He had four partners always with him;
Poverty, Prejudice, Bitterness and Despair
He pulled the trigger, but they loaded the gun.
(From Teacher’s Pet, Fay and Michael Kanin, 1958)
Nearly every case in this book involved children, in some cases these were the victims, but in most cases it is the victim or the condemned person who left orphans behind. These children grew up traumatised or suffering the stigma of the gallows. I am convinced that this would have affected the way they raised their own children. It is an accepted phenomenon that grandchildren of Holocaust survivors can ‘inherit’ post-traumatic stress disorder and, for the same reason, I believe that there will be many families in this country who are still feeling the effects of some of these crimes over 100 years later.
I think that most executioners became hangmen because they felt they were fulfilling an important role and in doing so were giving themselves a greater status. On another level, I cannot shake off the suspicion that most had a desire to take the role for no greater reason than they wanted to do it. In the case of Billington’s sons, however, they did not have the opportunity to decide independently whether this was a position they really wished to aspire to. In many ways, the role would have been more stressful for them because they had undertaken it as a response to their father’s keenness to monopolise the position.
Many hangmen, Billington included, seemed to find that the burden of killing people increased as they matured. Perhaps this was because they were gaining a greater personal understanding of their own mortality or just questioning the less than black and white nature of right and wrong.
Capital punishment was an accepted, although increasingly controversial, part of Victorian society and, while I truly believe that there is a tiny percentage of criminal population that does not deserve a place in any society, I cannot see how the job of executing them or any of the associated roles such as warder or chaplain could lead to anything but emotional damage. This is particularly the case with a hangman who would arrive, usually alone, and would be expected to single-handedly kill another human being without hesitation, emotion or any error. This is far too great a responsibility to put on the shoulders of a single individual.
This book is, in part, a relentlessly grim catalogue of murders. Showing just the ‘celebrated’ cases would glorify the role of executioner, whereas showing a fair cross-section of all the cases is the most valid way to give a true impression of how it was to perform such a relentlessly grim job in the mid to long term.
It is also interesting to note that the crimes that are sometimes looked upon as the blight of the modern age: child abduction, drink-related murders and knife crime, were prevalent then too.
Admitting that these types of crimes have existed since long before living memory, and still exist now, implies that they may continue to be part of our culture unless something in our culture itself changes. The unpalatable alternative is to acknowledge that these types of crimes are an unavoidable part of our lives and the victims are acceptable statistics. Poverty, addiction and poor education clearly act as catalysts in some cases. Writing this book has taught me a great deal about the Victorian era, I also believe that it could provide some clues about how to prevent violent crime in the twenty-first century.