Emmanuel Hamer hangs his head in shame. (Author’s collection)
The second half of 1893 saw Billington conduct executions in several police-related cases, with the police featured on both sides of the law. These came as part of a spate of executions he conducted during the latter part of the summer.
On 18 July he was at Northampton. Liverpudlian ex-soldier Richard Sabey had bought a knife in Liverpool with the intention of killing his girlfriend, Louisa Johnson. She had ended their relationship and intended to make a fresh start in Burton Latimer, near Kettering. She travelled there on 8 February, but Sabey followed and cut her throat as she walked along a quiet stretch of road.
Billington left Northampton and travelled directly to Worcester for his next engagement, the execution of petty-criminal-turned-killer Amie Meunier. Meunier, aged twenty-five, was a French hawker living in Great Colmore Street, Birmingham. In early January, Bromsgrove residents had noticed him around the Lickey End area. On 12 January one of the houses he called at was Long Eye, the home of Joseph Piecey and his wife Charlotte. Mr and Mrs Piecey thought no more of his visit, but they did not know that an axe had been stolen from one of their neighbours.
At ten o’clock the following morning Joseph was still in bed when he heard a man’s footsteps on the stairs, he climbed from his bed and opened the bedroom door. The intruder had been rifling through some boxes on the landing, but rushed downstairs when he realised that he was not alone. Joseph recognised the man as the hawker who had called a day earlier and hurried downstairs after him, but gave up the chase when he found his wife lying in a pool of blood. She had been killed with the axe.
Meunier rushed home, burnt his bloodied clothes and packed his bags. He told his girlfriend that the police wanted him in connection with some items he had stolen from his previous employer. He fled to Belgium and was at large for ten days before being captured and returned to England. His girlfriend gave evidence against him, as did Joseph Piecey and several other Bromsgrove witnesses. As was often the case, the criminal had not been at all astute in covering his tracks and the guilty verdict was reached with relative ease.
Billington’s next victim was an experienced police officer who took some steps to conceal the evidence of the murder he had committed. Had he planned the crime he undoubtedly would have done more to evade detection, but it was an unplanned act that saw George Samuel Cooke executed at Newgate on 25 July 1893.
PC 385 had been a police officer for five years, working for several divisions, including E Division at Bow Street in the early part of 1893. On 28 April complaints were levied against him by a young woman named Maud Mary Lockley. She was twenty-two years old and also went by the names of Maud Murton, Maud Smith and latterly, when she claimed to be George’s wife, Maud Cooke. She claimed that Cooke had beaten her and he was suspended. After a short investigation he was reinstated but transferred to X Division on 5 May, where his new beat included the grounds of the prison at Wormwood Scrubbs.
Cooke took up lodgings with PC Robinson and his wife Kate in Silchester Road, Notting Hill. During May he met and began to court a housemaid who lived locally. He told her that he was single and began discussing marriage, but despite this he had not completely severed his connection with Maud. Kate Robinson met her on several occasions when she visited his lodgings and he introduced the housemaid as his young lady.
At first he told Kate that Maud was a barmaid. In fact he had met Maud two-and-a-half years earlier when he was patrolling the Strand and she was subsidising her earnings as a waitress by working as a prostitute. When Kate discovered this she told Cooke that he wasn’t to let her visit the house again. Cooke had anyway already decided to break away from Maud entirely; he had been paying for her lodgings and planned to end this arrangement so that he would be free to pursue his new relationship.
Maud was not prepared to be pushed aside so easily and wrote to him saying that she would visit on 6 June. When she arrived at Wormwood Scrubbs police station, Cooke was already on duty and she was pointed in the direction of the prison. At twenty past ten Maud asked directions again, this time from PC Harris who was on duty opposite the North Pole public house. Cooke had just passed by and Harris saw her catch up with him further along North Pole Road.
