Death House and Its Place in the American Dream
Chapter 13 Death and the Maiden
Chapter 14 Hangman’s Pay
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgment of Sources
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
Marking Out the Territory
Yet within three days shall Pharaoh lift up thy head from off thee, and shall hang thee on a tree; and the birds shall eat thy flesh from off thee …
—GENESIS, XL, 19
When Pharaoh of old hanged his chief baker, he pardoned his butler, just as the imprisoned Joseph had predicted. A fat lot of good it did for the young Hebrew who had interpreted their dreams. He was left behind in the prison house until Pharaoh himself had troubling dreams.
This is the first biblical reference to capital punishment and perhaps a good place to begin this study of headsmen, hangmen, and their ilk. On the face of it, it seems simple enough: the baker was hanged and the butler was restored to his place, serving the Egyptian king his cup. But it is not quite as clear as it looks. Although the text says that Pharaoh hanged his baker, it also says that he would “lift up thy head from off thee,” which sounds more like the sword or ax than the rope. Does it mean that the baker suffered beheading as well as hanging? With a severed neck one should at least be safe from hanging. It seems more likely that the baker’s corpse was exposed in public, hanging from a tree, suspended by some part of him other than his neck until “the birds shall eat thy flesh from off thee.” With this interpretation it would appear that the exposure of hanging dead bodies—as a warning to other would-be wrongdoers, as a warning to strangers, as a measure of the terrible power of Pharaoh—was an established practice before hanging in its usual sense was introduced.
Although the Bible speaks of Pharaoh hanging his baker, it should be said that there is no suggestion that the king-god did the work himself. The times were primitive to be sure, but the more sophisticated times of Caligula in early Imperial Rome, and Vlad the Impaler, in fifteenth-century Transylvania, were yet to come.
The Babylonian ruler Hammurabi put together the earliest surviving code of laws around 2100 B.C. He had them written on a diorite shaft eight feet high, placed where all could see and wonder at it. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” was the gist of it, with paternal care offered to the widow and orphan. But there were peculiarities. For instance, if a builder was convicted of negligence in constructing a house that collapsed, killing the buyer’s son, it was the builder’s son’s life that was forfeited to the law, not the builder’s. Such a view is farther from our thinking than “the eye for an eye” concept; it robs the characters involved of their uniqueness, their individuality, rather in the way that God’s taking Job’s children is not precisely addressed by giving him replacements. The Code of Hammurabi was an enlightened code for its time, but its harsher provisions gave the official executioners ample work for their blades.
Exodus and the rest of the Five Books of Moses made improvements on the Code of Hammurabi, but it still wasn’t an executioner’s holiday.
… Behold also, the gallows fifty cubits high, which Haman had made for Mordecai, who had spoken good for the king, standeth in the house of Haman. Then the King said, Hang him thereon. So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then was the king’s wrath pacified.
—ESTHER VII, 9 AND 10
This reporting of King Ahasuerus’s decisive dealing with Haman is clearer than the description of the death of Pharaoh’s baker. The king issued an order and it was obeyed. It was singularly appropriate, since Haman built the gallows to be revenged upon his arch-enemy, Mordecai, the queen’s cousin and stepfather. He had intended also to wipe out all of the Jews in Persia because Mordecai refused to do him reverence. (It must be remembered that in those days Persia and its 127 provinces ran from India to Ethiopia. No mean kingdom, as St. Paul might have observed.) The king’s vengeance, it is worth noting, embraced Haman’s ten sons, who also perished on the gallows. We must assume that they were deeply involved in Haman’s plotting and also shared the guilt of the planned genocide. Unfortunately, the story speaks of a scheming wife, Zeresh, not sons. It does rather leave an unpleasant aftertaste once this Turkish delight of a story has been swallowed. Perhaps once a gallows has been set up, there is a tendency to keep it operating. An empty gallows might become a symbol of social flaccidity, imperial meltdown, and judicial laissez-faire.
