DATE WITH THE HANGMAN: A History of Capital Punishment

For more than a millennium, criminals in the British Isles were beheaded, garrotted, hung, drawn and quartered for crimes as varied as serial murder to impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner. Certain forms of execution, such as beheading, were reserved for the nobility, and up to the 18th century decapitated heads were displayed publicly on London Bridge. Hanging became the principal method of punishment at about the same time as the beginning of the movement for the abolition of the death penalty. In 1861 the number of capital crimes was reduced to four, and the last judicial executions took place in 1964 with permanent abolition in 1969. A number of high-profile miscarriages of justice contributed to the abolition, among them the trial of serial strangler John Christie in 1953, during which it emerged that a fellow housemate had been executed a few years earlier for a crime of which Christie was now found guilty. Another controversial case was the hanging of 19-year-old Derek Bentley, a mentally challenged young man whose younger accomplice had fired the lethal shot. Starting in 1900, the author lists all the judicial executions in Britain, totalling 865. Most entries are brief, giving the name, age, crime, date of hanging and name of the hangman, but some celebrated cases are described in detail. These include Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged, who was executed at Holloway in 1955 by Albert Pierrepoint, a member of a dynasty of chief hangmen. Ruth admitted killing her lover when she found him with another woman and made it clear she felt she deserved to die. By contrast, George Joseph Smith, the "brides in the bath" murderer, cold-bloodedly drowned a series of women for their money. 142pp, paperback, photos.