ollowing the enquiries and debate about hangmen and training in the 1880s, a memorandum was issued in 1891 on ‘instructions for carrying out an execution’. This document was the result of both the bunglings of Binns and the long-standing critical lobby in parliament against the barbarity of the death penalty. Another influence on this was the nature of executions throughout the Empire. By the closing years of the century, the regional hangings done by district magistrates in such places as India, were being questioned too, as the nature of military rule changed.
The memo gave detailed instructions about duties over a timescale that covered a preparation period as well as the scaffold work itself. For instance, this was the note on procedure which came as part of the worry about ropes: ‘After the completion of each test the scaffold and all the appliances will be locked up, and the key kept by the Governor . . . but the bag of sand should be suspended all the night preceding the execution so as to take the stretch out of the rope.’ In other words, the science and the craft of hanging was encoded. The only thing that could not be described and passed on was the professional behaviour in the ‘turning off work. That was still open to both use and abuse.
Billington is a name that was all over the papers for several years, such was the dominance of the Billington hangmen from Lancashire. The dynasty began with sheer amateur cheek and progressed through to extreme professionalism, with plenty of incidents along the way.
A social documentarist venturing into Newgate for some interesting ‘copy’ met James Billington and gave a picture of the execution shed. He noted that ‘from the condemned cell to the place of execution is not more than 40 feet’ and that Billington was the man impressively in control: ‘I never hope to experience this awful, ignominious and brutal death . . . Who knows, the writer may be a great man some day if he escapes Mr Billington . . . The hanging performed by Mr Billington leaves nothing to be desired.’ He sarcastically goes on to say that the dead felons, could they do so, would provide a ‘certificate of merit’ to the hangman. It would seem, then, that in James Billington, the first of a long dynasty of hangmen from that family in Lancashire, was most successful and that his name is not attached to any farces or bunglings.
James Billington. Laura Carter
Though a Bolton man, as Steve Fielding has written, he replaced Berry and that ‘it was unusual for the normally thrifty Yorkshiremen to employ a Lancashire man, who would have to travel and therefore run up an expenses account . . .’ But it did happen, and for eight years he was the man who became quite a familiar sight at Armley gaol, busy in the execution shed there. He had been married twice, having been born in Bolton in 1847. His first wife, Alice Pennington, died in 1890, aged only forty; they lost three children, including a little girl called Polly. One of the few anecdotes we have of him that show us the ordinary, human side of the man is the tale that, after his daughter’s death, her schoolfriends brought a wreath for her and the future hangman was overcome with grief, saying, ‘See, I’d sooner have lost £5 than ha’ lost her!’
He first worked in the mills as a piecer and then he sang in clubs and pubs before entering the retail trade (as many hangmen did) as a barber at Farnworth. James was, even when very young, interested in the macabre subject of execution, and he used to experiment with a dummy, done to death from a home-made scaffold constructed in the backyard where they lived at Higher Market Street in Farnworth.
As he was rooted in that community, cutting hair and no doubt chatting about holidays and work as barbers tend to do, he had to try to avoid the morbid curiosity aroused by his other job. His shop obviously attracted journalists and he tried to travel under a guise of anonymity too. He was known as Higgins when out on execution business, very smart and presentable. This would be the man met and respected by the reporter in Newgate, who had no doubt gone there partly in search of this quiet professional ‘in his lair’.
He had long wanted to be a hangman, and had applied at the same time as Berry, wanting Marwood’s position. He was to be in office for seventeen years, from 1884 to 1901. After the application, Billington was called to York where he was interviewed and asked to describe what method he would use to hang people. When he first began he worked near London, employed to work in the London and Home Counties. But he started work at Armley in 1884, hanging Joseph Laycock. Laycock was a worker at Kelham Island in Sheffield and was always a problem to someone. From being very young he lived by his fists and by indulging in petty crime. When he married Maria Green she probably had no idea what a problem she had saddled herself with, and they soon had a large family, four children born by 1884. Maria’s life was desperately deprived and tough. Laycock was often away as he was a militiaman (and also sometimes behind bars) and the young wife even had to resort to collecting bottles to make ends meet.
The couple were settled in White Croft and their relationship was more than stormy – in fact it was deathly perilous. Laycock had a homicidal streak and the local community knew that. Maria’s way of coping was to drink heavily, so matters degenerated rapidly. He assaulted her and did a spell in gaol for it. But not long after that, two men saw Laycock early in the morning, looking agitated. Mysteriously, there was no sound from the Laycock home for some time after that. Neighbours and Maria’s mother eventually realised that something dreadful had happened, and they saw Maria lying dead, her head almost off her shoulders. They called for the police.
In the Laycock house the officers found the man with his throat cut, not dead, but wanting to expire. He had cut the throats of all four of his children. When he was well enough to stand trial, the common problem in these cases was to emerge: was he insane? Lawyers throughout the nineteenth century increasingly found themselves having to try to construct a defence of insanity in these instances, and it was always difficult to do so. In the case of Laycock, it was known that his father and his uncle had both taken their own lives. The judge was of the opinion that this was not the act of a sane man, but the jury disagreed.
