Once a Jolly Hangman

by Alan Shadrake

  Darshan Singh was appointed Singapore's chief executioner when he was 27. Those he hanged were convicted of a variety of crimes from murder to drug trafficking. When I asked him exactly how many he had executed, he thought for a moment. 'Not really sure, lah', he said. 'Can be over 1,000 can be under'. When I contacted the Ministry for Home Affairs they could not verify that figure. To the government, anything to do with the death penalty must always be shrouded in mystery. No official statistics have ever been made available. Perhaps this may be because, having the highest per capita execution rate in the world, Singapore does not wish to be challenged by the fact - as has been shown in every country that has abolished the death penalty - that fear of the gallows does not deter capital crimes anywhere. If Darshan Singh's figure is accurate, the statistics are stunning and challenge belief. Singapore's population was a mere two million in 1959 when Darshan Singh took on the job. It's now nudging five million. The UK population was around 48 million in the 1930s. It is now more than 60 million. Capital punishment was abolished there in 1965. According to Amnesty International Singapore has long had the highest per capita execution rate in the world.

  As dedicated executioners, both Darshan Singh and Pierrepoint appear to have had many things in common with similar personalities. Pierrepoint, long dead, believed he was put on earth especially to do what he did and was 'protected by a higher power' throughout his long career. 'It is no source of pride, it is simply history, that I have carried out the execution of more judicial sentences of death than any executioner in any British record or archive'. But then he added: 'That fact is the measure of my experience. The fruit of my experience has this bitter after-taste: that I do not now believe that any one of the hundreds of executions I carried out has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder. Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge'.

  Darshan Singh talked to me in similar if less grandiose terms. But far from considering what he did was a waste of time he sincerely believes he has helped make Singapore an ideal place for all its citizens to live in peace and harmony and the economic success that it is today. Whether or not he will one day come to the same conclusion as Pierrepoint and condemn his life of killing is something only he can decide. Looking at those smiling, shiny dark eyes as we talked it was impossible to detect what he was really thinking. But I sometimes suspect that he had his own demons to deal with in the middle of the night, perhaps, with hundreds of other eyes staring back at him - the terrified eyes of those he last saw a split second before he sent them plunging to their doom and uttered those chilling, unforgettable words, 'I am sending you to a better place than this'.

  In 1948, one of Britain's most ardent and vociferous anti-death penalty campaigners, the Labour MP Sydney Silverman, said this in the House of Commons:

  It is not only the melodrama and sensationalism with which these proceedings are surrounded, it is not only the sordid squalor, every detail of which spreads into newspapers in every one of these crimes, it is not only the relentless finality of this penalty. No one who knows the records can doubt that there have been cases of error, that there have been miscarriages of justice, and that innocent men have in fact been executed. Until human judgment is infallible, we have no right to inflict irrevocable doom. Above all these things, there is the sense which we all have that this penalty, of itself, denies the very principle on which we claim the right to inflict it - namely, the sanctity of human life. The sole justification, if there be one, for the retention of this penalty is that is it necessary to protect society. No one can prove that this is true, no one can prove that it is untrue, but we may compare it and draw inferences from the comparison with the state of affairs in other countries in which this penalty has been abolished.

  The possible travesties of justice Silverman said could not be countenanced in a society such as Britain were later to become a reality. There were proven tragedies. We will never know how many others have been killed by the state on the basis of flawed evidence? Silverman's impassioned speech when he introduced his bill to abolish the death penalty eventually had its desired effect. But not before the Conservative MP, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe KC, who became Home Secretary in 1951, would accept the idea of judicial error. 'Of course, a jury might go wrong, the Court of Appeal might go wrong, as might the House of Lord and the Home Secretary. They might all be stricken mad and go wrong. But that is not a possibility that anyone can consider likely. The honourable and learned Member is moving in a realm of fantasy when he makes that suggestion'. Nevertheless Silverman got his way by a large majority and the bill passed on to the House of Lords where it was rejected, as expected, by a majority of 153. No executions were carried out while abolition was on the parliamentary agenda, and they were not resumed until November 1948, after a gap of nine months. The abolitionist movement grew stronger and resulted in a Royal Commission to examine capital punishment in all its ugly detail. In 1956 the death penalty was finally abolished in Britain for all time. Much of this historic event can be attributed to Albert Pierrepoint's boldness when he and some British newspapers first broke the Official Secrets Act. Fortunately for the establishment he was not prosecuted no doubt wisely deciding that much worse would inevitably have come out at his trial. His daring - albeit for money and publicity to boost the takings at his pub - had a huge effect on the public conscience and the eventual decision to do away with the gallows forever.

