Herefordshire Through Time
Herefordshire Through Time
"The sentence of the court upon you is, that you be taken from this place to a lawful prison and thence to a place of execution and that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead; and that your body be afterwards buried within the precincts of the prison in which you shall be confined before your execution. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul. Amen".
(The statement read out by the Judge upon sentencing a person to death.)
Execution as a form of discipline and deterrent has been used by society far back in history, and the establishment of the prison system did not mean redundancy for this highest form of punishment. However, the development of an organised system of holding and reforming criminals led to the development of a more regulated punishment.
It was at the turn of the 18th century that a scaffold specially constructed to hang a condemned man was first used. Prior to this date gallows had often been little more than a tree, where the condemned was hanged from a bough whilst standing on a cart or stool, which was then pulled away leaving him hanging.
In 1818 a collapsing scaffold was first used in Northamptonshire, and by the following year almost every prison in the country had a similar structure. The collapsing scaffold consisted of a gallows platform 6-8ft high, which was reached via a set of steps. The platform was surmounted by a structure consisting of two upright beams and one cross beam. The cross beam was around 8ft high and had an attached chain from which the noose was hung. Below the gallows was a hinged trapdoor through which the condemned man would drop when it was opened by a lever.
Many counties had their own hangman and assistants but there was one hangman who was the number one in the country, and he would travel around to perform executions in various counties. Hangmen were not exclusively executioners and many also carried out normal jobs, such as barbers and publicans.
The rope for the noose was a uniform five-eighths of an inch thick, with the noose woven in to the one end. Originally the rope was supplied by the hangman but later all rope for gallows was manufactured by a London rope-maker, who continued to do so up until the 1970s.
Until the 1880s executions were carried out in public places on temporarily-constructed gallows. In 1868 the Capital Punishment Amendment Act determined that executions must from then on be carried out in private within the precinct of the county gaol, with only the necessary witnesses.
At first, most executions were carried out from a gallows constructed in the prison yard, but by the 1880s a separate execution chamber was becoming more popular.
The first 31 years of private capital punishment in Great Britain saw 525 people hanged in 499 executions (sometimes more than one person was hanged in one execution, and there is even a case where four people were hanged at the same time).
All of these were hangings due to conviction for murder. There were 337 homicides, 122 uxoricides (murder of one's wife), 40 infanticides (legally, an infant was anyone under the age of 5), seven patricides (murder of a father), four sororicides (murder of a sister), and one fratricide (murder of a brother).
Twenty-six and a half per cent of all the murders committed were recorded as happening whilst the condemned was under the influence of alcohol. Of the 122 uxoricides 41% of the men had been drunk, but interestingly none of the 15 murderesses was recorded as being under the influence of alcohol. Alcohol may have been used as an excuse for the behaviour of the male murderers, the cause for their temporary lapse of character, whereas for women it was thought that there was no excuse for disobedience.
Firearms were the weapon responsible for the greatest number of murders, with knives coming in second.
The youngest person confirmed to have been hanged in England was Michael Hamond, aged just seven. He was hanged in King's Lynn, Norfolk, next to his sister Ann, who was 11 at the time. Their crime is unknown. In December 1888 Samuel Crowther entered the record books as the oldest man to be hanged, at 71 years old.
The County Gaol in Hereford was equipped with a flat roof above the entrance which was used for public hangings, so that they were a public display of justice (Ron Shoesmith, "Go to Gaol ... in Hereford", Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists' Field Club, Vol. XLVIII, 1994). This area was first used in August 1796, when John Philips was executed after being convicted of stealing 21 sheep. The event was documented in the Hereford Journal on 10th August 1796. After the Capital Punishment Amendment Act of 1868 hangings in Hereford, and elsewhere, were all carried out behind the closed doors of the prison.
By 1864 some 20 people had been hanged on the roof of Hereford Gaol in public view. There was an area at the back of the prison where inmates could be buried, unless claimed by their families. However, the bodies of murderers were usually handed over to medical institutions for dissection.
Between 1868 and 1899 Hereford Gaol had three separate executions during which five men were hanged for their crimes. The highest number of prison executions during this period was 50, with Hereford being joint 18th out of 78 prisons.
23 November 1885: John Hill and John Williams
Hill, alias "Sailor Jack", and Williams, who was known as "Irish Jack", were convicted of the murder of Anne Dickinson of Weobley. Hill admitted attempting to carry out the assault but said that Williams had come up and hit her on the head with a large stick, whereupon Hill ran off. Both men were convicted equally and hanged by the country's chief hangman, James Berry.
