Reflections on Hanging

Arthur Koestler

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780820355344
• Topic: Jura
• Subtopic: Rechtsgeschichte

Reflections on Hanging is a searing indictment of capital punishment, inspired by its author's own time in the shadow of a firing squad. During the Spanish Civil War, Arthur Koestler was held by the Franco regime as a political prisoner, and condemned to death. He was freed, but only after months of witnessing the fates of less-fortunate inmates. That experience informs every page of the book.

As Koestler ranges across the history of capital punishment in Britain (with a focus on hanging), he looks at notable cases and rulings, and portrays politicians, judges, lawyers, scholars, clergymen, doctors, police, jailers, prisoners, and others involved in the long debate over the justness and effectiveness of the death penalty.

In Britain, the book was part of a concerted, ultimately successful effort to abolish the death penalty. At that time, in the forty-eight United States, capital punishment was sanctioned in forty-two of them, with hanging still practiced in five. This edition includes a preface and afterword written especially for the 1957 American edition. The preface makes the book relevant to readers in the U.S.; the afterword overviews the modern-day history of abolitionist legislation in the British Parliament.

This book is relentless, biting, and unsparing in its details of botched and unjust executions. It is a classic work of advocacy for some of society's most defenseless members, a critique of capital punishment that is still widely cited, and an enduring work that presaged such contemporary problems as the sensationalism of crime, the wrongful condemnation of the innocent and mentally ill, the callousness of penal systems, and the use of fear to control a citizenry.

Part I

TRADITION AND PREJUDICE

I

THE HERITAGE OF THE PAST

The charge is prepar’d; the lawyers meet;
The Judges all rang’d (a terrible show!).

JOHN GAY: The Beggar’s Opera.

I. The Jack-in-the-Box

GREAT BRITAIN is that peculiar country in Europe where people drive on the left side of the road, measure in inches and yards, and hang people by the neck until dead. To most Britons it never occurs that there may be something odd about this custom. Every nation takes its traditions for granted, and hanging is as much part of the British tradition as counting in shillings and pence. Generations of children have squeaked with delight at the appearance of the puppet hangman in the Punch and Judy show. Four executioners are included in the Dictionary of National Biography; Jack Ketch, Calcraft, and “William Boilman”^* were as popular figures in their time as film-stars are today. There seems to be a jolliness about the procedure as if the victim twitching at the end of the rope were not a real person but a dummy burnt on Guy Fawkes’ Day. The present hangman, Pierrepoint, runs a public house called “Help the Poor Straggler”; his former assistant, Allenby, ran one called “The Rope and the Anchor”;¹ and the present Lord Chief Justice delighted a Royal Academy banquet with the story of a judge who, after passing sentence of death on three men, was welcomed by a band playing the Eton Boating Song’s refrain: “We’ll all swing together.” This was printed in an amiable “Profile” of Lord Goddard in The Observer,² which continued:

There is a story of his boyhood, which even though it be apocryphal, may illustrate the Goddard legend. When he first went to Marlborough, it was apparently a school custom to make every new boy sing or recite in his dormitory. Called upon to sing, the future Lord Chief Justice is said to have surprised the other boys by chanting in a piping voice: “You will be taken from here to a place of execution and hanged by the neck until you be dead. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

It all goes to show that hanging has, for Britons, a kind of macabre cosiness, like a slightly off-colour family joke, which only foreigners, abolitionists and other humorless creatures are unable to share. On November 2nd, 1950, Mr. Albert Pierrepoint was called to testify as a witness before the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment. He was asked how many people he had hanged in his career as an executioner, and answered: “Some hundreds.”³

Q. Have you had any awkward moments?—A. No, I have only seen one in all my career.

Q. What happened?—A. He was rough. It was unfortunate; he was not an Englishman, he was a spy, and he kicked up rough.

Q. He went for you?—A. Not only for me, he went for everybody.⁴

The acting Under-Sheriff for the County of London, Mr. H. N. Gedge, was also examined by the Commission on the unpleasant character who had kicked up rough, and confirmed Mr. Pierrepoint’s view:

Yes. He was a foreigner, and I personally have noticed that English people take their punishment better than foreigners…. He just dived at the Executioner with his head, and then he just fought with everything he had.⁵

There you are. Hanging is quite all right for Englishmen; they actually seem to like it; it is only the foreigners who cause trouble. The outsider appreciates neither the clean fun, nor the solemn ritualistic aspect of the procedure, nor the venerable tradition behind it. The Lord Chief Justice, asked by the same Royal Commissioners whether he was in favour of retaining the black cap, answered:

I think so. It is traditional, and I do not see any reason for interfering with a tradition which has existed over hundreds of years, unless there is some good reason for doing it…. The reason why the judge wears a black cap when passing sentence of death, I believe, is simply that the covering of the head, in ancient times, was regarded as a sign of mourning, and that is why it is done.⁶

Mr. Pierrepoint expressed equally strong views about the traditional aspects of the process:

Q. I imagine that people must talk to you about your duties?—A. Yes, but I refuse to speak about it. It is something I think should be secret…. It is sacred to me, really.⁷

One could hardly imagine a greater contrast in rank and dignity between two servants of the public; a fact which makes the similarity of their views on certain points the more remarkable. Thus, Lord Goddard was asked his views on the suggestion that women ought no longer to be hanged; he answered: “I do not understand that point of view at all.”⁸ Mr. Pierrepoint was asked whether there was anything particularly unpleasant in the execution of a woman. Mr. Pierrepoint said there wasn’t.

