Stephen Wade - Britains Most Notorious Hangmen

TRUE CRIME FROM WHARNCLIFFE

Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths Series

OTHER TRUE CRIME BOOKS FROM WHARNCLIFFE

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First published in Great Britain in 2009 by
Wharncliffe Local History
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Copyright (c) Stephen Wade, 2009

ISBN 978 1 84563 082 9
Print ISBN: 978-1-84563-082-9
ePub ISBN: 9781844688401

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Copy of George Watsons application to assist the famous hangman William Marwood. Lincolnshire Life

Introduction

Sir Thomas Browne, in his book,
Lydford Journey (1644) wrote:

Oft have I heard of Lydford law,
How in the morn they hang and draw
And sit in judgement after.

rowne was writing because he had heard of a judge of the Stannery at Lydford in Devon: a man who it was said hanged a fellow at midday and then conducted the trial. British history teaches us many things about the moral and legal codes which have created the spirit of the nation, and many of these formative habits and attitudes are anything but pleasant. We have always been a nation fond of exercising judicial killings. In February 2008, the Sun would have us believe that little has changed in this respect; the newspaper reported that 99% of its readers wanted the return of the hanging judge and the scaffold.

The feature reported that several famous people wanted the return of hanging, including Anne Widdecombe and David Davis. But interestingly, Sara Payne mum of murdered schoolgirl Sarah, nine, is against the death penalty.. the paper stated. The tone of the entire feature was one that has been repeated thousands of times in the media, summed up by the words: Almost 100,000 Sun readers unite today to call for the return of the death penalty.

What is not so often discussed is the notion of exactly who would supervise and carry out the hanging. The public hangman was the target of hatred, derision and violence through the centuries in which Britain hanged its felons; he was also often made into a celebrity and was of course the subject of morbid fascination. Hangmen feature just as prominently in the exhibits at Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors as villains. Even as long ago as 1601, they have been vilified, even by the men they hanged (in spite of being given money to beg that the death be quick). The Earl of Essex, executed in that year by the London hangman, Derrick, penned a ballad upon his life, and he wrote:

Derrick! Thou knowest, at stately Calais I saved

Thy life, lost for a rape there done,

Which thou thyself can testify

Thine own hand three and twenty hung...

The first hangmen were, on the manors and in the towns, paid by both the civil and the religious power-bases, because courts proliferated and several categories of people in high society had the prerogative of hanging culprits in their domain. They were usually rogues themselves, as was the case with a London hangman observed by a diarist called Machyn in 1556, who noted that The 2nd day of July was rode into a cart five unto Tyburn [the hanging site near todays Marble Arch]. One was the hangman with the stump-leg - for theft. The which he had hanged many a man and quartered many, and had many a noble man and other...

Of course, since capital punishment was abolished in Britain in 1964, we have become acutely aware of the sick and revolting adverse views of the act of hanging: notably the death of a person later proved innocent of the capital offence. Such was the recent case of Alfred Moore, a Huddersfield man who was hanged in 1951 for the murder of two police officers. The