An Audience with an Elephant

by Byron Rogers

  ‘I used to find it very strange. I kept finding these white hairs in the combs in Madam’s boudoir, but Madam had brown hair. I mentioned this to the butler, and he said that one night I would have to come round late. So I did, and he said I had to be very quiet. We crept up the stairs, he opened a door to the balcony above the Music Room, it was a huge room, and suddenly there was the sound of a piano.

  ‘Madam was playing a grand piano, I hadn’t known until then that she could play, and apparently she hadn’t since her husband died. But there was someone else playing as well, a Captain Moseley, one of the Hussar officers, on another grand piano. I can see it now, it was magical. I was fifteen years old. Everything around them had dust-sheets over it, even the curtains had covers. But it wasn’t that. Madam had her hair down. It was long and white and tied in a blue bow, and she looked so beautiful. The hair I knew must have been a wig, though I don’t know how she got all that hair up under it.

  ‘She called on our family a few times, but she would never sit on cushions, she had this fear of infection. And when she talked, she spoke ever so quiet. She looked too frail to be alive, a puff of wind could have taken her away. But she had the whole road rerouted, you know, to go round her house. My uncle called it the New Road.’

  Having listened to all this as quietly as the young girl had listened to the pianos, I said, ‘Could she do that?’

  Miss Frost smiled. ‘She did it. They had a whole row of cottages pulled down. I know they had others built in their place, but not quite enough, if you take my meaning. Some of the old had to go and live with their children, and one old chap had to go into the workhouse at Daventry. They was heart-broke, some of the old ones. Mr Agnew, he didn’t like the allotment sheds, said they spoiled his view. Know what he did? He had trees planted so they hid the sheds, only then there were pigeons in the trees, which ate all the peas in the allotments. They had a whole farmhouse pulled down once, I think that may have had something to do with the view as well.

  ‘Only then they decided to have a lychgate built for the church. To do that they had to get rid of some of the graves, and this chap, he had the pub, he came running to tell my mother, “Nelly, I’ve just seen something I doubt I shall ever see again.” This coffin was open, and there was a lady in it, with hair down to her knees, just bone of course, but the hair was beautiful. And the wind came and blew it all away. But some people hadn’t been buried that long. One old lady never went to church again on account of the fact that the Agnews had had her mother dug up. They had the money, and they could do it.

  ‘They did some good things. If someone was ill they sent soup, and when they paid for the electricity they had it laid underground so you couldn’t see it in Joymead. Mind you, you could see it everywhere else. I was too late to see the entertaining and the parties. There was never any guests in my time, except when the Hussars came. I remember this chap, the Hon. Verney Cave, he had this hare sent down from Scotland, monstrous great thing it was, hanging in the larder. It had a bowl under it to catch the blood, only after a while this was catching maggots as well.

  ‘The Hussars had their own cook, a corporal. The trouble was, he didn’t know how to cook anything, all he could do was tap-dance round the kitchen, singing, “I’m a little prairie flower / Growing wilder every hour. Nobody wants to cultivate me / So I’m as wild as wild can be.” So when the Duke of Gloucester came to supper with the officers, the corporal didn’t know how to cook the hare.

  ‘The cook, she wouldn’t skin it, she kept getting short of breath whenever she came near it, so I had to do it. She kept prodding me with a rolling pin towards the thing. Not that it needed skinning, when you pulled, whole bits fell off. But we cooked it and made some sort of gravy, and the corporal who served it said he’d seen maggots floating in the gravy. But they ate it. They ate the Gorgonzola as well, and that was even more far gone than the hare. They made a hollow in the cheese, and poured port in and, according to the corporal, you could see the maggots swimming round in circles like they were having a race. The Duke of Gloucester said it was the best meal he’d ever had.’

