Part 3 — DIVISION IV. THE “GALLOWS” LITERATURE OF THE STREETS. Public Executions, Dying Speeches. Confessions, and Copy of Verses. (continued 5)

Subsequent experience “got his hand in” as the saying is, and made him more adroit at strangling, but except among a very few relatives and old acquaintances, he was a man shunned and despised, and often liable to insults and desperate encounters in public company, when once the whisper went round that he was the hangman of York Castle.

Another unhappy being, fated to follow the same horrible vocation, is Smith, of Dudley. On the outskirts of the town there used to be seen the old half-tumbled down cottage, surrounded by a marshy piece of ground, where “Dudley Smith,” as he is often called, resided at the time he took it into his head to become a second rival to London’s famous hangman. The news of Askern’s exploits gave Smith courage, but made Calcraft only laugh and wonder how many more fools, ambitious of a black notoriety, were going to compete with him. Events soon followed to settle the question, and afford Smith the opportunity he sought.

“Red-handed guilt, the child of woe” then made rapid progress, and cast a gloom over many a household in Staffordshire, and throughout the adjacent “black country.” The difference of a few guineas settled the matter in the minds of the authorities of Stafford gaol, and struck the balance against the pecuniary demands of the skilful Calcraft, and in favour of the lesser price of the inexperienced Smith, who, however, supplemented the want of experience with that species of brazen impudence and animal confidence which men of his class possess. Mentally and physically he was of rougher mould than either of the two former gallows heroes. Nurtured from birth among miners, the companion of the most illiterate pottery hands, and with bull-dog tastes and habits, he was well fitted for the office of public executioner. A man being wanted for the coming “job,” he applied, sent in the “lowest tender,” and was accepted. Visions by day and night now haunted his mind; asleep or awake the gallows and all its appurtenances dwelt strongly upon his imagination, and flitted before his eyes in his drunken moments. Coils of rope here, there, and everywhere rose up before him, and sometimes twined about his own neck in his midnight dreams, like fiery serpents. Time was getting brief, and he must prepare to perform his task neatly and expeditiously, and in dexterity equal the renowned William Calcraft. So, accordingly, after being shown the sort of rope he must use, he set himself to the work of experimenting and forming slip knots round logs of wood, knobs of furniture and fixtures, the tops of his garden rails, and sometimes round his own neck, close under the ear, and sufficiently tight to satisfy himself that it would answer at the proper time. He practised also the pinioning process on his “young woman” in secret; who, not at all enamoured at his intended profession, at first stoutly resisted, but his importunities and determination made her submit to his strange proceedings.

Without overburdening our confined space with an enumeration of the criminals he afterwards executed at Stafford and elsewhere, suffice it to say, that after a few blunders and the usual violent outcries of the brutal multitudes, he became tolerably expert, and was considered a fit assistant to Calcraft, when a change of the law and private executions were determined upon. As we have been informed in the before quoted narrative of the first private execution, on account of Calcraft’s great age, and in obedience to the overtures of the authorities, Smith performed the subordinate part of moving the bolt that supported the platform on which the criminal stood; preliminary, it is supposed, to taking Calcraft’s place, if death or inability should ere long necessitate a change.

Such a change may be nearer than people suppose, for Calcraft is expected to be a successful applicant for a retiring pension, on account of his infirmities, now too plainly visible, in which event Smith might have for a competitor the notorious “Long Tom Coffin,” a costermonger of old Clare Market, lately pulled down, and a quaint character about town, who addressed an epistle in the following form to the authorities of Newgate, which we give in its original orthography, and “with all its blushing honours” and beauties “thick upon it”:—

“Wild Street, March 1st, 1868.

“To the Gaol Committee of Newgate,”

“Gentilmen,—As Ive heerd Calcraft yure ould hangmon iz goin to leeve iz plaise, Ive just takin the libertee too ask yu too chuse me, as I am villin too do the jobs on murdrers for the same pay, and vill ever bee punkshal hat it, ven ever yu vant to hang em up at the gallerse. Ive no objecshun to exshecute any vun yu pleese, without feer or favur too any relashun or aquanetense, but vill do my dooty imparshul, for vich I can git a goood karacter,”

I am Gentilmen,

Yure humbel sirvent,

Thomas Coffin.”

