The Invention of Murder (30 page)

The public executioner then had been John Foxen, who had died in 1829 and had been replaced by his junior, William Calcraft. Calcraft stayed in his post until he was forcibly retired in 1874, at the age of seventy-four. He was paid £50 a year, with an additional annual five-guinea retainer from Horsemonger Lane Gaol. Each execution there earned him one guinea, and he received £10 per execution elsewhere in England. He probably earned far more than this in perks – the clothes of the executed were his to sell, as was the rope, and there were those who believed that touching the hand of an executed man would cure ailments, and were happy to pay the executioner for access. (The politician Gathorne-Hardy remembered as a boy in the late 1820s or early 1830s seeing people waiting to touch the hand of an executed man in Shrewsbury.)

Attitudes towards the hangman are vivid in traditional Punch and Judy shows:

That would have been a merciful death to many, for Calcraft was notoriously inept. He used the old-fashioned short drop, which strangled his victims slowly, rather than quickly breaking their necks. William Bousfield was an extreme example of the horrors of such an execution. In 1856 Bousfield was found guilty of murdering his wife and children. After his conviction he had had attempted suicide by throwing himself on the fire in his cell, and he was so badly burnt he had to be carried to the scaffold and placed in a chair over the drop. Calcraft had apparently received a threatening letter, so he fitted on the cap and rope, ran down under the scaffold, quickly drew the bolt and scurried off into the prison. Bousfield, from his seated position, could reach one of the wooden supports through the open drop, and propped himself up. Three times a warder pushed him off the support; three times the terrified man managed to find another foothold. Finally Calcraft returned, and while a warder pushed the doomed man from above, Calcraft grabbed his legs and held on to him until he had strangled to death.

In his essay on Courvoisier’s death, Thackeray unconsciously relied in part on the vocabulary of the newspaper reports of executions. In newspapers, no one just walked to the scaffold, they walked with a ‘firm step’; they either ‘moaned piteously’ or spoke their last words in a ‘firm tone’. Thackeray did not free himself of this mindset entirely, but his description of Courvoisier as he emerged from the prison was horrifyingly, novelistically, believable: ‘He opened his hands in a helpless kind of way. He turned his head here and there, and looked about him for an instant with a wild, imploring look. His mouth was contracted into a sort of pitiful smile.’ That pathetically smiling figure haunted Thackeray. ‘I must confess then … that the sight has left on my mind an extraordinary feeling of terror and shame. I came away. that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for
the murder I saw done.
Two weeks later, he continued to feel ‘degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight; and. I pray to Almighty God to cause this disgraceful sin to pass from among us, and to cleanse our land of blood’.

Some remained untouched by these stories, or at least kept their sympathy and their interest in different pockets. The ballad and broadside market did well with Courvoisier, particularly after a rumour began to circulate that in one of his confessions (he made three) he said that he had been influenced by reading about Jack Sheppard.
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Broadsides poured out. ‘The Awful Murder of Lord William Russell, MP’ appeared on the day of the inquest, although the place of the inquest was given as ‘Norwich’, a fairly obvious error for Russell’s London address, Norfolk Street, and a sign of the speed with which the sheet was produced. It reported Courvoisier giving evidence and then, further down the page, the breaking news that ‘a man who had been in the service of the late Lord, has been taken into custody, but nothing has yet transpired as to the grounds of his apprehension’. The sheet (above) included an illustration of a man dead in his bed, but it was a stock image of a working-class room, with a rough wooden bed, the only other furniture a crude chest of drawers, and a chair holding the owner’s clothes. Similarly, a weekly journal illustrated Courvoisier’s arrest with a portrait of him that replaced the reality of the liveried servant with an image of a prosperous, fashionably dressed man, with a high collar, elegant waistcoat and carefully curled hair. The visceral reality of the execution that Dickens and Thackeray reported was, by the time it reached print, infinitely malleable: a duke’s brother’s bedroom was reduced to a working-class lodging; a servant was transformed into a fashion plate. Death turned it all into journalism.

