ohn Price was born in London somewhere around the year 1677, and was at first made an apprentice to a scraps and rags trader. After two years, when his master died, Price did not exactly hang around waiting for developments: he ran away and took up with any trade or general labouring he could. The Newgate Calendar author states that ‘His mother being left in circumstances of distress, was not able to give him a proper education . . .’
We know that he went to sea as well, putting in service on battleships (men-of-war) and there was plenty of war to be involved in at the time, with the Low Countries mainly. When he came back on land to find a way to start again, it was as the hangman that he found his metier, although the record he left is hardly a proud one.
Price was always in trouble, stepping over the line into lawlessness. But he was also feckless and constantly in debt. This was such a problem that on one occasion, after officiating at an execution of three felons at Tyburn tree in 1715 (the first main Jacobite rising), he was arrested for debt. It is entirely in keeping with the life of the typical Georgian hangman that he just scraped himself out of a long sentence, largely because he had the perquisites of the job: what he earned from sales and tips that day paid his debts. If desperate, a hangman could always sell the clothes of the dead, for example, in addition to selling the rope and having the expected sum to make the ‘turning off swift.
But there were more debts and these dogged him until he was eventually imprisoned in the Marshalsea, in Southwark, described later by Charles Dickens as ‘Partitioned into squalid houses standing back to back and hemmed in by high walls duly spiked at the top.’ We can have some idea of how grim that place was when we note that one of the warders, a man called Acton, was tried for murder in 1729. But Price had two spells in the limelight of criminal history - first as hangman and then as the hanged man, and his time in the Marshalsea defines the first period. Ketch followed him at that point.
John Price rivals that most infamous of eighteenth century villains in the list of his adventures, Jack Shepherd. This is because he and another rogue escaped from the place; they managed to make a hole in the wall and run for it, after several months inside. But there was a dangerous streak in Price; not long after that he killed a man, in 1718, and then he attacked a woman in Bunhill Fields. This was a very brutal killing. In the Newgate Calendar, the account is explicit and savage:
The three-legged mare, York Tyburn. Chris Wade
In the course of the evidence it appeared that Price met the deceased [Elizabeth White] near ten at night in Moorfields, and attempted to ravish her, but the poor woman, who was the wife of a watchman, and sold gingerbread in the streets, doing all in her power to resist his villainous attacks, he beat her so cruelly that streams of blood issued from her eyes and mouth, broke one of her arms, beat out some of her teeth, bruised her head in a most dreadful manner, forced one of her eyes from the socket and so otherwise ill-treated her that the language of decency cannot describe it . . .
Price was tried and sentenced to death. He denied the crime, but there were two eyewitnesses. These people had seen him in flagrante delicto, one saying that Price was ‘busy about her’ and that the poor woman’s clothes had been pulled up to expose her flesh. Price had responded to the witnesses’ intervention with drunken curses and the words, ‘Damn you . . . what do you want?’ He had told the people then that the woman was nothing but a drunk. Of course, in court, Price said the usual defensive statement: that he had merely been passing by when he saw Mrs White lying in that awful state. He even claimed that he had helped her to stand and then been found and suspected of the attack. The poor woman suffered a long, painful death, taking four days to die.
John Price was condemned to die. The story circulated in the Weekly Journal newspaper was that Price was not worried at all by the thought of the noose, and that he went to see the present hangman, took him by the hand and said, ‘He had hanged a great many and now he must hang him . . .’ The scene took place in Newgate. He was in that gaol for five weeks, in the condemned cell, a place where curious visitors could come, for a small fee, and stare at those awaiting death on the scaffold. The cell would have been dark, extending for around twenty feet by fourteen, and Price would have been constantly shackled in irons.
Petty Treason illustrated, a burning of a woman. Malefactor’s Register, 1800
The Weekly Journal reported: ‘He hath since sentence . . . been drunk several days excessively and committed horrid outrages.’ These appear to have been sexual depravity, and one report states that he raped a little girl who brought him food: ‘.. the hangman in Newgate has declared that a few days before his execution he had carnal knowledge of her . . .’
He was hanged on 31 May 1718 but at the Newgate gallows: there was no long, ritualistic procession to Tyburn for him. Before the noose was in position, he begged the gathered crowd to pray for him and they hoped that ‘they would take warning by his untimely end’ and after the hanging he was gibbeted at Holloway. We have an interesting footnote to this, and it tells us a lot about hangmen as a general profession: the hangman who preceded Price was called Marvell, a blacksmith, and he made the iron cover for the corpse on the gibbet. In keeping with the tendency of hangmen to be ‘multi-skilled’ as we say now, Marvell in retirement still played a part by using another skill.
John Price was just forty-one when he died. Historian James Bland has pointed out a mysterious note on the man’s life and story - that a line in the Weekly Journal of 28 May, 1720 notes that ‘In the same prison died one Price, widow of the late hangman who, had she lived, would have been transported.’ That is all that we know of her story. Much of the life of John Price is clouded in legend and half-truth. The facts we know for sure are few. Publications at the time confused his name and story with that of Ketch himself, such was the confusion about the number of executioners working in the last few decades of the seventeenth century.
The Newgate Calendar tells his story and ends with a moral assertion: ‘The lesson to be learnt from the fate of this man is to moderate our passions of every kind . . .’ Price never learned that lesson, and he slid from drunkenness to the lowest depravity, a notorious hangman with a shameful biography, though very much a man of his time in that horrendous criminal underworld of Georgian England.