eorge Smith’s photograph shows a man with a resolute expression and a firm mouth. He seems like a man who had stoicism and fortitude. He may not have attracted the notoriety of Calcraft and Binns, but he was busy as a hangman, notably in the West Midlands, and if for nothing else, he will go down in crime history as the man who hanged the Rugeley poisoner, William Palmer. Smith was born in 1805 at Rowley Regis near Birmingham, and although he was from a good, solidly Victorian family, he was something of a ruffian in his early years, and worked in gangs doing petty crime.
He married young and that does not seem to have forced him into regular work; he was imprisoned several times at Stafford for theft, and never really found what he wanted to do in life until the fancy of being hangman attracted him, and he managed to become assistant to William Calcraft, who used various assistants at times, including Evan Evans of Carmarthen, a man who changed his name to Robert Anderson because he was known as ‘Evans the Hangman’. The first work he did alone was of James Owen and George Thomas outside Stafford gaol in 1840.
Throttler Smith. Chris Wade
As private executions came in after 1868, Smith worked at times with Calcraft to learn the trade with rather less pressure than was normal at a public event. The first of these was the hanging of young Thomas Wells at Maidstone. Wells was a teenage railway porter who had killed his superior at Priory Station, Dover, after being told he was insolent and slack in his work. Wells loaded an old gun and shot Mr Walsh. There was no defence: it was murder. Wells was on the scaffold at Maidstone on 13 August 1868 and George Smith prepared him, using a hempen ring on his neck.
After that, Calcraft and Smith worked at Durham, hanging Alexander Mackay. Smith, who wore a velveteen jacket, suggesting he was something of a dandy, and it was none too successful, as a reporter commented that ‘signs of life were visible for a longer time after the bolt was drawn than we remember to have seen previously . . .’ Then in August 1872, Calcraft and Smith presided at a triple execution at Newgate. Smith was by that time a well-seasoned professional.
The sure sign that Smith was a real professional was in evidence at the hanging of wife-killer Samuel Twigg in 1861. Twigg lived in Bilston, marrying Mary Walton in 1845 and settling down to life as a bricklayer. But Twigg was a heavy drinker as well as a hard worker; he tended to become violent when in his cups, and by 1860, after his fighting had landed him in gaol a few times, he was heard to say about his wife, ‘One day I’ll finish her for good.’ On 24 July 1860, he went on a binge and came home roaring drunk, hammering on the door. When he and a drunken friend demanded food, Mary didn’t cooperate and Twigg became threatening to her. Luckily for the wife, Twigg soon slept, falling asleep on the floor, but as Mary took a light downstairs for their son, Twigg asked for a kiss and then stabbed his wife in the stomach.
People tried to help, but she was clearly bleeding to death. First the doctor and then the constable arrived, and Twigg was arrested. The locals outside shouted ‘Hang the bastard!’ That is exactly what happened. There was an appeal for a reprieve but at eight in the morning of 5 January 1861, he walked onto the scaffold in front of a huge crowd of several thousand, many of them being there after taking special trains. Smith was quick with the pinion and hood, and there was a massive swell of shouting and booing as the lever was pulled and Twigg slid down to his death. He was, as the custom dictated for such felons, quicklimed in the coffin and buried in the prison grounds. Smith was a true professional.
Throttler Smith, as he became known did jobs at Norwich as well as at Stafford. He was to make mistakes, as all the other hangmen did, but when it came to the really high-profile victim of his skills, William Palmer, he did the task well. Palmer poisoned fourteen people, all in order to gather some cash to feed his gambling habit. The gambling was unsuccessful and the debts mounted; although he was a fairly successful physician in Rugeley, setting up his practice in 1846, he had a wild streak which included fathering several bastards and following slow horses at the courses. Murder was the simplest way out of his problems, he thought, and so he began to use his knowledge of drugs and poisons to see off all kinds of people.
His first victim was his mother-in-law, who had come to live with his family in 1848; she died soon after arriving and her possessions and cash went to Mrs Palmer – which meant effectively that Palmer had the money to spend of course. By 1854 deaths in the Palmer household were more frequent than the average, even in that time when infant mortality was high. By that year, four children and an uncle had died in the house; when his wife died, he was left a very large sum of money, and the income from insurance firms was considerable. But the gambling went on, and after the doctor’s brother died the insurance people became suspicious and refused to pay out yet again.
What eventually caught him out was the death of his gambling friend, John Cook. They had both had a day out at Shrewsbury races and when they came home they went for drinks, as Cook had made some money (Palmer had lost as usual). But when Cook was ill at the party, and was subsequently treated by Palmer before he died, the suspicions around the doctor’s circle were too positive and rabid to ignore. The law paid him a visit and he was charged with murder. He had to be tried in London, such was the local hatred. In May 1856 he stood in the dock at the Old Bailey. It was a most notorious case. The Daily Telegraph reported on 27 May:
Each day since Palmer was first arraigned at the bar of the Old Bailey, among all classes of society, from the ennobled peer down to the most humble of London costermongers, there has been one grand prevailing desire to hear the trial, and if possible, to obtain a glimpse of the Rugeley hero of poisoning notoriety. Every morning has attracted crowds of spectators to the vicinity . . . from Ludgate Hill to Newgate prison there was a dense crowd of people prior to the opening of the court . . .