Q. Do you find your duties very trying, or have you got accustomed to them?—A. I am accustomed to it now.

Q. You do not turn a hair?—A. No.⁹

Lord Goddard was not asked how many people he had sentenced to hang, nor whether he turned a hair; but he was asked whether he thought that fewer people ought to be sentenced to death, or that fewer ought to be reprieved. He answered that too many were reprieved.¹⁰ He was asked whether he thought it proper that a man, certified insane, should be hanged. He said he thought it was perfectly proper.

Q. Even though he was insane, and presumably … not in a fit state to make his peace with God?—A. He could make his peace with God, I think, quite well.¹¹

Q. Another suggestion that has been made is that, whenever the jury makes a recommendation to mercy, the Home Secretary should have to carry it out?—A. That, I think, would be most disastrous.¹²

I have no personal animosity against Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard; but as the highest judge in the realm, he is the symbol of authority, and his opinions, which I shall have frequent occasion to quote, carry immense weight in the debate about hanging. The views which he holds are not accidental; they are a very consistent expression of the attitude shared by all who favour the continuation of capital punishment. Their arguments, and the philosophy behind their arguments, have remained unchanged over the last two hundred years, as the pages which follow will show. They can only be properly understood in the light of past history.

The scaffold and the executioner are memories of the past in all Western European democracies except France. The death-penalty has also been abolished in several North American States, in virtually the whole of Central and South America, and in a number of Asiatic and Australian states; making altogether thirty-six countries, the major portion of the civilized world.

The British are a proverbially disciplined and law-abiding people—more so than the average of abolitionist nations, which include hot-tempered Latin Americans and Germans who had been exposed to the brutalizing influence of the Nazi régime. Yet the defenders of capital punishment claim that the British nation, unlike others, cannot afford to dispense with the services of the hangman as protector and avenger of society. They say that the example of other nations proves nothing, because conditions in this country are “different”; foreigners may be deterred from crime by the threat of long-term imprisonment, the British criminal can only be deterred by the gallows. This paradoxical belief is so deeply rooted in the pro-hanging party that they do not even see it as a paradox. Many of them hate the idea of hanging and admit that the practice is repellent and evil, yet they believe it to be a necessary evil. This belief in the irreplaceable deterrent value of the death-penalty has been proved to be a superstition by the long and patient inquiries of the Parliamentary Select Committee of 1930 and the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment of 1948; yet it pops up again and again. Like all superstitions, it has the nature of a Jack-in-the-box; however often you hit it over the head with facts and statistics, it will solemnly pop up again, because the hidden spring inside it is the unconscious and irrational power of traditional beliefs. Hence all arguments are wasted unless we go back to the origins of that tradition, and unearth the elements in the past which exert such a strong influence on our present beliefs.

Let us go back, then, to the days of the Tyburn tree. It will be an excursion into a strangely neglected and little-known chapter of English history, which is very curious indeed—a forensic wonderland where the March Hare wears a wig and Malice wades through gore.

2. The “Bloody Code”

It will be convenient to proceed in two steps: to describe the unique method of dealing with crime which prevailed in this country around A.D. 1800, and then go even further back to explain how that situation came about.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the criminal law of this country was commonly known as the Bloody Code. It was unique in the world inasmuch as it listed between 220 and 230 offences to be punished by death, from the stealing of turnips to associating with gipsies, to damaging a fishpond, to writing threatening letters, to impersonating out-pensioners at Greenwich Hospital, to being found armed or disguised in a forest, park or rabbit warren, to cutting down a tree, to poaching, forging, picking pockets, shoplifting, and so on, through 220-odd items. The exact number of capital offences was not even known to the best legal authorities.¹³ Besides, each statute was so broadly framed that “the actual scope of the death-penalty was often as much as three or four times as extensive as the number of capital provisions would seem to indicate”.¹⁴

Let us remember that we are not talking of the Dark Ages, but of the beginning of the nineteenth century, up to Queen Victoria’s reign, when everywhere in the civilized world offences against property were being removed from the list of capital crimes. In 1810, Sir Samuel Romilly said in the House of Lords that “there was no country on the face of the earth in which there had been so many different offences according to law to be punished with death as in England”.¹⁵ Twenty years later Sir Robert Peel complained to the House of Commons: “It is impossible to conceal from ourselves that capital punishments are more frequent and the criminal law more severe on the whole in this country than in any country in the world.”¹⁶ And the greatest nineteenth-century authority at law, Sir James Stephen, talked of “the clumsiest, most reckless, and most cruel legislation that ever disgraced a civilized country”.¹⁷

