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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 183 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 183, February 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries public hangings were a fact of everyday life in England. These stranglings were often timed to take place on public holidays, and huge processions to the scaffold formed an integral part of the ritual. Crowds of up to 100,000 were recorded at the most celebrated lynchings.
For many years neither the scale of the judicial murder, nor the utter barbarity of the process, was treated with much more than a passing glance by establishment historians. Roughly 6,000 hangings were carried out between 1770 and 1800. And in the more high profile cases, dangling from a rope was merely a prelude to other refinements like disembowelment, removal of limbs, decapitation and burning at the stake, often with the victim still alive.
The common view is that it was not the state which was to blame for these atrocities. It was nothing to do with the establishment of new property relations through sheer terror, or of taming radicals, but merely a response to popular demand. The uncultivated mass liked nothing better than watching orgies of violence, so why not give them what they wanted!
As is often the case, all that gets in the way of this cosy explanation is one or two facts, and the author of this book has done a magnificent job in bringing quite a few to our attention. The main thrust of Gatrell’s book is to show that, in reality, crowd responses to these staged events were extremely complex and not, as we are so often led to believe, an excuse for a gruesome carnival.
Elements of morbid fascination often did combine with sheer callousness. But the spectators were just as likely to turn on the hangman as his victim: ‘The hanging of murderers was usually approved. But when humbler people [were] hanged for humble crimes, they could act like a Greek chorus, mocking justice’s pretensions.’ Moreover, ‘they sometimes saw what happened on scaffolds more clearly than the nice people did.’
When Robert Johnson was hanged for robbery at Edinburgh in 1818, the drop was too short: ‘below the scaffold, the executioner chopped furiously ...to make it fall further, but the crowd began to shower the magistrates and police with stones, and when a person of “genteel exterior” jumped onto the scaffold and cut Johnson down, the crowd bore him off still alive, while others tore his coffin to pieces and attacked the executioner.’
When a London bricklayer, Samuel Wright, was sentenced to death in 1863, thousands of small traders and workers signed petitions in his support. A public meeting of some 3,000 was held on the eve of the execution and the Home Office took all this as an attempt to ‘terrorise’ the government. A black bordered handbill was circulated, urging people to boycott the hanging. It read: ‘let Calcraft and Co. [the hangmen at Newgate] do their work this time with none but the eye of heaven to look on their crime ... There is one law for the rich and another for the poor.’ Instead of rushing to the execution, the people in the neighbourhood kept their blinds drawn down.
In London especially, ‘even the architecture of punishment was ubiquitous’, stretching from Tyburn in the west, to the pillory at Charing Cross, the gibbets at Execution Dock, and ‘with nice symbolism along the sewer of the Fleet River’, through Newgate, Ludgate, the Fleet and Bridewell gaols. Gallows graffiti appeared everywhere, like the game of Hangman’s Noose.
In 1847, the London printer, Gilpin, issued a broadside inviting all and sundry to attend what he described as a Grand Moral Spectacle, organised by the Secretary of State for the Home Department and to take place in front of the county jail in Bury St Edmunds where ‘a young girl, sixteen years of age is to be publicly strangled’. Gilpin adds that the assistance of a minister of the Church of England ‘in his robes canonical’ would help to impress on the minds of the multitude ‘an abhorrence of all cruelty, a love of mercy and kindness, and a reverence for human life.’
The character of Punch, and his battles against marriage, law and morality, ‘fed fantasies whose potency in the age of public hanging later generations would never fully realise’. In one skit Punch cons the notorious executioner, Jack Ketch, into putting his own head in the noose, and then tops him.
Public hangings were eventually stopped in 1868, and took place behind closed doors from then on, until the last execution was carried out in 1964. The usual explanation for this change is that middle class sensibilities were fearfully offended. Gatrell argues that, on the contrary, the main priority was to make the punishment seem even more terrifying, not less.
The middle class attitude all along had been squeamish and hypocritical. They approved of the state’s aims – to defend their own privileges – but swooned at the methods employed. They had refused to face up to what was going on in their name and had no conception of what the gallows symbolism meant for the working poor – the ones most likely to face the drop. With an effortless twist, they put the blame for the barbarity on the bystanders, rather than the perpetrators.
On the other hand, the mob had not proven reliable. Increasingly, it had become quite seditious. And now, shut away from the prospect of any popular sympathy or compassion, the ordeal of the prisoner was intensified. Even Adam Smith noticed that:
‘A brave man is not rendered contemptible by being brought to the scaffold. The sympathy of the spectators supports him, and saves him from that shame, that consciousness that his misery is felt by himself only, which is of all sentiments the most insupportable.’
Gattrell’s conclusion is chilling: that, in hiding penal violence, the Victorians ‘consulted their own feelings and not those of the punished; and that within the secret prison power was to be – and is – wielded more efficiently than ever it had been at Tyburn.’
The Hanging Tree – Execution and the English People 1770–1868 by V.A.C. Gatrell, Oxford University Press £20, is available from Bookmarks (081 802 6145)
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