When he was sentenced and the prospect of such a celebrity villain being hanged was appreciated, the fervour was uncontainable in the media. The public had also learned a good deal about the nature of strychnine, Palmer’s chosen poison. Letters to The Times and other papers educated the readers on this, on several occasions. One writer noted that ‘In proof of the correctness of the pinion that strychnine remains in the bodies of animals killed by it, permit me to quote a single instance . . . . On a fox being found dead and the proprietor of the covert being blamed for it, on enquiry it appeared that some hens’ eggs had been contaminated with strychnine, that a rook and magpie and eaten these . . . and then been eaten by the fox . . .’
On Saturday 14 June at eight in the morning, Throttler Smith executed Palmer at Stafford. Barriers had been placed in the main road and in the street where the scaffold was placed. As well as 150 of the regular police force of the county, a large number of special constables was assembled. The authorities were well aware that a huge crowd would gather. The Daily Telegraph set the scene:
The inns of Stafford drove a busy trade on Friday. All day long, people flocked into the town, by road, by rail, on foot, on horseback, in gig, carriage or on donkey. Such crowding at the railway station, such jostling in the tavern yards, tavern parlours and coffee rooms, such crowding and pushing in public houses . . . Beds had been at a premium for days before, for everybody wanted to get shelter . . . There was no bed to be got, not for love nor money . . .
People with an eye to business had provided stands which would be good viewing points for the hanging; costs for these ranged from five shillings to a guinea. Primitive Methodists arrived to walk with banners proclaiming ’Prepare to Meet Thy God’ and walked around with papers warning of the dangers of gambling.
The press took a deep interest in the condemned man’s last week in the gaol, noting all visitors; Palmer’s brothers and sister went to see him, and he would not see his one remaining son. The press commented: ‘The poor child, it appears, is still at Rugeley with his grandmother; he has been informed that his father has gone to some distant part of the country and is anxious for his return . . .’ The chaplain was with Palmer most of the night, and readers were told that Palmer had a cup of tea but nothing to eat, and said that he was prepared for the ordeal.
Throttler Smith was naturally a figure of intense interest to the reporters. Some writers got his name wrong, referring to him as John; it was stated that ‘he was dressed in a very clean white smock-frock; he is a remarkably thick-set, robust looking man, apparently between fifty and sixty years old . . . he carries on some little labouring trade in the town of Dudley.’ Some facts given were wrong, such as one report that he had only done a few other hangings. As usual, enquiries about the hangman’s fee were made and it was aid that he had a flat fee of five pounds plus expenses.
The accounts of the hanging present a remarkably controlled and smooth job, despite the fact that 25,000 people were watching from various places and distances. The Telegraph wrote:
The hangman, having drawn the cap over the face of the prisoner, retired from the scaffold and withdrew the bolt that secured the drop, which fell, and he appeared to die instantly. There was not a single convulsive effort observable, his pinioned hands gradually dropped, and he ceased to exist apparently without a pang. His hands, which had presented a white, plump appearance, had turned blue, indeed almost black . . . The awful silence which prevailed was terrible . . .
Such a high-profile celebrity killer was the subject of more interest even after death. After hanging for an hour, the body was cut down and then a cast of Palmer’s head was taken by a man from the Liverpool Phrenological Society.
Palmer was buried within the area of the gaol. Ironically, people had gambled on whether or not Palmer would hang; betting types took odds of 12 to 1 that he would not hang. In keeping with the killer’s poor gambling, it was made known that he had placed a massive bet on a horse called Yellow Jack in the Derby that year. He would have lost his £400.
As for Smith, near the end of his working life he was to experience a fiasco similar to the Liverpool Dutton story. This was the case of Christopher Edwards. This was yet another wife killing. Edwards was a locksmith from Willenhall, aged thirty-four. He had knifed his wife. The hanging turned out to be a highly irregular affair. At first it seemed that things had progressed quite normally, as the lever was pulled and Edwards’ body hung on the rope. But just as the officials were ready to accept it was a clean job, the body began moving; Edwards moved like a fish in shallow water, jerking about and struggling for life. It was four minutes before he died.
Smith had had another bad experience in 1866 with a man called Collier. This was at Stafford, and Collier was a poacher who had killed a local worthy; the rope slipped away from the overhead beam at the first attempt, and Smith had to take the man down so that the chaplain could talk to him, while another rope was rigged. As a second attempt was begun, the crowd was restless and abusive: there was around five minutes lapse of time between the two hangings, and it is not clear how much the poor culprit knew about all this.
This was the end of the line for Throttler. After all, he was sixty-seven. As with so many other hangmen, he was something of a local celebrity of course. He spent his last years thirty miles from Stafford, at Tividale, and he died in 1874. He was sixty-nine and it seems that, again with a feature of the hangman’s declining years, drink played a part in his death. His son, another George, did a few hangings as assistant, but did not progress. There was no chance of there being a dynasty as was the case with the Billingtons and the Pierrepoints. But the Victorian world knew the name of Throttler Smith, forever linked with the Rugeley poisoner. In fact, he had proved to be one of the mentally toughest on record, enjoying a general good regard with the public. Comparisons with the abuse suffered by Binns make that clear. He did have one difficult experience, though, as he was waiting for a train to Birmingham after hanging a man called Price. The Warwick and Warwickshire Advertiser tells the tale: ‘He had a bundle of clothes in his hand which were supposed to be those which Price wished to be given to the mother of the murdered girl, but which proved to be a suit of his own. He stood on the edge of the platform and a strong fellow mounted the balustrade, jumped on him, and bore him down onto the line, to which some twenty or thirty other men soon made their way . . . The 12.50 goods train, which does not stop at Warwick, had not arrived . . . Some of the ring-leaders threatened to push the executioner under the engine when it came up.’ They were after revenge on him because he had not let Price finish his prayers before pulling the lever. Smith was saved by the intervention of the station master.