n 1835, a broadside headed ‘The Conversion and Death of Samuel Burrows’ was published, and it claims to be an account of the life of the Cheshire hangman, Samuel Burrows, as told in an interview with him the day before he died:19 October 1835. Burrows had died of a ‘liver complaint’ it recorded. Through the considerable pain, Burrows told the story of his life in that career, spanning twenty-four years, in which time he had executed fifty-three felons. Burrows’ place of work had been the gallows in front of the new City Gaol and House of Correction, built in 1807 to replace the old Northgate Gaol at Chester. It is clear from old prints that from the famous city walls, hangings could have been seen, so it is not difficult to imagine the crowds with their grandstand views.
As with so many hangmen, Burrows took a pride in his work and he also had a moral perspective on the nature and purpose of the office. He said in that last conversation that he had had many enemies, but that ‘ . . . when they rebuked me I laughed at them, for it was all folly, for I solemnly declare I never injured any person in my life . . .’ Here, he is making clear the fact that a hangman is performing a public duty - something done without malice. He insisted on his ‘innocence’ of anything homicidal, as every hangman has to do, perceiving judicial killing as something totally different from a common murder outside the law of the land. The tone of Burrows’ statements makes him seem like a well controlled, equable character, someone who weighs and considers words before speaking, a circumspect man, something valuable for this hated profession. So morally upright was the man that he had made sure that his own son was brought to justice for theft. This boy, Charles, was given seven years’ transportation and went to the prison ships in the Thames, the hulks, before being shipped across the world to Van Dieman’s Land.
Burrows had lost contact with his son, and noted that he would not see him again before his imminent death. Charles was more than likely living a new life abroad and would probably have made a new life for himself after probationary years at the penitentiary, most likely at Port Arthur. Burrows’ attitude to all this family tragedy is uncomplaining and accepting. The fact that his son was a wrongdoer did not change anything in his attitudes.
The Dumb Steeple, a Luddite rendezvous. The author
The Cheshire hangman was active in the years when the country was in political and economic turmoil. Between c.1810 and 1834 when he was in office, crimes against property were common as the working classes and the underclass such as maimed soldiers and beggars were on the roads; poaching was common, and in the years at the end of his period in office, the 1830s, there was agricultural trouble as well as urban protests and riots, over all kinds of matters, as it was a time of depression and social unrest.
Burrows was brought up in the rural working class; there is no detail about exactly what he did, and what skills he learned. What is certain is that, like Askern and Curry, it was the payment of the work that was most attractive. I say that because he was fond of a drink, and he fits the template of the typical executioner of his time in that, of course. There is no escaping the fact that the common hangman in the Regency years was particularly a person to be reviled and scorned. He was one of the instruments of the repressive authoritarian government, paranoid from the fears of revolution which had happened across the Channel, and worried that anarchy in the streets would grow rapidly as new industries and rural enclosure brought the ‘rabble’ into towns. It was an age in which the local militias were often called out to stop the riots and protests, and the landlords and wealthier land-proud middle class feared for their lives. Many, like Patrick Bronte in Haworth, kept a pistol and perhaps fired it in practice as he did, in his rural parish, scared that when night fell, he and his daughters would be easy victims of desperate gangs.
In Cheshire in Burrows’ time, the common crimes were very much what they were elsewhere in England: machine-braking, riot, destruction of property, murder, highway robbery, arson and infanticide. Burrows was in business against the Luddites, as mentioned earlier in Yorkshire. In 1812 Luddites attacked a mill in Stockport and fifteen men were sentenced to die. However, in keeping with the trend of that time to try to commute sentences where possible, there were just two men waiting for Burrows’ dealing out death: John Temple and Joseph Thompson. What was happening in that horrendous year of 1812 was that magistrates across the counties of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire were trying to communicate with the various county sheriffs to have militia standing by, and also to infiltrate the gangs of Luddites by applying the services of agents provocateurs to mix with the enemy and spy on them.
Thompson had been involved with an attack on John Goodair’s factory at Edgeley; he and others had started a fire and destroyed the new power-looms that were the focus of hatred and unrest. There was a particular witness who saw him, and she was secure because the rioters left when the militia arrived. Temple was in a gang that did something equally horrific in that context - they broke into a private residence and threatened the family, saying they wanted guns. Temple was arrested and stolen materials were found on him. A double hanging was ordered.