The last person to see Maud alive was Thomas Grimshaw, who worked as a chemist at the prison. As Grimshaw returned home he passed a young woman and a police constable arguing. He went indoors and the voices continued until half past eleven when he heard the man say, ‘Are you going off now?’
At 6 a.m. the following morning a shepherd, Harry Kimberley, was returning from Old Oak Common after spending the night watching his sheep, when he saw a woman’s body lying in the grass:
Nearing morning the sheep grew quiet and then I decided to take a sharp spin round to warm myself. On the way I met one of the jail warders who passed close to the spot where the murdered woman was lying without noticing her. When I discovered her she was lying on her back and her hands were tightly clenched upon her body. Her mouth was stuffed with clay and no doubt this was done so that she could not scream. The unfortunate woman, in my opinion, must have lain on her right cheek for some time after her assailant had laid her for dead, and that in her death struggle she must have turned her face upright.
The alarm was raised and by seven o’clock both the police and the police surgeon, Mr R. Jackson, were in attendance. Her body was taken to the mortuary. It was soon established that she had not been robbed and had been dead for at least four hours. Her head injuries were extensive. Jackson described them:
There was blood on her face and head and a clot of blood under the head. There were two fractures of the skull, one over the right eye and the other over the right ear. The right eyeball was smashed. The two fractures could not have been the result of one blow. The lower jaw was fractured and there was blood on the palm of the right hand. The right hand was under the body and the left across, and they were clenched.
Further investigations revealed bruising to the shoulders and lacerations and haemorrhaging to the brain. He concluded that she had been kicked or beaten to death.
Several people saw Cooke towards the end of his shift, but there was nothing in his manner to alert them to his guilt. Kate Robinson was the first person to notice that something was amiss. When Cooke returned to his lodgings, he seemed flushed and refused breakfast. A little later Kate saw him burying something in the garden. She waited until he wasn’t looking and discovered a truncheon. Without disturbing it she alerted her husband. Several other officers had already identified the body as the woman who had been looking for PC Cooke on the previous evening and he was quickly arrested.
Maud’s head injury was consistent with a blow from a truncheon. Bloodstains were found on the left leg of Cooke’s trousers and boots, and the heel of his boot was shown to be an exact match to the marks found on Maud’s face and neck.
Initially he insisted that he was innocent: after reports that he had confessed appeared in several papers he wrote to his solicitor: ‘Mr Hynes, Answer to your letter, I can earnestly say that there is no foundation in it whatever, for I have not signed or said nothing and it is a falsehood.’ But by the time the case came to court Cooke must have realised the hopelessness of his situation and confessed:
It was done with the truncheon I was carrying; my ordinary truncheon. When I got round the prison that night I saw her. I said, ‘What are you doing here?’
She said, ‘I am going to stop here until you go off duty.’
I said, ‘There will be another policeman up here directly.’
She said, ‘I would like to see him. I would tell him something.’
I said to her, ‘You clear off.’
She said, ‘I shall not.’
We stood arguing the point for some time and I went across the Scrubbs towards where she was found thinking I could get out of her way; but she followed me. In going across I took my truncheon out of my pocket and put it up my sleeve. When near the spot where she was found I said to her ,‘Are you going?’
She said, ‘No, I am going to stop and annoy you until Sunday.’
She then turned her head. I drew my truncheon and hit her on the side of the head. She fell down and never moved. I then hit her, I think, twice on the head and once under the jaw. I then placed my foot on her neck and kept it there for about five minutes. She never moved, but gave one gurgle. I then went back to the prison and saw police constable Kemp and told him I had been round the prison once, and we were jolly all night afterwards. I thought nothing of killing her. I have been much happier since she has been dead than I was before. She was always annoying me and I was in misery.