The state has always exercised power over the individual. That, some think, is what the state is for. In the Bible, few get off with a warning. Take Haman’s poor sons, for example. One of the ways in which the state, be it king, sultan, or emperor, exercised this authority was through terror. There is nothing like a few dangling bodies outside the citadel to remind the newcomer that one transgresses civil and criminal law at one’s peril. There is a story somewhere about European travelers being cast away on a strange and foreign shore. When they see bodies dangling from a gibbet, instead of turning around and heading back into the breakers, they thank their lucky stars and embrace one another warmly, for they’ve landed in a Christian country.
In the twenty-second book of the Odyssey, Homer describes what must be the most ancient formal description of an execution by hanging. The hangman, the first whose name has come down to us, was Telemachus, the son of Ulysses, who executed Penelope’s twelve faithless handmaidens. Telemachus may have been a figure in fiction, but so much of Homer has been discovered to have some parallels in history, I have included his treatment of the faithless handmaidens. Here is the passage in a translation by William Cowper:
… leading forth
The women next, they shut them close between
The lofty wall and scullery, narrow, straight,
And dreadful, whence no prisoner might escape.
Then, prudent, thus Telemachus advised:
The death of honour would I never grant
To criminals like these, who poured contempt
On mine and on my mother’s head, and lay
By night enfolded in the suitors’ arms.
He said, and noosing a strong galley rope
To a huge column, led the cord around
The spacious dome, suspended so aloft,
That none with quivering feet might reach the floor.
As when a flight of doves entering the copse,
Or broad-winged thrushes, strike against the net
Within; ill rest, entangled, there they find;
So they, suspended by the neck, expired
All in one line together. Death abhorred!
With restless feet awhile they beat the air,
Then ceased.
In the library at Trinity College, Dublin, is a treatise, On Hanging (1866), by a Victorian fellow of the college, the Reverend Samuel Haughton, M.D., F.R.S. (1821–1897). In it he argues at great length how Telemachus was able to dispatch a dozen women on a cable suspended at both ends. He found, through the use of mathematics that are beyond my technical means to display and my mathematical ability to fathom, that if Telemachus suspended one end of his cable from a high pillar; tied slipknots in the cable for nooses; and then, with help, hoisted the women aloft by pulling on the other end of the rope which had been passed over another high point, it could not be done. The force needed to lift the handmaids in a group was lacking. Homer never claimed to have test-driven every part of his book. Haughton goes on to say that if the youthful hangman attached a dozen noosed ropes from the suspended cable, then it would be possible. Here is what the polymath Haughton concludes:
The ship-rope, with one end fastened to the pillar, was carried around the vaulted dome of the kitchen and made fast upon itself; from this rope were then suspended smaller ropes with slipknots or nooses, which were passed round the necks of the women, who must have been lifted up one by one for the purpose, so as to swing clear of the ground. The simile of fieldfares [thrushes] and wood-pigeons [doves] caught in nooses hanging from a rope stretched from tree to tree, and placed in the passage to their roost, seems rather to favour the second interpretation … as if the women hung, like Bluebeard’s wives, “tit tat toe, all in a row!”
Dr. Haughton’s scholarship was given not only to tidying up minute points of physics in the classics, but also to research into the brakes of railway trains, the physiological properties of nicotine and strychnia, the Baltic sea-louse, polarized light on polished surfaces, the velocity of rifle bullets, the muscular anatomy of the leg of the crocodile, climate, tides, urine in human beings, and the distortion of fossils through slaty cleavage. He also wrote about the long drop, which transformed the old practice of hanging from being a tumble and a kick to the modern practice of giving the victim a sudden drop of some distance which either breaks the neck outright or at least dislocates vertebrae, which is almost as good. The Irish invented the long drop, which, in time, crossed the Irish Sea to England, where it was picked up by William Marwood and his successors.
