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short and as Tapner dangled on the end of the rope he managed to free an arm. He tried to pull himself up and spectators reported that he managed to get an elbow through the trap before the Deputy Sheriff knocked it away. The executioner was ordered to pull on Tapner’s legs and the Sheriff was able to report to the Home Office that ‘The sufferings of the culprit did not last for more than four minutes after the trap fell … I am satisfied that the struggles of the culprit were not greater, nor more prolonged, than is usual upon such occasions’.
    Such occasions were becoming less frequent and in 1832, a Whig administration abolished the death penalty for stealing from houses, coining, and stealing livestock. Increasingly, juries could not be persuaded to convict defendants of capital offences, especially where only loss to property was involved. Further reforms to the capital statutes followed and, although capital punishment remained on the statute books for offences such as treason or piracy, in practice the number of public executions had slowed to a mere trickle of unreprieved murderers. Furthermore, the Capital Punishment Amendment Act 1868 abolished public execution. There were those who argued that the sight of the gallows was the only sure deterrent but Victorian sensibility would no longer tolerate felons being strangled in public, nor crowds of uncertain temper in middle-class districts disturbing commerce and scandalising the respectable. The very last person to be executed publicly in England was Michael Barratt, an Irish nationalist who planted a bomb outside Clerkenwell Prison in order to free Irish prisoners. Twelve people died as a result and Barratt was turned off on a mobile scaffold erected outside Newgate Prison on 26 May 1868. Henceforth, executions took place within prison walls, witnessed only by officials and (in the early years) gentlemen of the press. The question for abolitionists was whether this change was a step on the way to the total abolition of capital punishment or whether the ability to conduct executions in private might only serve to encourage it.

    The Cure for Murder, or Justice clings to the Gallows . Justice clings to the gallows as the only proper punishment for those who have committed murder. A satire against those who wanted to abolish capital punishment. (Matt Morgan in The Tomahawk , 23 October 1869.)

    A depiction of the hanging at Newgate in 1900 of Louise Masset for killing her five-year-old son. Note there are no female officers present. (P. H. Ripp in L’espress de Lyon Illustré , 28 January 1900.)

THE SLOW DEATH OF HANGING
    I now hold that the law of capital punishment falls with terrible weight upon the hangman and to allow a man to follow such an occupation is doing him a deadly wrong.
    S O WROTE Henry Berry in 1905. Berry is remembered as one of the most humane and conscientious of British hangmen, though even his record was far from spotless. In November 1885, in the first year of his career, he allowed too long a drop when hanging Robert Goodale at Norwich for the murder of his wife. The result was that Goodale’s head became detached. As there were no longer any public witnesses and with the horrors of the execution out of sight, many of the abolitionist organisations that had been influential prior to 1868 went into decline. Yet, within the penal establishment, people began to consider the effect that carrying out sentences had on those called upon to implement them. Albert Pierrepoint, who served as a hangman from 1932 to 1956, later wrote of having ‘seen prison officers faint upon the scaffold, strong men weep, and women prison officers sobbing helplessly.’ When a woman was to be hanged, the female prison officers did not enter the execution chamber, being replaced by male officers, but the effect of an execution upon a whole prison establishment was described as ‘dismal’. Pierrepoint himself made a point that others endorsed: ‘All the men and