by Phil Clarke
James (Jemmy) Botting
A pitiful object who shuffled about in the street, shunned and disliked by his fellow townsmen anonymous brighton resident
At the end of the eighteenth century, the Bottings were a large and established Sussex family who had been resident in the county since Saxon times. Even today the memory of James Botting is considered by his descendants to represent something of a blemish on an otherwise respectable family name. James Botting’s story illustrates perfectly just how isolated executioners often were from the rest of society, and how unfavourably the profession was looked upon by most ‘normal’ people – even members of the executioner’s own family. Having said that, it does seem as if James, or Jemmy as he was known, did not do a great deal to help himself.
James Botting lived in West Street, Brighton. He owned a house there that came to be known as ‘Botting’s Rookery’. The house was often frequented by Brighton’s lower class of vagrant, many of whom had few options but to lodge under the same roof as Jemmy Botting, who even they regarded as an ‘unsavoury’ character. Whether he accepted lodgers for the sake of company or to supplement his executioner’s income is unclear, but he was certainly not a man who made friends easily.
Botting was first employed as an executioner at Horsham Gaol at the turn of the nineteenth century and, having trained as an assistant under Langley, he worked his way up to become chief executioner at Newgate Gaol between 1817 and 1820. At the end of his career, Botting often boasted that he had executed a total of 175 people. This number is probably accurate, and it is known that in one week alone he hung a total of thirteen people. For multiple hangings Botting used a gantry-type rope gallows with two parallel beams, similar to the ‘new drop’ gallows used by his predecessors Brunskill and Langley. Botting is perhaps best known for executing the Cato Street Five, who attempted to overthrow the British government, but failed dismally and paid with their heads.
The Cato Street Five
During the first part of the nineteenth century, England was suffering from great social, economic and political upheaval, made worse by the effects of England’s long war with France. The problems collectively became known as the ‘Condition of England Question’, and many talented political minds were dedicated to the task of sorting out the mess.
The members of the Cato Street Conspiracy were veterans of the Spencean Philanthropist society, which was named after the radical speaker Thomas Spence. They were essentially a hard-line socialist group that advocated common ownership of land and the destruction of the royal family as well as the English aristocracy. The Spenceans had grown more and more angered by what they saw as the elitist government’s mismanagement of English resources, as well as the actions of the army during the events of the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, when the calvalry charged on a crowd of protesters, killing eleven people and injuring a further 500. These angry Spenceans formed a splinter group who believed in bringing about an English revolution, similar to the French Revolution which had gone before. That splinter group has become known as the Cato Street gang.
Some of the members of the Cato Street conspiracy (including Arthur Thistlewood, the man who would emerge as their leader) had been involved in the spa fields riots of 1816, and so were already considered enemies of the state. Police spies described Arthur Thistlewood as a ‘dangerous character’ who believed passionately in violent revolution. The name, ‘Cato Street’, comes from the location of their meeting place near Edgeware Road, London – a premises rented by member John Harrison – from which terrorist operations could be planned and executed.
The death of King George III on 29 January 1820, destablised the government still further and, during the fallout, the Cato Street gang were mobilising. The gang planned to invade a cabinet dinner, hosted by Lord Harrowby, the lord president of the council at his house in Grosvenor Square. Having stormed the building they would then assassinate the entire cabinet, as well as the prime minister, Lord Liverpool.
At his trial, conspirator James Ings, a butcher by trade, claimed he intended to decapitate the cabinet ministers and display two of their heads on Westminster Bridge as a symbol of their victory. It remains unclear which particular two heads he was referring to.
Thistlewood sent Jamaican-born William Davidson, a former employee of Lord Harrowby, to gather information about the dinner. Harrowby’s servant told Davidson that his master wouldn’t even be in London on the night the dinner was due to take place. This information could have saved the conspirators lives, but Thistlewood would not listen and ordered the operation to proceed as planned.
Little did Thistlewood know that one member of his group, George Edwards, was in fact a government spy who had been recruited by the home office to infiltrate the Cato Street gang and sabotage their revolutionary mission. A few of the other gang members suspected the truth and voiced their concerns, but again Thistlewood ignored them, making Edwards his aide-de-camp. It was a very bad move. Edwards had himself suggested the idea of invading the dinner, which was infact a home-office trap. The home office then placed a fake advert for the dinner in The New Times in order to create a convincing background for their sting. The Cado Street gang had been set up.
On February 23, the night of Lord Harrowby’s dinner, the members of the Cato Street gang gathered in the hayloft of their headquarters. They were armed with an assortment of weapons: pistols, grenades, knives and swords. Meanwhile two police officers, along with twelve members of the Bow Street Runners were waiting in the public house opposite the gang’s headquarters for reinforcements to arrive from the Coldstream Guards. At 7.30 p.m., the Bow Street Runners decided that they could wait no longer and charged into the house. In the resulting brawl, Thistlewood killed Richard Smithers, a police officer, using a sword. Some of the gang surrended peacefully while others fought for their lives. William Davidson fought desperately but failed to win his freedom, Thistlewood, Robert Adams, John Brunt and John Harrison escaped from the scene via a back window, only to be captured a few days later. On 1 May 1820, the five ringleaders: Arthur Thistlewood, James Ings, Richard Tidd, John Brunt and William Davidson were executed at Newgate by Jemmy Botting.