“P.S.—Nevyew by my granmuther’s side to the late Doctur Coffin.”

The secret execution of Wells, the railway porter, at Maidstone, on August 13th, 1868, marks in the criminal calendar William Calcraft’s disappearance from public life. He will henceforth be surrounded by the mystery becoming his terrible office, and the rising generation of criminals who take an interest in the matter, will have to ask their seniors what kind of man he was, and to trust to their imaginations for the picture of him. To no man probably will this mystery be more welcome than to Calcraft himself. He has shown, on more than one occasion, that his dread of facing the crowd was equal to his victim’s dread of facing the gallows.

At the execution of the Manchester Fenians, and of Barrett in London, he was seen to manifest more fear and nervous weakness than any of the men whom he was to put to death. On both occasions he received violent threatening letters from the fenian friends of the culprits. He therefore shuffled about the prison yard, and seemed afraid to mount the gallows-steps, while the sweat fell from his face, and stood in large drops upon his brow. It is a great relief to him for his few remaining years, and a moral gain in every sense to society, to have lost sight of him; for after all, he constituted perhaps the most revolting part of a public execution. The strong prejudice, and the intense savage hatred of the crowd against him was, no doubt, a most unjustifiable feeling, seeing that as the mere instrument of justice and of judgment, he was neither to be hated nor to be loved; but it existed in such intensity that there was no prospect of its ever being lessened. The effect was extremely injurious even to the poor kind of morality that public executions were supposed to promote. The passive feeling of awe with which men might be disposed to look on a criminal going to a righteous doom, was changed into an active feeling of disgust and horror, when they beheld the man by whom he was publicly strangled; and there was too much reason to believe that they left the precincts of the gibbet with more of this unjust feeling uppermost in their minds, than that which open-air executions were meant to inculcate.

All this is now changed by the private system of hanging, but it also destroys every plea for retaining the use of the gallows, as we have before argued in previous pages.

In sketching the career of Calcraft, much is necessary to be said respecting his predecessor, Tom Cheshire, to whom he acted for some years as an assistant hangman, and who gave him during that time repeated instructions in the art of putting criminals to death.

The commencement of his professional life reaches back far into the reign of George the Third, when Tom Cheshire first employed him, and was in the height of his fame. A very remarkable character was old Cheshire, who used to wear always a snuff-brown coat reaching down to his heels, and on that account was often hooted at wherever he was seen, as the “snuffy skull thatcher!” Many of the ancient customs of Newgate he was an eye-witness of, and which will be interesting to mention here.

