An Audience with an Elephant (30 page)

Syd Dernley was in his late sixties then, a good-looking man with wavy hair, who could have been anybody’s grandfather with his pipe and cardigan and slippers. Indeed, he was somebody’s grandfather, and must have been that somebody’s despair with his practical jokes. This man, between the years 1948 and 1953, took part in 28 hangings. I had to keep reminding myself that here was the last living practitioner of something the Anglo-Saxons had brought with them out of the forests. Abolition was not even 25 years old, yet it felt as though I was sitting in a room with Jack Ketch.

At the time Syd Dernley did not want his name used, even though (he gave a leer) it might be worth it just for the shock it would give her next door. But he still felt the shadow of the Home Office on him, which had treated its hangmen like jobbing gardeners, paying them half their fee on the morning after an execution and half a fortnight later, to ensure they did not gossip. The Civil Service was also determined such a man would never achieve the social cachet of his French equivalent, Monsieur de Paris, as he was called, who was a sub-contractor and owned the guillotine, which meant he could supplement his income by showing tourists over the thing. However, the third generation of the Sanson family, whose grandfather had briskly decapitated royalty, was so unnerved by young English women tourists, who not only wanted to see the thing but to pose grinning under the knife, that he took to drink and pawned the French guillotine, thus creating chaos in the French judicial system.

Syd Dernley recalled that his own fee per execution was just three guineas, although later this was raised to five; there were perhaps eight executions in a good year, and travel warrants were always third-class, although his chief, Albert Pierrepoint, travelled first. Someone in the Home Office had decided that an assistant hangman was not a gentleman. Even so, the job was never advertised. Syd Dernley himself applied for it, in hope, as he told me, of meeting criminals. He was a miner who had an obsession with the books of Edgar Wallace (‘Wrote 123 books, he did, and I’ve got 80 of them. It were all Edgar Wallace’s fault’). Unfortunately, Wallace forgot to mention one small fact that might have made all the difference: the average length of time between the moment the hangman entered the cell and the moment the trap fell was eight seconds. It was the best-kept secret that there was always a locked door, which, if a prisoner inquired about, he was told was a store for old furniture. Beyond that, just 15 feet beyond it, was the gallows. Mr Dernley never did get to meet criminals socially.

‘If he were honest. . .’. His wife had brought in another plate of scones. ‘. . .If he were honest, he did it just to get out of the colliery.’

The Home Office replied with brevity, telling him no vacancy then existed, but a year later wrote again, just as briefly, requesting him to present himself for interview at Lincoln jail. ‘Governor were a tall bloke, and he wanted to know my hobbies. I said I liked shooting. Where did I shoot? Up at Castle. He were a bit taken aback at that, and asked, did I shoot with the Duke then? No, I said. I generally shot after Duke had gone to bed. That were it really. He was so tickled he called the doctor in. “Got a poacher here, says he wants to be a hangman.”’

There followed something so bizarre no black comedy could hope to match it: the Class of ’48 – Syd Dernley and three others – was sent on a week’s training course to Pentonville Prison. Of his colleagues, Dernley remembers two: a mathematician from ICI (‘He were just interested in the mathematics of hanging’) and an ice-cream salesman from Birmingham.
They spent the week in the Condemned Cell, doing long-division sums.
‘You divided 1,000 by the man’s weight. What for? For the length of the drop.’ Sum after sum, scribbling and puzzling, puzzling and scribbling (‘Important that, you get yer sums wrong and you can take a man’s head clean off’). They hoped to have Pierrepoint as a tutor, but it was an elderly warder. The practical aspects they tried out on each other, the pinioning and the strapping, and took turns on the lever (‘Push forward, just as in a signal box’).

No knots. ‘The noose is already there.’ He had dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘Hang on, I think I’ve still got one about the place somewhere.’ What? My host had skipped lightly past me to a drawer in a sideboard, from which he produced a length of rope, the inside of which was bound in leather (‘to stop rope burns, that’) and one end of which had a metal loop, through which he passed the rope. ‘Just a souvenir,’ he told me.

