Execution: A Guide to the Ultimate Penalty (34 page)

His career was unremarkable, his clients consisting mainly of swindlers, thieves, highwaymen and the like, all of whom he dispatched with average competence, and he would have ended his career comparatively quietly had it not been for a series of events which rocked London to its very foundations. In 1780 Lord George Gordon, Member of Parliament and agitator, presented a petition which led to the No-Popery riots in which mobs attacked and burned scores of buildings in the city, including Newgate itself. On 7 June that year Dennis was walking along Holborn towards his home, through the crowds which were pillaging and burning dwellings believed to be owned by Catholics. As often happens, he found himself not only caught up in the mob but actively participating in the violence.

Reported to the authorities by locals who relished the possible downfall of the hated hangman, Dennis was arrested, charged and, despite his denials of intent, sentenced to death. Mindful of the poverty his own family would sink into after his death, he implored the authorities to award the vacant post of executioner to his own son, ‘a youth of sobriety and ability, who would be a credit to the profession’. The application was rejected, it being pointed out that, should it be granted, the son would have to hang his own father.

But fate, or shrewd calculation by the City Fathers, intervened, for within a matter of days he was granted a free pardon ‘so that he could hang his fellow rioters’.

Three years after the momentous transfer of the gallows to Newgate, Edward Dennis passed away in his apartments in the Old Bailey, where he had lived over the shop, so to speak. He was granted a Christian funeral at St Giles in the Fields on 26 November 1786.

This vacancy provided the opportunity for William Brunskill to be promoted from deputy executioner, a post he had held for seven years. Sober, nervous, with a fawning and an apologetic manner, he was unfortunately prone to mishaps. On his first solo appearance, on 22 November 1786, his task was to hang seven felons before a large and critical crowd. Experiencing the same state of nerves as those that affect actors on their first night, he nonetheless carried out the hangings faultlessly; then he completely forgot himself and, as the seven bodies slowly gyrated behind him, he faced the crowd, placed one hand on his chest and made a sweeping bow.

His income being mainly on a commission basis, Brunskill had achieved the number-one spot at the wrong time, for in the previous year the government had decided to colonise Botany Bay and the surrounding area in Australia. Convicts were sentenced to be transported there instead of being hanged. Nor was that all, for the outbreak of war with the French meant that a large part of the criminal fraternity was inducted into the services on a non-voluntary basis, thereby reducing considerably the number of potential clients for the whip and rope.

Despite such difficulties, he held the job for many years, coping even with the horrific executions inflicted on women guilty of husband-murder and coin clipping, that of being burned at the stake. As usual, while carrying out hangings, he suffered public abuse and rioting around the scaffold. On one occasion, when two convicts were being hanged, the crowd erupted so violently that many were crushed; after the felons’ bodies had been cut down and the constables had cleared the streets, 30 persons were found to be dead and many others had been injured.

With all his experience, however, mishaps continued to haunt Brunskill, culminating in one that occurred on 5 June 1797. Two condemned men were receiving spiritual comfort on the scaffold by the Newgate chaplain, the Rev. Villette, and a Roman Catholic priest, while Brunskill and his assistant John Langley were adjusting the nooses around the victims’ necks.

But someone had neglected to double-check the vital bolts for, without warning, the hatch suddenly opened, plunging all six downwards into the depths, the two felons stopping abruptly half-way as their halters tightened, to die without absolution or blindfold. The other four, priests and executioners, plummeted on, to finish up in a struggling heap of arms and legs, with violent oaths being emitted by at least two of them!

At the age of 72, a ripe old age for one of his calling, Brunskill had a seizure and, paralysed by a stroke, submitted his resignation on 9 May 1815, having served as executioner for more than 40 years. A grateful council awarded him a pension of fifteen shillings a week.

The noose was taken over by John Langley, who operated for only two and a half years. He was succeeded by James Botting, a man who had a penchant for submitting his grievances to the powers that be, claiming increases in wages and the services of an assistant. An unsavoury and unpleasant man, he seems to have delighted in his chores, loving hanging for hanging’s sake.

Never deigning to speak to his ‘party’, as he referred to his victim, he possessed a ghoulish sense of humour at other times. Once, on being jeered at by a group of layabouts at a street corner, he was asked why he didn’t verbally retaliate. Drily he replied: ‘Nay, I never quarrel with my customers!’ Ironically, one of the gang, a man named Falkener, later committed rape and became a customer, being hanged by Botting on 12 April 1817.

The hangman retired after more than three years on the scaffold, his health affected by the rigours of his profession. Confined to his bed by a stroke, he suffered from hallucinations, the worst being recurring visions of the 175 felons he had hanged, all parading in a macabre procession, each wearing the obligatory white cap, each with his head tilted to the right. ‘Damn their eyes,’ he used to complain indignantly, ‘If only they’d hold their heads up and take off their nightcaps, I wouldn’t give a damn about any of them!’