In order to get another grasp on the questions surrounding an execution, let me leap more than two thousand years away from Ithaca and Ulysses’ happy reunion with his family, to the all-but-forgotten death of Julia Murdoch, in Toronto, Upper Canada. This case, not extraordinary in any way, except for the people involved, will be used as a paradigm of what this book is concerned with. On 14 December 1837, while the restless province of Upper Canada was getting ready to participate in or resist a rebellion in favor of democratic institutions, and Lower Canada was about to launch a similar grassroots insurrection, but in French, Toronto legally hanged a young woman named Julia Murdoch for having murdered her mistress. It was only when Julia began selling silver spoons that her nursing of the invalid Mrs. Harriet Henry was questioned. When the body was examined, arsenic was found and Julia was immediately arrested. At her trial, she maintained her innocence in spite of evidence that she had mixed the poison in a dish of fish she served her patient. I found her story buried in the hundreds of pages of John Ross Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto.
The murderess was a woman about 21 years of age, unmarried … and well thought of by the family.… The day before her execution she stated that she considered the dreadful circumstances in which she was placed as a merciful arrangement of Divine Providence for the purpose of leading her to a true repentance of her misimprovement of early religious advantages.
By that, I suppose she meant that being condemned to death had led her back onto the goodly paths of righteousness and that a timely repentance would bring her all the joys of eternal bliss—“after a few short years of harmonious torture in Purgatory,” as Brendan Behan used to say, although I don’t suppose that Purgatory played a big part in Julia Murdoch’s theology.
The mention of Brendan Behan was not without guile. In his play The Quare Fellow, the warder, Regan, has a conversation with the prison visitor, Mr. Healy, on the night of a hanging in an Irish prison:
Healy: I can’t see how society could exist without hanging. Don’t you believe in it?
Regan: Well, I’ve seen such a lot of it, sir, that I suppose familiarity breeds contempt. But do I believe in it? Well, it works. I’ve never seen the fellow that could go out and drink a pint afterwards. You mean we kill people to stop other people killing other people?
Healy: And because they have killed other people.
Regan: Oh sir, we never mention that part of it in the business. That’d be revenge.
Healy: But we give a condemned man every spiritual facility. I venture to say that some of them die holier deaths than if they had finished their natural span.
Regan: But that’s not our reason for hanging them, sir. We don’t advertise ‘Commit a murder and die a happy death’. You want to be very careful in what you’re saying, sir, or you’ll have them all at it. They take religion very seriously in this country, sir.
Healy: The fact remains, the condemned man does get a priest and the Sacraments, more than his victim got maybe.
Regan: Well, sir, maybe it would be more of a deterrent if we gave them no priest and no Sacrament.
Behan based this play about what happens to a prison population when a hanging takes place on his own experiences in Mountjoy Prison. The “quare fellow” told Brendan the night before he was topped, “I will be praying for you in Heaven tonight.”
Let’s return to the execution of Julia Murdoch in Toronto in December 1837.
… The day of execution was cold, snow on the ground, and the scaffold was erected on Toronto Street, where now stands the York Chambers, near the old jail.… The Christian Guardian of that date says that the utmost decorum marked the conduct of the vast assemblage of persons who witnessed the fatal result. “It was, however, exceedingly revolting,” says the Guardian, “to see among the spectators a number of females.” On the day of her execution fully four thousand people congregated about the jail yard, a large proportion of them being women and children.…
Whenever one reads an account of a public execution, whether it is in Beijing or Tripoli, Tyburn or the Place de la Révolution, the reporter is shocked and amazed at the number of women and children who have come to look. Dickens himself said it. Maybe it was expected of him. Writers were always shocked and amazed that one-half of the population should show the same morbid curiosity as the other.
Let us go back to poor Julia Murdoch where we left her on her way to a Toronto scaffold, with four thousand curious spectators of both sexes and all ages waiting to see the fatal outcome.
