Free Newgate: London's Prototype of Hell by Stephen Halliday Page A

actresses, politicians or the nobility. Six years after the event, in February and March 1846, Dickens wrote to the Daily News , ‘I did not see one token in all the immense crowd of any one emotion suitable to the occasion; nothing but ribaldry, levity, drunkenness and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes’. 18 The only sign of decorum lay in the cry of ‘Hats off!’ which went round the crowd immediately before the trap was opened by the executioner.
    Thackeray described the appearance of Courvoisier as he stepped on to the scaffold and his own reaction to the spectacle: ‘He turned his head here and there and looked about him for a while with a wild, imploring look. His mouth was contracted into a sort of pitiful smile’ and then added, ‘I have been abetting an act of frightful wickedness and violence … I pray that it may soon be out of the power of any man in England to witness such a hideous and degrading sight.’ 19
    The hideous and degrading spectacle of Courvoisier’s execution was in fact quite decorous when compared with some of the events that occurred outside the Debtors Door. In 1789 the execution of William Skitch, a burglar, did not go according to plan when the rope became detached from the scaffold and Skitch simply fell through the trapdoor to the ground. The crowd was sympathetic, but Skitch called out, ‘Good people, be not hurried. I can wait a little,’ while the executioner prepared another rope. 20 In December, 1827, a house burglar named John Williams was sentenced to death and made a desperate attempt to escape from Newgate by scaling a drainpipe. He fell and injured or broke both legs. These were dressed by a surgeon and he was carried to the scaffold where, during his death throes, blood was seen to be pouring from the wounds in his legs.
    In 1807 occurred the hangings of John Holloway and Owen Haggerty who had been convicted of a murder in Hounslow five years earlier, the only real evidence coming from their supposed accomplice, Benjamin Hanfield who, by turning King’s Evidence, was pardoned. Despite a warning from the judge that such evidence should be treated with caution the jury took only fifteen minutes to return a verdict of guilty. Both men went to the scaffold protesting their innocence to the last but the notoriety of the case was such that a crowd of over 40,000 had assembled. A pieman who was plying his trade dropped his basket. Some of the crowd stumbled over it and in the ensuing mayhem more than thirty people were killed by being trampled underfoot, while many others were injured and taken, with twenty-seven of the dead, to St Bartholomew’s Hospital nearby.
    Last-minute confessions to a crime were usually well received. In July, 1864, Thomas Briggs was robbed and beaten to death in a train. A suspect, Franz Muller, was identified by a cabman named Matthews, who was acquainted with Muller and believed that Muller had pawned some of Briggs’s property with a pawnbroker in Cheapside, appropriately called Death. By this time Muller had sailed for New York, but Matthews accompanied two policemen to New York on a faster vessel where Muller was arrested. Muller confessed to the crime only when Calcraft, the executioner, placed the hood over his head outside Newgate. Shortly afterwards the cabman, Matthews, was himself briefly jailed at the request of creditors with whom he had run up large debts on the strength of the £300 reward money that Matthews expected for identifying Muller.
    More barbarous methods of execution were still in use for certain crimes after the transfer of executions to Newgate. Phoebe Harris, Margaret Sullivan and Catherine (also known as Christian or Christine) Murphy were burned at the stake for coining, which was regarded as high treason, though it was the practice to strangle the victims before confining their bodies to the flames, a merciful end compared with that of the martyrs of earlier reigns at nearby Smithfield. The last of these, Catherine