  When Darshan Singh innocently broke Singapore's very own Official Secrets Act by allowing me to interview him - a surprise interview that made waves around the world - the establishment no doubt became fearful that their own citizens might one day catch the abolitionist bug. Not a word of the interview was published in any of the government-controlled newspapers, including The Straits Times. Only The New Paper published a report on its front and inside pages - not about the gory details I elicited but an attack on me for allegedly 'tricking' Darshan Singh to spill the beans and embarrass Singapore. Those were not his words but the words of The New Paper diverting public attention from reality once again! I am told that the shock waves that went through the hallowed halls of the Presidential Palace when my interview was first published in The Australian, one of the country's biggest newspapers, were palpable. It was the kind of publicity Singapore dreads. To them it was a major loss of face and no doubt inspired anti-death penalty activists everywhere to stand up and protest. They attacked and condemned Singapore - 'a nation with ice in its veins' - without mercy. It was the very stuff that so alarmed the British establishment back in the 1940s and 1950s when abolitionists, empowered by evidence that innocent men had been hanged, finally claimed the moral high ground. Singapore was now getting the same kind of treatment and they didn't like it one bit.

  3

  Looking For Mr Singh

  Woodlands. It seemed an unlikely part of Singapore to find the home of the hangman. But there I was driving along Upper Bukit Timah Road hoping that the address I had found was the right one. Or more to the point the man who lived there really was Singapore's chief executioner, Darshan Singh. I wanted to meet this unknown but much-feared gentleman who was about to hang the Australian drug trafficker Nguyen Van Tuong on death row in Changi Prison. Named after the vast acres of rubber trees planted by the British during early colonial days when Singapore was a mosquito-infested mango swamp, Woodlands lies just across the border at the southernmost tip of the Malaysian peninsula. The name was on every signpost starting from my home near Bukit Timah Nature Reserve where monkeys leap from trees and sit on rails waiting for unwitting humans to give them food who risk being fined if they do or attacked if they don't.

  When Sir Stamford Raffles 'discovered' the tiny island in the early 1800s for the East India Company it was, according to the records, populated by no more than 158 Malay fishermen and their families in tiny hamlets dotted along the coastline. Within a year or two of Raffles's arrival, immigrants had swelled the numbers by more than 5,000. Business was beginning to boom with the Brit
ish presence and the East India Company moving cargo to China and back. But no one at that time would ever have predicted the population of the Little Red Dot - Singapore's nickname - would soar to almost five million in less than 200 years. The People's Action Party government hopes to push that total to 6.5 million before 2020 by encouraging couples to have more

  babies and relaxing immigration rules, especially for highly qualified men and women in the fields of finance, medicine, science, technology and just good old entrepreneurship.