When the last night of some poor condemned wretch had arrived, at midnight, and from hour to hour, till the dawn of the execution morning, a bell man used to parade outside the prison walls under the grating of the condemned cell, and in loud solemn tones accompanied the harsh sounds of his bell with his warning-cries, to “prepare for death.” With a blush of shame for our forefathers, we are obliged to confess that, murder by law on the gallows was then so common for burglary, highway robbery, forgery, horse and sheep stealing, shop-lifting to the value of forty shillings, and other minor offences, that “hanging Monday” was regularly looked for, after every Old Bailey sessions, when a batch of males and females, sometimes amounting to half a dozen, would be hung up like so many dogs and cats on a Monday morning, although only found guilty and sentenced on the preceding Friday. Simple stealing from a house or the person was then oftener punished with death than were murderous offences. And so awfully unscrupulous were the “Bow-street runners,” as the officers of police were termed, that the innocent used to be “planted” with stolen property, entrapped, sworn positively against, and put to death for the sake of the £40 “blood money” then given for every one capitally convicted. Then the horror of the “condemned cell, and pew, and press yard” were kept continually going, and the blood-thirsty monsters afterwards held their nightly saturnalias together, with spies, informers, bawdy-house pimps of both sexes, and the master and deputy-hangman amongst them; who revelled and toasted the success of their trade of blood-spilling. Then also, the “press yard” witnessed every sessions the torturing of its many youthful victims by the lead-knotted lash; and the “press room” resounded with the piercing shrieks of a prisoner undergoing the punishment awarded to those who refused to plead. Whenever a prisoner at the bar declined to say whether he was guilty or not guilty (a formality required by the law before he could be tried), he was taken to the “press room,” laid on the stone floor naked, and with arms and legs extended, chained fast by the wrists and ancles; and a stout board was placed on the front of his body, on which heavy iron weights, one by one, were gradually placed, after every time he was asked if he would plead to the question first put to him, “guilty or not guilty?” Some poor tortured wretches, after a certain number of ponderous weights, never less than half-hundreds or hundreds, had been heaped upon them, would be terrified into pleading and standing the chance of their trial; but others would be obstinately dumb till such a pile of weights was added, that they were, according to the sentence of the law, crushed to death! The murderer’s pew in the chapel, on the sabbath day, often presented a spectacle, that once seen, never was forgotten. While the late Rev. Dr. Cotton, then the prison chaplain, was preaching the “condemned sermon” one time scowling assassins deep-dyed with the blood of many victims would be seen grouped together; at another time youth and innocence, wrongfully condemned to die a felon’s death on the gallows (as history has since proved), through perjury, or misconstrued circumstances and uncertain evidence. Amongst these we must not forget the fair and beautiful Eliza Fenning, a virtuous maiden servant of a tradesman’s family in Fleet Street, who suffered death on the public gibbet for an offence which she called God to witness that she was totally innocent of! She was convicted on doubtful circumstantial evidence of attempting to poison the whole family, by putting arsenic into the flour of some dumplings she made for their dinner. All her solemn asseverations of innocence availed her not, and the best of characters was entirely useless: sentenced to die she was, and she was ruthlessly hanged by her fair neck, before a vast sympathising multitude of men, women, and children in the Old Bailey, all melted to tears, and crying out “shame,” “shame!”

The beauteous innocent creature appeared on the gallows platform in a new white dress from head to foot, as spotless as her own purity; and we doubt not her soul, the moment it was released by the executioner’s vile hands, was caught up by attending angels and carried to the haven of eternal bliss.

Long after it was too late to wipe out the stain of her judicial murder, her master’s son confessed on his death bed that he secretly mixed the arsenic in the flour she used, during her brief absence from the kitchen, as an act of revenge for refusing to submit to his embraces.

Tom Cheshire and Newgate has witnessed other ghastly scenes, and his predecessor has had adventures with “Sixteen-string-Jack, Jerry Abershaw, Jonathan Wild, Jack Shepherd, Betsy the bank-note forger and foot-pad, who was half executed and restored to life; when the CONDEMNED used to go in an open cart, sitting on their coffins, from Newgate all through Holborn to a public half-way house in St. Giles’s, where they were allowed to stop and drink their “parting draught” with their friends, and be presented with their “last nosegay,” and then resume their procession through Oxford Road, and at the top of it, in the open space facing the gates of Hyde Park, near the turnpike that then existed, to be at once executed on Tyburn’s three-corner’d gibbet.

Passing to later times, Cheshire and his man Calcraft knew something about the noted Dr. Brooks and the dreadful secrets of old surgeon’s hall at the back of Newgate. Subjects for dissection being very scarce, “BODY-SNATCHERS,” sometimes called “resurrectionists” used to watch funerals during the day time in the church-yards of London, mark where the youngest and plumpest subjects were interred, and at night, with digging tools take them up and bag them in sacks, which they would speedily convey to a hired hackney coach standing conveniently near, and drive off with them to the said hall, or to St. Bartholomew’s, according to orders. As body-snatching did not always supply enough subjects for the numerous doctors and students who required them for lectures and experiments, a viler class of offenders sprang to way-lay the friendless and unfortunate, entice them into some lonely out of way house surrounded by vacant ground walls, and there poison and smother them. These horrible villains were called Burkers, who contrived for a long time to sell the bodies of their victims undetected for large sums, as persons who had died naturally and been buried. At last a poor Italian boy who exhibited white mice in the streets, was burked by Bishop, May, and Williams, in a lone house in Bethnal-green, and one night was offered at Bartholomew’s hospital. The doctor to whom they took it, feeling certain after a minute examination, that the corpse had died a violent death, quietly sent for the officers of justice, and gave them into custody. They were tried and found guilty on the clearest evidence of Italians who identified the boy, and were hanged by Calcraft and his master amidst the loudest execrations ever heard in the precincts of Newgate.