  She paused. ‘It was sad for Madam at the end. She had just one servant, and Mr Michael’s old nanny used to come and stay, but no one else ever did in that huge house. Still, we had no idea it was going to be pulled down. And the saddest thing of all was still to come. There’d been this huge clearance sale, and my cousin Charlie, he went to Banbury the day after. And I shall never forget this, he said the Agnew photograph albums, and their papers and letters, were blowing all over the Cattle Market. Apparently nobody had emptied the drawers and the cupboards and the dealers had just tipped the lot out. That was terrible. Charlie said it was a heartbreaking thing to see.’

  It would be hard for any of us to understand how he felt, for this was the family from the Big House, of Miss Joy and Master Ewen, and little Mrs Agnew who feared thunder and cushions but who could still divert roads. All their lives they had been in such awe of them, and now all that was left was blowing round a cattle market.

  Peter Stanton is Chairman of the Joymead Managers now. ‘A glorified caretaker really, when you think they used to meet on Tuesday afternoons. Who could afford to meet on Tuesday afternoons now?’ The Agnew endowment barely covers the annual insurance cost, and no brass bands play on summer evenings. ‘And who’d come to listen if they did?’

  But they still hold the annual tea on each anniversary of Joy’s birthday, and in a good year perhaps half the village comes.

  The Last of Things

  The Gallows Humorist

  ONLY SPOKE TO HIM a month ago, so it was a shock to hear about the death of Syd Dernley of Mansfield. I can remember as though it were yesterday, and always will, the afternoon six years ago when we met, and Mr Dernley in the neat little bungalow talked about his old job, while Mrs Dernley made scones for us. She kept emerging with fresh batches, chiding me for my lack of appetite, while her husband, brisk and informative, produced a length of rope for my inspection, or sat, lost in nostalgia. And believe me, if there is anything more terrifying than a hangman, it is a nostalgic hangman. . . Mr Dernley was Britain’s last surviving executioner; he was 73.

  We met because he took exception to something I had written about a hangman my grandfather knew, who had decorated his front room with nooses and portraits of his Victorian colleagues, and whose life, the Carmarthen Journal noted in its 1901 obituary, had been dominated by just one thing, ‘a deep-seated longing to participate in the infliction of capital punishment everywhere’. The paper had begun the obituary with a remarkable sentence: ‘He has at last “shot his bolt”, as he himself would put it.’

  His name was Robert Evans (though on occasion he called himself Anderson), a solicitor’s son from Carmarthen, who, by a bizarre coincidence, lived in a house that has subsequently become a symbol of lost innocence to generations of Eng. Lit. graduates: Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill. The hangmen Calcraft and Marwood were his guests here, and successive Home Secretaries must have groaned at seeing that address on the eager letters of advice on scaffold etiquette they received from it most months. ‘The doomed one should be addressed firmly and, as far as can be, cheerfully assured that he will not be hurried into eternity without being allowed proper time and means to prepare himself, and he should be made to feel confident that no unnecessary punishment be inflicted on him. . .’.

  Evans or Anderson built a gallows in his garden, on which he would sit his neighbours, my grandfather probably among them, and ply them with strong drink. When I wrote about him I made the point that he would have been none the worse for some urgent medical attention; and in the post a few days later there was a letter. Why, enquired the writer, should a hangman not have a sense of humour? He himself had been a hangman, and he had a sense of humour. Mr Dernley asked me to tea.

  But writing about ‘Y Crogwr’ (The Hangman), safely tucked away in Victorian Wales, or reading about such men in Thomas Hardy, was worlds away from this jolly man hopelessly addicted to
practical jokes. At one point he produced a safety razor stuck into one of the old round-socket electric plugs (‘Know where I can get this fixed?’), and a little later, a wobbly, lifesized rubber hand which he had in his sleeve (‘Shake’). Had it not been for the friendly presence of Mrs Dernley, and my own curiosity, I should have run howling into the spring afternoon in the first minutes of that meeting.

  Syd Dernley was in his late sixties then, a good-looking man with wavy hair, who could have been anybody’s grandfather with his pipe and cardigan and slippers. Indeed, he was somebody’s grandfather, and must have been that somebody’s despair with his practical jokes. This man, between the years 1948 and 1953, took part in 28 hangings. I had to keep reminding myself that here was the last living practitioner of something the Anglo-Saxons had brought with them out of the forests. Abolition was not even 25 years old, yet it felt as though I was sitting in a room with Jack Ketch.