As with so many of the other criminals hanged by Billington, Cooke was tried and sentenced to death by Mr Justice Hawkins. In his summing up, Hawkins advised the jury that their decision was simply whether to convict Cooke of murder or manslaughter. He pointed out that in Cooke’s own statement the first blow was struck when the victim’s head was turned away. She never raised her arms to protect herself. Hawkins added:
Anything more cruel than that which followed the first blow when the poor woman was lying defenceless was hard to imagine. Words, without blows or without threats, amounted to no such provocation as would reduce that which would otherwise be murder to manslaughter. There was no suggestion of a threat or a blow on the part of the woman, but all that could be said was that the woman was annoying him and would not go away.
After such clear direction the jury was unlikely to return any verdict apart from finding Cooke guilty of murder, but they did ask for his sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment on the grounds of Maud’s provocation. Hawkins, who was known as The Hanging Judge, assured the court that the recommendation for mercy would be forwarded to the Home Secretary but added that, in his opinion, the death penalty was the only appropriate punishment.
Cooke was hanged at 9 a.m. on 25 July. Billington allowed a drop of 6ft 3in and death was instantaneous.
Billington arrived at Newgate to prepare for Cooke’s execution just after sentence had been passed on his next victim, twenty-eight-year-old Charles Squires.
Squires was a quarry worker living in Long Sutton, Somerset. His wife was twenty years old when they married and already mother to a two-year-old son, Jim Cable. Within a month of their wedding Mrs Squires reported, first to her mother, then to a local nurse, that her husband had beaten the child.
Although the police were involved, Jim remained with them and no further incidents were reported for the next few months. However, on the morning of 1 May 1893 Mrs Squires called out of the window, desperate to summon her mother living opposite. She told her that Jim was dead.
They called a nurse to attend the body. She thought that Jim had been smothered, at which point Squires claimed that his wife had accidentally suffocated Jim after falling asleep on him. But she refused to back up his story, explaining that Jim had been well when she put him to bed but had woken crying during the night. Charles had refused to let her attend to Jim and had gone himself, which had been the last time she had heard any sound come from the toddler’s room.
Charles Squires was tried at Wells Assizes and hanged at Shepton Mallet on 10 August.
Six days later Billington’s services were again required; this time at Chelmsford to hang the murderer charged in the second police-related killing that summer. This time the officer had remained on the right side of the law.
On Sunday 16 April 1893, Herbert Patten and his girlfriend were taking a Sunday afternoon walk through the village of Purleigh, Essex, when they were stopped by Elizabeth Eves. She was concerned because her husband, a police sergeant, had not returned home from duty that morning. They told her they had not seen him and continued their walk, leaving the village and walking across the fields toward Hazeleigh where, by coincidence, they were to be the ones to discover his body.
The unusual encounter with Mrs Eves gave Patten the urge to investigate when he spotted a patch of disturbed ground at Bellrope Gate. He quickly realised that the dark staining in the grass was blood and found the body of Sergeant Adam John Eves lying in shallow water at the bottom of a nearby ditch. Three sticks, one of which was broken, were also discovered in the ditch.
His body was taken to his cottage; the police were called as was Dr George Melmoth Scott, who explained his findings at the inquest which was held the following week:
The body was dressed in full uniform, with overcoat. The coat and tunic were unbuttoned. All the injuries were confined to the head and throat. There were three wounds on the forehead. One was over the left eyebrow, running upwards and outwards. Some of the wounds must have been caused by a knife or sharp instrument, others by a blunt knife or a stick. The injuries could not possibly have been self-inflicted. On the neck and throat were three cuts, two being under the left ear. The cause of death was haemorrhage from the large wound in the throat; the injuries in the head were not sufficient to cause death. All the wounds were inflicted during life.
On the same evening that Sergeant Eves died, a theft of corn had been reported from Hazeleigh Hall Farm and a search of the area near the ditch revealed discarded corn sacks and some spilled corn close to Bell Rope Gate. While local policeman, Inspector Pryke, was investigating the theft Chief Constable Captain Showers sent two extra officers, Inspector Terry and DS Dale, to help with the murder enquiry. An ‘incident room’ was opened in the Bell Inn. Pryke discovered that the records showing quantities of corn harvested had been falsified, there were at least thirteen bushels missing; very quickly the murder and theft investigations merged into one.
