The death penalty has long been a part of our history. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, women were prosecuted for witchcraft and subsequently executed. In October 1660, after Charles II had returned to the throne, he exacted revenge on some of those who had sought the death of his father, Charles I, by executing them for high treason. Four individuals were hanged, drawn and quartered at Charing Cross, in front of a crowd that included diarist Samuel Pepys, who had gone out for that specific purpose. Pepys had previously seen Charles I beheaded, and saw his attendance at the latter event as his ‘chance…to see the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the King’.

Varying methods
Executions could differ in terms of the methods used – with some being forms of torture rather than quick deaths. The breaking wheel was used, primarily in medieval times, as a method of public execution, working by breaking a criminal’s bones. One man, Robert Weir, is said to have been killed by this means in Edinburgh at the start of the 17th century. Women who had killed their husbands could be convicted of petty treason, a crime that was punishable by being burned on a stake. Better known is the execution method used on Anne Boleyn, among others – she was supposed to be beheaded with an axe, but Henry VIII was said to have shown her ‘mercy’ by agreeing to her request to be killed with a sword. However, hanging has been the primary form of capital punishment in Britain since Anglo-Saxon times.

Public executions could take place for a variety of offences – such as high treason, in the case of the Regicides of the 17th century. Those were high profile cases, however, and more often than not, hangings involved ordinary men and women who had committed various crimes for different reasons, but who all found themselves facing death as a result. This does not mean, however, that all those sentenced to death did actually die. Some might benefit from pardons, and not all those accused of a crime punishable by death received that punishment, thanks to partial verdicts (being convicted of a lesser offence, such as manslaughter instead of murder, for example).

Surprising survivals
There were more unusual cases, though, of individuals who faced the hangman and survived. In September 1724, Margaret Dickson achieved infamy when she ‘outwitted’ her executioner, John Dalgleish, at Edinburgh’s Grassmarket. She had been convicted of killing her illegitimate child, although she consistently denied this. She was hanged, but after her body had been carried away by friends, they discovered that she was, in fact, still alive. A month later, she came to Edinburgh from Musselburgh, and found that there was a crowd waiting for her. A local paper reported that such was people’s curiosity to see this woman who had escaped the noose, that the woman herself – now known as ‘Half Hangit Margaret’ – was in danger of being trodden on or even killed by their excited milling. Luckily for Margaret, one of her relatives was the tollbooth keeper, and he got her into his house and managed to smuggle her back out of town by his back door. She was said to live many more years of life back in Musselburgh, where dark tourists would visit her and pay her to tell them her story.

Twelve years later, Thomas Reynolds was convicted of destroying the turnpikes in his hometown of Ledbury in Herefordshire. He was hanged at Tyburn, but after he was cut down from the scaffold, he was put into a coffin and then his grave. As this was being done, a local woman asked to see his body. His coffin was opened, and to the amazement of onlookers, he took a deep breath, and lifted his hand to his chest. The crowd lifted the coffin back out of the grave, and took it along Oxford Street. They then stopped to see how he was – and he was still alive, breathing strongly and moving, although unable to open his eyes. He was then taken to a doctor, and various remedies were tried, including giving him brandy and extra layers of clothes to keep him warm. It seems that the crowd eventually tired of the miracle, and didn’t know quite what to do with Reynolds. After two miles of being carried, and lots of stops in the cold weather, Reynolds finally died. Again. At this point, a grave was hastily dug at the side of Oxford Street, and the 28-year-old was reburied.

Such stories of those individuals who had escaped execution occupied many pages of the newspapers, and the minds of ordinary people. Hanging was designed as a deterrent to crime, and those who had to face it were treated with a mixture of curiosity, horror and interest from others. When people went through the process and survived, even if only for a short while, others were eager to hear about what it felt like. However, in the case of Reynolds, he was still treated with a mix of fear in some quarters; at some places, they tried to get locals to take him in while he recovered, but they all refused ‘for fear of trouble’ from the authorities.

The Bloody Code
Such stories were unusual, of course; they were outnumbered by press accounts of individuals being hanged without controversy. And as the 18th-century progressed, it was clear that people could be hanged for all sorts of offences; indeed, by 1800, the sheer number of offences that were punishable with death was so great that this aspect of the legal system at that time became known as the ‘Bloody Code’. At the end of the 17th century, there were 50 crimes punishable by death in England and Wales, but just over a century later, there were more than 200 crimes, many relating to damage to property. By making what seem to us rather trivial offences subject to the death penalty, the government hoped that people would be deterred from committing crimes. This aim was futile, though; people carried on offending.

Altering offences
Over the course of the early 19th century, how offences were dealt with changed; for example, shoplifting stopped being a capital offence in 1823. Judges and juries became increasingly reluctant to sentence some individuals to death and might find them guilty of a lesser offence – in the case of grand larceny (the theft of goods worth over a shilling, an offence until 1827 when it and the lesser offence of petty larceny were abolished, replaced by a single offence of simple larceny), a jury might decide that an individual had actually stolen goods worth less than a shilling, meaning that he or she would face punishment but not death. In other cases, offences were altered, making it harder to convict someone of a crime punishable with death. In 1803, for example, proof of murder became necessary in order to convict an individual of infanticide – a capital offence.

