Read The British Execution: 1500–1964 (Shire Library) for Free Online

executions and at the final moments ‘the behaviour of the crowd is as solemn as it can be.’ There is much evidence on both sides and modern readers will perhaps not be surprised that different newspapers reported the same execution quite differently, depending upon their stance on the subject as a whole. One thing, however, is clear; the crowd could turn hostile very quickly if the procedure itself was botched by the executioner.
    Thus far we have observed some of the punishments visited on wrongdoers, but who were the men employed to carry them out? For most of British history, to be an executioner was not merely to hang felons, but also to whip, burn and mutilate bodies. Such a man was generally shunned, in particular by the very people who employed him. Certainly, the British executioner was a man of low social status and was, for the most part, badly paid. Generally, executioners were not salaried employees; rather, they were men who worked on a fee-per-job basis. Even into the 1920s the fee was a mere £10 in England and a more generous £15 in Scotland.
    Executioners in the eighteenth century and before supplemented their fees by selling souvenirs such as pieces of the rope and other artefacts associated with notorious felons. The belief that the touch of a hanged man would cure skin diseases allowed executioners to charge sufferers for mounting the scaffold and many a young child was carried up to touch a swinging corpse. During the nineteenth century, the ‘perks’ of the executioner were steadily removed. Those active in London tended to be the busiest, but as the number of executions declined, many counties ceased to have their own executioners. An executioner would thus be sent out from London to perform the occasional provincial appointment. Notwithstanding their popular notoriety, such executioners were only temporarily employed at the whim of the Home Office and selected upon each occasion from a list. Although some attempted to give themselves some species of official status, there was in effect no single official state executioner appointed as the nation’s lethal civil servant.

    A hangman of 1840, depicted by Kenny Meadows in Heads of the People .
    The money earned by executioners had always been inadequate and those who wanted respectability and stability had to pursue a regular occupation between executions. But many were not respectable. Some came to the trade to avoid the noose themselves. During the reign of Charles II, a man and his two sons were convicted of horse-stealing at Derby. All were condemned but a pardon was offered to any one of them who would hang the other two. The father and older brother declined, but the younger brother took the offer with alacrity and thereafter served as the county’s favoured executioner. Similarly, in 1731, a Matthew Blackbourn was convicted of a capital offence at York, but received a pardon on condition of serving as hangman. There were many hangmen who were convicted felons and who continued in their old ways while ‘on the books’. For example, in The Hangmen of England Victor Bailey notes that Pascha Rose, himself a hangman, was hanged at Tyburn in 1686 for housebreaking; another, John Price, was hanged at Bunwell in 1718 for attempted rape. One of his successors, William Marvel, was transported in 1719 for stealing silk handkerchiefs. John Thrift, another eighteenth-century hangman, was found guilty of murder; Edward Dennis of larceny: the list goes on. Men either came to the job desperate or became desperate in the job. Many were heavy drinkers and lived a low life, but not necessarily through choice. Coaches would not carry executioners for fear of the ill luck that they carried; respectable people would not associate with them; and if the more enterprising of them carried on small independent businesses as cobblers, carpenters, publicans and the like, it was for a good reason – few people wanted to employ them.
    The most famous executioner of