During the earlier times of that awful looking gail, the classification and administration were so loose as to render it a perfect HELL ON EARTH. Depravity, ribaldry, drunkenness, gambling and debauchery there reigned unchecked in its dark dungeon, between gaolers and the lowest of their male and female prisoners. The latter sex often times exchanged clothes with their keepers, when the govener was, at night, fast asleep, and in their cells they carrried on whatever lewd revels they had a fancy for, and made a pandemonium of the prison. At the death of Cheshire, Calcraft became principal executioner. He was previously a private watchman at Reid’s brewery, Liquorpond Street, and by trade a lady’s shoemaker. He is also celebrated as a first-class rabbit-fancier, whose breed has won prizes, and unknown, has graced the festive board of many London families. At the Tiger public house, corner of Devizes Street, near the Rosemary Branch, Hoxton, next door to his old residence in his younger days, he used to meet great numbers of his brother snobs, rabbit-breeders, and skittle players, and there held jollifications and played skittles with them. On account of the prejudice of the neighbours, and the too-great freedom of impudent boys in calling out “Jack Ketch,” his habit was to go out very early in the morning and after dark. He is married, and is the parent of a goodly number of sons and daughters, morally brought up and schooled, who have sometimes, been unjustly annoyed by ignorent people on account of their unfortunate parentage. To show the full force of this prejudice we will mention a curious circumstance that happened to one of his daughters.

She was accustomed to meet and court a young mechanic at a friend’s house. One night a supper was appointed to be held there, and the sweetheart had promise of a good merry-making with mutual acquaintances of both sexes, not one of whom knew Miss Calcraft by her paternal name. Through some mysterous cause we have never had explained, just as all were comfortably seated around the smoking viands on the table, and were pledging the lovers and each other in preliminary bumpers of beer and gin, strange footsteps were heard on the stairs, followed by a knock at the door, and when it was opened, the whole company, especially Miss Calcraft’s lover, were suddenly petrified with horror. No sooner was the fatal name pronounced and a recognition passed between father and daughter, than the young man at one bound cleared the table, rushed down the stairs, ran fast away from the house and was seen no more; thus proving again to the deserted hangman’s daughter, that “the course of true love never runs smooth.”

A parallel to the iniquities of the old Bow Street runners are to be found in the records of our modern police force of London. “Jack Ketch’s warren” was well supplied by police scoundrels from many quarters of the poverty stricken districts. One of the most infamous was the “prig’s haunt” in Tyndal’s Buildings, Gray’s Inn Lane, inhabited by low Irish, where King, a policeman in disguise, attended daily when off duty, to teach pocket-picking and all the arts of burglary to poor outcast boys. Between experiments with various instruments, and lessons on the way to use them, a coat was swung across a line, and the young ones were shown how to pick the pocket single-handed when a thief was by himself, and when they went together in twos and threes. As fast as they became adepts in the art and went into the streets to obtain their living by it, King, who always knew their walks, watched them in his uniform, and the moment they committed a robbery, pounced upon them and procured their conviction, for which he obtained the praise of his superiors for extraordinary vigilance, and rewards, besides court-fees at the sessions. At last this vile thief-trainer became too clever; he was denounced by some boys sharper than himself, and some of his honester brother-constables took the clue up, unravelled it to the end, and on the clearest evidence got him sentenced to penal servitude for life. A more recent proof, while we are penning this, has come out, that perjury is still rife in the Metropolitan police force. Three policemen have been wrongfully procuring the conviction of a drover on the charge of stealing several sheep from a field at Tottenham, and have received their “blood money” from the County of Middlesex funds. Since their poor victim has been suffering incarceration, the real thief, at the trial of one of his confederates, has confessed to his own guilt, and declared the entire innocence of the man formerly sworn to by the said policemen. May justice soon overtake them.