  The government is following the tradition established during the days of empire when Singapore became one of the world's major trading crossroads. The population grew by leaps and bounds as Chinese, Malays and Indians were encouraged to migrate to provide skilled workers, enterprising businessmen and, of course, cheap labour. Since independence in 1965, Singapore has undergone a dramatic change from green to concrete. It is now packed to the gills with high- rise apartment blocks, factories and shopping malls, intricate road and rail systems all neatly interspersed with or camouflaged by remnants of the rain forest the island once was. All this is the direct consequence of the massive industrial modernisation programme initiated and driven by the pre-eminent political personality of the past six decades, Lee Kuan Yew. He also foresaw the need for good public housing, education and hospitals, to support and foster all this modernisation. Huge blocks of low-rent government flats and factory estates sprang up as fast as the rain forest disappeared or was depleted. Of course, all this progress was, arguably, helped by the British legacy: a basic infrastructure of legal, governmental, educational and economic systems designed primarily, of course, to maintain its colonial and military power base and just as importantly the status of the colonial elites.

  Although the legal system was based on English law it was soon fine-tuned to ensure that Lee Kuan Yew and his People's Action Party remained in power in perpetuity by silencing all political opposition through fear of being jailed as 'communists' or financially ruined. Lee also adapted some other methods acquired from the former rulers. Ominously, one of these included the British way of hanging. If Singapore can boast one of the highest standards of living and growth rates in Southeast Asia there is another statistic that it prefers not to talk about except in the abstract. It has the highest execution rate proportionate to its population in the world - higher than Iran, China and Saudi Arabia. The fear of the gallows and the malevolent spectre of its mysterious, enigmatic hangman - so death penalty advocates maintain - has kept Singapore a relatively crime free and safe place to live, raise families and, just as importantly, do business.

  An incomparable aficionado of the British way of hanging is Darshan Singh who joined the colonial service as a prison officer in 1957. Using the so-called Table of Drops devised by the nineteenth century cobbler-turned-hangman, William Marwood, Darshan Singh was taught by B. Seymour, the last British colonial hangman. The Table of Drops, advocates of the death penalty assured everyone, was the most 'humane' method in preventing slow strangulation or decapitation if the calculations - body weight and height determined the length of the drop - were correct.

  The purpose of my hoped-for meeting with this gentleman was not only to talk about his long, secret career but in particular the imminent execution of Nguyen. It was an execution that was promising to create a storm of protests across Australia and many parts of the world. I was new to Singapore in 2003 and all this made me more and more curious about the man who was to hang Nguyen even though at that time the trial process had not been completed. It seemed a foregone conclusion, however. Nguyen had been caught with 4.2 kilograms of heroin - way above the 15 grams minimum that mandates the death penalty in Singapore. His days were obviously numbered.

  My interest in the death penalty and all that it means was probably inspired by the fact that I grew up just a few miles from a notorious British execution spot - Gallows Corner in Essex - where, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, public hangings were a regular form of weekend entertainment just before the pubs opened. Of course, this was long before radio, movies, television and premier league football. There was a need to relax from back-breaking and boring jobs in the soul-destroying factories of industrial England. There was little else to do. This was fun to many Britons - a regular boozy weekend carnival of the most appalling kind. These condemned prisoners were not always vicious criminals or notorious masked and armed highwaymen such as Dick Turpin who also ended up on the gallows. Some were mere horse thieves, burglars or pick pockets, like 'Jenny Diver' of Mack the Knife notoriety who took advantage of spectators at these gory spectacles and robbed them as the condemned swung from the gallows.

  Of course, the death penalty in Britain and more than two-thirds of the countries in the world has now been abolished in law or in practice.

  Some countries retain the death penalty for ordinary crimes such as murder but can be considered abolitionist in practice in that they have not executed anyone during the past ten years and are believed to have a policy or established practice of not carrying out executions. The list also includes countries which have made an international commitment not to use the death penalty. Amnesty International figures show that during the past decade, an average of over three countries a year have abolished the death penalty in law or, having done so for ordinary offences, have gone on to abolish it for all offences.