The report of their executions is painfully familiar in the chronicles of hanging: Thompson did the worst thing a hangman could do in those days when the strangulation incurred led to a slow death - he tied the knot at the back by the thick muscle of the neck, not close to the carotid artery. Poor Thompson dangled in agony, fighting for life, doing the ‘rope dance’ for seven minutes. Temple was more fortunate and died comparatively quickly. But Burrows was not deterred by this error. In fact, local papers make it clear that he tended to swagger and make it clear to his public that he was unmoved by anything. Even after he had hanged his one woman victim - Edith Morrey - it was reported that he was not noticeably affected (as Calcraft was).
The Morrey case was one of those events that put into the public arena the whole matter of petty treason as opposed to murder. This was 1813, a time when the burning of wives for murdering their husbands was not on the statute book, and had that not been the case, the usual custom of strangling the woman before she was at the stake would have been Burrows’s job. In 1790 that barbarous penalty was abolished, though there were cases of that abolition being ignored in some places. Luckily and mercifully, she was hanged. Morrey had plotted the murder of her husband, with a man called Lomas actually doing the deed. The judge thought that Lomas was ‘the least guilty’ and so the wife was seen as the worst criminal in the affair, branded ‘the principal in the horrid crime’.
Burrows was very much in demand in 1813; that was the case across the land then, due to all kinds of social antagonism. Most of the offences were very extreme - notably arson and destruction of property. But it was in 1820 that there was a major event in Burrows’ career. It was not surprisingly a double hanging that was the cause. But oddly, for it was the kind of stunt that the drunk Curry might have done, his action here goes against his deathbed insistence that he did no wrong to anyone. In fact, what he did was give the already maligned profession an even more bad press. He was due to hang two young men - William Rickington and Ralph Ellis. The former had gone into Coddington rectory by force and stolen materials, then set fire to the building. Ellis, only nineteen, had burgled a home in Ellesmere Port. What Burrows did was reported by the local paper: ‘In affixing the ropes, the fellow who fills the disgusting office tried the length of them, by applying with the utmost sang froid the noose of one to his own neck; some person in the crowd cried out For shame, Shame! The fellow repeated the motion, smiling at his own callosity of feeling, which called forth the execration of the multitude . . .’
As historian Derek Yarwood has pointed out, the local newspapers took against Burrows and made sure that the world knew what a drunkard their public hangman was. Yarwood writes: ‘Whereas before the Chester papers had appeared content to protect the anonymity of the city’s hangman, the perennial Burrows had the kind of personality and presence they found impossible to ignore . . .’ But there was no smoke without fire. Before a hanging in 1826, of a burglar, Burrows was actually kept under lock and key on the night before the execution, merely to keep him away from the drink, under watch at the Governor’s house.
This habit of ensuring the hangman’s sobriety carried on after that case; in 1829 when he had a double execution to control, he was restrained again, this time in a prison cell. Once more, we have to note that clearly there was no substitute, or surely an obvious difficulty in obtaining an assistant, such was the obloquy placed on the profession. Although Burrows’ reign was generally one in which he was always in disgrace or at least fulfilling the general image of the public hangman as a dissolute, low creature, sub-human and beneath contempt, there was one aspect of his career, related to so-called ‘social crime’ that shows another side to him, and indeed to the justice system and personnel at the time. ‘Social crime’ was generally the kind of offence related to the game laws. In a world where the wealthy propertied folk kept a jealous and zealous guard of their goods and game, poaching was seen as a legal issue. This is because men would shoot a rabbit or a hare to feed a hungry family, not simply for the criminal frisson and the sheer trigger-happy pleasure of hunting at night. In 1829, a man called Henshall and his crime demonstrated some of the associated problems.
Henshall was only twenty, a farmer, and he joined a gang going poaching one night, on the land of the Earl of Stamford. The Earl was fighting fire with fire, very much in the manner of the western sheriffs who raised a posse. Henshall and his friends found themselves pitted against a large body of gamekeepers and assorted recruited men, and someone in the young man’s gang wounded a gamekeeper. Henshall was caught and charged; in the 1820s there was a universal paranoia against all kinds of rural crime, and the established power-base in both Westminster and in the counties wanted deterrents. Henshall was to die. After the age-old practice of a fellow criminal saving his neck by turning King’s evidence, Henshall, it seems, became the ‘patsy’ of the gang and took the brunt of the punishment.