Laycock’s response to the death sentence was: ‘Thank you, your worship, thank you.’ After inspection by medical men, out to verify the point about genetic insanity, resulted in their insisting that there was no such influence in this case. He was to be a victim of Billington. It was a blessed release, one might argue. When it came near to the time he was to be taken to be hanged, his resolve weakened and he was weeping, overcome by the desperate situation, when Billington came to the cell. Laycock asked, pleadingly, ‘Thou’lt not hurt me?’ The report of the conversation was written in such a way that Billington’s Bolton accent was attempted: ‘Theaull be eawt of existence in two minutes.’ But Laycock collapsed and had to be helped to the noose. As Billington fixed the rope where he wanted it, the condemned man spoke his last words: ‘Oh my children, my children. Lord have mercy on my children.’
Billington’s record of executions went far beyond Yorkshire, though. He was the man who hanged Amelia Dyer at Newgate, who had murdered a four-month-old child. She had been one of the people involved in the so-called ‘baby farming’ scandal at the time, probably killing at least six babies, purely for the money. But his most famous (or infamous) client was arguably the poisoner, Dr Neil Cream, at Newgate, in 1892.
Cream was born in Scotland but he emigrated to Canada in the 1850s. After graduating in medicine he started practice in Chicago, but he was fond of using poison and had a streak of homicidal tendency in him, poisoning his mistress’s husband in 1881 and when released ten years later from Joliet prison he went to London and indulged his psychopathic desires by attracting prostitutes whom he could use for experiments with strychnine.
But the bad doctor liked notoriety and enjoyed the risk of being found – a common trait in serial killers. He even went to the police to tell them that not only was he in danger of attack but that he knew the identity of the killer who had been dubbed ‘The Lambeth Poisoner’ (himself of course). Not long after, following a spell back in America, he returned to London and while doing his nefarious experiments, he was described by a survivor and of course, arrested. A woman pretended to have taken pills, knowing the danger she was in, and went to fetch the law. The officers found seven bottles of strychnine at his home. The next step was to court, and after that, Newgate to await execution.
James Billington, along with others present at the scaffold, heard the doctor say, ‘I am Jack the . . .’ just as he was ‘dropped’. But of course, he was in Joliet gaol at the time of the Whitechapel murders.
Most of Billington’s hangings were full of incident, but few so chaotic as the triple hangings at Newgate in 1899 when an assistant called Warbrick and a whole crowd of warders were present at the scaffold following a brawl in the courtroom at their trial. Billington did not have a proper view of everyone involved and he pulled the lever while Warbrick was still pinioning one of the felons. The assistant fell down the trap with the three killers, and he had the wit to grab one of the pairs of legs to break his fall.
As with all the hangmen, James had to keep plying another trade, and he took a public house called the Derby Arms in Bolton. He married again in 1891, a woman called Alice Fletcher, the daughter of a local greengrocer. But before we leave the account of the first Billington, there is one more job he did that has to be told. This relates to the man in Oscar Wilde’s great poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, who killed the one he loved:
He did not pass in purple pomp
Nor ride a moon-white steed,
Three yards of cord and a sliding board
Are all the gallows need.
So with rope of shame the herald came
To do the secret deed.
The murderer in question whom Wilde saw and knew was trooper Thomas Wooldridge, who had killed his wife, Laura Ellen, by cutting her throat, at Clewer, near Windsor. James Billington hanged Wooldridge on 7 July 1896. The soldier was in the Royal Horse Guards, and Wilde dedicated his poem to him:
In Memoriam C.T.W.
Sometime trooper of the Royal Horse Guards
Obit H.M. Prison,
Reading, Berkshire
7th July, 1896
James’ period on the Home Office list ended in 1901; there were several other Billingtons who were hangmen in a long dynasty, but none of them were specifically hangmen appointed for Yorkshire as James was. But what happened was that the family – Thomas, who died young but was assistant, John and William – did some executions in Yorkshire. Most notable was William, the second of James’ three sons. He performed a number of executions in his short period in office (1902-5) and in the records of these, one in particular gives us a vivid picture of the Billingtons at work: this was a hanging in Ruthin in February 1903.
William Hughes had been in the Cheshire Regiment and had served in the Empire; he returned in 1890 and worked as a collier near Wrexham. He married Jane Williams in 1892, but after a few years (and the death of one of his sons) matter between them degenerated and he left her. Jane had to work as a housekeeper and William was convicted for desertion of his family. There was a burning jealousy in William as he knew that his wife was now with a man called Maddocks. Intending to kill both his wife and her lover, he arrived at the Maddocks house with a shotgun. When he learned that Maddocks was not there, he shot both barrels into his wife and then shortly after gave himself up to the police.
Ruthin gaol is a small, oppressive place (now a crime museum) and it had a small execution shed behind. The authorities had worked out the logistics of hanging, as a contemporary account explains: ‘The prisoner occupies as his death cell, two cells which had been knocked into one . . . The cell was about fifteen yards or so from the scaffold so that he had only a short distance to walk. In the wall of the prison a hole had been knocked through, which led onto the second storey of the gallows . . .’
