by Anita Anand
For some, the shooting of Sir Michael was merely the callous murder of an old and defenceless man. To others, it threatened the very foundation of the British Empire. Sir Michael was a stalwart defender of the Raj, and many in Britain agreed with his hardline policies towards India.
Conversely, millions in India itself regarded the murderer as an avenging angel, who, after twenty-one long years, had settled a terrible score. Thanks to Udham Singh, the name ‘Jallianwala Bagh’ was being spoken all over the world once again. It was a name the British would rather have forgotten – a portal into a nation’s shame at a time when the country needed to be both shameless and fearless.
The Home Office, Special Branch, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), MI5, the Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), as well as the prison and prosecution services, all knew the importance of Prisoner 1010. They agreed he had to die quickly, with as little fuss as possible. Cross must have known all this. How had he managed to mess things up so badly?
Instead of taking his own measurements, Cross appeared to have relied heavily on the prisoner’s paperwork. According to 1010’s file, he was ‘stocky’, ‘heavy built’ or ‘well built’. It described a man 5 feet 8 inches tall, ‘weighing 172 lbs’ and ‘generally sound and healthy’. The man Albert saw through the spyhole in the cell door seemed like a different person entirely. Udham was thin, sallow and sickly, nothing like the iconic picture of him that had run in so many newspapers.
Udham had been held on remand at Brixton Prison for months before his transfer to the Ville’s condemned wing. There, the senior medical officer, a man called Dr Hugh Grierson, had been tasked with keeping the prisoner alive long enough to hang him. Udham had not made it easy. From the moment he arrived at Brixton, he had been trying to kill himself. When his attempts to slit his wrists or take poison were discovered, he pushed his food tray away. Udham had tried to starve himself to death. Weeks of hunger striking did terrible things to the human body.
Grierson found it objectionable that Udham refused to die the way the British had planned, and talked about him as if he were a stubborn animal or errant child in dire need of training. Udham was ‘uncooperative’ and ‘responded badly to authority’.6 In his notes, Grierson observed: ‘There was always an undercurrent of antagonism to everyone, sometimes bordering on dumb insolence. He was untruthful, and I could not rely on anything he said.’7
Adamant that Udham Singh should not escape the hangman’s noose, Grierson ordered a regime of force-feeding. Three times a day in the weeks leading up to his trial, warders entered 1010’s cell and pinned his body to a gurney. They forced a feeding tube into his mouth, down his throat and into his stomach. His teeth clenched on the rubber gag that prised his jaws apart. Denounced as a form of torture for decades, ever since harrowing accounts of the procedure had been made public by the suffragettes, force-feeding was rarely used in Britain by 1940. Prisoner 1010 was subjected to ninety-three of these brutal acts during his time at Brixton.
Grierson had been at pains to play down the impact on his prisoner, insisting that he had taken it all surprisingly well. Even if the true horror of the experience had been made known, few would have cared. Udham Singh was one of the most hated men in Britain. Most were counting the days till he dangled from the end of a rope.
Grierson’s troublesome prisoner only decided to eat again after the judge passed the death penalty on him, but by that time his weight had plummeted. As he accepted meal trays again, he slowly put the pounds back on, but Stanley William Cross had no idea what he actually weighed at this moment, on the eve of his execution. To Albert’s disgust, Cross had ignored the hangman’s code, drilled into them both all those years ago when they had trained at this very prison. Nothing should be left to chance. Preparation was key:
Take your time all the time . . . Choose your rope the afternoon before. And that’s the time you test that the drop works smoothly, to your complete satisfaction, when you’ve got word that the prisoner is at exercise, or in the chapel, or wherever they’ve put it in his mind to go. You don’t want to have him hear it, he’s only next door.8
Udham was right in front of them now, playing cribbage with a guard, passing the hours till the moment appointed for him to die. Albert knew that, at this late stage, there was no way discreet measurements could be taken. The governor and the sheriff of London were hovering outside Udham’s cell, talking nervously among themselves, showing no sign that they were going to leave. There was no way the two executioners could now breeze in and ask the Indian to step on a set of scales. Not without disgracing themselves entirely.