Purleigh was a small community and the prime suspects were a group of petty criminals: brothers Richard Davis aged thirty and John Davis aged thirty-four, forty-seven-year-old Charles Sales, and thirty-seven-year-old John Batemen. As well as having previous convictions for theft and poaching, which in John Davis’ case included an additional charge of assaulting Eves during his 1891 arrest, all the men had been employed to thresh the corn at Hazeleigh Hall Farm.
Arrests were made within hours of the discovery of Eves’ body. Bloodstains were found in John Davis’ cart and each of the other men had bloodstained clothes. Two further arrests followed the next day when another farm worker, Thomas Choat, informed the police that two of his colleagues, James Ramsey and his son John had made threats against Eves. James Ramsey’s house was searched and the police discovered more bloodied clothes and some empty wheat sacks.
On 3 August 1893 four of the men stood trial: the Davis brothers, Sales and Ramsey Snr. The case against them was that they had all been involved in the theft of the corn and having been caught by Eves, had attacked and murdered him. On 4 August the case against Sales was dropped. When the final verdict was delivered Ramsey was also found not guilty, but the two brothers were sentenced to death.
John Davis used his remaining time to save Richard’s life; he wrote a letter confessing to the murder, stating that he and Ramsey had attacked Eves, that Ramsey had been the one responsible for cutting the policeman’s throat and that Richard had done no more than help them steal the corn and throw the body into the ditch. Richard’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Although Ramsey escaped punishment for the murder, Richard and John’s wife later testified against him for the theft of the corn and he was sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude. In an imbalance of justice, John Davis was therefore the only one hanged for Eves’ murder.
James Billington did not conduct the execution alone, for the first time he was assisted by William Warbrick. Warbrick was local to him, a lay preacher in Lancashire and Yorkshire until be became an assistant hangman. Warbrick was not only close to Billington professionally, but also lived in Bolton and had known of the family for some years. On the face of it, his relationship with Billington could have included professional camaraderie as well as kinship towards his fellow Lancastrian; in reality the name Warbrick was to cast a shadow across the Billington family.
In his 1916 memoirs published in the Weekly News he introduced himself:
Born at Blackburn on April 13th 1843 I was at work in the mills when I was eight years old, and shortly after my mother’s death, when I was fourteen years of age, I bundled up my clothes, threw them out of a back window, and jumped out after them and ran away from home. That was a precocious beginning to life but at any rate I prospered sufficiently to take a wife at 19, and not so many months afterwards I was a witness at my first execution.
It was to be a triple affair in front of the old Kirkdale Gaol at Liverpool – for hangings were in public in those days – and although at that time I hadn’t the faintest idea of ever being an executioner I was very keen on seeing how men would mount a scaffold and face doom.
Everybody had been discussing the deeds for which these men had received the death sentence. There was William Robert Taylor, who had killed his landlord, Mr Mellor, at Manchester, out of a mistaken sense of grievance against him. There was also much mystery about his three children, whom he was believed to have murdered, but the main fact that lifted the case above the ordinary was his wife’s attempts to free her husband by voluntarily entering a policed station and declaring – ‘It’s me that committed the murder on the man Mellor; it’s not the man they have taken.’
She was found to be guiltless, and so her husband took his place on the scaffold beside John Ward, who, with Michael Burke (who was reprieved in such dramatic fashion), had been found guilty of the murder of Constable Jump at Ashton.
The man with whom my wife and I were then living at Waddington, in Yorkshire, near Clitheroe, was equally interested with me in these affairs, and when he said, ‘Suppose we go to Liverpool and see these executions,’ I jumped at the chance. A man in the village, who had been there before, advised us to get off the train at a station before we got to Liverpool, and we were glad to do so, when we found over 100,000 there. Our manoeuvre had enabled us to get fairly close to the scaffold.