However, a jury in an infanticide case could return a verdict of concealment of birth instead – a lesser offence punishable with a prison term of up to two years. By 1861, there were only four capital offences left, and it was murder that most often resulted in the perpetrator being hanged.

It had long been common for public hangings to be the excuse for festivities – the public turning up in large numbers to watch executions as entertainment. Broadsides (early newssheets, often in the form of ballads) as well as food and drink would be sold, and enterprising locals might sell ‘seats’ at or outside their homes to spectators. When Richard Patch, Benjamin Herrin and Sarah Herrin were executed at Horsemonger Lane Gaol in Southwark in 1806, after being convicted of murder (Patch) and counterfeiting coins (the Herrins), the press reported that the prison was ‘surrounded by thousands’ by 6am on execution day, and that ‘the Tenter Ground, the tops of the houses, and surrounding scaffolding, were covered by the multitude’. These were people from all classes, with many being ‘persons of the greatest respectability’.

Over 40 years later, in 1849, Swiss-born Marie Manning and her husband Frederick were convicted of the murder of Marie’s lover, Patrick O’Connor. He had been killed and buried at their Bermondsey home. The couple were hanged side by side – like Patch and the Herrins, outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol – witnessed by a riotous crowd. Charles Dickens also watched, but was horrified by the mob’s violence and its viewing of the executions as a form of entertainment; he would write to the papers expressing his unease at the event. One newspaper at the time added that the enormity of their crime ‘contributed to swell to an unusual extent the perverted curiosity which executions never fail to excite’. Dickens was not alone in his horror at this spectacle; others had previously queried whether allowing people to watch a hanging really had any deterrent effect on them, or whether it was just a day out. This concern grew, and in 1868, hangings were made private, taking place behind the closed doors of prisons.

Priscilla Biggadyke was the first woman to be hanged within the walls of a prison, after public executions were abolished in 1868. Priscilla, 35, was hanged at Lincoln just after Christmas in 1868, having been convicted of poisoning her husband, Richard. The couple had only one bedroom, but Richard, who worked as a well sinker, took in two male lodgers. He soon suspected that Priscilla was a bit too ‘intimate’ with one of the lodgers and they quarrelled. Priscilla was heard to say that she ‘wished he might be brought home stiff’ and soon after, Richard was fed a dinner of mutton and shortcake, became ill, and died the next morning. His dinner had been laced with arsenic. Priscilla, who attempted to lay the blame at the lodger’s door, was found guilty of the crime. Her last words to the hangman were, ‘Shame on you, you are not going to hang me!’ Priscilla’s case shows that although hangings were now private, the newspapers still reported on them, getting the news out to the public. Some individuals continued to stand outside the prisons on execution mornings, waiting for a flag or other sign that the hanging had taken place. Although some may have genuinely felt a desire to ensure that justice had taken place, others were still seeing hangings as a day out, standing outside a prison with others to get as close as they could to the ‘action’.

Abolition
After hangings were made private, it would still take nearly another century for the death penalty to be abolished. We remember the infamous cases today – such as John ‘Reg’ Christie, hanged in 1953 for murdering his wife and at least two more women, all found in his house and garden – but many more in the 20th century have been largely forgotten about. Two years after Christie was hanged, a 32-year-old labourer named Sydney Clarke was convicted of murder. He had killed Rose Fairhurst, a 45-year-old woman down on her luck, who was known as ‘Blondie’. Rose’s body was left on a site near Loman Street in Southwark on 9 February 1955 – a site that had been bombed during World War 2 and not redeveloped. As a result, Clarke became known at the time as the ‘Southwark bombed-site murderer’. He was caught after a numbered ticket was found near Rose’s body: the ticket was for the cubicle that Clarke had been sleeping in at a county council hostel. During his court case, the ticket was described as a clue ‘almost as good as the murderer’s visiting card’. Clarke was convicted and hanged at Wandsworth Prison.

Ten years after Clarke was hanged, the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act suspended the death penalty in Great Britain for five years, setting out that, instead, life imprisonment would become the mandatory punishment. This was made permanent in Great Britain in 1969. Northern Ireland did not come under the remit of the Act, and the death penalty was only abolished there in 1973. However, the death penalty for a limited number of other crimes, including treason, remained on the statute books for years afterwards: in fact, the death penalty for treason was only completely abolished in 1998.

It’s hard to believe it now, nearly 60 years after the last hanging in the UK, how much of a regular occurrence it was, accepted by society for centuries as the inevitable penalty of serious crime. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, feelings changed about it, with the efficacy of it as a deterrent being debated, but since Anglo-Saxon times, it had been part of our system of punishment, even when it led to the innocent dying, or others surviving the torture of hanging. In some cases, such as in Margaret Dickson’s, surviving a hanging might result in a full pardon. {