The Barlinnie Story

by Robert Jeffrey

  Back in the cells, the film describes the deadly ritual in detail. The beam that secured the rope is shown and it is remarked that Barlinnie could have dealt with three men at a time though all executions that took place were described as ‘singles’. We are informed that the bodies hung for an hour over a sandpit to catch excrement and body fluids before being cut down and placed on the post-mortem slab. The fact that the rope snapped the second and third vertebrae and caused instant death is pointed out. Not explored is the belief of some abolitionists that snapping the neck in this way produces paralysis and that strangulation is the actual cause of death, which could possibly be far from instant and painless.

  A total of ten executions by hanging took place in the prison’s Hanging Shed between 1946 and 1960 (previously the gallows were situated in Duke Street Prison). Ten men had their lives ended by the grim ritual of the rope – the youngest and last being 19-year-old Tony Miller from the south side. Those who died were:

  8 February 1946 – John Lyon (victim John Brady)

  6 April 1946 – Patrick Carraher (victim John Gordon)

  10 August 1946 – John Caldwell (victim James Straiton)

  30 October 1946 – Christopher Harris (victim Martin Dunleavy)

  16 December 1950 – James Robertson (victim Catherine McCluskey)

  12 April 1952 – James Smith (victim Martin Joseph Malone)

  29 May 1952 – Patrick Gallagher Deveney (victim Jeannie Deveney)

  26 January 1953 – George Francis Shaw (victim Michael Connolly/Conly)

  11 July 1958 – Peter Manuel (victims Marion Watt, Vivienne Watt, Margaret Brown, Isabelle Cook, Peter Smart, Doris Smart, Michael Smart)

  22 December 1960 – Anthony Miller (victim John Cremin).

  A few of those thrown into the death cell did come out alive. On occasion the sentence was commuted. One of the most notorious to escape the drop was double murderer Donald Forbes who died in Inverclyde Hospital, with two security officers at his bedside, in the spring of 2008. No stranger to the Bar-L he was once known as Scotland’s most dangerous man, and he was reckoned to have spent 45 years behind bars in various Scottish jails. In 1958 he was sentenced to hang for killing a night watchman. But the death penalty was commuted after Forbes married his pregnant lover in jail. They divorced and the child was put into care. Forbes was freed in 1970 but after only a few weeks on the outside he killed again and was jailed. In 1971 he escaped from the maximum security wing at Peterhead, but was recaptured. He was released in 1998 and had a few years of freedom before being branded Scotland’s oldest drug dealer and jailed, aged 68, in 2003 for dealing in cocaine and cannabis. He was to die before he could taste freedom again though you could hazard that had he lived it would have been only be a brief brush with life on the outside before he was again caged.

  The story of every hanging in Barlinnie is a grim one, murderers of all ages and backgrounds having their life taken from them by society, legally demanding a life for a life. Some of the horror has been described in that remarkable film ‘Hanging With Frank’ but in truth some of the scenes inside the Hanging Shed defy description or understanding. The last execution in Barlinnie, that of the ‘boy killer’ Tony Miller, illustrates powerfully the battle between the folk who blindly, oblivious to all argument, believe those who have killed, no matter the circumstances, deserve to die in a cold, calculated and fully premeditated way and those who find the concept of judicial murder, and the drawn-out cruelty of it, offensive and sickening.

  Though it can be even more cruel elsewhere. In Britain such expert executioners as Harry Allen and Albert Pierrepoint could kill a man or woman around ten seconds after they were taken from the death cell. (Actually the fastest execution on record was performed by Albert Pierrepoint and his assistant Sid Dernley when they killed James Inglis in seven seconds in Strangeways in Manchester in May 1951.) This is in contrast with the torturing behaviour of the authorities in some states of America, where the victim of the gallows, gas chamber, or old Sparky, had to wait for long minutes beside the executioner as the charges they had been convicted of were read to them before their release into eternity.