The execution was to be at two o’clock, but someone had been amusingly enterprising, for before twelve o’clock boys were hawking printed leaflets, purporting to be ‘Taylor’s speech on the scaffold’!
Burke had been dramatically reprieved only a few hours before, the tidings arriving while he was taking final leave of his wife after a most pathetic interview.
When the condemned men came out, looking pale, but quite firm, Taylor struck me as quite respectable-looking, though Ward was a rough-looking customer. Calcraft, the executioner, busied himself with them for what seemed a long time, and while he was strapping their wrists, Ward pulled his cap off, and flung it towards the crowd. If I had put my hand out quick enough I could have caught it, but I preferred to guard my pockets. For I wasn’t a millionaire, and I had drawn my wages before setting out.
Nowadays when a man is hanged his neck is broken, and he dies at once. But then it was nothing more or less than slow strangulations, and when Taylor and Ward were dropped, we could see them jerking about for quite a time.
Nevertheless, I saw nothing to cause me any repugnance, and as we came away I said to my companion, ‘There was nowt to be afraid of in that.’
At the same time I cannot pretend to have felt any desire to act an executioner’s part in which respect I differed considerably from Jim Billington, who told me that he had had a passion for it ever since he was a lad.
For years before I began to assist him, Jim Billington and I were the greatest of friends, and in its proper place I shall have much to tell of the personal lovableness of this man, as well as the other characteristics that formed part of his strange make-up.
Jim was a Sunday school visitor at Farnworth, and I was a local preacher on the Primitive Methodist plan, and in this way we came often in contact, and became very close friends.
He at that time held very strict views on the question of sobriety, and for that reason had cause to be dissatisfied with the men who were his assistant executioners. Consequently, for about a year, he was continually begging of me to put in for the job as he wanted someone with whom he knew and could rely upon.
At length I gave way to his pleadings and he advised me to write to the Home Office asking to be placed on their list. I never sought any recommendation. I simply sent my preacher’s plan and it proved sufficient evidence of my respectability.
William Warbrick’s background bears some startling similarities to Billington’s: born just a few years and miles apart, working in a mill from an early age and a long-standing attraction to executions. He claimed:
It was solely due to the personal requests of the late James Billington that I became one of the instruments in carrying out the capital sentence as his assistant.
Given the choice, Billington would have been far happier carrying out his work alone. However, as the Home Office stated that the employment of an assistant should become obligatory, and Billington aimed to keep control of his engagements by bringing his own.
When Warbrick describes his first visit to Chelmsford it becomes clear how little training or mental preparation he had actually undertaken:
It was my first execution and although I knew we were not due in the prison until four o’clock on Tuesday afternoon preceding the morning of the execution, my anxiety got the better of me, and I prevailed on Jim Billington to go on the Sunday night.
Accordingly he met me at midnight on Bolton Station and off we set for London on our way to Chelmsford. We got there at 6 a.m. and went sightseeing for the rest of the day. We got to Chelmsford just before four o’clock on Tuesday afternoon.
I was just a little affected by the grim entrance to the gaol where we were kept waiting a minute or two while we timed in. Then Jim was sent to interview the Sheriff but I was not allowed to take part in this conference.
We went to view the scaffold, an operation I viewed with considerable interest. Contrary to the usual conception among the public, the hangman does not provide the rope. He provides nothing.
Ropes, straps and everything else necessary are sent in a box from the Home Office and the executioner neither brings anything nor takes anything away.
In that gaunt chamber of death stood a bag of sand, and I was curious about it until Jim explained its purpose. It weighted exactly the same as the doomed man and when Jim in the deftest way had fastened the rope to the beam running along overhead he hooked the neck of the sandbag into the noose and pulled the lever.