… She readily submitted to be pinioned.… The prisoner was dreadfully agitated, and as she walked to the gallows leaned for support on her spiritual comforter’s arm. When she arrived at the platform she appeared to regain her courage, and after prayer had been offered up she knelt on the trap-door, and was hurried into eternity.…
Kneeling on the trap seems to have been a North American phenomenon. I can’t recall an Englishman going to his death in that position, unless he was being beheaded. From a religious point of view, it would appear to be an excellent way to leave this world, but in Britain, even preachers, like the celebrated Dr. Dodd condemned for forgery, on the point of death at Tyburn or Newgate, preferred to stand. It might have had something to do with the amount of slack in the rope. It would appear, in the case of Julia Murdoch at least, that there was no shortage. Giving people enough rope is not only a figure of speech.
Earlier, I referred to the excellent Reverend Samuel Haughton, the Victorian polymath, who used mathematics to settle problems in Homer. In his paper On Hanging, he demonstrates, with impressive use of mathematical calculations, the science of neck-breaking. With the unfortunate Julia having just been turned off, this might be a good place to discuss what happens. With a short drop, death comes from asphyxia, caused by stoppage of the windpipe, or apoplexy, caused by pressure on the jugular vein. With a long drop, death comes about through a shock to the medulla oblongata, caused by fracture of the vertebral column. As Haughton explains:
In the [cases of the short drop], death is preceded by convulsions, lasting from five to forty-five minutes, which are caused by the cessation of the supply of arterial blood to the muscles. In the [case of the long drop], death is instantaneous and painless, and is unaccompanied by any convulsive movement whatever.
From the time of William Marwood, the English hangman, the job has been trying to calculate how the latter alternative could be managed. The variables are the weight and height of the prisoner and the length of the drop, which is controlled by the length of the rope. With a large range in heights and weights, the correct drop for one will not do for another. Each of us has a correct drop. It is personal to each of us. Like a fingerprint or credit card, it is not transferable.
The trick, of course, is trying to figure out the scientifically perfect drop for everyone requiring one. Unfortunately, it is not a purely scientific question. Two men may possess the same height and weight, but one of them might be young, muscular, and active, and the other old, flabby, and sedentary. The hangman must make a judgement. Should he give men and women of similar heights and weights the same drop? The hangman has to make a judgement. If he is conservative by nature, there is a chance of asphyxiation with convulsions; if he is too liberal, the head may be torn off. From a medical point of view, a decapitation is fast and painless, but it fails on aesthetics and decorum. A decapitation is messy, discredits the hangman, and gives the whole prison service and the justice system itself a black eye.
Here is Haughton’s formula for a perfect hanging, guaranteed to give a clean break, or at least a dislocation:
Divide the weight of the patient in pounds into 2,240, and the
quotient will give the length of the long drop in feet. For example,
a criminal weighing 160 pounds should be allowed [a] 14 feet drop.
Haughton suggests that if it is inconvenient to provide a drop that long, and a lighter person would require even more space to fall through, shot or heavy weights should be affixed to the legs of the patient. This was in fact done with very light victims.
A word of caution: Dr. Haughton’s long drops are very long indeed. I cannot in all conscience recommend them. His suggestion of using a standard shock of 2,240 foot-pounds was amended in 1888 in Britain. The figure used there was 1,260 foot-pounds, and this force too was changed again, in 1913, to include another factor. Although it was prepared on a slightly different principle, let me insert here the table that English executioner James Berry developed after an earlier one led to some professional embarrassment.
A HANDY GUIDE FOR HANGMEN
RULE—Take the weight of the Client in Stones and look down the column of weights until you reach the figure nearest to 24 cwt. [hundredweight], and the figure in the left hand column will be the Drop.
The prisoner’s height comes into the matter when it is time to cut the rope and make a noose. A tall client will need less rope than a short one to drop the same distance. By calculating the total length of the drop and subtracting the height of the prisoner, you have the length of rope needed from the surface of the scaffold down. The distance from the beam to the floor gives you the rest of the length.