  The original idea of having public executions in Britain was to frighten people to death to ensure they obeyed the law, to always be good, hardworking, upright God-fearing citizens. It didn't seem to work, however. People still murdered, robbed, raped, burgled, stole sheep and horses, chopped down trees and picked pockets - all crimes which attracted the death penalty equally in those days. Much to the chagrin of many fans of the sport' public executions were banned in 1889 not only because they were suddenly deemed unseemly' or uncivilised' but also because the British establishment decided that putting people to death ought to be shrouded in mystery and something to fear rather than a gory spectacle to enjoy with the family. Hangmen were made to sign the Official Secrets Act forbidding them to talk or write about what they did and the horrors that inevitably took place during the execution ceremony. Until they became brave enough to defy it, newspaper editors came under the same Act and faced fines and even jail. But the postwar era saw a more vociferous and powerful revival of the anti-hanging lobby and emergence of human rights activists, who finally achieved their aim in 1965 just as Singapore gained its independence and Darshan Singh was well into his career executing people at the rate of about twelve a month.

  And now I was in Singapore. It was the first time since capital punishment was abolished in Britain that I had lived in a country where the death penalty seemed to be universally accepted as a matter of fact save for a handful of brave human rights activists. I happened to switch on the television one afternoon in late September 2003.1 was suddenly jolted from the nineteenth into the twenty-first century. The then Singapore prime minister, Goh Chok Tong (now senior minister) was being asked by BBC interviewer Tim Sebastian how many people had been executed so far that year. He looked surprised and said he 'believed' it was in the region of 'about 70 to 80'. Asked why he did not know the precise number he replied curtly: 'I've got more important things to worry about'. Two days later his office issued a statement revising the figure down to ten. Singapore does not normally release statistics on the people it hangs. Amnesty International estimates that more than 400 were hanged from 1991 to 2001, mostly for drug trafficking and murder. At the time of publication of this book - 2010 - the figure is estimated to verge on 550. But since Darshan Singh got the job back in 1959 the grand total is actually closer to 1,000 or even more, although six years of that time was during British rule. Only the government's well-guarded archives could reveal the actual figure and frequent requests by me and other interested parties remain ignored.

  Most executions are carried out in complete secrecy and only occasionally acknowledged in the government-controlled media - o
r when pressured to do so when a foreigner is involved. Only those in the know are aware that on any given Friday, someone could be on their way to the gallows. But no one, except the hangman, the prison governor, a doctor, a priest, and a team of hopeful organ transplant surgeons standing by, knows for sure. So I knew I was treading on dangerous ground when I embarked on an attempt to extract some of Singapore's most carefully guarded secrets. If my information were correct, I was about to meet the most secretive hangman in history in one of the most secretive nations on earth where the topic of hanging people is as obsessively guarded as all those gold bars at Fort Knox. Was I on the verge of obtaining yet another major scoop in my long career as an investigative journalist? Or would I be arrested for attempting to suborn a public servant to break the Official Secrets Act? It would be a major, if dangerous, coup that would make worldwide headlines. I also knew I could end up in jail, a news item myself!

  4

  At Home with the Hangman

  I had no idea what to expect when I rang the doorbell. I was just hoping that this was the home of Singapore's unknown but much-feared hangman, Darshan Singh. Not just hoping I was at the right address but musing humorously that he would kindly invite me in for a cup of tea and a chat - and tell me some secrets of the gallows he'd been in charge of for close on half a century. More important, I wanted to talk to him about his next 'job' as he was to call it later: the execution of the Australian citizen Nguyen Van Tuong was only weeks or days away. Australia was slowly waking up to the fact that yet another of its citizens was about to be hanged in another Asian country for trafficking drugs. It was promising to be yet another controversial execution in Singapore that brought down the wrath of many foreign countries and abolitionists - including those of Dutchman Johannes van Damme, Filipina maid Flor Contemplacion, Nigerian Amara Tochi, and Singaporean Shanmugam Murugesu and Malaysian Vignes Mourthi. It would also put the spotlight again on the German citizen Julia Suzanne Bohl, a high profile drug trafficker, and Briton Michael McCrea, a double killer, who miraculously escaped a grisly, ignominious end on the gallows by circumstance or political machinations and economic power. I was taking pot luck that I was at the right place and also that he would be at home.