Thud! The trapdoor had opened and the bag had gone through the drop in the same way as our victim would fall on the following morning.
I found there were two reasons for this procedure. In the first place it tests if the apparatus is working smoothly. Secondly, it takes any remaining stretch out of the rope as the sandbag is left hanging there all night.
Warbrick was keen to fulfil his role as assistant and asked Billington to direct him:
‘You haven’t much to trouble about,’ Jim Billington replied, ‘I will do practically everything. When we go into Davis’ cell you must help me pinion his arms. When you get on the drop pull out the cotter-pin to free the lever and strap Davis’ legs. Then stand aside as spry as you can.’
Billington’s tone of confidence robbed me of all anxiety. From that time forward I never worried the slightest over any job, I knew I was with an exceptionally clever man and that I could rely implicitly upon him.
The last five executions of 1893 took place in the last five weeks of the year and were all Billington’s. On 28 November at Manchester a painter named Emmanuel Hamer, also known as Victor Hamer, was hanged for the seemingly motiveless murder of seventy-four-year-old widow, Catherine Tyrer. Twenty-five-year-old Hamer had been one of the men employed to paint a terrace of houses in Salford and on several occasions Mrs Tyrer had brought the men tea. On 28 October her neighbour, William Denson, heard a strange noise and saw Hamer run from Mrs Tyrer’s house. He gave chase while other neighbours went inside and discovered the elderly lady unconscious and bleeding profusely. She was taken to hospital but died of her injuries.
According to press reports of Hamer’s execution, death was practically instantaneous.
Hamer tried to blame the attack on alcohol, and it was never established whether his real motive was theft, or just the result of a petty grudge that had formed after Mrs Tyrer complained about his crude language.
One case deserving more notoriety than it ever received is that of John Carter, tried at Reading Assizes and executed at Reading Gaol on 5 December 1893 for the murder of his wife, Rhoda. Much of the detail of the case has been lost, the documents which still exist at the Public Record Office do not include Carter’s post-conviction confession, and the Oxford and Berkshire local papers are, in the main, not in a fit state to be viewed.
Rhoda Titcombe and John Carter had married in April 1893, she was thirty-one years of age and was John’s third wife. She also became stepmother to Thomas Carter, aged nine, and his five-year-old brother Nelson. They lived together at Bronfield Farm, Watchfield, near Farringdon, which at the time fell in Berkshire but is now part of Oxfordshire.
On 20 July Rhoda was seen by numerous people: by her mother Ann Titcombe who lived nearby, her stepson Thomas just before he went to bed, and by various villagers as she took a late evening walk with her husband. Those were the last times she was seen alive.
The following day, when Thomas and Rhoda’s mother asked where she was, John told them both the same story: Rhoda had gone to visit her sister. When this was proved to be untrue the Carter’s house was searched, the police found nothing but they were becoming suspicious. John Carter’s explanations were inconsistent, and on 24 July he disappeared from home. Two days later he returned and, as he walked back into the village, he was spotted by one of his brothers, James. John told James that he had killed Rhoda and that her body was buried in the workshop adjoining their house. James told the police and in a second search they discovered her body. According to the Berkshire Chronicle, ‘The head and knees had been squeezed together and the body was pressed into a hole 2ft square. The limbs appeared as if scorched.’
Local residents remembered a putrid smell coming from Carter’s house on the night Rhoda disappeared. At the inquest it was revealed that there had been an attempt to burn and then boil the body. Mr Coniston Spackman, surgeon, examined the body:
The examination as far as it went indicates that the woman must have died from strangulation, the swollen and discoloured condition of the face indicates suffocation or strangulation but post-mortem changes might cause the same appearance after the lapse of a week.
The finger marks on the throat indicate compression of the larynx by a right-handed man attacking his victim from the front.
The dislocation of the thyroid cartilage and its moveable condition indicates a sufficient amount of violence to cause death by strangulation.