Returning to Calcraft and his latter days, we have to congratulate our readers upon his religious conversion, and regular Sunday attendance with his wife, at a church near Poole-street, Islington. He has long ceased to love his office and make money by sales of the clothes of the numerous culprits, and bits of the ropes that hanged them. The ancient ceremony of swearing in the executioner was an awful one. Amidst a collection of ropes, fetters and handcuffs, with his hand upon the bible, he was required to solemnly swear that he would execute every criminal condemned to die, without favouring father or mother, or any friend whatsoever; and when he had taken the horrible oath he was dismissed with the ominous words—“GET THEE HENCE WRETCH!”

The latest performance of Calcraft is reported below, and shows that the first private execution at Newgate was like the one at Maidstone, privately barbarous and publicly useless.

At nine o’clock in the morning of September 8th, the first private execution in London took place in the interior of Newgate Prison. The culprit was Alexander Arthur Mackay, a youth of only eighteen years of age, who, on the 8th of May last murdered a woman Emma Grossmith in whose service he was, at 11, Artillery-passage, Norton Folgate. It now only remains to tell how he expiated his crime upon the scaffold in the presence not of a roaring, surging mob, but in the solitude of a prison, and before a few persons, whose number did not much exceed a score.

Inside the gaol the scene was solemn to the last degree. The representatives of the morning newspapers whose duty it was to witness the execution were admitted to Newgate at half-past eight, and after traversing several gloomy corridors found themselves in an inclosed yard near the prison chapel, in front of the scaffold. A few words will enable the reader to picture for himself the scene.

The yard is a square one, entered by a wicket gate at the south-east corner, and in the corner to the north-west stands the scaffold. In the south-west corner, near the grating through which prisoners undergoing punishment hold converse with their friends at periods arranged for by the prison rules, is a space railed off for the representatives of the press, and standing at invervals of a few yards apart are men of the City police, occupying the remainder of the yard. Behind the scaffold the prison buildings rear their massive walls, and from the roof peers down upon the solemn scene below a stolid warder stationed there in order that, so soon as the ghastly business is at an end, he may signal the man in whose hands are the ropes to hoist the black flag, as a witness to the outside world that justice is satisfied; on the opposite side of the yard are other prison buildings with grated windows, but no outward sign of the life within, while flanking the yard north and south are walls—the one is topped by a terrible cheveaux de frise, and over the other hangs suspended a large cloth, the sound of whose rustling as shaken by the wind—it beat against the prison wall,—was as the flapping wing of a huge bird of prey. The silent expectation of the twenty minutes spent in that dreadful yard was the most painful experience of the present writer’s life. Absence of sound when a man is alone in the heart of a trackless forest is said by travellers to be fearfully oppressive, but the involuntary silence of twenty men waiting the entrance of the messengers of death and their victim becomes painful to the last degree. Sometimes there is a slight murmur heard from the outside of the prison, with now and again the clanking of a latch or the grating of a bolt within the gaol itself, and occasionally a low hum of conversation in the yard—these are the only sounds heard, and they only serve to intensify the oppressiveness of the silent intervals that intervene. What was going on within the prison during this time was not known to the representatives of the press. Under the new Act of Parliament they are excluded from what was known as the pinioning room, and only see the very last scene of all, an alteration very agreeable to the feelings of gentlemen upon whom is imposed a most painful duty. They learned after the execution that Mackay had since his condemnation conducted himself with great decorum, had frequently expressed his great sorrow for the crime he had committed, and his perfect readiness to die. The poor youth, we were told, lost his own mother when he was about the same age as one of his victim’s children, and this deepened in his own mind the intense feelings of piognant regret he seemed to experience between his sentence being pronounced and carried into effect. He was most attentive to the ministrations of the Rev. Mr. Jones, ordinary of Newgate, and took the sacrament at his hands on Sunday, The condemned youth slept soundly until about six o’clock in the morning, when he rose and remained in communion with his spiritual adviser until the last. So much for the interior of the prison; outside the silence remained unbroken, save by the sounds of which we have spoken, until within a quarter of an hour of nine, when from the neighbouring church of St. Sepulchre a passing bell began to toll, and a slightly increased murmur from the outside world reached the ears of those who waited within the prison. At about this time Mr Sheriff M’Arthur, with his under sheriffs, Messrs Roche and Davidson Mr. Jonas, the governor; and Mr. Gibson, the surgeon of Newgate, entered the yard, and having satisfied themselves that all the arrangements were complete, retired, leaving the space again to the reporters and policemen, one of the latter body having some few minutes earlier turned sick and left the yard. This almost unbearable suspense lasted until the clocks in the neighbourhood were heard to strike the hour, and then the clanking of a latch behind the black screen surrounding the scaffold was followed by the appearance of the Rev. Mr. Jones, who supported the doomed man as he ascended the few steps leading from the ground to the drop. The chaplain, whose voice trembled with emotion, read the Litany from the Church of England Prayer-book, and Mackay joined with a loud, clear voiee in the responses, his voice being heard distinctly over the yard, even after he was capped and noosed. Just at this supreme moment the young man’s firmness seemed about to forsake him, and he tottered as though to fall, but the hand of the chaplain laid upon his arm sustained him, and in another second the trap on which the unhappy man was standing fell, and he hung suspended. The fall was a very short one, and signs of life were visible for a longer time after the bolt was drawn than we remember to have seen on any similar occasion. As soon as possible every one concerned in the ghastly business was glad to make his escape from this last act in a doleful drama. To the spectators, judging from our own experience, and the appearance of many persons present, nothing could have been more terrible than this sight of a man, calmly, methodically strangled under shadow of a prison wall, without any of the frothy excitement that has up to within a very short time formed part of an execution ceremony. Few things could be more impressive, so far as the outside spectators were concerned (by reason of its fearful suggestiveness) than the silent running up of a black flag from the gaol wall just as the murderer passed down into the valley of the shadow of death; and nothing we should say could have been more awful than the sight of those four high, hard, pitiless walls to the wretch brought forth to die. Such is an account of the first execution of a murderer in London that has taken place out of sight of such as chose to brave the horrore of an execution crowd in order to see a fellow-creature die a shameful death.

