Pierrepoint (2 page)

Governor Cruickshank was to be the key to Harry achieving his ambition. Tall, and in his mid-fifties at the time, he wore a bushy beard and had the appearance and bearing of a country squire. Cruickshank had recently taken over at the Manchester Gaol after a successful governorship at Durham Gaol. He spoke sternly and in a dignified tone to the aspiring hangman, and following the brief interview, in which searching questions were asked for the reason for the application, Harry was told before he was accepted he would have to undertake six days’ training at London’s Holloway Prison.

While Harry waited to hear if his application had been successful, Cruickshank wrote to the Home Office at the beginning of March 1901:

Harry duly received the letter informing him he had passed the interview. There was just one small snag: the training had been arranged to start on the following Monday, meaning
that Harry would now have to inform his wife of his new career choice.

Mary Pierrepoint was at first convinced it was a joke, but when Harry told her of his life-long ambition, and then produced the letter and testimonial from governor Cruickshank, she realised he was serious. She made several vain attempts to get him not to go through with the quest, but by now the train tickets had been purchased, and Harry had arranged leave of absence at the furniture store.

Buoyed up with the excitement of travel and ambition, Harry boarded the stuffy express train on the cold morning of Monday, 11 March 1901. Upon arrival in London his shyness and reticence to reveal the purpose of his first visit caused him a certain amount of worry. How was he going to reach his destination if he was afraid to ask directions? He eventually summoned up the courage to ask a policeman and soon presented himself at the gate of Holloway Gaol. After a brief interview with the governor, Harry was informed that there had been a change of plan and that his training was to be carried out instead at Newgate Gaol. Within the hour he was entering, for the first time, the forebodingly grim walls of the soon-to-be-demolished gaol.

By this time, Newgate was no longer a holding prison for convicts serving sentences of imprisonment; rather, it was now a remand prison for those awaiting trial at the adjoining old Central Criminal Court. The site had been a prison for several centuries, but it had been earmarked for demolition and was to be the site of the new criminal court, the Old Bailey. It was still the principal centre of execution for persons condemned for crimes committed to the north of the River Thames, though. When Harry’s training was being arranged, the authorities had intended to use a wing of the prison that was empty, as prisoners were being redistributed in readiness for
the closure of Newgate. When it became clear that the wing would still be occupied, the officials were left with the dilemma of either postponing Harry’s training for two or three months, or arranging for it to be carried out at Holloway. Letters were sent out to this effect, but then it was decided to move Newgate prisoners to another part of the prison and for the training to go ahead as originally planned, at Newgate.

Harry was introduced to Governor Millman, a white-haired, kindly man, who explained a little about the prison and his duties and then had one of the wardens escort Harry to his quarters for the duration of the stay. He was assigned to a dismal attic room up a flight of narrow steep stairs known as the ‘Hangman’s Room’, conveniently situated so that it overlooked the execution chamber. The woodwork was pitted with carvings of a generation of former executioners who had occupied the room through the ages. Harry found it glum and depressing.

After depositing his bag in the room, he was allowed to walk around the grounds of the prison. He was later introduced to the man who was to be his instructor on the following day, who during their chat to the warder invited him to cross the city and accompany him that evening to Holloway Gaol, where he was delivering an important message. Glad of the company, and of another chance to see some of the city, Harry agreed.

He slept badly that first night inside the prison. The atmosphere of the room and the apprehension of the role he had taken on caused him to toss and turn fitfully, until daybreak allowed him to rise, take breakfast and then finally get the chance to get stuck into his duties.

In the company of his newfound friend and instructor, Harry was taken around the execution chamber, before being left to his own devices to work out how the traps
opened and were reset. The duties of an executioner were carefully and patiently explained, and he spent most of the first day familiarising himself with the ropes and chains, how the noose was rigged up, and most importantly how to measure the drops. It was a long day with just a short time for a lunch break.

Day two began with a dummy execution. Harry was led to the condemned cell, where the ‘prisoner’ was pointed out to him, seated at a table in a dark corner. With little training so far under his belt, he approached what he expected to be a warder with a thumping heart, and his nerve was shaken further when, upon reaching the table, he saw the man he was to hang was a stuffed dummy with a grotesque painted face and its right hand making a salute. Wisely keeping any show of emotion in check, Harry pinioned the dummy’s arms as he had been shown, and as two warders picked up the dummy, he followed them onto the trap, where he slipped the noose around the pseudo-victim’s neck and pulled the lever for the first time.

Repetition was the key during the intensive course, which had been set up for would-be hangmen following the Aberdare Report in the mid-1880s. The report had been commissioned to address the issues regarding the appointment, conduct and all other aspects of being an executioner. This came as a direct result of a series of botched executions by a number of hangmen, in particular Bartholomew Binns, and Bradford’s James Berry, who had finally hung up his ropes after a turbulent eight-year reign as the chief executioner in 1892. Berry had applied to carry out the double execution of two poachers at Edinburgh in 1884, and following the successful completion of the task he was given testimonials from the officials there, which were enough to secure him the title of Chief Executioner for
England and the rest of the United Kingdom. After a promising start, however, Berry had a run of messy executions, unsavoury incidents and run-ins with officials that led to him eventually leaving the post. The Home Office learnt its lessons from the affair, however: all subsequent hangmen would be thoroughly vetted and trained by their own officials before being allowed to undertake their duties.