  At the time Syd Dernley did not want his name used, even though (he gave a leer) it might be worth it just for the shock it would give her next door. But he still felt the shadow of the Home Office on him, which had treated its hangmen like jobbing gardeners, paying them half their fee on the morning after an execution and half a fortnight later, to ensure they did not gossip. The Civil Service was also determined such a man would never achieve the social cachet of his French equivalent, Monsieur de Paris, as he was called, who was a sub-contractor and owned the guillotine, which meant he could supplement his income by showing tourists over the thing. However, the third generation of the Sanson family, whose grandfather had briskly decapitated royalty, was so unnerved by young English women tourists, who not only wanted to see the thing but to pose grinning under the knife, that he took to drink and pawned the French guillotine, thus creating chaos in the French judicial system.

  Syd Dernley recalled that his own fee per execution was just three guineas, although later this was raised to five; there were perhaps eight executions in a good year, and travel warrants were always third-class, although his chief, Albert Pierrepoint, travelled first. Someone in the Home Office had decided that an assistant hangman was not a gentleman. Even so, the job was never advertised. Syd Dernley himself applied for it, in hope, as he told me, of meeting criminals. He was a miner who had an obsession with the books of Edgar Wallace (‘Wrote 123 books, he did, and I’ve got 80 of them. It were all Edgar Wallace’s fault’). Unfortunately, Wallace forgot to mention one small fact that might have made all the difference: the average length of time between the moment the hangman entered the cell and the moment the trap fell was eight seconds. It was the best-kept secret that there was always a locked door, which, if a prisoner inquired about, he was told was a store for old furniture. Beyond that, just 15 feet beyond it, was the gallows. Mr Dernley never did get to meet criminals socially.

  ‘If he were honest. . .’. His wife had brought in another plate of scones. ‘. . .If he were honest, he did it just to get out of the colliery.’

  The Home Office replied with brevity, telling him no vacancy then existed, but a year later wrote again, just as briefly, requesting him to present himself for interview at Lincoln jail. ‘Governor were a tall bloke, and he wanted to know my hobbies. I said I liked shooting. Where did I shoot? Up at Castle. He were a bit taken aback at that, and asked, did I shoot with the Duke then? No, I said. I generally shot after Duke had gone to bed. That were it really. He was so tickled he called the doctor in. “Got a poacher here, says he wants to be a hangman.”’

  There followed something so bizarre no black comedy could hope to match it: the Class of ’48 – Syd Dernley and three others – was sent on a week’s training course to Pentonville Prison. Of his colleagues, Dernley remembers two: a mathematician from ICI (‘He were just interested in the mathematics of hanging’) and an ice-cream salesman from Birmingham. They spent the week in the Condemned Cell, doing long-division sums. ‘You divided 1,000 by the man’s weight. What for? For the length of the drop.’ Sum after sum, scribbling and puzzling, puzzling and scribbling (‘Important that, you get yer sums wrong and you can take a man’s head clean off’). They hoped to have Pierrepoint as a tutor, but it was an elderly warder. The practical aspects they tried out on each other, the pinioning and the strapping, and took turns on the lever (‘Push forward, just as in a signal box’).

  No knots. ‘The noose is already there.’ He had dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘Hang on, I think I’ve still got one about the place somewhere.’ What? My host had skipped lightly past me to a drawer in a sideboard, from which he produced a length of rope, the inside of which was bound in leather (‘to stop rope burns, that’) and one end of which had a metal loop, through which he passed the rope. ‘Just a souvenir,’ he told me.

