CHAPTER 12

He Killed Grandma

1883

This is poor work. He is not dead yet …

his is a story as much about the hangman as it is about the murderer he was supposed to send to the next world. Henry Dutton, an ironworker, had killed Hannah Henshaw, his wife’s grandmother, and was due to be hanged in the precincts of Kirkdale Gaol on 3 December 1883. The problem was that the man charged with seeing him quickly into oblivion was Bartholomew Binns

Binns was only in the office for a year, and was sacked. Later, he assisted the more competent Tommy Scott in 1900, but in his own annus horribilis as hangman he was responsible for a few botched jobs. He had helped the very professional and successful William Marwood, from Lincolnshire, who had invented the more humane ‘long drop’ method which involved more skilful calculations of the drop/body weight ratio. But Binns did not learn much. There were several complaints from governors and clergy about Binns’s work and he was politely asked to go. He had a moment of notoriety when he was written about as the man who hanged one of the Phoenix Park murderers, O’Donnell.

But poor Dutton was to be hanged by Binns at Kirkdale. He had hanged a man for the first time just a few weeks before (Henry Powell at Wandsworth) but Duttton was only the second in line for the tyro executioner.

There was a special element of drama in the case, as two local journalists were to be present, and also Dutton had asked the chaplain to give the optional Condemned Sermon on the Sunday before the fatal hour. The sermon was given, covering three warnings that are surely totally irrelevant, if not insulting, to a condemned man: not to be drunk, not to allow a bad temper to possess you, and not to marry in haste. Unless these were likely to happen in the next world, the whole affair appears to be cruelly ironic. But in the very early hours of his last day on earth, Dutton had something to eat (cocoa, bread and butter) and took sacrament in the prison chapel.

At seven Binns arrived. For some odd reason, the governor would not allow Binns’ assistant to enter Kirkdale. It was normal practice to have a hangman together with his assistant. But the prison bell began to toll at a quarter to eight and in haste, Dutton was brought to meet Binns and to be pinioned ready for the drop. Then, as the chaplain read some text concerning man’s sins, the ritual walk to the scaffold began.

This final walk was in line with regulations: the chief warder led the way, followed by Dutton and two warders; then Binns was behind them, followed in line by a doctor, the under-sheriff and chaplain. So far so good. But then they reached the scaffold.

The drama came when Dutton was given the rapid final pinioning and strapping ready for the lever to be pulled; the clock for eight had not struck, and Binns walked to look at his victim, causing a rather nervous atmosphere. Dutton asked Lord Jesus to receive his soul. Then the clock struck, and the lever was pulled; Dutton dropped, but it was not a quick death.

The doctor looked down at the struggling man on the rope and said: ‘This is poor work, he is not dead yet.’ In a drop of almost seven and a half feet, the body spun and the man did not die for eight minutes. That was outrageously cruel by any standards. The doctor could see what the problem was: a very thick rope had been used (like a ship’s hawser, the doctor said) and Dutton was very short, only five feet two inches. The result was what every hangman feared: slow strangulation rather than a snapping of the spinal column with speed and humane intention.

There was an inquest after all this farce, Mr Barker, the county coroner, in charge. The prison governor, Major Leggett, made a long statement outlining the time taken for the culprit to die, and also added that nothing had been done to ‘hasten the end’ of the unfortunate Dutton. The doctor’s evidence would make difficult reading for anyone concerned about the terrible suffering the man had experienced: only a slight separation of two bones in the vertebrae near the point of contact with the rope had happened, rather than any sharp break. In the doctor’s opinion, the noose had been placed at the wrong position near the nape of the neck, rather than under the jaw or the ear. There was, it was stated, a difference of 300 pounds in weight in the drop/body ratio.

The question that must have been on everyone’s lips was boldly asked by the coroner: ‘Was the executioner sober?’

Major Leggett answered that he was not sure. Then an interchange took place, something that must have ensured Binns’ departure from his post:

Coroner: Has the hangman left the gaol?

Leggett: Yes.

Coroner: I wish he were here.

A juryman asked the governor’s opinion of the affair. Leggett said: ‘I think it was inefficiently performed – clumsily. I did not like his manner of conducting the execution. He seemed, in adjusting the strap on the man, to do it in a very bungling way, which I did not like at all.’

It was one of the most disgraceful cases of a botched execution in the annals of that grim but necessarily professional task at that period. As Shakespeare said in another context: ‘If it were done, when ’tis done, ’tis good it were done well.’ The coroner considered the affair to have been a disaster, referring to the fact that ‘the executioner seemed to be a new hand at the work’ and that he should have done what the previous man, Calcraft, had done, that is pull on the legs of any man dangling but not swiftly dying.

One final irony in the Binns story is that he took part in a show featuring ex-hangmen, and that, as one writer of the time said, he ‘reveals his art for the entertainment of the large crowds …’ Incompetence was not to deter Mr Binns from making his year’s deadly work the stuff of a media circus.