Cross looked at Albert in desperation. Speaking out of the corner of his mouth, and hoping nobody else could hear, he begged for help: ‘Eh, Albert! What drop shall we give?’9
Not entirely displeased by his colleague’s plight, Albert replied: ‘You should know. You’re the boss.’10 A more spiteful man would have left it there, let Cross’s career go hang with the convict, but his Uncle Tom would not have approved. Besides, Albert was not a man who liked to see needless suffering. If the hangman’s drop was too short, this man would strangle slowly, legs kicking in the space beneath the trap door. If the sandbag attached to his feet was too light, his spine would fail to sever cleanly and painlessly, and the end would also come slowly. If it was too heavy, his whole head might rip off. Albert understood that this was no time to gloat:
I took the paper out of [Cross’s] hand and a pencil from my pocket. The truth was that I had already worked out in my mind an approximate drop from the details of the prisoner’s height and weight which I had heard, and from my inspection of the condemned man. I put the paper up against the wall of the execution chamber, made a fast check that my memory of the weight was right and wrote down a figure. I didn’t bother to look at the Home Office table, because I was already using my own experience.11
Congratulating himself on his superior skill, Albert took a last look at the man they were going to kill in the morning. It was hard to believe that this crumpled creature had caused so much trouble.
But people had been underestimating Udham Singh all his life. There is no record of how long it took 1010 to die. In his memoirs, Albert Pierrepoint would only say: ‘We duly carried out the execution next morning, took the body down, stowed the gear and reported to the governor.’12
Confidential prison files indicate that Udham Singh’s last moments were anything but easy, suggesting that Cross either misunderstood or ignored Albert’s advice. Details, deemed so potentially embarrassing they were ordered sealed in perpetuity, forcibly opened by Freedom of Information requests, hint at the gross incompetence of the execution. Blame was laid firmly at Cross’s feet: ‘I have to report for the information of the Commissioners, that in my opinion this man [William Cross] is unsuitable for the post of executioner . . . the whole method in which he carried out the execution was such as to bring me to the opinion that it would not be safe for him to be employed again.’13
Stanley William Cross never did work as an executioner at the Ville again, but Albert Pierrepoint went on to become Britain’s longest serving hangman. He would pull the lever on 400 men and women during his long career. Keeping his cool while Cross lost his won him his longed-for recognition. In death, Udham Singh had inadvertently set Albert Pierrepoint up for life.
Hanged men get no headstones. Bodies, cut down and loaded into a wooden cart, were rolled into a small nondescript space round the back. The space reserved for bodies was so small that Pentonville’s executed had to be buried one on top of another. After the burial party had dug its hole and lowered in the new incumbent, guards threw layers of chalk dust onto the plain wooden boxes before covering them with dirt. It was a tried and tested way to avoid putting a spade through some old murderer’s skull. The soil round the back of Pentonville was striped like a grisly gateau, white lines showing where one man ended and another began.
Udham Singh’s line lay close to Roger Casement’s, an Irish aristocrat who had been
hanged as a traitor, and Dr Crippen, a notorious wife-killer. Only Pentonville’s governor knew for sure where all these men lay. Gathering dust in his desk drawers, he had a chart with names, depths and steps away from the wall. It was important to keep a record, just in case anyone wanted to dig up any of these wretched specimens. Of course, it rarely happened. This patch at the back of Pentonville was filled with the forgotten and the damned.
CHAPTER 2
THE GOOD SON
Michael O’Dwyer had always loved the loamy richness of Tipperary earth. It was good, wholesome and it grounded a fellow. To his mind there was no nobler profession than tilling the soil, making things grow and going to sleep exhausted after a long, hard day. Michael was a sentimental man.