The period of pressure required would be from three to five minutes according to the complete exclusion of air or otherwise and the victim would be unable to cry out nor would she be able to resist for much longer than a minute if the pressure was sufficiently complete to exclude all air from the lungs and especially if the nose mouth and chest were pressed upon at the same time, of which there appears to be some evidence from the fracture of the nose.
Carter claimed that he had become jealous when his wife insisted on visiting her sister. He explained that they had rowed then she had attacked him with a razor and had died in the ensuing struggle. His solicitor asked the inquest jury to return a verdict of manslaughter but they quickly decided that Carter must stand trial for murder.
Carter appeared at the Autumn Assizes with various members of his family including his mother-in-law and brother, who both testified against him. However, by far the most chilling account of the night of Rhoda’s death came from his nine-year-old son, Thomas:
I last saw her (Rhoda) at 8 o’clock she was then just going out for a walk with father. I and my brother went to bed about half past eight. I did not hear them come home. I slept in the next room to my father, upstairs.
In the night I heard something go knock, knock, knock on the floor in my father’s bedroom. It was a banging noise and lasted about twenty minutes. It woke me up. I heard someone call out. It sounded like Rhoda’s voice.
By Rhoda I mean my step-mother.
I heard the voice say, ‘Lord have mercy on us.’ I heard these words while the knocking was going on.
I was frightened. I did not get up. I heard no other voice.
I afterwards heard another knocking noise all down the stairs. It was heavier than anyone walking down stairs. I went to sleep afterwards and did not hear any more.
I had never heard any such noise before.
On 17 November Carter was sentenced to death and taken to Reading Gaol. The date for his execution was 5 December and in the days leading up to it he decided to confess to the murder of his second wife as well. He wanted her to have a decent burial and described the spot, at the same house, where her body was buried. Her remains were uncovered and reburied. Full details of her murder and the circumstances of his first wife’s death do not appear to have survived.
Billington arrived at Reading on 4 December and left immediately after completing his duties on the 5th. His appointment in Reading meant that he was conveniently located to carry out the execution of George Mason. Mason was a young soldier with the 3rd Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment based at Portsdown Hill, near Portsmouth Harbour, Hampshire. He had been headstrong, and bore a grudge against Sergeant James Robinson, who had confined him to barracks after minor misbehaviour on the evening of 26 June. Mason was still fuming at rifle practice the following day and he turned his gun on Robinson shouting, ‘Now I am level with you’. Robinson was mortally wounded and Mason became one of the three nineteen-year-olds, of which he was the youngest, executed during 1893. The other two were John Hewitt, hanged at Stafford on 15 August, and William Williams, hanged at Exeter on 28 March. Mason was the only one dispatched by Billington.
On 18 December Billington and William Warbrick arrived at Lincoln in readiness for the execution of Henry Rumbold the next day. Rumbold originated from Great Yarmouth and had been a merchant seaman. He was married to a woman who was also from Yarmouth but the two had separated soon after their marriage. Rumbold had eventually entered into a relationship with a woman named Harriet Rushby, but again this relationship was fraught with problems, mostly stemming from Harriet’s habit of dating other men during Rumbold’s periods at sea.
This continued for two years until November 1893. Returning to Grimsby from his latest trip, he discovered that Harriet had moved from their home into new lodgings. He tried to reason with her but she was determined to end their relationship. On 7 November he caught up with her and walked her home. Once inside her rooms a row erupted and Rumbold shot and killed her.
In court he insisted that the guilty verdict and the death penalty were the only appropriate punishments. His attitude towards his imprisonment only changed after a visit by his mother, brother and sister.