It is interesting to note that, had the Cato Street gang succeeded in bringing about a bloody revolution, Jemmy Botting could have stood to play a central part. We do not know what his personal politics were, if indeed he had any, but as chief executioner he would have been extremely useful for desposing of aristocrats and landowners – and could even have found himself executing the king himself! As it happened, Thistlewood and his gang of would-be revolutionaries proved no match for the British government, and Jemmy Botting died a poor man’s death on the streets of his home town.
The Cato Street five were the last people in England to be hung, drawn and quartered. The sentence was delivered thus:
That you, each of you be taken hence to the gaol from whence you came, and from there that you be drawn on a hurdle to a place of execution, and there be hanged until you are dead; and that afterward your heads shall be severed from your bodies, and your bodies be divided into four quarters to be disposed of as his magesty sees fit. And may God in his infinite goodness have mercy upon your souls.
The execution day itself was a high-profile event and up to 100,000 people were expected to flock to Newgate. The sheriff for the City of London, Mr Rothwell, was put in charge of making the necessary arrangements. He decided, because of traffic constraints, that transporting the condemned men to Newgate on a hurdle was out of the question. Additional barricades were set up in order to accommodate large numbers of spectators and an additional platform was added to the Newgate gallows in anticipation of the execution day. The preparations went on for an entire weekend. Additional security were employed to prevent rioting, sawdust was liberally scattered over the platform in readiness for the spillage of blood, and the condemned men’s coffins were placed near to the gallows.
On the morning of 1 May, the prisoners w
ere brought to the scaffold. James Ings and Richard Tidd took time to inspect Botting’s work. Ings is known to have addressed Jemmy directly, saying: ‘Now, old gentleman, finish me tidily: pull the rope tighter; it may slip’. His comrade, Tidd, asked Botting to make sure that the knot was placed under his right ear instead of his left. Their concern achieved little but a few minutes distraction from the dismal reality of their situation. Prisoners had very little control over how quickly or how painlessly death came to them. It is true that Botting would have had some degree of control over how carefully he positioned the noose and how accurately he planned the drop, but it was by no means the exact science it became in the twentieth century. At eight o’clock, when the drop fell, Ings and Tidd both struggled and choked for up to five minutes before death finally claimed them. The five men were left hanging for the full half hour in order to make sure they were dead, then each body was cut from the scaffold and lifted back on to the platform, where they were laid in their coffins with their nooses still tightly tied around their necks. Then, in turn, their heads were positioned on a small block at one end of the coffin. A masked man, probably a surgeon or perhaps a butcher, was charged with the responsibility of decapitating each man. Then Botting held the heads up to the crowd proclaiming loudly: ‘This is the head of a traitor’.
It is not clear from historical record whether the men’s bodies were actually quartered in public or not. One imagines that this would have been a difficult procedure to carry out on a scaffold, but since the main point of this was deterrent as opposed to further punishment, it seems likely that the full sentence was carried out in full public view.
Sometime after executing the Cato Street gang, Botting became paralysed and had to retire on a five shillings a week state pension. He relied on free drinks from Brighton barmen in exchange for gruesome stories he told about his bloody past. He could only get around using an old seat on wheels as both a crutch and resting place. Local rumour has it that his fellow Brightonians avoided him to such an extent that one day when he fell from his wheelchair at the corner of Codrington Place and Montpelier Road, nobody would stop to help. Jemmy Botting persished alone in the street like a stray animal. It is ironic that although the criminals Botting executed died, as he did, in full public view, at least they were the centre of attention for a large crowd of avid spectators. Botting, on the other hand, was totally ignored by the world and died as a result.
According to local ghost stories, on the occasional dark and windy night, Botting’s rickety wheeled chair can be heard dragging past his local – the Half Moon Pub in Brighton’s Boyces Street.
PART SIX: TYBURN
Tyburn
The Early Years
Tyburn has become synonymous with the ultimate criminal punishment – death by hanging. However, back in twelfth century, the area that would see an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 convicted criminals killed was just 250 acres of rough fields. Through the middle of this untended expanse of countryside ran the River Tybourne. Its name originated from the fact that the bourne – another term for brook – branched off at two major points, and ‘ty’ means two. This river used to run south into the Thames near today’s Vauxhall Bridge. The banks of the River Tyburn were lined with elm trees, one of which which the conquering Normans termed the ‘Tree of Justice’.
The first recorded hanging at Tyburn was in 1196. William Fitz Osbert had been found guilty of plundering from the rich. He sought sanctuary at St Mary-le-Bow Church but was soon smoked out by the pursuant authorities and dragged to the terrible location where he was strung up by the neck. The events of his capture and subsequent hanging sound more like that of a lynching than an organised execution, especially as there existed no man-made gallows at Tyburn at this point in time. Instead, Fitz Osbert was brought before a rope swung over a branch belonging to the Tree of Justice.
