140 Public Executions
Swansea
has many distinctions, such as being where the first weekly English language
newspaper in
Wales - The
Cambrian - was published in 1804, and likewise the first Welsh language
newspaper in
Wales
- Seren Gomer - in 1816.
It would hardly
be a distinction, but
Swansea is also where the
last public execution in
Wales
took place
. This was not such a violent occasion as
mentioned last week - the burning of Bishop Robert Ferrar in Nott Square, Carmarthen, in March 1555 - but
it was a hanging in April
1866 outside
Swansea prison,
witnessed by a crowd of thousands. This
inspired a poem by Harri Webb, while Ferrar’s execution had inspired a poem by
Ted Hughes, who was related to the bishop on his mother’s side. Disorderly scenes at the hanging in Swansea contributed to future
executions being carried out within prison walls.
Swansea’s most notorious public execution - also
a hanging - was that in 1290 of William (Gwilym) Cragh of Llanrhidian,
sentenced to hang by William de Breos, with the execution carried out on Gibbet
Hill (by today’s North End Road).
Bizarrely an apparently dead Cragh later recovered, and this was
regarded as a miracle.
The last person to be publicly executed in Wales was Robert Coe, aged 18, from the Midlands. He worked
in a blacksmith’s shop as a striker at the Powell Dyffryn Works, and in
September 1865 in Mountain Ash’s Graig Dyffryn Wood
he murdered fellow-worker John Davies with a
hatchet, severing his head.
The
motive was murder - Coe took 33 shillings from the dead man and hid the
body.
But Coe and Davies had been noticed
drinking together in an inn on the day of the murder, and were seen by a stile
leading to the woods.
Some months later Davies’s
body was discovered, and when the borrowed hatchet was found to contain traces
of blood, Coe was arrested.
He did admit
to his crime just before his execution, for which crowds poured in to
Swansea, with special
trains laid on: around 15,000 people were present at 7am, including women and
children.
Street vendors had set up
stalls near the scaffold, with some even driving their carts right up to the
gallows, then removing and hiding the wheels, so that the police could not move
them on.
They would charge exorbitant fees
for people to witness the execution from the carts.
Essex-born William Calcraft, then in his
sixties, was the hangman, a role he performed about 450 times.
But as the crowd pushed and jostled, scores
were injured and many trampled on.
The Cambrian
commented, “We are far from believing that any salutary effect is produced upon
the minds of the spectators by the exhibition presented them, by seeing a poor
wretch deliberately and publicly strangled, and would gladly welcome the
alteration in the law.”
Public
executions
were often held on market days to enable
the largest number of people to see them, with school parties attending as a
moral lesson, and public houses and gin shops doing a very brisk trade on a
hanging day. Sometimes executions were carried
out around midday to give people time to get there.
Death masks might be made of famous criminals
after their execution and put on display - that of body-snatcher William Burke,
executed in
Edinburgh
in 1829, shows the indentation in his neck left by the noose.
In
London,
Madame Tussaud’s waxworks might purchase a prisoner’s clothes and other objects
from the hangman to display, to add authenticity to wax figures in the “Chamber
of Horrors”.
Throughout the nineteenth
century Quakers and such authors as Dickens and Thackeray were prominent in
calling for an end to all this.
The last public
execution in mainland
Britain
was in May 1868, just before the Capital Punishment (Amendment) Act came into
force to end public hanging, two years after Robert Coe was hanged outside
Swansea prison.
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