Sarah Thomas was another servant who killed her elderly employer, but her story inspired nothing but sympathy. Like both Eliza Fenning and Courvoisier, she had barely settled into her new place in Bristol when Elizabeth Jefferies, a notoriously sour and bad-tempered spinster, was found beaten to death, her house ransacked, in March 1849. Her dog had also been killed, and pushed down the privy, and her servant of seventy-two hours’ standing had vanished. Sarah Thomas was seventeen or eighteen, with a ‘round chubby face’, and from a respectable labouring family. The police immediately searched her family home, where she was found hiding in the coal hole, together with a gold watch and chain, twenty-seven sovereigns and some change, a silver gravy spoon and five tablespoons, engraved with the initials ‘EJ’.

At the magistrates’ hearing, the neighbours reported that they had heard screaming from the house on the night when the murder was presumed to have taken place, but Miss Jefferies’ ‘infirmity of temper was well known’, and they just banged on the wall with a stick. The next day Miss Thomas came bearing an apology from Miss Jefferies, claiming that the noise had been a cat yowling. The neighbour said she thought it had been the maid herself. ‘I have heard you crying out in the yard,’ she said, but Miss Thomas denied it, although she added, ‘She is such a good-for-nothing woman … that I can’t live with her.’

The inquest reaffirmed the general view of Miss Jefferies. Her brother testified that he had not seen his sister for a year because of her bad temper. Lucy Chard, a previous servant, said that Miss Jefferies had refused to let her sit in any room that had a fire, and fed her only on rice, or a potato or two. The manager of an employment agency said she had sent servants daily for over a week, but either they refused to stay, or Miss Jefferies rejected them. Miss Thomas, without legal counsel, gave her story at the inquest: she had been sitting in the house when a former servant, whose name she gave variously as Maria Lewis or Maria Williams, appeared, saying that Miss Jefferies had refused to give her a character and that she was going to kill her. Snatching up a stone from the kitchen she disappeared upstairs; on her return, she made pancakes before killing the dog and vanishing into the night. An even more outlandish story was told by a child who said she had been at the pub next door with her uncle, a blind street musician, when a rifleman had entered Miss Jefferies’ house, killing her with his sword, and hanging her head ‘up to dry’ before returning to the pub, where he sat placidly drinking. At this point the child had hysterics, and her uncle told the court that she was an epileptic, and insane.
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The child added, as if in confirmation, ‘I’ve seen many people killed … The Rifles generally kill them.’ She was dismissed and Sarah Thomas was charged with wilful murder.

At her trial the following month, the evidence of Miss Jefferies’ appalling treatment of her servants piled up. The next-door neighbour had heard shouting and crying, and Miss Jefferies screaming that her new maid was a ‘dirty hussy’. The former servant also appeared, with an alibi that made it impossible for her to have committed the murder, or even to have cooked pancakes, on the night in question. She did, however, confirm Miss Jefferies’ behaviour: she herself had worked there less than two weeks. Lucy Chard testified that Miss Jefferies had threatened to beat her twice. Miss Thomas’s defence now was that she had murdered her mistress, but as a reflex response, hitting out when Miss Jefferies beat her.
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The judge summed up unsympathetically, calling her story ‘improbable’. The jury, while finding her guilty, added a recommendation to mercy because of her youth. The judge retorted tartly that he saw no reason to pass on the recommendation, and it took two men to remove the weeping girl from the court. After she had gone, the judge allowed that he would, after all, agree to the recommendation.

In gaol, Miss Thomas confessed to the crime once more, saying that the day after she arrived, Miss Jefferies had tried to hit her, then locked her in the kitchen all night. The next morning at five Miss Jefferies came downstairs to order a fire for her own room. That night Miss Thomas was told to sleep on the floor in her mistress’s room, and the following morning she had crept down to the kitchen for the stone. Unlike the judge, most felt for the girl. Her parish priest wrote to the Queen; the Quakers petitioned the Secretary of State, as did the Young Men’s Society. Three and a half thousand Bristol women – approximately 8 per cent of the women in the city – signed a petition for mercy.