In all these years no advancement had been made in the design or function of the gallows, tragic errors continuing to occur. One in particular was never forgotten by James Foxen, hangman from 1820 to 1829, when Charles White was found guilty of trying to burn down his house in order to defraud the insurance company. Sentenced to death, he struggled furiously with Foxen and his assistant, Thomas Cheshire, while being tied up on the scaffold. No sooner had Foxen left him to operate the drop than White managed to free his arms and wrench his cap off. He was overcome by the officers and secured once more, but, as recounted by an eye-witness:

‘The accustomed signal being given, the drop sank; but the wretched man, instead of falling with it, suddenly bent his knees and jumped his feet up on to the platform; seizing the cord about his throat with his hands, which he had sufficiently loosened by the violence of his struggles, he made an attempt to prolong that life to which he seemed to be so strongly attached.

At this moment the spectacle was horrifying in the extreme. The convict was partly suspended and partly resting on the platform. During his exertions his tongue had been forced from his mouth, and the convulsions of his body and the contortions of his face were truly appalling. The cries from the crowd were of a frightful description, and they continued until the executioner had forced the wretched man’s hand from the rope and, having removed his feet from the platform, had suffered his whole weight to be sustained by the rope.

The distortions of his countenance could even now be seen by the crowd, and as he remained suspended with his face uncovered, the spectacle was terrific. The hangman at length terminated his sufferings by hanging on to his legs, and the unhappy wretch was seen to struggle no more.’

It should be remembered that in those days of the short drop, the victim did not fall out of sight through the trap but remained in full view the whole time.

On Foxen’s death in 1829, William Calcraft took over, a man who was destined to rule the scaffold for 45 years. No demon, he and his wife attended church every Sunday. He loved his two children, and in addition to having a pet pony which followed him like a dog he also bred rabbits and pigeons.

A product of his time, lacking learning or any spirit of inquiry, he accepted and adhered to the tried and trusted method of the short drop, unable to imagine that there could possibly be a more merciful way of killing his fellow men than by choking them to death. It could well have been one of Calcraft’s clients who coined the phrase ‘This suspense is killing me’!

On top of his basic pay of approximately twenty-five shillings a week, each execution brought him in a guinea, one pound one shilling, though for a hanging outside London an extra fee of ten pounds was expected and received. In the unlikely event of a last-minute reprieve, half that was still paid. By way of fringe benefits, he earned half a crown for each flogging he administered, plus an allowance for cat-o’-nine-tails and birch rods.

Murderers male and female, body-snatchers and Irish rebels, all mounted the scaffold steps, to be dispatched by this thick-set, white-bearded man in his funereal black suit and odd-shaped tall hat. He has his place in execution history as having officiated at the last occasion on which a woman was hanged in public, when he executed murderess Frances Kidder on 2 April 1868. He followed this a month later, on 26 May, with the last public execution of a man, Michael Barrett, a Fenian, dispatched for trying to blow up the Clerkenwell House of Correction in an attempt to rescue his colleagues, 12 people being killed and many others injured by the explosion.

Some weeks later, on 13 August 1868, Calcraft performed a similar task at the first private execution. This was in Maidstone Gaol, Thomas Wells being hanged for murdering Dover’s station-master. The venue may have changed, but not the technique; indeed, it was a debatable point whether less mercy would be shown at a private execution than at one enacted in full view of the public. Be that as it may, Calcraft allowed his victim a drop of no more than 2 or 3 feet, the murderer ‘dying hard’.

By 1874 the authorities decided to retire him – he was, after all, 75 years old and still adhering to the harsh methods he had always practised. Under protest, he did so, and became a surly recluse until his death five years later.

The arrival of William Marwood in 1874 marked a turning-point in the history of executions, for here was a thinking man, a man who had not only taken an interest in executions, but was convinced that the present method was wrong. By experiment, although one does not know how, and by calculation, he was certain that he could improve it, and so wrote to the authorities.

He pointed out that by adjusting the length of the rope to the weight of the body, the neck would be dislocated and the death almost instantaneous. At last, when he was over 50 years of age, he was given his chance, and became an executioner. Despite filling the post for only nine years, his dedication and ability soon earned him that which few hangmen had ever achieved, the respect of the public.

In order to spare his victims as much pain as possible, he invented a running noose fitted with a metal ring through which the rope would slide easily; the noose replaced the hangman’s knot used previously. But the most important innovation was his use of the long drop: ‘Weigh carefully and give as long a drop as possible,’ was his maxim, a principle now employed by hangmen all over the civilised world, and, if for nothing else, thousands of condemned men owe their ease of dispatch to Marwood.

Without presumably any detailed physiological knowledge, he based his method on the fact that, in layman’s terms, death comes quicker with a broken neck than a squeezed throat. Strangling by the rope simply presses on the jugular vein and carotid arteries, but fracture-dislocation of the spinal chord brings immediate loss of sensation, rupturing most of the sensory pathways. Marwood reasoned that if the victim could be dropped a carefully calculated distance, the downward force due to his weight at the point of stopping would be sufficient to break his spine and cause almost instantaneous death or, at least, total unconsciousness followed by death.

The carefully calculated distance was the vital factor. Too short a drop would not fracture the vertebrae of the spine, death then coming slowly by strangulation. Too long a drop would literally tear the victim’s head off, which, although instantaneous in itself, was nevertheless unacceptable. This latter risk was the complex issue, the length of drop depending on the type of rope, its elasticity, the correct positioning of the knot (under the left ear), weight of the victim, his age, and physical details such as the strength of his neck muscles and general fitness.