20 March 1888: James Jones and Alfred Scandrett
On 19 October 1887, the two men broke into a house belonging to an old man, Phillip Ballard, at Tupsley and killed him with an axe. They were soon arrested and Jones claimed that Scandrett had delivered the fatal blow whilst he had been a mere bystander. The two men tried to blame each other for the crime, and on being sentenced to death Scandrett tried to strangle Jones in the dock as he believed him responsible for his fate. They were hanged by James Berry.
23 December 1891: Charles Saunders (aged 31)
Charles Saunders was a blacksmith sentenced to death at Hereford Assizes for the murder of a young child.
Saunders had persuaded the parents of Walter Charles Steers (aged two) to let him look after the boy whilst they were in London. During May, Saunders and his girlfriend "tramped" (hitchhiked) to Leominster, using the child to help them beg for food and money. They took shelter in a disused cottage, and one night after Walter's crying had kept Saunders awake he picked the child up and murdered him. He buried the body under a pile of straw where it lay undiscovered for 16 weeks.
Saunders was convicted on the evidence of his girlfriend and hanged by the successor of James Berry, a Mr. James Billington. The execution had to be put back when Billington was delayed on his journey from Durham by thick fog. Billington arrived a little after 9am and after briefly checking the equipment he began the execution.
It was recorded that after the trapdoor fell the body swung from side to side and the arms seemed to twitch for several seconds.
By the turn of the 20th century most prisons still housed a separate execution shed within the prison yard, where the condemned were held until the day of their execution. On the day there would be a procession of the condemned man to the gallows, which was often a long way away. By the 1920s an execution cell attached to the shed was the norm.
The condemned man was still read the "Litany of the Dying" and laid to rest in unconsecrated ground behind the prison after being left to hang for one hour. There were often several bodies laid together in the shallow graves of the prison.
After the start of World War I many of the smaller, more rural prisons were shut down. The first was Devizes in Wiltshire in September 1915, and Hereford followed suit in the same year.
The last hanging at Hereford Gaol was in 1903.
15 December 1903: William Haywood (61 years)
William Haywood was a quarryman who had murdered his wife Jane at Lucton on 11 July. Haywood, who was employed by Leominster District Council, had been seen wheeling his wife's body in a wheelbarrow towards the quarry where he worked. She was later found dead with horrific head injuries from a blunt instrument. It is thought that she had tried to get her husband to come home from the pub for dinner and he refused at first, but later followed her home and beat her to death.
The Shire Hall was packed full on the day of the trial and crowds lined the streets to see the Judge leave his lodgings in High Town, with his coach accompanied by trumpeters and footmen. A former inmate of a lunatic asylum, Haywood pleaded insanity at his trial. Witnesses were called to back up his claim but he was convicted and sentenced to death. As he was led from the court his daughters were heard calling out "Goodbye Dad". Haywood was then said to have remarked to his attendants, "They expected me to faint, but I didn't!"
He was hanged by Henry Pierrepoint and John Ellis, on a grey and drizzly December morning. He was hanged in the prison coach house, which meant he had a short walk in the open air. To prevent the public seeing him workmen repairing the roof of the nearby Merton Hotel were forbidden to mount their ladders before 8.15am. The only members of the public that were allowed to view the execution were one of Haywood's daughters and the prison chaplain, the Rev. Treherne. The crowd outside the prison heard the thud of the trapdoor as the cathedral bell chimed at 8am, and Haywood was quickly buried in a simple coffin in the prison yard - the last person to be hanged or buried in Hereford Prison (Betty Grist and Derek Foxton, Edwardian Hereford, p. 39).
It is clear from the descriptions of the condemned men hanged for their crimes in Hereford that they were working class, and probably with little education or money. Names such as "Sailor Jack" and "Irish Jack" would have been rarely given to members of the middle and upper classes.
Saunders, who was hanged for the murder of a young boy, appeared to have been of vagrant status and as such would have been considered relatively worthless in society. As we have no record of murder cases brought against the upper classes we cannot say whether they received more lenient punishments compared to those of the lower classes.
(For further information, see Steve Fielding, The Hangman's Record, 1994 and 1995. We are grateful to Craig Morley for bringing the hanging of the children Michael and Ann Hamond to our attention.)
[Original author: Miranda Greene, 2003]