Rather than the story ending with Rumbold being a rather typical lover-turned-killer, it transpired that he still had another crime to confess. When his visitors informed him that the majority of his legal bill had been met by his brother, Rumbold became agitated. During his brother’s next visit he explained that when he had been the skipper of a boat, he had deliberately rammed into another boat in the North Sea. He had expected the man who had paid him to sink the second ship to ‘look after him’ by paying his legal fees, but since he had failed to do so Rumbold felt no loyalty towards him. He signed a statement before he was executed, supposedly giving the police enough information to act upon.
Shipping losses, deliberate and otherwise, were not uncommon at the time. A review in Diver Magazine on the book Shipwreck Index of the British Isles includes the paragraph:
The number of shipwrecks around our shores is inestimable. The authors will have gathered tens of thousands by the time the Index is complete. Many ships vanished with no record, others foundered in remote places and their end was never known. Some broke up swiftly and only floating wreckage remained to add to the abundance of unidentified but observed wrecks.
In March 1894 a case was brought by Henry Smethurst, owner of the ketch Fortuna. He was claiming damages against Messrs Hamiltons’ steam trawler, the Glasgow registered S.T. Ibis. On 17 August 1893 the Ibis, skippered by Rumbold, had collided with the Fortuna at a location about 280 miles east and half a mile south of Spurn Point. The Ibis’ owners pointed to Rumbold’s statement and claimed that Grimsby Alderman Smethurst had paid Rumbold to destroy his boat. The jury chose not to believe Rumbold and the Hamiltons were ordered to pay costs.
Had this case come up before Rumbold’s execution, he may have met his fate with far less calmness.
Of Rumbold’s execution, Warbrick said:
We sat and worked out Rumbell’s [sic] drop. He was the heaviest man I ever helped to hang, for he weighed 204lbs which was 9lb short of Mrs Dyer’s weight. He was 5ft 6in in height, and when we had peeped in on him we noticed that he had a fairly thick neck.
When all these facts had been taken into consideration we decided that his drop should be 6ft 2in …
… About a minute before eight on the execution morning Billington and I entered the condemned cell after getting the usual signal from the Governor. Rumbell [sic] jumped nimbly to his feet as we did so.
He shook hands with me, but ignored Jim Billington. He made the common mistake of taking me for the senior executioner and Jim for the assistant …
… Rumbell [sic] was very different from most men in his demeanour during the last tense moments, most men go to the scaffold dazed and see hardly anything of what goes on but Rumbell took a keen interest in all that was done.
He looked down at me as I knelt and strapped his legs together, and that done, he took a keen glance all round. I am sure that some of the onlookers were considerably more put about than was the doomed man.
He was given no time to lose his remarkable self-possession. In a trice Billington had pulled the white cap over the condemned man’s head and launched him into eternity.
The year was not to finish on such a calm and collected note. On 19 October forty-five-year-old Frederick Wyndham (also known as Frederick Window) had shot and killed his seventy-two-year-old widower father, James.
Frederick was a butcher living near to his father between Bisley and Oakridge, near Stroud. Hot tempers ran in the Wyndham family and it was the father’s own unreasonable behaviour which had tipped Frederick over the edge. About three weeks before his death James had lost his temper with his daughter, Susanna Stephens, and had twice attempted to run her over. This infuriated Frederick and added to the anger he already felt at his father’s ‘immoral’ relationship with the live-in housekeeper Mrs Mills.
While out shooting with his father Frederick lost his temper and stormed away, threatening to shoot Mrs Mills, but changed his mind and returned, shouting, ‘I’ll shoot you! I’ll shoot you!’ before discharging both barrels into his father. He told his sister what he had done before handing himself in. His signed statement read, ‘I solemnly declare that I shot him – put two barrels into him. I hope he is dead. He is dead I hope and I can die happy in a minute.’
He was executed at Gloucester by James Billington on 21 December. Thomas Scott was the assistant. Wyndham had not finished ranting by the time he was on the scaffold, and his final words were, ‘Bless you all, goodbye,’ followed by the most ungrantable of last wishes, ‘I should like to kill that woman before I die.’