Although we do not know his name, we shall hope that the hangman who ushered Julia Murdoch into the next world knew his business. You will notice in this account that the hangman’s presence is only implied. We don’t get a picture of him standing there. “She readily submitted to be pinioned.…” The hangman must have been there to do the job, but the writer keeps him far from the event, as though he were not there at all. His appearance may have been wondered at by the crowd, but it is his disappearance from the written account that makes me wonder. Is this woman hanging herself? Is she alone, kneeling on the trap, high above the crowd with its abundance of women and children? Where are the other functionaries? Are we in a dream, a nightmare where things are done but where there are no doers? There is a spiritual comforter, a prop for her last moments as he supports her to the gallows. Any decent spiritual support should involve the practical as well as the metaphysical. When prayers are offered up, without a direct reference to who it was who was offering them up, or who it was who was hurrying Julia into eternity, the narrative takes on a ghostly appearance. Many years after this, when hangings were first being done without the gentlemen of the press in attendance, the Home Office in London instructed governors of Her Majesty’s Prisons to pull a veil over these things:
… no record should be taken as to the number of seconds, and if pressed for details of this kind the Governor should say he cannot give them, as he did not time the proceeds [sic] but “a very short interval elapsed”, or some general expression of opinion to the same effect.…
It is also suggested that any reference to the manner in which the sentence was carried out should be brief, without detail, such as: “… it was carried out expeditiously and without a hitch …,” which, one might say, John Ross Robertson seems to have anticipated by nearly one hundred years. In his version, Julia arrives “at the platform” and is “hurried into eternity” in the same sentence.
I have wandered some distance from the square on Toronto Street, near the old jail, where Julia Murdoch leaned for religious support upon the arm of her spiritual adviser. The clergy was there for Julia and for most other customers of Jack Ketch, and Ned Dennis, and all of the honest tradesmen to follow them. The state seemed to be aware that at the moment of execution the culprit separates into two parts: the earthly remains and the immortal soul. It is a complicated business, and however dark the deed for which the condemned prisoner is about to suffer, the state recognizes that there is a point beyond its jurisdiction where the Church takes over. In some Catholic countries, where hanging is or was practiced, the death hoods placed over the heads of the prisoners have a hole cut in them to allow the soul to escape the cotton confines and begin winging its way back to the Creator who gave it.
In the story of Julia Murdoch, there is no mention of the medical profession; yet it was usual for a doctor to be standing by on these melancholy occasions to declare that the prisoner was dead. In Julia’s day, the presence of a surgeon was no more suspect than the prayer book of the spiritual adviser. Indeed, in modern times, it was always assumed that the attending physician played his role as an act of charity. But he was part of the execution team. He played his part just as the guards strapping the unfortunate criminal into the embrace of the electric chair were playing theirs. The Reverend Samuel Haughton recalled the execution of a man who had had a tracheotomy
some years previous to his execution; and such was the ignorance of those who conducted the hanging, that he was dropped through a short height quite insufficient to injure the spinal cord, and breathed with ease through the aperture in the trachea, suffering horrible tortures, until relieved by the humanity [italics mine] of the surgeon of the jail, who closed with his finger the aperture through which he breathed, and so completed the clumsy work of the hangman.
The anomaly of this, the contradiction to the Hippocratic oath sworn by all medical men, was somehow unchallenged until the coming of the lethal injection. This form of execution seemed to demand more from the medical profession than it cared to give. Before, they had only to announce when a pulse could no longer be heard; now, they were being asked to pick a vein, open it, and see that an injection of deadly poisons went into the arm of the condemned. The doctors refused to play. But had they already passed that point? When a doctor, holding the limp wrist of a suspended body, said that he could still hear a pulse, the execution continued. His voice could have stopped it. It is probably playing theoretical games to dissect the role of the doctor at the place of execution, and I’m reminded of Brendan Behan’s philosophical warder in The Quare Fellow. The withholding of sacraments and priests might be more of a deterrent to crime than having them on tap. Having a “physician in attendance” tends to remove the barbaric realities of an execution. He makes it palatable for the multitude.