Born on 28 April 1864, close friends described him as ‘Irish to the backbone’.1 The land of his forefathers, filled with folklore, music and poetry, meant everything to him. In later years, Michael devoted much of his time tracing his sept – a Celtic term for a large and influential family within a clan. Historically, the O’Dwyer sept was one of the most powerful in Tipperary, and his family even had its own coat of arms: a rearing red lion, or ‘lion rampant’, pawing the air on a background of white ermine. The Latin motto beneath reads: ‘Virtus sola nobilitas’ – ‘virtue alone ennobles’.
To his delight, Michael found that his ancestral roots were entangled in hundreds of years of Irish history. As he would later write, his clan had witnessed the very birth of his beloved country: ‘The O’Dwyers emerged from the Celtic twilight of tribal conflicts and struggles against the Danes at the Battle of Clontarf, AD 1014.’2
Even Barronstown, where Michael grew up, an inconspicuous parish of 33 square miles, was described by him in terms of epic poetry. Lying in ‘the heart of the “Golden Vale’ ” and ‘under the shadow of the Galtees’. He described a land of ‘blue mountain and the rushing river’.3
Michael was one of fourteen children, the sixth of nine sons born to Catholic John O’Dwyer and his wife Margaret. The family farmed an 85-acre holding,4 and from childhood the somewhat wild boy gained a reputation as a ferocious rider, pelting over fences and pushing both his riding companions and his mounts to their absolute limits. He was courageous, careless and sometimes callous with his horses.
Surrounded by siblings of similar age, Michael preferred the company of adults, particularly his own father, of whom he said: ‘It is no filial exaggeration to say that he possessed the best traits of the Irish character.’5
In Michael’s doting eyes, John O’Dwyer had ‘an unselfish devotion to his family, partly concealed by an austere demeanour, loyalty to his friends, fortitude in times of trouble, and a genial spirit of hospitality’. 6 Margaret, his mother, was no less adored. In his memoirs Michael described a woman with saint-like patience: ‘She kept the family together in her own loving, unobtrusive and efficient manner till all were launched in the world or provided for at home, no easy task in those days of agricultural depression.’7
Economic downturns were merciless in Ireland, and Catholic Ireland suffered most of all. The Great Famine gripped the country for years, beginning with an outbreak of potato blight in 1845. It wiped out an entire harvest; crops were left to rot as the disease laid waste to acres of fields. Since potatoes were the mainstay of the Irish diet, widespread starvation was inevitable.
Despite describing parents who valiantly struggled against the odds, Michael’s family were immune to the horrors faced by their neighbours. His father not only owned land and stables, but also made money from a modestly sized herd of cattle. The O’Dwyers of Tipperary were by no means rich, but business was good enough for John to pay for the education of all fourteen of his children. Michael’s family never knew a day’s hunger in their lives.
Other things set the O’Dwyers apart, too. Though staunchly Catholic, Michael’s father could not stand the tenor of nationalism among his co-religionists. While they detested the English and called for full Irish independence, John O’Dwyer was more convinced by the arguments of Daniel O’Connell, an Irish political leader who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, campaigned for the right for Catholics to sit in the Westminster Parliament. O’Connell believed the only way to improve the lives of his countrymen was to come to some power-sharing agreement, working within Parliament.
In contrast, groups like the Young Ireland movement demanded nothing less than full independence. These men, who later morphed into the Irish Republican Brotherhood, or Fenians, were despised by the O’Dwyers. They referred to them as ‘thugs’ and ‘hotheads’. John O’Dwyer placed more faith in the men in Westminster than those seeking to overthrow them. Michael was therefore weaned on the belief that Parliament’s might was right. Nationalists embodied chaos. His later responses to men like Gandhi were rooted in these early attitudes.
At the age of seven, Michael O’Dwyer was sent to St Stanislaus boarding school in Tullamore in central Ireland. Miles away from the warmth of his family, he would endure an austere school regime run by Jesuit monks. Though they were known to wield a cane with enthusiasm, Michael never expressed any regret at being sent away at such a tender age. The Jesuit brothers’ benign despotism was to be admired. Michael was an unusual boy in many ways.