The newspapers were one-sided for the murderer and against the victim. The
Era
editorialized that people too easily spoke of servants as ‘the greatest plague of life’; while many of them were just that, many more were ‘ill-used … treated as mere animals … tested sorely and severely. poor, friendless, and almost helpless, women by nature, slaves by accident. taken foul advantage of, and seldom appreciated’. On the employer’s side, it added, ‘Her fate was a terrible one. [but] For MISS JEFFERIES, there is no sympathy. She lived miserably, and died deplorably, poor woman!’ Like the
Era,
the
Manchester Guardian
described Miss Jefferies entirely negatively: she was ‘tyrannical, peevish, and violent, and degraded herself by beating her servants’. She had been killed by ‘three blows of a pebble’ – an extraordinarily dismissive way to speak of being beaten to death. The
Observer
also reported rumours which implicated drinkers at the pub next door and an unnamed ex-servant in a botched robbery – perhaps the only nineteenth-century murder case where the wild post-crime rumours were deployed in defence of the murderer.

This support made no difference. The legal establishment and its officials persisted in seeing Sarah Thomas as a stereotypical working-class murderer, evil and cunning rather than impulsive. During the inquest, the
Bristol Mercury
(otherwise very sympathetic) noted, in a standard phrase newspapers used for young, working-class accused, that she ‘appeared to regard the investigation with indifference’, interpreting dazed terror as hard-boiled criminality. Similarly the prison governor was offended by her behaviour on her last day of life. She was given paper and pen to write a farewell letter to her parents, but instead of the formal catalogue of contrition and remorse he expected, she drew a picture and printed the letters of the alphabet. She was, to a modern eye, a functional illiterate. The governor’s middle-class sense of propriety was also disturbed when Mrs Thomas asked him to ensure that her child’s clothes were returned to the family after her death; he lectured her on her ‘want of feeling’, but she failed to show ‘correct appreciation of the advice’. Just as, evidently, he had no appreciation of the value represented by the clothes to a family who had probably sold all they had to pay for legal representation.

The execution was unimaginably horrible, even by the standards of the day. The
Bristol Mercury
described it as judicial murder, a ‘public strangling’. In the run-up, as usual, there were plenty of commercial activities. The lessee of the Prince’s Street bridge was outraged that the gaol had permitted barricades to be erected, blocking the view from the bridge, and thus preventing him from selling viewing spaces (he sued for compensation). More
ad hoc
activities were found in such fairground diversions as weighing machines, a ‘standard’ (yardstick) for measuring height, gingerbread-and nut-sellers, and broadside-sellers. To counter this atmosphere, the Bristol Religious Tract Society handed out 6,000 handbills.

The
Liverpool Mercury
estimated the crowd at 25,000 (Bristol’s population was then approximately 135,000). When the governor went to fetch Sarah for the walk to the scaffold, ‘She appeared greatly excited, stamped her feet, exclaimed several times, “I will not go! I will not go!” and added, if they meant to hang her, it should only be by force. The chaplain then tried his office with her, entreating her to be calm, and not to resist the execution of the law, but she persisted in her refusal. [the governor] begged her to act on the chaplain’s advice. She became quite frantic.’ It took more than six officers to half-carry her, and ‘She still resisted with all her might … uttering piercing cries … With great difficulty, and amidst a scene of the most painful nature, she was got into the press-room, where her arms were pinioned and she was. implored to go to the gallows quietly, but she still said she would not.’ She was finally carried up the stairs to the scaffold by two officers, screaming and struggling to the end. ‘Though our reporter,’ said the
Liverpool Mercury,
‘has witnessed many public executions, he states that this was the most harrowing and disgusting that he ever saw.’ The
Daily News
followed its report of this dreadful death with a letter commenting on it: ‘What a specimen would it be for some future historian of English civilisation, of English humanity … [a] girl of 20 [she was in fact seventeen or eighteen], driven nearly to insanity by the appalling prospect of a violent death to one so young and so weak … shrieking and desperate … while the representative of civilised justice and the minister of a Christian creed looked on at the [legal] murder.’