In this chapter, I’ve used poor Julia Murdoch as a typical example and have wandered away from her story to explore the role of executions in general, and the role of the executioner in particular. Her case was typical of most of the people who suffered for their crimes: they had the misfortune to be born in their own times and not our—in this respect—more enlightened times. Today, Mary Jones, hanged for a minor theft, would be on welfare, not dragged to Tyburn with a babe at her breast. In Britain, Jack Ketch and his kind have been paid off and retired. The last of them has just died after keeping a pub, raising rabbits, or growing geraniums for the last decade or two. As it should be.
In Canada, the hangman has been on furlough since December 1962. Once exiled on 13 August 1964, the hangman has never been invited back to Britain. In the United States he was banished and then recalled after a hiatus of a dozen years. There the executioner is still a busy man, and we will come to him in due course.
CHAPTER TWO
The Road to Tyburn
“You’re a kind of artist, I suppose—eh!” said Mr Tappertit.
“Yes,” rejoined Dennis; “yes—I may call myself an artist—a
fancy workman—art improves natur’—that’s my motto.”
—DENNIS THE HANGMAN
IN BARNABY RUDGE BY CHARLES DICKENS
John Price was a hangman. He followed in the footsteps of the original Jack Ketch. That means he was adept with both ax and rope. The block served for political crimes, such as came out of the troubles in Scotland; the noose served most other felonies, from murder to shoplifting. The stake was still in use until 1790. Price would have done his share of whipping and branding as well. He was a well-known figure outside Newgate and along the long road through Holborn and Oxford Street to Tyburn. This was well west of the city, at what is known as Marble Arch today. A small plaque marks the fatal spot, for those brave enough to risk modern traffic to look for it. Here stood the infamous triangular gallows: three mighty beams of oak supported by a like number of uprights. At Tyburn, John Price could tie a tippet as nice as you please and turn off one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight gallows birds from each of the three crossbars of the Deadly Never-Green, Tyburn’s Triple Tree. Twenty-four could ride the three-legged mare at once. And John Price was the factotum who made the felons piss when they couldn’t whistle, take a leap in the dark, ride a horse foaled by an acorn.
Price was a Londoner, born about 1677. His father had been killed in Tangiers when Johnny was only seven. As a youth he learned the rag trade, which in those days was the rag trade not haute couture, which he practiced until he was pressed into the navy. This is where he learned about ropes and knots and rum. From there he became hangman for London and Middlesex, a not very skillful practitioner of a function that demanded very little in the way of craft.
The public and officialdom alike were blind, deaf, and dumb to the sufferings of his victims. The spectacle was all, and, of course, the edifying examples provided the fruits for further crime. Pickpockets and other petty hoodlums worked the crowd around Tyburn, missing much of the moral lesson being enacted for their benefit. If there were reformers in Britain, they were not looking at the gallows in Price’s day. The idea that horror corrupts was unknown in 1700. The parade to Tyburn Fair served a useful social purpose: those who saw the lawless turned off would go and sin no more. That was the philosophy, and the nation remained blind to its fallacy for another hundred and fifty years.
Although Price had plenty of practice in his craft—the cavalcade to Tyburn was increasing as the list of capital crimes enacted for the protection of British citizens and their property grew longer—there is no sign that he improved in his calling. He also missed the message that his trade was supposed to broadcast. Of the hundreds of the condemned who started out from Newgate with him, he was the sole survivor. Price must have felt himself grown immortal, he outlived so many of his traveling companions. Perhaps a kind of hubris set in which made him complaisant, and led him at last through debt and prison to the prisoner’s dock. Coming home drunk in Moorfields one moonless night, he met his nemesis, Elizabeth White, an apple seller. Perhaps he misunderstood her profession. Anyway, by whim or design, he was on her. But Mrs. White was not going to be had by every drunken ruffian in London. She put up a fight, which enraged Price, who began to batter her unmercifully. The watch, alerted by her screams, took him into custody. Despite her injuries, she was able to describe what had happened before she died four days later. Price was condemned to death and afterwards to be hung in chains on the last day of May 1718.
