We can only speculate as to why the execution of certain criminals drew more of a crowd than others. Sometimes the notoriety of the crime committed affected the draw (Dick Turpin is a case in point), or even the weather might limit numbers. Special note was always made of any execution where the strength of the crowd was considered to be great, usually referred to in the records as ‘a large concourse of spectators’ sometimes even resulting in injury to the assembled onlookers. In 1649 the hanging at York of a convicted husband and wife, George and Maria Merrington, proved so great an attraction that the day ended with broken bones. In Mary’s case, the crowd was variously estimated to be between five and twenty thousand.
She was not alone on the gallows that Monday morning, as she was hanged in company with a fellow poisoner, Joseph Brown, an agricultural labourer also convicted at the 1809 Lent assizes for the murder of his 55-year-old landlady, Elizabeth Fletcher of Hensal near Ferrybridge, and the attempted murder of her sister Sarah, in 1804. Though suspected at the time of Elizabeth Fletcher’s death, Brown escaped justice as there was insufficient proof that he had liberally laced the Fletcher sisters’ sweetened ale with an overdose of laudanum. Brown, like Mary, was also widely regarded as possessing some mystical powers, the basis of which was his ability to predict the death of others. Whether or not he foretold his own demise, he was certainly the cause of it, as having later been convicted of theft and sentenced to transportation, while awaiting embarkation for Botany Bay, he confessed to his earlier crimes, the surviving Fletcher sister giving damning evidence against him at his re-trial.
Officiating on the gallows on the morning of the 20th was York’s most infamous hangman – the twice-sentenced, twice-reprieved William ‘Mutton’ Curry. In York, the position of hangman was usually filled by a convicted felon who had been pardoned sentence of death on the condition that he accept the job; some of whom even took on something of a dubious ‘celebrity’ status. A convicted sheep-stealer, hence his ovine nickname, ‘Mutton’ Curry was originally a labourer from Thirsk. His sentence of death had been twice commuted to transportation, and while being held in York Castle Gaol in 1802 awaiting his enforced passage to Australia, he was prevailed upon to accept the vacant position of hangman. Curry was known to be partial to a drop of gin, perhaps hardly surprising given the nature of his work, and this consequently led to some less than professional executions. On one occasion, Curry was so drunk The Times reported that:
‘The executioner, in a bungling manner and with great difficulty (being in a state of intoxication), placed the cap over the culprit’s face and attempted several times to place the rope round his neck, but was unable.’
It took the assistance of the gaoler and the sheriff ’s officers to complete the job, before an incensed and increasingly hostile crowd angrily demanding Curry’s own execution. On another occasion, clearly the worse for drink, Curry actually ended up falling through the trap door himself. He would go on to hang fourteen Luddites (machine wreckers) on one day in January 1813 and did not actually retire until 1835.
As the time for execution approached, both prisoners proceeded to the gallows, accompanied by the sheriff and his attendants. It was noted that ‘the number of persons assembled was much greater than usual for such occasions’, many of those turning out to see Mary swing having come a great distance to witness the spectacle, and a large number travelling from Leeds on foot, straggling along the course of today’s A64 still linking Leeds to York. One wonders how many of their number were made up of those once swindled by ‘The Yorkshire Witch’. Nevertheless, the appearance of Mary upon the gallows ‘created a visible emotion among the spectators – not of brutal insult, as once disgraced the British character in the metropolis, but of awe and deep commiseration’. A hushed and respectful silence fell over the assembled crowd during the few moments the prisoners spent in prayer, only interrupted by a half-suppressed cry for ‘mercy’. The Reverend Brown made one last attempt at persuading Mary to relieve her conscience and unburden her soul before the drop fell, enquiring whether she had any communication to make? Mary said she was innocent.
It was reported that some of the spectators gathered that morning really thought that Mary would save herself from death at the last moment by employing her supernatural powers to vanish into thin air as the noose tightened – but when the drop fell Mary’s life ended, along with that of Joseph Brown, both sent to face ‘another more awful tribunal’ in the Great Hereafter.
