Hangmen of England: The History of Execution from Jack Ketch to Albert Pierrepoint

Out of Print

From the appointment of the infamous Jack Ketch in 1663 to the abolition of the death penalty in 1969, England saw three-hundred years of hanging for a multitude of crimes from stealing a loaf of bread to murder. Public hangings drew vast crowds and the hangman himself became an almost mythical figure of fascinated revulsion.

Certainly the men who undertook this gruesome duty were an unusual breed. At first they were often recruited from the same prisons as their victims, and perhaps unsurprisingly they ended up, like John Price, 'dancing the Tyburn jig' at the end of the same rope.

The hangman's art changed considerably over the years as did the image of the hangman. William Marwood, inventor of the 'long drop' in the nineteenth century, declared of his predecessor, William Calcroft, "he hanged them, I execute them." But the increasing professionalism of the hangman could guarantee neither the smooth working of the gallows nor the peace of mind of its operator.

James Berry, for instance, mysteriously failed to hang John Lee no less than three times in 1885, and later in the same year managed to decapitate one of his victims - a danger in the 'long drop.' John Ellis, however, was the first hangman driven to suicide by the psychological effects of the job, but not before he became famous as the first hangman to appear on stage, an experience he apparently found more nerve-racking than any of his performances on the gallows.

Despite the appalling nature of the hangman's task and the public opprobrium he often had to endure, there was never any shortage of volunteers to assume Jack Ketch's grisly mantle. It is a tribute to the peculiar glamour of the gallows that the young Albert Pierrepoint, who was later to hang some of the most infamous murderers of the twentieth century, cheerfully wrote, "When I leave school I should like to be the official executioner,"

Hangmen of England is a fascinating collective portrait of the men who chose to perform this brutal and often brutalizing duty, and throws a unique spotlight on some of the darker byways of English social history.