As a token that Price’s crime was considered especially vile, the gallows had been erected in Bunhill Fields, close to the scene of the crime and, today, to the Old Street underground station. Price was sent thither from Newgate in a cart, heading east for a change. (The expression “gone west,” as a euphemism for dying, came from the drive west from Newgate to Tyburn.) He was a game one, but nearly stupefied with drink, which could be found anywhere in the prison for such a good cause. A hanging was a celebration of a kind, a celebration of life for the living and a send-off in style for the victim. The nubbing cove, as the hangman was called by the street loafers and pickpockets, was the master of ceremonies, even though a beadle sat astride his horse and the ordinary (chaplain) from Newgate offered the consolations of religion. According to the latter, Price stubbornly refused to confess his crime before they left the prison, but did so on the gallows, where he cautioned the huge crowd to take warning by his example.
Price was not the first hangman to have been hanged, nor the last. But his fate serves as a useful introduction to this functionary who served the forces of law and order in Britain at a time when both law and order were rather different from what they are today. The eighteenth century may have given us the Enlightenment, but the life of the mind and the supremacy of reason were born out of a dungheap of social ills that can scarcely be imagined. Picture, if you can, a place where dead bodies hanging in chains and cut-off legs, arms, and heads stuck on spikes at the outskirts of cities, rather the way the emblems of service clubs are now, were among the common-places of daily life. It was a rare criminal brought to the gallows who hadn’t made his way through the crowd to see others executed on some earlier, happier day. Many in the condemned hold at Newgate thought that hanging was too good for the likes of themselves.
The bravest tried to make a good end. They dressed for the occasion, wore nosegays, distributed alms to the poor, bought drinks along the way for their friends, and, at the last, made a ringing, flippant speech about a short life and a merry one. When all was ready, and if they had nerve enough, they then flung themselves off the hangman’s ladder, which rested against the gallows. Some jumped out of the cart before the hangman could do his job. The rest stood on the tailgate of the cart and waited for the hangman to start up the horse and leave them kicking in the air. Jumping off the hangman’s ladder may have improved the chances of an easier death, but it didn’t take much to produce something better than the slow onset of death at Tyburn.
Traditionally, highwaymen died game. Men like “Sixteen-String” Jack Rann flirted with the ladies as they went down Holborn. He won his Tyburn tippet as a bridal cull on Watling Street. Jack always cut a fashionable figure in the pleasure-gardens of Bagnigge Wells, where he promenaded with his mistress, Miss Roach; in front of Henry Fielding’s brother, Sir John, at Bow Street; at Tyburn itself, where he came with the bright blades of his day to watch the show. He came at last to Tyburn in 1774 as the show, with a nosegay and a quip. His end was marked not only in the usual way, with the hawking of Last Dying Speech and Confessions of Sixteen-String Jack Rann, but with a “flash ballad” that was written and circulated some time after Jack had stepped into the air:
Farewell ye rooks, fairwell ye plains,
No more Miss Roach will on you reign.
Your sighs and tears are all in vain.
We part but ne’er shall meet again.
I wish I was a country girl
My cows to milk, my lambs to tell;
And love I’d never took in hand,
I’d never parted with Jack Ran.
Fellow highwayman Jack Sheppard, who had astonished everybody by escaping from Newgate four times, made a good end trying to astonish everybody with another hairbreadth escape, which was foiled by a cautious jailer who discovered a hidden penknife in Sheppard’s pocket. He was twenty-two at the time of his death and a mighty loss to the ladies who came in droves to see him suffer.
Jonathan Wild, who was the model for Peachum in Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, earned his reputation as a thief-taker, or prototype policeman, but was in fact in league with the underworld, acting as a fence and running what we would call a protection racket. He was in the end taken to Tyburn, wearing a nightshirt, ready for the grave. On the way, Wild picked the pocket of the ordinary, the chaplain who saw prisoners through their last agonies. This last theft brought some embarrassment to the Reverend Thomas Purney. It was a corkscrew.