After execution by hanging, it was usual for the body to be left dangling for about half an hour before being cut down and, ordinarily, claimed by friends or relatives for burial. A skilled hangman’s knot would ensure the certainty of a broken neck, usually at the third vertebra below the skull, and therefore a swift end, but the alternative was a slow and agonising death by strangulation – the sinister origin of the phrase ‘to pull one’s leg’ and the expression ‘hangers on’ harking back to the time when a criminal’s family would pay someone to pull down on them during their hanging, and thereby minimise their suffering. However, that part of Mary’s sentence stipulating ‘that your body be given to the surgeons to be dissected and anatomized’ was now carried out. Mary Bateman’s body was loaded onto a horse-drawn cart to be taken to the Leeds General Infirmary. Yet with the road from York to Leeds thronged with horses and gigs, and those who had come on foot to see the execution, it was close on midnight before the hearse reached its destination. Even at this late hour it was met by ‘immense crowds of persons’ curious to view Mary’s lifeless body. Such was the macabre demand for a look at the deceased murderess that on the following day Mary’s corpse was exhibited in the surgeon’s room at the infirmary, with threepence admission charged for the privilege. Incredibly the number of people willing to pay exceeded two and a half thousand, many of them touching the body before they left the room, a superstitious precaution against the belief that Mary might interfere with their dreams. Consequently, the sum of £30 was raised for the benefit of the General Infirmary; at least Mary had performed one genuinely charitable deed, even if it were from beyond the grave, though of course she was never actually buried.
Mary’s dissection was an ‘event’ doubtless attended by some who were not aspiring physicians - during the nineteenth century, the spectacle of dissection was quite available to members of the public; they might be patrons, artists, or even ticket-buying curiosity seekers who had paid a high price, certainly in this instance. What is surprising is that Madame Tussaud does not seem to have been interested in capturing Mary’s likeness in wax for her ‘separate room’ as the Chamber of Horrors was then known. It may be that she missed the boat, quite literally, because her touring show was in Dublin during the trial and she moved it to Belfast in May. Pauline Chapman in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors gets Mary’s name wrong (calling her Mary Bates) and offers no explanation as to why she was not included in the list of ghoulish exhibits. It would be another twelve years before there were any new additions. After the dissection was complete, the greater part of Mary’s skin was removed and tanned and preserved, and strips of the resulting ‘leather’ sold as lucky charms and curios. To modern eyes, though this undoubtedly appears to have been a grisly practice, and Mary Bateman seemingly one of the earliest murderers to have her skin thus preserved, she was certainly not the last. The skin of William Burke, the murderer of Daft Jamie in the Netherbow district of Edinburgh and the skin of William Corder, who killed Maria Marten in the Red Barn, both appeared in later years as book covers and calling card cases. Mary Bateman’s skin ‘tanned and distributed in small pieces to different applicants’ according to the January 1873 edition of Notes and Queries ended up spread all over Yorkshire. Among those who possessed such a gruesome keepsake was William Elmhirst, a Deputy Lieutenant for the West Riding, and though it seems improbable that a man in so upright a position and renowned for his eminently dull character would relish a portion of a murderess, he was a friend of Mr Chorley’s, one of the officiating surgeons at
the Leeds Infirmary, and the same surgeon who had looked after William Perrigo, and who had provided the analysis of Mary’s poisons at her trial. Indeed a folding cup made of Mary’s skin certainly belonged to Elmhirst’s son Robert at one time. The gruesome fascination didn’t end there however, as other portions of Mary’s skin were employed to cover books – the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, allegedly owned a volume bound in her skin, shelved in his library at Marlborough House, and other similarly bound tomes were once held in the library of Methley Hall in Yorkshire, though since the house was demolished in 1963, their whereabouts are now unknown.
With regards to the fate of the rest of Mary’s mortal remains, amongst the 1867 catalogue of curiosities listed in ‘Mr Stubbs’ Private Museum’ in Ripon, North Yorkshire, appears an entry for ‘Part of the Tongue of Mary Bateman, the notorious Yorkshire Witch’. Obviously the macabre memento had later passed into another’s hands as in 1891 the editor of Yorkshire Notes and Queries wrote that:
‘The tongue of Mary Bateman is in the possession of a gentleman in Ilkley, with whom we are personally acquainted. There is absolutely no doubt as to its genuineness. The curious reader may see it at any time by the courtesy of the present owner.’