This state of affairs was the more puzzling as in some other respects British civilization was ahead of the rest of the world. Foreign visitors were impressed by the exemplary fairness of British courts—and horrified by the savage penalties they inflicted. They were amazed to find the highways dotted with gibbets, creaking and groaning with the bodies of criminals. The gallows and the gibbet were such common objects in the English countryside that in early guidebooks they were used as landmarks for the traveller; for instance:

By the Gallows and Three Windmills enter the suburbs of York…. You pass through Hare Street … and at 13'4 part for Epping Forest, with the gallows to the left…. You pass Penmeris Hall, and at 250'4 Hilldraught Mill, both on the left, and ascend a small hill with a gibbet on the right…. You leave Frampton, Wilberton and Sherbeck, all on the right, and by a gibbet on the left, over a stone bridge.¹⁸

Between London and East Grinstead alone, three gallows stood at different points on the highway, in addition to several gibbets where the dead criminal’s body was suspended in chains “till his corpse rot”. Sometimes a criminal was “hung in chains” alive, and died only after several days. Sometimes the corpse was drenched in tar to make it last longer. Sometimes the skeleton was left hanging after decay of the body was completed. The last gibbeting took place in 1832 in Saffron Lane, near Leicester, when the body of James Cook, a bookbinder, was suspended thirty-three feet high, his head shaved and tarred, but had to be taken down after a fortnight to stop the merrymaking of the Sunday crowds.¹⁹

“Hanging days” were, during the eighteenth and up to half-way through the nineteenth century, the equivalent of national holidays, only more frequent. We read, for instance, that in George Ill’s reign, working hours for the poor “were inordinately long, and there were very few holidays except just at Easter, Whitsuntide and Christmas, and on the eight ‘Hanging Days’ at Tyburn”.²⁰

According to Lord Templewood, there were about one hundred public executions a year in London and Middlesex alone:

“This constant round of spectacles had much the same effect on industrial production as mid-week races and football matches at the present day. It was, for example, common in London for coachmakers, tailors, shoemakers, and other craftsmen who were engaged to complete orders within a given time, to remind their customers: ‘That will be a hanging-day, and the men will not be at work.’ “²¹Yet we must remember that in 1800 the total population of England and Wales was only just over eight million (as opposed to forty-five million today).

The cherished symbol of the hanging tradition was the “Tyburn Tree”. The scenes that took place at the public executions were more than a national disgrace, they were outbursts of a collective madness, a kind of mediaeval St. Vitus’s dance. Its distant echoes are still discernible when the notice of a hanging is posted at the prison gates. The crowds assembled to watch at Tyburn (the present Marble Arch) sometimes numbered a hundred thousand and more. An early chronicler gave this description of the scene:

All the Way, from Newgate to Tyburn, is one continued Fair, for Whores and Rogues of the meaner Sort. Here the most abandon’d Rakehells may light on Women as shameless: Here Trollops, all in Rags, may pick up Sweethearts of the same Politeness…. Nothing is more entertaining to them, than the dead Carcasses of Dogs and Cats, or, for want of them, Rags, and all Trompery that is capable of imbibing Dirt. These, well trempled in Filth, and, if possible, of the worst sort, are, by the Ringleaders, flung as high and as far as a strong Arm can carry them, and commonly directed where the Throng is the thickest.²²

In the provincial towns, it was the same. A clergyman from Shrewsbury testified before the Select Committee of 1856 on the first public execution he had witnessed, the hanging of Josiah Misters in 1841:

The town was converted for the day into a fair. The country people flocked in their holiday dresses, and the whole town was a scene of drunkenness and debauchery of every kind. … A very large number of children were present: children and females constituted the larger proportion of the attendance.²³

The nineteenth century marched on, and some European countries had already abolished capital punishment altogether, others let it fall into abeyance; yet in England public hangings, although they were now transferred to places near the prison gates, remained a kind of officially sanctioned Witches’ Sabbath. As late as 1864, this is how The Times described the crowd assembled to watch Mueller’s hanging:

… sharpers, thieves, gamblers, betting men, the outsiders of the boxing ring, bricklayers, labourers, dock workmen, with rakings of cheap singing halls and billiard rooms, the fast young men of London…. Before the slight slow vibrations of the body had well ended, robbery and violence, loud laughing, oaths, fighting, obscene conduct and still more filthy language re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface for Americans, by Edmond Cahn
• Preface
• Part One: Tradition and Prejudice
• Part Two: The Law
• Part Three: The End of the Nightmare
• Appendix One: The Experience of Foreign Countries
• Appendix Two: Patterns of Murder
• Afterword
• References and Sources
• Index