It was not until 1220 that a gallows was constructed to deal with capital punishment. This was possibly due to an escalating crime rate. A far cry from the structures that would grace Tyburn in future centuries, this primitive design consisted of two uprights and a cross-beam capable of taking the weight of ten prisoners. The procedure was simple. The unfortunate ten were forced to climb a ladder to elevate their position, whereupon the appointed executioner twisted the ladder away, leaving the condemned with only air beneath their feet as the rope went taut. The victims struggled against asphyxia for several minutes after being ‘turned off’, as this final act was known. One might imagine that any would-be criminals among the gathered voyeurs would be turned off in a different manner at such a sight.
This was certainly the intention of the authorities. Tyburn was in a perfect position to act as a deterrent to all prospective lawbreakers entering the city from the North. Unfortunately, while this was their aim, it is unlikely that it worked. The number of death penalties issued by the Old Bailey increased enough to warrant continued improvements to the structure at Tyburn.
The Triple Tree
In 1571, the basic gallows made way for a larger, more elaborate structure that became known as the Triple Tree owing to its triangular shape. It possessed three legs like a tripod each between 3.7 and 5.5 metres (12 and 18 feet) high and was fixed in place by crossbeams at the top. This formation allowed as many as twenty-four victims to be hung from the gallows at once, with eight executions on each crossbeam, and was first used to hang the martyr John Storey on 1 June 1571. Clearly, by this stage, there was demand for the new enlarged structure but records show the first instance of it being used to full capacity was not until 23 June 1649, when twenty-three men and one woman guilty of burglary and robbery were conveyed in eight carts and hung upon the wooden tripod. This ‘Triple Tree’, or ‘Deadly Nevergreen’, continued to end the lives of criminals for almost 200 years, when further developments were deemed necessary. The last execution upon this triangular gallows came on Monday 18 June 1759, when a cart containing the convicted highway robber Catherine Knowland was backed up underneath its beams. This coincided with a drop in the number of hangings as the permanent fixture made way for a portable version, referred to as the Moving Gallows by one chronicler of the time. The first recorded execution to use this new mobile style, dragged into position at Tyburn by horses, came on 3 October later that year when four men were hanged at once.
Another change in the design of the Tyburn gallows arrived in 1760. This consisted of a hatch elevated approximately 46 centimetres (18 inches) above the level of the scaffold boards, replacing the need for a horse and cart. Earl Ferrers was the first to test the new design on 5 May 1760, revealing further improvements were necessary. When the signal was given to activate the hatch, the rope and the neck of Ferrers stretched so much that the aristocrat was able to touch the boards with his toes! Thomas Turlis, the appointed hangman, was forced to pull on his legs to put an end to the nobleman’s misery. It would be another twenty-three years until it would be officially adopted as the city’s official method of dispatch.
The Tyburn Theatre
The display of death at Tyburn quickly developed into a spectator sport. The Hanging Match, as it was commonly known, attracted thousands to Tyburn, and when hanging days were decreed public holidays by the government they drew even greater numbers, creating a real carnival atmosphere throughout the city as well as about the gallows.
With the rabble that packed the streets came the vendors and hawkers keen to take advantage of the onlookers. Refreshments as well as mementos were sold. Writings purporting to be the last speeches of the dying could be purchased well before the ‘dying’ had the chance to make one! The sale of alcohol
was also permitted around the gallows and copious amounts of gin and beer were consumed throughout the day. It was inevitable that fighting broke out, and these bouts of violence no doubt added to the theatrics of the day, serving as unofficial support acts to the main event.
It was not solely official vendors that did a roaring trade on hanging days. Pickpockets and thieves operat
ed with reckless abandon during the Paddington Fair, ensuring that money and valuables were taken by more nefarious means as well. While all eyes were on those due to be dropped, many pockets were being lifted. The irony here is clear. Many condemned to death for theft became accessories to yet more larceny by providing fellow criminals with an opportunity to commit crime. This could be considered adequate evidence that these events were more of an incitement than a deterrent for some.
Collective eagerness to see people dance the Tyburn jig grew to such an extent that in the early eighteenth century stands were constructed at Tyburn alongside the gallows. These were similar to the grandstands found at racecourses and were open galleries in which seats could be hired out to those who could afford the high prices. These were called Mother Proctor’s Pews, after a cowkeeper’s widow who used to sell seats on Hanging Day at two shillings each during the early 1700s. These seat-sellers were able to bump up the price when a particularly popular figure was due to be hanged. One Mammy Douglas, a fellow grandstand vendor, chose to increase the rate to two shillings and sixpence when it was the turn of Dr Henesey to be executed for treason in 1758. The punters reluctantly paid the exorbitant fees and sat down to watch the doctor hang, but before the deed could be done a rare last minute reprieve arrived. While relief must have enveloped the fortunate Henesey, those that had come to see him die were overcome with anger and rioting promptly broke out in the handsomely priced grandstands. They had paid to see a neck in the noose and it is reported that Mammy Douglas bore the brunt of their rage: she nearly paid the ultimate price when the mob tried to hang her!