Into this small, quiet market town came the Billington brothers, William and John. The Denbighshire Free Press had this account of them:
Great curiosity was evinced both in Denbigh and in Ruthin to see the hangman Billington . . . From appearances no one would think for a moment the two quiet-looking, pale-faced persons attired in dark suits, with bowler hats, were the men who would be chief actors in the launching of a human being into eternity . . . They bore absolutely no luggage . . . that had been forwarded to the prison to await them . . . Upon arrival at the jail Billington had hardly put his hand upon the bell when the attentive warder opened the door and admitted them . . .
It must have been a difficult night, even for the two professionals, as they slept ‘very close to the condemned cell where their prisoner was sleeping his last earthly sleep . . .’ It is a small local gaol, with narrow corridors and low roofed cells and offices. It would not be going too far to imagine that they heard Hughes snore – if he slept at all that night.
But the main point here is the bland, restrained efficiency and bearing the hangmen had. The Billingtons took their trade seriously and planned everything well. The local reporter appears to have known everything they did, pointing out that Billington ‘announced everything to be in perfect order before he retired early’. As for the prisoner, he simply asked for one last thing – to see a photograph of his family looking happy, and that was granted.
William’s most celebrated victim was Samuel Dougal, of the Moat House Farm case in Chelmsford. Dougal had killed and buried Camille Holland at the farm and it had taken detectives a long time to find her body in a trench. The importance of that case with regard to hanging was that there was an incident on the scaffold involving the chaplain. The Reverend Blakemore had a strong desire to ascertain the truth for moral and religious reasons, in his capacity of attendant chaplain. But he stepped over the line of protocol and good sense when he delayed the whole proceedings for some time, asking Dougal, who was standing on the trapdoor with the hood over his head, if he was guilty or not guilty. There was a delay, but the man was heard to say the word ‘guilty’ a split-second before the lever was pulled. This led to a scandal, and finally to a reform in legally-sanctioned procedure, barring chaplain’s from interfering with the work of professionals in the penal service. Billington must have been patient that day.
William also hanged a sailor from Durham called John Sullivan. It was a case in which the defence of unsound mind was tried, because in the navy he had suffered heart problems and also depression. It did him no good at all. What Sullivan did was murder a friend and shipmate called Lowthian with an axe. It was well documented that Sullivan had an intimate relationship with the other man, and his closeness had transmuted into a crazy obsessive desire to control. He had been seen holding a knife to the man’s throat, and then later he held an axe and talked about murder. One night, as Lowthian was chatting to a friend, the killer approached and sliced him with the axe. There was some kind of basis for a defence case, because rambling, mad letters were found in the killer’s belongings, and he was totally deranged for some time before the attack.
The author of the Billington story – Mrs Van der Elst, stopping the events on hanging day. Author’s collection
But at the trial in June 1904, his defence counsel, Arthur Hutton, lost the case and Judge Grantham gave the death sentence. William and John officiated at Pentonville on 12 July.
There is considerable confusion about the sources of information for William Billington. A book printed in the 1940s has this in a chapter on executioners:
THE MADNESS OF BILLINGTON
William Billington was public executioner. In 1925 he went mad and murdered his wife and two of their children, then killing himself.
This was written by Violet Van Der Elst, a militant campaigner for the abolition of hanging. It seems that someone was in a muddle here, as that fact seems to apply to the Rochdale hangman, John Ellis.
Regardless of all this, the fact is that William was a busy man in the years between 1902-05. The last hanging at Newgate was of George Woolfe and William saw to that. Woolfe was convicted of killing his girlfriend, and he proved to be the last of 1,169 felons hanged at the famous old London gaol, since the gallows were placed there instead of Tyburn in 1783. Only three months after that death, Newgate was demolished. It had long been thought that the old place was not suitable for modern prison work, especially that of execution.
The main chroniclers of hangmen in Britain agree that William lived from 1873 to 1934. Yet the Billington family historian has him born in 1875 in Standish. What that historian does explain is that there were indeed family problems around William and his wife but not murder or suicide. In July 1905 he was charged with failing to maintain his wife and two children; they were taken into the Bolton workhouse as a result. He was given a month’s hard labour in gaol. There was further trouble and he had a second sentence later. The real muddle comes with the note in the family history on the web site that ‘William died on 2 March 1952 in his early 60s.’ If he was born in 1875, that is clearly wrong.
William’s life is a mystery in some ways, but what is clear in terms of the work of the Billingtons, execution was often difficult and sometimes sensational. The most important factor in this here is the event of 1899 in Lincoln. There, when James was booked to do a job, he was too ill and William went in his place. Amazingly, the astonished Governor allowed matters to proceed. William told the Governor that he had experience when in fact he had not, and was not on the official list until three years later. He had to tell the Prison Commission that he had performed an execution while not sanctioned by the Home Office.
Another Billington scandal was one involving a mysterious character called ‘Warbrick’ who ran a campaign of hatred against William, at one point writing to the Home Secretary, sending a newspaper cutting with an account of William being convicted for assault. But Warbrick did act as a very capable assistant most of the time.