I was beyond questions as he told me of the time the four of them attended their first execution at Shrewsbury jail. He had a photograph of them with Pierrepoint, taken outside the railway station, and it could be any works outing, except that after it was over there were three. ‘The maths chap, he wet himself in the taxi and emigrated. But me, I was impressed. The clock struck nine, Pierrepoint and his assistant went into the cell and, as I told you, eight seconds later it were all over. Mind you, me and him got it down to seven when we hanged James Inglis who’d murdered a prostitute in Hull. Fastest hanging ever, that. And what’s more, the condemned man has no time to be frightened. People talk about the electric chair, but that’s cruelty. They talk about the guillotine; that’s quick, but it’s a bloody mess. Here, I’ve got one of them as well, made it me-self.’ And from somewhere the extraordinary being had produced a tiny working model with a little blade which he pulled up and released. Click. ‘But hanging’s humane. I timed it from the time that clock in Shrewsbury struck nine. Eight seconds.’

‘Perhaps you find this shocking,’ murmured Mrs Dernley.

‘Nothing shocking about it,’ said her husband, before I had time to say anything. ‘I’d come home, and the wife would say: “All right”. That were all. It were an accepted way of life, and we both believed it had to be done. Of course I tried to keep it secret at first, but we weren’t on phone, and the old postmaster had to come puffing up the hill whenever a telegram announced a reprieve. So it was suggested we had a phone put in, only there were a two year waiting list, so then I had to say what me other job were. We had the thing in two days. But, being I were a miner, we lived in a Coal Board house, and the phone people must have had to install an extra pole or something, so they got in touch with the pit manager. He told his clerk, and after that it were like dropping a stone in a puddle.

‘For six months there was a hush every time I went in a pub. But after that it were all right. Some of the men even made jokes about it when we were playing dominoes: “Whose drop is it?” “I dunno, ask ’im. “E’s the expert”. But nobody said anything adverse, and I’ve never regretted it. It were a very interesting time in my life, when I got to see a lot of the country and met some people I should never have met in pit.’

But one of the others had regrets. News of the ice-cream salesman’s other job leaked out in Birmingham and affected sales to the point where one day his boss called him in. ‘Harry, ice-cream and hanging, they don’t mix, boy.’ Which left two of the Class of ’48, though the maddening thing was that Syd Dernley had forgotten what became of the other man. He himself went his busy way, helping to hang Timothy Evans, of whose guilt he remained convinced, as you might expect, for even hangmen aspire to sleep at nights.

At one point I hesitantly touched on the more lurid aspects of folklore, but he was not in the least embarrassed. No, he said, he had never seen hanged men with erections, and it had been part of his job to undress the corpses in the execution pit. Pierrepoint in his autobiography talks of this as a moment of intimacy, where it was just him and ‘the poor broken body’ of his victim. The last thing he wanted on the gallows was gallows humour, and the day inevitably came when Syd Dernley cracked a joke. Through the post the letter came, brief as the first, informing him there would be no further need of his services.

He felt the disappointment keenly, which was why, for old time’s sake, he told me, he had bought a gallows. He bought it off a doctor who had it out of the old Cambridge jail, and it came in a Pickford’s van. He sprang to his feet again, and rummaged in that drawer out of which by now I was convinced anything might come. He showed me a photograph of the gallows which he installed in his cellar, with two green spotlights trained on a tailor’s dummy he had got from John Collier’s. This had come without a head, so he had arranged a white bust on its shoulders – at which I started, for there was something familiar about that gaunt profile.

‘Hey, that’s Dante you’re hanging.’

‘Who?’

‘Dante. Italian poet.’

