Geoffrey Abbott - The Executioner Always Chops Twice - Ghastly Blunders on the Scaffold

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

CONTENTS

Part One:

Part Two:

Dedicated to the memory of my friend the late, great hangman Syd Dernley

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Grateful thanks are due to all the librarians, curators and custodians of newspaper and similar archives who devoted so much time in helping me delve, dig and discover material for this book. Gratitude is also due to those long-since executed gentlemen and women whose facetious last minute quips leaven these pages; for what is life, or even rapidly approaching death, without humour?

I am also greatly indebted to Dr Harold Hillman, formerly Reader in Physiology and Director of Unity Laboratory of Applied Neurobiology at the University of Surrey.

INTRODUCTION

In the days when life was short and disease was rife, when existence for the lower classes was a daily struggle to survive and humane consideration for the wrong-doers, as prescribed by the law, was minimal, death on the scaffold, however violent, was accepted by the populace as the norm and, to many, as a regular source of entertainment. No instruction was given to the executioner regarding exactly how he should perform his task and little or no consideration was given to the possible suffering of the victim, for had not he or she attempted to remove or replace the monarch, change the countrys religion or committed some other hideous crime?

So why hone the axe razor-sharp? Why go to all the trouble of training a man to aim it accurately and mercifully? Why allow the victim to die quickly on the rope, or die at all, before disembowelling them with the ripping knife, had they been sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered? After all, the victims were there to be punished and punished they were. Deterrence was the name of the game and as a negative can rarely be proven, the question as to whether it worked or not remains unanswered.

The legal responsibility in England for the execution of criminals, by whatever means, was that of the sheriff, the word derived from shire-reeve, he being the chief officer of the Crown of each county or shire. That official however, in order to avoid having to do the distasteful job personally, subcontracted it out to anyone who volunteered, and so the task of beheading, hanging, or of drawing and quartering the condemned person, was undertaken by the hangman, the title describing his more usual occupation.

Those who tightened the noose, swung the axe or wielded the ripping knife were men of their times, most of them lacking sensitivity or imagination, many of them brutal and callous. Employed when the occasion demanded rather than as civil (!) servants, few if any records were kept of their names, and anonymity was also essential to avoid retribution wreaked by the supporters of those they had executed. Loathed and abused by the public at large, their services, however repugnant to the society of the day, were essential, for without them all those engaged in administering the law of the land, the judges and lawyers, the court officials and the juries, would have been totally redundant.

Admittedly some of them, Thrift, Sanson, Schmidt and the like, tried to dispatch their victims in a humane manner, but the very presence of the almost invariably hostile crowds inhibited their efforts. By instinct anti-government, those who attended executions generally classified the executioner as a symbol of authority and targeted him accordingly, but he was also traditionally greeted with almost affectionate abuse (akin to the present-day treatment of football referees). And just as todays soccer fans would not miss a home game for the world, so in the days of public executions the locals seized every opportunity to attend a local hanging or beheading. Should it be the execution of the perpetrator of a particularly horrific crime, residents of nearby towns would pour in by cart, coach and wagon; in the nineteenth century the rail companies would even lay on special excursions with reductions in fares for group-travelling.

These events provided a great day out for the whole family; they would get there early to get a good seat on the specially erected wooden stands, while the more affluent would book rooms overlooking the scaffold and partake of wine and such repasts as cold chicken or pheasant to sustain them through the performance. Piemen and ale-purveyors plied their wares among the spectators, pickpockets thrived, and the ladies of the night worked days for a change.

Crowds of any sort are peculiarly amorphous bodies capable of committing the sort of acts which its individual members would never dream of carrying out. As an integral part of a mob, those around the scaffold never hesitated to direct disparaging remarks towards the executioner, shouting derogatory comments regarding his skill, appearance, doubtful sobriety and parentage; such epithets were sometimes accompanied by easily obtainable missiles such as rotten fruit and vegetables, even the occasional dead cat. Only when a murderer had killed a child or dismembered a female victim did the hangman find any favour with the crowd, and that but rarely.

So it was hardly surprising that when the executioner, exposed and vulnerable as he was in full view of everyone, became distracted and, at times, apprehensive over his personal safety, things went horribly wrong: nooses slipped, wrong levers were pulled, axes and swords wavered off-aim and guillotine blades jammed.

Even in more recent centuries, when executions took place behind prison walls and the executioners themselves were men of conscience and humanity, the scientific advances at their disposal, being more intricate and technical, brought their own problems with them: electrodes dried out, veins eluded the probing syringe, cyanide delivery mechanisms malfunctioned and trapdoors inexplicably failed to fall. Because no system is totally infallible (and executions are operated by human beings with all their failings) blunders were, and still are, inevitable and unavoidable.

Through it all, however, shone the ability of some of the more undaunted victims to retain an almost unbelievable lightheartedness; delivering a blithe quip or wry comment moments before their lives were brought to an abrupt end. Regardless of their crime, one can only admire their courage and wit under such pressure.

PART ONE:

METHODS OF TORTURE AND EXECUTION

METHODS OF TORTURE

The Boots

Among the tortures mentioned in this book, many chroniclers believe that the boots ranked high among those available to the courts; indeed, some called it the most severe and cruell paine in the whole worlde. Whichever variety of this device was used, the victim, even if not subsequently executed, was invariably crippled for life. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this particular method of persuasion was popular in France and Scotland (where it had the deceptively whimsical-sounding name of bootikins), and so distressing was the sight of a victim undergoing this torture that, as Bishop Burnett wrote in his History, when any are to be struck in the Boot, it is done in the presence of the Council (of Scotland) and upon that occasion almost all attempt to absent themselves. Because of the members reluctance, an order had to be promulgated ordering sufficient numbers of them to stay; without a quorum, the process of questioning could not begin.