  I was beyond questions as he told me of the time the four of them attended their first execution at Shrewsbury jail. He had a photograph of them with Pierrepoint, taken outside the railway station, and it could be any works outing, except that after it was over there were three. ‘The maths chap, he wet himself in the taxi and emigrated. But me, I was impressed. The clock struck nine, Pierrepoint and his assistant went into the cell and, as I told you, eight seconds later it were all over. Mind you, me and him got it down to seven when we hanged James Inglis who’d murdered a prostitute in Hull. Fastest hanging ever, that. And what’s more, the condemned man has no time to be frightened. People talk about the electric chair, but that’s cruelty. They talk about the guillotine; that’s quick, but it’s a bloody mess. Here, I’ve got one of them as well, made it me-self.’ And from somewhere the extraordinary being had produced a tiny working model with a little blade which he pulled up and released. Click. ‘But hanging’s humane. I timed it from the time that clock in Shrewsbury struck nine. Eight seconds.’

  ‘Perhaps you find this shocking,’ murmured Mrs Dernley.

  ‘Nothing shocking about it,’ said her husband, before I had time to say anything. ‘I’d come home, and the wife would say: “All right”. That were all. It were an accepted way of life, and we both believed it had to be done. Of course I tried to keep it secret at first, but we weren’t on phone, and the old postmaster had to come puffing up the hill whenever a telegram announced a reprieve. So it was suggested we had a phone put in, only there were a two year waiting list, so then I had to say what me other job were. We had the thing in two days. But, being I were a miner, we lived in a Coal Board house, and the phone people must have had to install an extra pole or something, so they got in touch with the pit manager. He told his clerk, and after that it were like dropping a stone in a puddle.

  ‘For six months there was a hush every time I went in a pub. But after that it were all right. Some of the men even made jokes about it when we were playing dominoes: “Whose drop is it?” “I dunno, ask ’im. “E’s the expert”. But nobody said anything adverse, and I’ve never regretted it. It were a very interesting time in my life, when I got to see a lot of the country and met some people I should never have met in pit.’

  But one of the others had regrets. News of the ice-cream salesman’s other job leaked out in Birmingham and affected sales to the point where one day his boss called him in. ‘Harry, ice-cream and hanging, they don’t mix, boy.’ Which left two of the Class of ’48, though the maddening thing was that Syd Dernley had forgotten what became of the other man. He himself went his busy way, helping to hang Timothy Evans, of whose guilt he remained convinced, as you might expect, for even hangmen aspire to sleep at nights.

  At one point I hesitantly touched on the more lurid aspects of folklore, but he was not in the least embarrassed. No, he said, he had never seen hanged men with erections, and it had been part of his job to undress the corpses in the execution pit. Pierrepoint in his autobiography talks of this as a moment of intimacy, where it was just him and ‘the poor broken body’ of his victim. The last thing he wanted on the gallows was gallows humour, and the day inevitably came when Syd Dernley cracked a joke. Through the post the letter came, brief as the first, informing him t
here would be no further need of his services.

  He felt the disappointment keenly, which was why, for old time’s sake, he told me, he had bought a gallows. He bought it off a doctor who had it out of the old Cambridge jail, and it came in a Pickford’s van. He sprang to his feet again, and rummaged in that drawer out of which by now I was convinced anything might come. He showed me a photograph of the gallows which he installed in his cellar, with two green spotlights trained on a tailor’s dummy he had got from John Collier’s. This had come without a head, so he had arranged a white bust on its shoulders – at which I started, for there was something familiar about that gaunt profile.

  ‘Hey, that’s Dante you’re hanging.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Dante. Italian poet.’

  ‘That’s who it is? I often wondered. Doctor threw it in when I bought gallows.’ His cellar was not high enough for this to be assembled with the drop beneath it, so he put two blocks of wood under the thing, just enough, he smiled, just enough for the trap to creak. Those were social years. ‘Word got round, and all sorts turned up. A managing director came. “I understand you have a gallows in your cellar.” I took him down. “I understand you have a rope.” He stood there. “Excuse me, may I have the rope round my neck?”’

  It was like those cosy afternoons long ago, chez Sanson all over again, but the experience did not lead Mr Dernley to booze. He took flashlit photographs and had certificates printed, some of which his victims framed and hung on their walls. He was keeping a post office then, and time passed merrily enough until, his wife being taken ill, her cousin came to keep house for him, who, of course, did not know where anything was.