Harry was among the first of the applicants to undertake this instruction and every day during the week’s training he learned all aspects of the ritual required to dispense instant death. On the final day he had to carry out a repeat dummy execution as he had done on the second day of his training. This time the watchful eyes of Governor Millman and other officials were on him; Harry carried out the mock execution competently and efficiently. Prison medical officer Doctor Scott then gave him a short written and oral test before he was sent home to await the outcome. Detectives had already visited the furniture store managed by his sister, for a character reference; his conduct had been reported back as satisfactory, so all Henry had to do now was wait. His wife’s original objections to Harry’s new career diminished after she realised the extra wage would make a huge difference to their growing family. Soon enough, a letter was sent from Holloway to the Home Office, confirming Harry had passed the test:

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Spring took over from winter and Harry went about his duties selling furniture. What he didn’t know was that in official circles it was being proposed that he attend a double execution scheduled to take place at Stafford Prison on 2 April 1901. On 22 March, the Home Office wrote to the governor at Stafford to inform him that Henry Pierrepoint had recently undergone a course of instruction to their satisfaction and it was suggested that he should, if possible, be employed as a second assistant in order to test his nerve and make him familiar with the full details of execution procedure. They asked if the governor would contact the under-sheriff to see if he would agree to this. The governor concurred with this thought but soon wrote back to the Home Office that this idea had been rejected by the high sheriff:

The gist of the letter was that Staffordshire didn’t want to pay any fees for the extra assistant, for which they would have been liable, and concluded with the suggestion that the executioner should be employed at a London prison, where governor Millman could confirm that the assistant was suitable. On 23 March, Harry received a letter informing him that he had successfully completed the instruction and that his name had been added to the list for the post of executioner and assistant.

With his keen interest in murder cases, Harry had already read about an horrific murder that had taken place ten miles or so away, in Bury, carried by 59-year-old millwright William Goacher. Goacher lived with his wife of 30 years, although of late they had been on bad terms. He was seen drinking in a Bury public house one morning in March 1901; later that night after he returned home, screams alerted neighbours to a disturbance at the Goacher household. Upon investigation, they found Mrs Goacher had been beaten and was suffering from terrible burns, caused by her husband holding her head into the fire. She died from her injuries on the following day.

Goacher was sentenced to death at Manchester Assizes; an official letter requesting Harry Pierrepoint’s attendance at Strangeways Prison arrived at his small terrace house at the end of April. Opening the slim brown envelope he read that he was requested to assist James Billington at the execution to be carried out on 18 May 1901. His euphoria at the news was soon dashed by a second letter, received a week later. Tearing it open he read that the Home Secretary had ordered a reprieve, and that his services would therefore not be required. Although evidently disappointed, Henry recorded that he satisfied himself that he had been prevented from helping to hang a man who may have been innocent. He
waited patiently for the next call; his patience was rewarded when, on the last day of October, he received a letter from Governor Millman inviting him to assist at the execution of a French anarchist, whose crime had shocked the country only a few weeks earlier. Harry wrote back accepting the engagement, and on the morning of Monday, 18 November 1901, he boarded the train at Manchester’s London Road station, aware that in 20 hours’ time he would no longer just be a Manchester furniture salesman. At 8 a.m. on the following morning, provided he kept his nerve and there was no last-minute hitch, he would join a select group of men on the list of the hangmen of England.

Marcel Faugeron was a 23-year-old French deserter who had arrived in London in the spring of 1901. He had become friendly with Vincent Durant, a fellow Frenchman, whom he had asked to help find him lodgings and a job in his trade as a barber. He was taken to a boarding house near Tottenham Court Road, where he lodged with a number of other French immigrants.

Around this time Faugeron was introduced to Hermann Francis Jung, a 64-year-old Swiss watchmaker who carried out his business from a shop in Clerkenwell. Jung lived in the basement of the same premises, with his wife and two children. The young Frenchman had by this time discovered that a number of his fellow lodgers and new friends were anarchists, plotting to carry out activities in Belgium, and also planning to assassinate the Tsar, who was in France at the time.

On 3 September, Matilda Jung heard a disturbance upstairs in the shop and as she rushed from the kitchen she saw Faugeron, whom she recognised from previous visits, fleeing through the door. Her husband was lying on the shop floor; he had been stabbed to death. She shouted for help and Faugeron was arrested as he fled down the street.

At his trial before Mr Justice Bingham, Faugeron’s defence claimed that he had stabbed Jung in self-defence after the old man had threatened violence against him if he didn’t carry out an assault on Joseph Chamberlain, a prominent cabinet minister whom some factions held partly responsible for the war in the Transvaal. The prosecution claimed that Faugeron had gone to the shop in order to obtain either money or goods to fund anarchistic activities he and his comrades were planning to carry out.

When the judge concluded the passing of sentence of death on the accused in the usual manner (but in French), with the words, ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul,’ Faugeron replied: ‘I hope so. If that is what justice is in this country I hope I shall have better justice in the next world!’ There had been almost no hope of a reprieve and, arriving in London, Harry confidently made his way across the city, where he finally got to meet James Billington in the entrance to Newgate Gaol. Billington had been the Chief Executioner for over a decade. In his early fifties at the time, he had been a mill worker, singer and wrestler before opening a barber’s shop in Farnworth, Lancashire. In 1884, he became the executioner for Yorkshire, carrying out one or two executions a year before superseding James Berry in August 1891. Now, a decade later, he ran a public house in Bolton and was often assisted by his two eldest sons, Thomas and William Billington, who had both graduated from the executioner’s training school.