‘That’s who it is? I often wondered. Doctor threw it in when I bought gallows.’ His cellar was not high enough for this to be assembled with the drop beneath it, so he put two blocks of wood under the thing, just enough, he smiled, just enough for the trap to creak. Those were social years. ‘Word got round, and all sorts turned up. A managing director came. “I understand you have a gallows in your cellar.” I took him down. “I understand you have a rope.” He stood there. “Excuse me, may I have the rope round my neck?”’

It was like those cosy afternoons long ago, chez Sanson all over again, but the experience did not lead Mr Dernley to booze. He took flashlit photographs and had certificates printed, some of which his victims framed and hung on their walls. He was keeping a post office then, and time passed merrily enough until, his wife being taken ill, her cousin came to keep house for him, who, of course, did not know where anything was.

One morning, a man came to read the electric meters. Syd Dernley was busy in his post office, but he noticed the man walk up his garden path. Five minutes later he saw the man come running down it, running faster than he had ever seen any man run, down the path and up the street till he was lost to sight Which was odd, considering he had come by car.

His wife’s cousin had not known where the meters were, so the man had said to leave it to him, and had opened a few cupboard doors before opening the one leading down into the cellar. He must have switched the lights on, at which point the two green spots came on. ‘You know, I can’t remember anyone coming to read our meters after that. It were all estimates.’

At the time I was writing a column for the
Sunday Express
and thought hangman Syd an ideal profile for the paper. But no, they wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole; it was explained to me that however much the paper’s readers might approve of hanging, it would be too much of a shock to confront them with a hangman. Their ancestors were not so squeamish. Hangmen, along with their victims, were the first authentic working-class heroes (and hangmen had a longer shelf life). Crowds met them when they arrived on business in county towns, and newspapers scrupulously noted their taste in dress. ‘Mr Berry,’ recorded the
Carmarthen Journal, ‘unostentatiously
dressed in a plain suit of dark clothing and wearing a red Turkish fez.’ (The italics are mine.)

I kept in touch with Syd Dernley, a helpful man, who at one point sent me a table of weights and drops, a sort of hangman’s ready-reckoner. He also sent me various ideas for feature articles.

In return, I read and tried to help him with a memoir he had written about his poaching days, and I must have kept this for some time, as I remember an irritated reminder from him (‘If you don’t want to find yourself dangling from one of your apple trees’). I never could cope with his humour.

When we spoke last month, he told me the last gallows of all had finally been taken down (‘You know, the one they had at Wandsworth for blokes with a mind to run off with Queen’), although it had subsequently been reassembled at the Prison Officers’ Museum near Rugby. He urged me to go and see it; he himself, he said, had already been twice.

End of an Era

HE HOUSE IS
up for sale. I have the particulars in front of me, and I am staring with admiration at one phrase, ‘situated in well-wooded grounds’. You have to hand it to estate agents: if Tarzan’s house came on the market, that too would be in well-wooded grounds.

Every time he called, said the man from the village, he felt more and more like the Prince hacking his way through to Sleeping Beauty. But when it came to the actual building even the estate agents gave up. Undergrowth they could cope with, but this was beyond their adaptable little adjectives. It was, said the prospectus lamely, ‘an interesting residence’.

The house had fascinated me ever since I moved to the village five years ago. It stood, or rather lurked, in its wood, quite alone and beyond the street lamps, 200 yards from the last houses, at the top of a small hill. At first I thought it was empty, for though you could see where a drive had been, the brambles and grass had closed in until there was little more than a sheep track leading from the gate. There were no signs of life, and at night the lights were never on.

But then there was no need for lights. Its owner had been totally blind for the last 20 years of her life. She was the vicar’s daughter and had lived there ever since her father died in the 1930s. At that point her grandmother, who had never been able to stand clergymen, came back into her life to buy the land and build the house. Only the old lady built it in this crazy style, half suburban villa, with brick and rendering, and half Tudor. All the windows were latticed and all the interior doors were without metal fittings, just massive wooden latches.