The body, after hanging an hour, was cut down, and a coroner’s inquest, as prescribed by the Act of Parliament, was held in the course of the afternoon, previous to burying it.

The last personage we shall record here as a fit companion to all the before-mentioned, is Sanson, the renowned HERO OF THE GUILLOTINE. On the outskirts of old Paris, in a small neat cottage overlooking the banks of the Seine, surrounded by palings at the front, and thick hawthorn hedges at the sides and back, lives secluded from vulgar gaze a descendant of three generations of the Sansons, who from father to son have inherited the office of public executioner. He is a grim-looking old man of strong build; and is complacent to all visitors whose curiosity leads them to see and converse with him, and view his curious cabinet of murderers’ relics and criminals’ curiosities; and who make their request with becoming civility. He is full of anecdotes about the exploits of his ancestors at chopping off the heads of Louis the XVI, Maria Antonette, Charlotte Corday, the authoress of the famous saying “O! liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name,” as she was about to put her neck under the guillotine knife. He will exhibit at the same time, models of guillotines, instruments of torture, amongst them spokes of the blood-stained breaking wheel of former days, locks of the hair of various nobles and their ladies, rings, brooches, and other trinkets of the victims of the bloody Robespierre, with pieces of the robes and surplices of the bishops and priests who were then brought out of dungeons and guillotined in multitudes early every morning for weeks together, till the ground where the scaffold stood ran with blood. A few skulls and finger-bones of remarkable persons he will also show, and tell how he obtained them. We will now spare our reader’s feelings, and conclude by hoping that the day is not far off, when the awful adventures of the heroes of the gallows and guillotine will be numbered among the things of the past.

THE END.

Elliot, Printer, “The West-End News” office, 475, Oxford Street, W.C.