In fact, Mary’s pickled tongue was still on a list of those items held by Bolling Hall Museum in Bradford in the 1950s. However, as the exhibit was deemed to be too macabre to be held in the Museum’s collection it was destroyed by incineration.
As for Mary’s skeleton, this was used initially for anatomy classes and afterwards, together with a plaster cast death mask of her face, put on display in the Leeds Medical School. Here the dismembered skeleton remained for nearly 200 years, before being loaned to the Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds, along with the death mask where, minus the legs and without the mandible, but bizarrely with an apparent additional rib, it was an exhibit which until very recently could still be viewed by the public. There is perhaps an echo here of Lord Justice-Clerk Boyle officiating at William Burke’s trial in December 1829 summing up his sentencing with the words ‘And I trust, that if it is ever customary to preserve skeletons, yours will be preserved, in order that posterity may keep in remembrance of your atrocious crimes.’ It was and is still on display in the Anatomy Museum of Edinburgh Medical School.
A further tangible vestige of Mary Bateman’s execution is also still in existence, held in the archives of the York Museum Trust. This is an original copy of one of the many broadsheets printed to be hawked to the crowds attending that day, detailing the crimes of Mary Bateman and Joseph Brown.
Just like the programmes sold at sporting events today, these single large sheets of paper, printed on one side only, were customarily sold to the audiences that gathered to witness public executions in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain as a memento or souvenir of the day’s proceedings. Vendors would set up their carts and booths hours before the appointed execution time, selling food, drink, souvenirs and even pornographic material in addition to these broadsheets to a pressing crowd eagerly awaiting the coming judicial spectacle. Ephemeral in nature, these publications were aimed at the middle or lower classes, and most sold for a penny or less and documented the gruesome and gory facts and rumours which surrounded the crimes of those about to be publicly executed. Usually sold near the gallows on the day of the hanging, a woodcut illustration invariably accompanied a description of the final hours of the condemned and their last dying confession, all in sensational, dramatic detail. Even if only a limited number of people witnessed an execution – which was certainly not the case in York on Monday 20 March 1809 – such pamphlet-style accounts were designed to reach a wider audience.
In this instance measuring a little over fifteen inches long by nine inches wide, the Bateman/Brown broadsheet was produced in William Storry’s printshop in Low Petergate in the city. Storry’s business was still listed in the second volume of the History, Directory & Gazetteer of Yorkshire for 1823, the printing works at number 53 part of a site which had been used as a printing works since before 1768, and an adjacent house, at number 7 Grape Lane having been acquired in 1819 by William Storry as an extension to the works, so clearly Storry was still in business over a decade after Mary’s execution, though her eventual legacy would prove to be far more enduring.
Chapter 10
‘Damn her name to everlasting fame’
Certainly Mary Bateman achieved a sort of celebrity through the notoriety of her criminal behaviour that still fascinates today. The astonishing nerve of the woman in carrying out her cons and frauds, her ingenuity and her total amorality – she never met a lie she didn’t like – have assured her an established place in the list of female murderers and even given the ‘Yorkshire Witch’ a kind of immortality.
Mary was an ‘ordinary’ woman turned into an ‘extraordinary’ one, and in this respect has the ‘fame game’ really changed? Though today’s media coverage facilitates the mass devouring of crime stories and while we may recoil in shock and horror, inherently we wonder why people kill and we are intrigued by the ways in which the deed is accomplished, and with such obvious relish that it seems a part of the ordinary human condition, and ever was it thus. To quote the renowned crime novelist Dorothy L Sayers, ‘Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent enjoyment than any other single subject.’ And the public always has had an appetite for a great villain, especially a female villain. Hogarth’s portrayal of Sarah Malcolm, the multiple murderess sketched by the talented satirical, and at times subversive artist in 1733, while she awaited execution in Newgate Gaol, is a perfect case in point. Prints of her portrait were sold at sixpence each, and devoured by an eager public, hungry to put a face to the infamous murderess, much in the same way as The Extraordinary Life, published in 1811, two years after Mary Bateman’s execution, and running to a twelfth edition. Sensational stories of female criminals figured large in the salacious public imaginations of their time, augmented by the awfulness of their crimes – Sarah Malcolm was charged with the brutal murders of 80-year-old Lydia Duncomb, 60-year-old Elizabeth Harrison, and 17-year-old Ann Price. The two older women had been strangled; Price’s throat had been slit. Like Mary Bateman, Sarah Malcolm was to maintain her innocence to the end. Coincidentally, echoing Mary’s ultimate fate, though some contemporary accounts report that Sarah was buried, Hogarth’s Biographical Anecdotes assert that her body was dissected by a Professor Martyn, who later donated her skeleton, in a glass case, to the Botanic Garden in Cambridge. Amongst the skeletal exhibits which were later moved from there to the Museum of Biological Anthropology, of the skeletons the Museum still holds, while several can be identified as female, none, with any certainty, can be identified as Sarah Malcolm.