Just as Wild was turned off, he grabbed the body of the man standing next to him so that the force of both their falls would be absorbed by the one neck. The stratagem failed and Wild went off to his grave with the others.
Jonathan Swift caught the temper of the times when he wrote “Clever Tom Clinch, Going to Be Hanged,” in 1727, which, oddly enough, is the year of Bach’s great St. Matthew Passion.
As Clever Tom Clinch, while the rabble was bawling,
Rode stately through Holborn, to die in his calling;
He stopped at the George for a bottle of sack,
And promised to pay for it when he came back.
His waistcoat and stockings and breeches were white,
His cap had a new cherry ribbon to tie’t.
The maids to the doors and the balconies ran,
And said, “Lack-a-day, he’s a proper young man!”
But, as from the windows the ladies he spied,
Like a beau in the box, he bowed low on each side!
And when his last speech the loud hawkers did cry
He swore from his cart “It was all a damn’d lie!”
The hangman for pardon fell down on his knee;
Tom gave him a kick in the guts for his fee:
Then said, “I must speak to the people a little;
But I’ll see you all damn’d before I will whittle!
My honest friend Wild (may he long hold his place)
He lengthen’d my life with a whole year of grace.
Take courage, dear comrades, and be not afraid,
Nor slip this occasion to follow your trade.
My conscience is clear, and my spirits are calm,
And thus I go off without prayer-book or psalm.”
Then follow the practice of clever Tom Clinch,
Who hung like a hero, and never would flinch.
Like beer and tea, sprouts and plum duff, hanging suited England. Englishmen understood the gallows as they understood iron, brick, and railways. But the noose wasn’t native to this sceptered isle. It was imported by invading Anglo-Saxons. You might say that the gallows and the cross arrived in Britain about the same time. The ax and block were well established by then, a Roman legacy like straight roads and high walls facing Scotland. The first executioner we hear about was the Roman soldier, around A.D. 303, who beheaded St. Alban and turned him into a martyr with a stroke of his short blade.
Brian Bailey talks about these early days in his Hangmen of England:
William the Conqueror was extremely sparing in his use of the death penalty, inflicting it only on conspirators against his rule, but Henry I reintroduced it for murder and other crimes, including theft, and there are several mentions of hanging sentences by local manorial lords during the early Norman period, most notably the instance in 1124 recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, when Ralph Basset “held a court of the king’s thanes at Hundehoh in Leicestershire, and hanged there more thieves than ever before: forty-four of them in all were dispatched in no time, and six had their eyes put out and were castrated.”
Who did this castrating and eye-gouging has not come down to us in any detail. Generally speaking, the lord of the manor let his bailiffs attend to such things, delegating a local ne’er-do-well who had assisted before. According to Bailey, there was a law in force in Kent at the time of Henry VII that if a prosecutor could not find someone to execute the sentence of the law upon a felon, he was obliged to do it himself or face prison.
An executioner named Cratwell—we have only his surname—served during the reign of Henry VIII and was kept busy by him on both block and gallows, until he mounted the ladder himself for stealing from a booth at Bartholomew Fair. Cratwell must have been missed on the job, because all the Tudors had need of the services of a small army of headsmen and hangmen. And with the complications of changing religious orthodoxies, it was hard to keep up with the burnings in Smithfield, Tyburn, and elsewhere. Foxe’s History of the Acts and Monuments of the Church, popularly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, is, as George IV might have observed, a damned fat book, and it recounts the groans and sufferings of only one side of the religious question. Hangmen, Papist and Protestant, had to deal with all comers or face the consequences. A headsman needs to suspend his religious curiosity, as Edward Gibbon did, at an early age, if he plans on getting on in his trade.
The first executioner whose name has stuck in the imagination of succeeding generations was Jack Ketch. His became the generic name for hangman right down to our own time. Although his name has lasted down the years, his ineptness has happily been forgotten by almost everyone. Historians are less fortunate. Although they can discover little about the early years of Richard Jacquett or John Catch, who became Jack