  The life and death of Tony Miller split opinion in Glasgow and Scotland and the only thing of worth to come out of snuffing out a pathetic young life was that it did much to turn public opinion against the rope. Miller had been convicted on 16 November 1960 of his part in the capital murder of John Cremin, a middle-aged homosexual. These days it would be described as a particularly horrible and tragic piece of ‘gay bashing’. The murder took place in what was known then as Queen’s Park recreation ground. In the sixties in daylight, particularly at the weekends, it was busy with dozens of school and amateur football teams knocking hell out of each other on the ash pitches, activity that meant many hours of work for the doctors in the nearby Victoria Infirmary using wire brushes to sweep the ash and stones out of the many cuts on the young footballers’ knees, hands and arms. And during the Glasgow Fair, for a fortnight, the football pitches gave way to caravan pitches and the big top and fairground attractions. The visit of such as Bertram Mills’ touring circus was a highlight of life on the south side.

  But the ‘recce’, as it was called, was a more sinister place on dark winter nights. Homosexuals used the bushes that separated it from the railway running from Mount Florida into Central Station in town as a rendezvous. The men who haunted the area on the hunt for a secret assignation in the greenery, hidden from the gaze of passers-by, were easy prey for any strong violent young men wandering into the darkness of the park from the streets of Crosshill or Queen’s Park looking for trouble. Cremin had been hit on the head with a piece of wood and robbed of his watch, bankbook and £67. Miller was charged along with an accomplice and both pleaded not guilty but the other youngster claimed Miller had struck the fatal blow, something that it would appear could be a matter of dispute. There were no witnesses. Miller’s lawyer, the redoubtable Len Murray, one of the top criminal lawyers of the era, set up an appeal against the sentence of death.

  In a book published in 1995, Mr Murray recalled that one of the grounds of the appeal was that the judge Lord Wheatley had failed to offer the jury the option of a culpable homicide verdict, a finding of guilt that did not carry the death penalty. But the court of appeal refused to act and set the execution for just three days before Christmas. Viewed now, many years on, it does seem remarkable that, considering the circumstances and the alleged involvement of two people and the age of the one convicted, that the appeal court took such a hard line on the sentence. At this time there was a growing movement against the death penalty seen by many, and not just liberal writers in the press and pundits on TV, as the ultimate barbarity, a blot on a society that claimed to be civilised.

  The opponents of capital punishment rallied in a massive plea for the life of Anthony Miller. On the streets of Glasgow men and women of conscience stopped their last-minute Christmas shopping to sign a petition to save his life. Wherever Miller’s family and an army of friends laid down a folding table and handed out petition sheets there were long queues. The fight for a young life was an unforgettable feature of the run up to Christmas. This exercise produced more than 30,000 signatures, a huge, collective plea from the citizens of Glasgow to save Anthony Miller. The petition was sent to the then Scottish Secretary, John S Maclay, and the reply was delivered with Christmas just a week away. With ‘regret’ Mr Maclay was unable to find sufficient grounds to justify him advising Her Majesty to interfere with the due course of law.

  In death row in Barlinnie young Anthony Miller was resigned to his fate. His mother who had fought to save him visited him every afternoon, but he would not talk about the crime. ‘It is too late now,’ he said. And so at 8am on the morning of 22 December he took his last fateful steps to the gallows. Thankfully he was the last to do so in Barlinnie.

  The executioner in this tragic case was Robert Stewart, an Englishman who was on the Home Office list of executioners from 1950 to 1964. He had wor
ked as an assistant to Pierrepoint and had what has been described as the ‘distinction’ of carrying out one of the last two hangings in Britain when he killed Peter Allen at Walton Prison in Liverpool. What a sad, uncivilised business it all was.

  There is an old joke told in prison circles that can make you laugh and think seriously at the same time. It concerns two castaways drifting on an ocean after a shipwreck. They spy an island in the distance and one of them says right away that he will swim ashore. The other worries that they might not get a welcome and could be swimming into trouble, maybe the inhabitants of this unknown island might not be civilised. Of course they are civilised, says the first man: ‘There is a gallows on that hillside.’