While other Stanislaus pupils were preoccupied by books or the first XI cricket team, he saw his future in the Indian Civil Service, or ICS. An administrative elite never exceeding 1,200 in number, the ICS ran the Raj in the name of the monarch. Drawing from a pool of the best British talent, ICS men were given enormous power and responsibility and chosen by fiercely competitive exams. For young men born without title or fortune, the ICS was one way they could really make their mark on the world.
One of the first British civil administrators in India was the legendary John Lawrence, every schoolboy’s hero. Born in 1811, Lawrence owed his fortune and his considerable fame to Punjab, a province in the north of India. Lawrence was viceroy of India by the time Michael was born, and his meteoric rise fired up many a schoolboy’s imagination:
A hard, active man in boots and breeches, who almost lived in the saddle, worked all day and nearly all night, ate and drank when and where he could . . .
Heat, sun, rain, climatic changes of all sorts were to be matters of indifference to him. There was no place for drawing room niceties as an officer who made the mistake of taking a piano with him to the Punjab discovered. ‘I’ll smash his piano for him,’ Lawrence declared and moved the officer five times from one end of the province to the other in two years.8
Men like Lawrence were heroes to boys like Michael.
The competition to join the ICS in the late 1800s was tremendous, and a market for ‘Educational Crammers’ burgeoned as a result. One of the most famous was run by a Mr Wren in London’s Powis Square. Michael O’Dwyer cantered through the curriculum as if he were riding one of his family’s horses, but his gusto failed to impress Wren. As O’Dwyer would later observe, he ‘used to say that our batch of thirty was the rottenest that had ever passed through his hands’.9
Emerging from the ‘rotten’ bunch, Michael passed his ICS exams with flying colours. It was an especially notable achievement because news of two murders in Ireland had threatened to derail his studies altogether. On 6 May 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Henry Burke, the chief secretary and permanent undersecretary for Ireland respectively, were stabbed to death in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. It had been one of the most audacious acts of nationalist violence for years. Alarmed, Michael’s thoughts flew to his father. The Phoenix Park murders made him ‘ashamed of being an Irishman’10 for the first time in his life, he said. If the nationalists could kill powerful statesmen, what hope was there for a farmer like John O’Dwyer?
Michael O’Dwyer’s worst fears came true seven months later: ‘Our home was fired into in December 1882, and my father and sister had a narrow escape.’11
The family received police protection, but the episode took an unexpected toll on his colossus of a father neverthele
ss. When Michael returned home for the Christmas holidays, John O’Dwyer suffered a stroke, which he believed had been brought on by the stress of recent months. It seemed mild at first, leaving him lightly paralysed, but another stroke was on its way. On Christmas Day, ‘one of those soft mild winter days the south of Ireland is often favoured with’,12 John asked Michael to drive him around his fields.
‘It was to be his last look,’ recalled the devastated son. ‘Soon after his return, he had a fresh seizure and passed away early the next morning.’13
Michael never forgave the nationalists for what they had put his father through. He would loathe their kind for the rest of his life.
Young ICS candidates were expected to complete a two-year probationary period at an English university. Balliol College, Oxford, had a reputation in the late 1800s as a leadership factory. Recent graduates included George Nathaniel Curzon, Alfred Milner and Herbert Henry Asquith, men who would go on to serve as viceroy of India, secretary of state to the colonies and prime minister of Great Britain respectively. After Michael won his coveted place, he studied with his customary intensity, passing out fourth among all ICS candidates that year.
This result was good enough to catapult him into a prime Indian posting, however the young Irishman did not yet feel ready to start his working life. Still in mourning, Balliol, with its rigorous demands, provided him with just the diversion he needed. He asked for permission to remain a while longer. The India Office agreed to fund a year-long extension, on the condition that he completed an honours degree in that period. This left Michael with little time to wallow in his sadness, because he had to squeeze a three-year course into just one. Jurisprudence was one of the most challenging degrees Balliol had to offer, and though predicted to get only a third-class degree, he came away with a First.
