The British Execution: 1500–1964 (Shire Library) by Stephen Banks Read Free Book Online Page A

the subject of the trial, and not the murder. Edith herself appeared in her own defence and appeared glib and overconfident of acquittal. Many, including Edith, were surprised when she was convicted. The public mood, which had been hostile to her at first, now swung behind her and a petition for clemency quickly gathered thousands of signatures. It was not heeded and, at 9 a.m. on 9 January 1923, Edith was hanged in Holloway Prison. Freddy was executed at the same time in nearby Pentonville.

    Dr Crippen is hanged at Pentonville, 23 November 1910. ( Le petit Parisien , 11 December 1910.)

    Edith Thompson is executed at Holloway Prison for the murder of her husband. The true circumstances of the execution were rather more horrific than the image suggests. (Illustration by Andre Gallard in Le Petit Journal , 21 January 1923.)
    Freddy maintained to the end that Edith was innocent and the manner of her execution became something of a scandal. An hysterical Edith had to be dragged to the gallows by four wardens. Accounts of what followed are contradictory, but one version asserts that she then collapsed and had to be hanged while tied on a chair. It was alleged that she suffered massive internal bleeding, leading some to suggest that she might have been pregnant at the time. Whatever the truth, the effect upon the presiding officials is well documented. The prison chaplain suffered a nervous breakdown and resigned. A witness giving evidence to the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment in 1950 said of the governor that she ‘had never seen a person so changed in appearance by mental suffering as the governor appeared to me to be’. Two of the wardens attending went to see Beverley Baxter, MP, to plead for abolition and Baxter said to the House of Commons later, ‘Their faces were not human. I can assure you, they were like people out of another world.’ And still the executions went on.
    Nevertheless, there was gathering opposition in Parliament to the death penalty. In 1930 a House of Commons Select Committee recommended a five-year suspension of executions. In 1938, the House of Commons carried a motion calling for the same. With the war the issue was sidelined, but in 1948 the Commons narrowly passed a bill, again asking for a five-year suspension. The Lords threw it out; the bishops being prominent in the argument in favour of capital punishment. On the continent meanwhile, the horrors of war and the abuses perpetrated by totalitarian regimes had turned opinion in the newly reconstituted states decisively against execution. After a round of executions for war crimes, there were no further executions in Italy after 1947 (although it remained a possibility in law) and capital punishment was forbidden in 1949 under the constitution of the new West Germany. Switzerland had already abolished it after a referendum in 1944. Although capital punishment remained on the statute books of other countries, there was an increasing tendency to commute death sentences to life imprisonment. Yet in Britain, in the context of a general increase in crime, a section of public opinion remained convinced of the deterrent effect of the hangman and it was only after a number of controversial executions that the demand for change became inexorable.
    In November 1949, Timothy John Evans was arrested for the murder of his wife, Beryl, and their baby, Geraldine, after their bodies were found at his address in Ladbroke Grove in London. Evans, who had learning difficulties, confessed under police interrogation to the murder of the child. He subsequently retracted that confession, but nonetheless was hanged at Pentonville Prison on 9 March 1950. A key witness in the case against him was John Reginald Christie, who lived at the same address. But in 1953, Christie was convicted of the murder of his own wife and confessed to the murder of five more women whose remains were found at the house. These women had been killed over a ten-year period and all had