  Interestingly, the first man to die in the new Hanging Shed was, like Tony Miller, also very young, not long out of his teens. John Lyon was convicted of killing a Navy man. His execution was the subject of intense public interest. Though, now that the place of execution had been moved from Duke Street there had been some dilution of the grim ritual. The practice of flying a black flag over the prison on the day of an execution had been abolished with the move to Barlinnie. And the crowds outside the prison at the time of death had also diminished. Around 70 people turned up outside the jail to read a typewritten notice pinned on the prison gate at 8.15am, minutes after Lyon’s death. It read: ‘We the undersigned hereby declare that sentence of death was this day executed on John Lyon, in the prison of Barlinnie, in our presence.’ The document was signed by two magistrates, Bailie James Duff and Bailie James Frazier; Robert Richmond, deputy town clerk; JP Mayo, the Governor; Dr Scott, the medical officer and the chaplain the Rev John Campbell. The 70 or so citizens who turned up included the hanged man’s younger brother and members of the family. The crowd was allowed by the police to approach the gate in an orderly fashion and read the notice of death for themselves.

  The figure of 70 who turned up to ‘see off’ John Lyon contrasts with the 80,000 (some reports say 100,000) who trekked to Glasgow Green in 1865 to see the last public hanging in the city. The man put to death by the legendary Calcroft – an executioner infamous for his ‘short drops’ which resulted in the convicted man or woman being strangled to death – was the poisoner Dr Pritchard whose wicked deeds projected him into Glasgow folklore. His loathsome act of having the coffin lid unscrewed so that he could kiss the wife he killed goodbye ensured he was unlikely ever to be forgotten. He also killed his mother-in-law by poisoning. His infamy was perpetuated in the wax works of Glasgow showman AE Pickard where for years he was the star attraction. Pickard also included in his sideshows a tableau of a working model of a hanging. Whenever a new murderer died on the gallows, which was quite often, Pickard changed the clothes on the dummy in the tableau and labelled it with the name of the most recent criminal to be executed.

  One phrase in the notice of Lyon’s death gave a hint of the barbaric nature of execution: ‘In our presence’. For a hanging then needed a good party of witnesses, including two magistrates. This necessity led to one Glasgow politician making history – Bailie Mrs Bell became the first female magistrate to watch a man killed in front of her when in 1925 John Keen was hanged for murdering an Indian peddler called Noorh Mohammed, in a house in Port Dundas. The right for women over 30 to vote had been won in 1918 (it was to be 1929 before the legal limit was dropped to 21) and Mrs Bell, when elected to the council, felt she had to undertake the full range of duties of a magistrate. Even if it meant the ordeal of watching a hanging. Keen must have made the ordeal a little easier by taking his death with great fortitude. Reports said that he walked to the gallows with a firm step and erect figure.

  Opponents of capital punishment are often surprised at the matter-of-fact attitude the victims of the rope can take. In the Barlinnie archives there is a handwritten note scrawled in pencil made by a visitor to Peter Manuel shortly before his death which stated that all was more or less ‘normal’. And I remember the Glasgow Godfather, Walter Norval, telling me of leaving a court appearance handcuffed to a young man. In the van on the way back to the jail Norval inquired conversationally of this criminal how his appearance in court had gone and his fellow traveller, as it were, calmly remarked that they ‘are going to hang me in a fortnight’. It was so matter of fact that it was only when a prison officer confirmed it that Norval realised it was no joke. The youngster he had been handcuffed to was John Lyon.

  The most infamous and expert hangman in history, Albert Pierrepoint, was the man who despatched John Keen in the old Duke Street prison and Mrs Bell was a junior magistrate, one of an official party that included another magistrate Dr James Dunlop, the prison governor, the chief constable and the town clerk depute.

  It was said in the papers that a large crowd had gathered in Cathedral Square and loitered around for some time before and after the hanging, which took place at the traditional hour of 8am. The newspapers reported that Mrs Bell went through the ordeal unflinchingly and retained full self-possession through this trying experience. She was said to be pale but quite composed when she emerged from the prison after the execution. Interviewed later in her home she claimed not to have been the least upset or nervous at the ordeal, adding that there was nothing in the proceedings to upset any woman possessed of ordinary nerves. Keen had been calm and collected when she saw him in the cells. Immediately after he had replied to the usual question on his identity, the murderer had asked the magistrates if they would shake hands with him. Both bailies agreed to this request and Mrs Bell said the act seemed to afford him some immediate comfort in his last moments. After this the official party went to the execution chamber and they had just taken up their positions when Keen arrived. Mrs Bell said: ‘He was pale but carried his head high and went unhesitatingly to his place. There was no scene of any kind.’ He was dead 45 seconds after leaving his cell.

