A Penny For the Thoughts Of Three Who Opposed Public Executions

If twenty-one-year-old housebreaker John Tompson hoped to achieve immortality when he carved a crude hand-engraved message into the surface of a smoothed 1799 copper Cartwheel Penny, he can rest in peace. Almost two hundred years after he created his own memento and epitaph, it turned up as a lot in a well-publicized 2018 TimeLine Auction where the worn penny sold for £600 inc. bp.

The words engraved on its surface by the young man as he awaited execution read: CAST FOR DEATH, together with his name, age, and the year of his conviction (1826).The phrase, shortened so that he could compress the lettering into the limited space on the coin, alluded to the belief, popular within the ranks of the Georgian underworld in those days, that Fate had cast the dice which had rolled to the unalterable decision that John Tompson must suffer execution to pay for his crime.

The place of execution, Surrey County Goal, lay in Southwark, in the days when the county’s borders reached as far as the south bank of the Thames. Better known in the 1820s as Horsemonger Lane Gaol, it had opened in the 18th century, and remained Surrey’s principal place of execution up to its closure in 1878. Especially renowned for its multiple hangings, it had a line of seven gallows located on its gatehouse roof. Penal authorities believed at the time that public executions deterred crime. In truth the gruesome spectacles drew huge crowds in which pickpockets thrived; where harlots pied their trade; and where agitators and inciters to violence could publicize their causes with little fear of apprehension by watchmen and constables hampered by the throngs of people blocking narrow streets and alleyways.

 Although the poor of Southwark no doubt made up the bulk of the watching crowds, eyewitnesses from other social levels attended for assorted reasons, some to record their opposition to public hangings. For example, when George Manning and his wife Marie were executed for the murder of money lender, Patrick O’Connor, two eye-witnesses left us their impressions of the spectacle. The Mannings had invited O’Connor into their home, shothim, stolen his money, then buried his body under their kitchen flagstones. Following a trial and a guilty verdict, they faced execution on the gatehouse roof of Horsemonger Lane Gaol on 13th November 1849. Among the tens of thousands who flocked to witness the final scene in what had become a notorious crime, was Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, who witnessed the execution during a visit to London in that year. The following is an extract from his diary recording what he saw, and the effect it had upon him: Walked over Hungerford Bridge to Horsemonger Lane, Borough, to see the end of the Mannings. Paid half a crown for a stand on the roof of a house adjoining. An innumerable crowd in all the streets. Police by the hundreds .. men & women fainting. Manning and his wife hanged side by side; still unreconciled to each other. What a change from the time they stood up together to be married! The mob was brutish. All in all, a most horrible and unspeakable scene.

By a remarkable coincidence, another author – of even greater renown – watched the same execution. Here areextracts from his later newspaper report:
I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution this morning could be imagined by no man. ..The horrors of the gibbet and of the crime which brought the wretched murderers to it, faded in my mind before the atrocious bearing, looks and language, of the assembled spectators.  … As the day dawned, thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians and vagabonds of every kind, flocked on to the ground, with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment…  When the sun rose brightly it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to feel ashamed. ..When the two miserable creatures who attracted all this ghastly sight about them were turned quivering into the air, there was no more restraint in any of the previous obscenities … I am solemnly convinced that nothing that ingenuity could devise to be done in this citycould work such ruin as one public execution, and I stand astounded and appalled by the wickedness it exhibits. I do not believe that any community can prosper where such a scene of horror and demoralization as was enacted this morning outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol is presented at the very doors of good citizens …

The writer was Charles Dickens.

*Public executions were abolished in England in 1868