Pierrepoint by Steven Fielding

Monday, 9 April 1906, and were shown the new execution suite situated at the end of ‘C’ wing. The cells occupied a second-floor landing in the five-storey-high wing, and the condemned cell was two old cells knocked into one to allow exercise in the cell rather than outside in the common yard, which was deemed not advisable.
    The two brothers were furnished with the man’s details and took a discreet look at him in his cell before heading over to the scaffold to rig the drop. Protruding from one side of the wing the gallows room was a high, green, glass-topped, purpose-made building with trap doors that filled most of the floor and which opened into the cell below. A large beam ran across the room with a chain hanging down and onto this they attached the noose. Together they rigged a drop of 6 feet 6 inches and left the rope to stretch overnight.
    Wakefield hanged at 9.30 a.m. Having reset the traps, coiled the noose to the correct height and secured it with pack-thread, Tom realigned the chalk mark to indicate where the man’s feet would be positioned. After breakfast they took their position outside the condemned cell and waited for the signal to move.
    Walters had enjoyed a hearty breakfast and was finishing his final smoke when the hangmen entered the cell. He offered no resistance as they secured his arms and led him the few short paces across to the scaffold. Harry had his man on the drop in seconds; Tom strapped his ankles and on a signal from the Deputy Sheriff, Harry pulled the lever. The doors crashed against the padded walls and held firm.
    It was the sunniest day of the year so far and a large crowd waited outside in a hope of seeing the hangman depart, but as the local paper recorded later that evening, the hangman slipped away from the gaol as silently and rapidly as the bolts in the trap door floor slipped from their sockets.
    When Harry travelled down to Nottingham in August to hang a sailor who had murdered his former girlfriend, he met up with another new assistant. William Willis was an Accrington-born man who had graduated from the executioner’s training course a few weeks earlier. Edward Glynn and Jane Gamble had been living together as man and wife for some time, but in February she left him for another man. He made threats that he would kill her if he saw them together and on the night of 3 March, as they left a Nottingham public house, he stabbed her repeatedly before fleeing.
    Before his execution, Glynn made a full confession to the murder, in front of his solicitor and three prison warders. The entrance to the gallows room at Nottingham was such that once the condemned man entered he had to be turned aroundon the drop so that the lever was to the left of the executioner after he noosed the pisoner. Glynn thought he was being walked off when he was suddenly moved after he had taken his place on the scaffold. A warder who had spent the last few weeks as his constant escort in the condemned cell, and had accompanied him on his final walk, burst into tears as the drop crashed open.
    Tom was again Harry’s assistant when he went back to Wakefield on 9 August to execute Thomas Mouncer, a Middlesbrough butcher who had strangled his paramour after a drunken night out.
    There were two dates in Harry’s diary for November: on the 13th he was at Wandsworth to hang Frederick Reynolds, who had cut his girlfriend’s throat after she broke off their engagement. A fortnight later he was at Knutsford Gaol in Cheshire, where he dispatched Edward Hartigan, a Stockport builder who had battered his wife to death with a hammer.
    Willis had again been the assistant at Knutsford, but when Harry travelled down to Chelmsford in early December, he discovered that no assistant had been engaged, and for the only time in an English prison he carried out the execution alone.
    He had travelled to the Essex gaol to execute Richard Buckham a 20-year-old farm hand, who, along with his younger brother, had been charged with