  All this caused much controversy in the newspapers as the fitness of a woman to carry out such an onerous duty was debated. Mrs Bell seems to have been a woman of real steel. She felt that if a woman offered herself as a member of a town council she should undertake the full range of duties required, regardless of her gender. She added her opinion that any of the woman members of Glasgow Corporation at the time could equally well have undertaken the duty. In the afternoon of the day of execution a formal inquiry was held under a sheriff in the County Buildings where witnesses confirmed what had gone on in the execution chamber and the prison doctor, Gilbert Gerry, confirmed that he had examined the body and ‘found all life to be extinct’. A grim ritual indeed.

  If Keen took his fate calmly, the same could not be said of the second man to die in the Barlinnie Hanging Shed – a couple of months after John Lyon. Patrick Carraher was a lone wolf bad guy, not a member of a gang, but capable of seriously troubling society on his own. He was convicted of stabbing a man called John Gordon of Aitken Street in the neck. There was an appeal for his life which, considering his ‘previous’, was not surprisingly turned down. And even such a clearly dangerous, mentally flawed individual – he had been before the High Court twice on murder charges twice previously – had people petitioning to save him from the rope. This would appear to be part of the growing revulsion against the death penalty rather than action in favour of one person.

  Carraher was almost your identikit hard Glasgow hard man, always at the ready to flick an open razor across the jugular of an enemy or indeed anyone who crossed him. His defence was mainly that he was a medical psychopath and that the verdict should have been that he was of diminished responsibility at the time of Aitken’s death. This was a fairly new track for defence lawyers at the time and it did not wash. But Carraher was a man with no seeming understanding of right and wrong – indeed he was described as a human time bomb who created mayhem wherever he went.

  Unlike many of his kind he did not march boldly into eternity. It was reported that this hard man had to be dragged screaming and struggling to the end. It must have been a harrowing morning’s work for warders and executioners (there
was always an assistant to pinion the victim’s legs) alike. Such tales can only strengthen the opinion of those who strongly oppose capital punishment. You often hear supporters of the death penalty say they would carry out the sentence themselves. You wonder if their beliefs would have been strong enough to sustain them on days like 6 April 1946.

  One man with first-hand evidence on the effects of participating in an execution was Bill McVey, who had a highly successful career in the prison service, rising from trainee officer to the very top. In 1991, in a remarkable interview, he remembered when as a 25-year-old in Barlinnie, he stood to attention while Albert Pierrepoint placed the rope round the neck of James Robertson. Bill McVey had walked alongside Robertson on the 20-yard journey from the condemned cell to the gallows. As he left the spot he vowed to himself that he would never again take part in such a grim ritual. Pierrepoint seemed able to convince himself that at a hanging he was merely ‘the arm of the law’ rather than a person taking the life of another. Bill McVey did not see it that way. Subsequently interviewed by a reporter from the Glasgow Herald he said: ‘It did not turn my stomach, but I remember feeling awful and I believe calls for the return of capital punishment are rubbish.’ He pointed out that those who bray loudest for the return of the rope have no experience of it in practice.

  The dispatching of James Robertson was even more tragic than most executions, for he could have saved himself from the gallows but refused to do so. It came about like this: he was accused of killing his mistress by running over her with a car (he then reversed over the body several times to make sure she was dead). He was defended by Laurence Dowdall, the lawyer they call the ‘pleader’s pleader’, the most renowned of a long line of Glasgow defence lawyers who have remarkable records of getting bad guys ‘aff’. Indeed it is joked that when Rudolph Hess parachuted down on Eaglesham, near the start of the Second World War, and was promptly arrested, his first words were ‘Get me Dowdall’. On looking back on the fate of James Robertson, Laurence Dowdall said: ‘That was a sad, sad case. The extraordinary thing about it was that if he had told the truth in the witness box he would never have been convicted of murder. His wife knew that he had been conducting this liaison but he said he was not going to let her down in public.