The subsequent events in court and in gaol were highly irregular. Even the judge, Mr Justice Jervis, a straight-laced man who had earlier written to the Home Secretary, protesting about the ‘vile’ Sunday papers, wept. In that letter, he had said that the moral backbone of the nation was rotting, and ‘violated with a face of brass the constitution and laws of this country’. This same man was now visibly moved by the plight of young Henshall. Contrary to his popular image, so was Burrows. The newspaper report said,
‘Even the executioner, hardened as he is by his natural disposition, and his long familiarity with scenes of this nature, even he was moved to tears by the affecting scenes in the ante-room, as well as those whose painful duty it was to witness it . . .’ The painful scenes were of Henshall praying and begging divine forgiveness. His behaviour was exactly the kind of thing that the journalists and social critics of the day wanted in their accounts of hangings - repentance and confession.
Burrows was involved in a mishap of proportions that would have made even Curry look proficient. This was in 1834 - a year of living very dangerously in England. At that time, the results of poverty and repression were evident everywhere. A cursory read of The Times for that year reflects the sense of danger and violence everywhere, and Chester was no different. Burrows found that he had four men to hang in April 1834. One of these, John Carr, had committed a terribly savage attack on a man, with multiple stabbings, over a few pence. But, as with Curry at York, Burrows was to be troubled by hanging several victims at once. It was an event somewhere on the cusp between horror and dark comedy, because the bolt did not move and Burrows desperately tried to shake and shove the device into action. The four hooded men, awaiting eternity, stood and shuddered. What followed was the hangman’s nightmare. All four men went into the air, kicking and fighting for life, and one of them got his feet on the wood supporting the scaffold. The crowd that day had an extra treat in terms of ‘turning-off drama.
At various times, Burrows was attacked by the good citizens of Chester, but he deserved some kind of retribution for his sheer arrogance and drunken displays. On one occasion he had taken too much beer and was publicly disgracing himself by talking about his prowess with the rope, actually holding some clothes of a former dead felon. He was himself in court, facing the judge, after that disgusting performance. He was fined five shillings and if he could not pay that promptly, he would have been arguably the most abused and reviled character in Chester history - a hangman in the stocks. It was certainly not unknown for hangmen to be hanged, but it was virtually impossible for a hangman to be stocked or pilloried, as the event would have totally ruined the man in question. However, Burrows had no good reputation to lose, of course. He paid the fine.
Sam Burrows died in 1835 and after that, Chester hangings were rare affairs, with hangmen being brought in to do the work; William Calcraft was usually the man for the job. Burrows’ record is overall nothing to be proud of; he goes into the dark chronicles of hangmen as one of the worst drunks in an occupation notable for its use of ‘Dutch courage’ in seeing the turning off through to death. Burrows would not only have found beer easily available at any time of day: if he needed extra confidence he could have bought gin. One streetwalker of early Victorian London wrote: ‘Demands for gin assailed us on all sides, women old and young, girls and boys in the most woeful tatters, some cried for a pint, some for a glass . . .’
Drink, as with almost all the notorious hangmen, had been both the ruin and the cause of success for Burrows. But of course, in his dying words as he spoke of his life, he could say with resignation, ‘I know I have many enemies, and when they rebuked me I laughed at them.’ At least he survived, unlike poor John Ellis whom we shall meet later, a man who took his own life. As Ellis’s biographer, Jack Doughty, wrote, ‘As public executioner, he once possessed nerves of steel. Now they had gone to pieces. For over two years he had suffered from neuritis, heart trouble and nervous trouble . . .’ Those words could apply equally well to Samuel Burrows. We have to remember that in his time, hangings were barbaric, with no consideration given to the anatomical factors and to humane death. In the years before the mid-Victorian years, the range of capital offences was horrendously large. In Scotland, a young man called Aikenhead was hanged for blasphemy in 1697, Bible in hand, although he had offended by saying that Christianity was a ‘load of nonsense’.
Any number of such victims, for offences ranging from theft to poaching and from assault to robbery, came Burrows’s way, and he had to find a way to cope with all that brutal ‘turning off of desperate, poor and deprived lives: some were evil villains and others he executed were feckless and half-starved. Such was the lot of the common hangman.