Perhaps had the prolific Hogarth still been alive (he died in 1764) he would have relished taking Mary’s likeness, reinforcing a brand of celebrity foreshadowing the high minded Victorian morality that would affect and determine who was thought to be deserving of fame. In this context, criminals still held the limelight. It is tempting to put flesh on the remaining bones of Mary Bateman and visually and metaphorically bring to life a woman who has been dead for over two centuries, but this is almost impossible given the sources. Only one near contemporary image of Mary is available to us, that being the engraving for the frontispiece of The Extraordinary Life, where she is shown holding up in her right hand the spurious hen’s egg bearing the inscription ‘Crist is coming’. In his Lives of Twelve Bad Women published in 1897, Arthur Vincent, who featured Mary alongside other notable villainesses who were ‘consistently bad’ such as the infamous Moll Cutpurse and the aristocratic poisoner Frances Howard, the Countess of Somerset, stated that:
‘There is no worthy likeness of the ‘Yorkshire Witch’, nothing but a rough cut prefixed to the “Extraordinary Life and Character of Mary Bateman”, which is here reproduced in all its native barrenness.’
Whether the artist engraver had actually seen Mary in life we cannot
know. Her face is certainly bereft of any expression or emotion, no more revealing than the plaster cast death mask taken from her skull which until recently was still on display in the Thackray Medical Museum alongside her partial skeleton, or that of the 3D render of Mary’s face undertaken by University College London in 2001, at the behest of a BBC television series. With regards to the engraver responsible for Mary’s image, we can guess his identity thanks to a contributor to the 1868 volume of Notes and Queries, a long-running quarterly scholarly journal founded in 1849 as an academic correspondence magazine, in which scholars and interested amateurs could exchange knowledge on folklore, literature and history. A certain Mr Edward Riggal of Bayswater, in possession of one of the ‘ten thousand copies’ of The Extraordinary Life, a second edition of the book, noted the ‘curious portrait – inscribed “Mary Bateman, the Yorkshire Witch. Topham, sc. Leeds”.’ However, the engraver’s name is not visible on the frontispiece engravings featured in the reproduction copies of The Extraordinary Life available as a reprint today. While the name of Topham is usually associated with the Leeds-born watercolourist and engraver Francis William Topham, as he was born in 1808, the year prior to Mary’s execution, it would seem likely that the Mary Bateman engraving was executed by Francis’s uncle Samuel Topham, born in Kirkgate in Leeds in 1788, and to whom the young Francis was apprenticed as an engraver. The ‘sc.’ added to the Topham name indicates the Latin ‘sculpsit’; many early bank note engravers using ‘sc’ as the equivalent of saying ‘Engraved by…’. As to the authorship of The Extraordinary Life, attributed to ‘Anonymous’, another entry in the 1868 Notes and Queries leads to the suggestion that the book may well have been written by Edward Baines who was also responsible for the book’s publication, printed by Davis & Co based in Vicar Lane in Leeds. As well as being a politician, an MP for Leeds in the 1830s, Baines was a newspaper proprietor (he bought the Leeds Mercury in 1801) and the author of numerous historical and geographic works of reference. Amongst his best-known writings are The History, Directory and Gazetteer of the County of York and a History of the Wars of Napoleon; it is not beyond the realms of possibility that he was responsible for writing The Extraordinary Life, a work of ‘moral reflections’ as he must have been acutely aware of Mary’s newsworthy trial and execution.
The Yorkshire Witch Page 13