by Sarah Wise
Newgate Prison and Debtors Door, photographed shortly before the building’s demolition in 1902
Sir Nicholas Conyngham Tindal, his fellow judges, the lord mayor, and the duke of Sussex had repaired to the private apartments above the Sessions House. Here, over dinner, the duke told the lord mayor that trials such as these made him proud of England, which had “the most perfect, intelligent and humane system.”1 Evidently overheard by someone who was transcribing his words, the duke continued: “The judges of our land, the learned in our law, nobility, magistrates, merchants, medical professors and individuals of every rank in society, anxiously devoting themselves and co-operating in the one common object of redressing an injury inflicted upon a pauper child, wandering friendless and unknown in a foreign land. Seeing this, I am indeed proud of being an Englishman, and prouder still to be a prince in such a country and of such a people.”
In the condemned block, the three were searched to ensure they had no means of cheating the hangman and were then locked into their separate cells, each with two guards. The fifteen condemned cells (built in 1728 and retained when the prison was reconstructed, along with the Sessions House, in the 1770s) stood at the northern end of the Newgate/Old Bailey complex, three stories of five rooms, each nine feet by six, and nine feet high. A dark staircase leading between the floors, Charles Dickens would later note, was luridly lit by a charcoal stove.2 The condemned block was built of stone that was three feet thick, and each cell was paneled with planks of wood. In summer, these were chilly rooms; in winter, bitterly cold. The cell door was four inches thick with a small, grated hole; the cell window was five feet from the ground and a foot high, double-grated and barred. At best, the cells were in semidarkness, and after sundown each was lit by a single candle. On the floor was a hemp mat, which acted as a mattress and was tarred to keep out damp and vermin, and a couple of horse rugs, which served as blankets.3
Separating the condemned cells from the rest of Newgate was the Press Yard, at the southern end of which were two “press rooms”—wards containing tables, benches, and a fire where the condemned were allowed to spend their daytime. In the Press Yard, remand prisoners used to be pressed to death by iron weights placed on a board if they refused to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty, an act that was viewed as treasonable; this peine forte et dure had squashed its last victim in 1726, but the memory of the ancient cruelty was retained in the name of the yard. It was just ten feet wide but seventy feet long, running down from the Newgate Street wall to the garden of the Royal College of Physicians (the college once backed onto the prison/Sessions House complex) and to another icon of the medical profession, Surgeons Hall, where, between 1752 and 1796, members of the Company of Surgeons had taken apart the bodies of the executed. (This had been the site of Sir Astley Cooper’s earliest triumphs, by his own admission: “The lectures were received with great éclat, and I became very popular as a lecturer. The theatre was constantly crowded, and the applause excessive.”)4
Dare it be said, Newgate was not so bad. Not so bad as it had been. John Wontner had been in charge since 1822 and his governorship was regarded by many at the time as something of a golden age, though overcrowding continued to be a problem.5 George Dance the Younger’s building was supposed to hold 350 prisoners, but in 1826 the population had reached 643, down from over 900 in 1815. (If two men were kept in the same cell, the warders had noted that “crimes have been committed of a nature not to be more particularly described.”)6 Newgate housed both men and women (the ratio was four to one), though they were segregated, while children between the ages of eight and fourteen were kept in the “school” area. One of the most serious criticisms was that those awaiting trial mixed with the already convicted, the innocent and the novice being “contaminated” by the older felon, with the result that the same old faces would come back into the jail time and time again. No strenuous efforts were made here to “redeem” the criminal, unlike at Millbank Penitentiary. Compared with that at many other London jails, however, Newgate’s death rate was low, at three a year; and suicide was uncommon.
A sketch of the Newgate press room, where the condemned passed their remaining daytimes
There were no limitations on the number of visitors, and family and friends could bring in food and drink to augment the prison ration, which was in itself not ungenerous. Every day, breakfast consisted of half a pint of gruel; each prisoner had a pound of bread a day; and dinner alternated between half a pound of beef on one night and soup on the next, with vegetables and barley. The Newgate diet was a source of criticism, since it was said by many to be more plentiful and of better quality than the food eaten by the nonoffending poor outside the prison walls. There was no restriction on the amount of porter that could be drunk (it was safer than the water), and visitors noticed high levels of drunkenness among the inmates. The tradition of “garnish,” or “chummage,” had each new arrival buy a round of drinks for those who shared his cell or ward—under threat of humiliation, such as removal of his trousers. It is impossible to gauge the extent to which psychological bullying went on, though an idea of the mores of Newgate thieves in the late 1820s is suggested by the tale of one prisoner who found himself being shunned when it became known that during the robbery at the London Docks for which he was imprisoned, he had knocked unconscious his victim, an aged sea captain.7
Physical violence among inmates was said to be rare, and rioting even rarer, with the only dissent tending to occur after lockup on the nights when the “transports” were announced—those who the next day would be taken, in “drafts” of twenty-five, to the hulks, either to finish their jail term there or to set sail for the other end of the earth. These announcements seemed to trigger anger and despair across the jail.
* * *
John Bishop slept soundly in his cell and woke at around six on Saturday morning. The Reverend Dr. Theodore Williams, true to his word, turned up at ten. The vicar took Bishop into the room of Brown, the turnkey of the condemned block, and here, as the two men sat on either side of Brown’s table, Bishop began to reveal a number of most interesting matters—one of which was that James May had had no knowledge of how the boy’s body had been obtained, that he was entirely innocent and must have his death sentence overturned. Bishop continued, and the vicar’s pen flew over his notebook as he tried to capture the killer’s account. Suddenly there erupted into the room a party of furious men: Dr. Horace Cotton, the chaplain (or “ordinary”) of Newgate; prison governor John Wontner; and Alderman Wood, City sheriff. “Come, come, Mr. Williams,” said Dr. Cotton, “what is all this about? I suppose you want to extract confessions with a view to publishing them.” Dr. Cotton demanded that the confession stop immediately, and Bishop was ordered from the room and told to walk awhile with Brown in the Press Yard. Dr. Cotton told Dr. Williams that he had no right even to be in the prison, since these were condemned men and therefore came under the jurisdiction of the ordinary of Newgate. The extraction and publication—for money, via the newspapers—of condemned men’s confessions within twenty-four hours of an execution was among the perks of the ordinary’s job; it was one of Newgate’s many interesting old traditions, a practice sanctioned by the lord mayor of London and his court of aldermen. Alderman Wood told Dr. Williams that any written account of Bishop’s story would not be allowed out of the prison—it would have to be surrendered at the sheriff’s office. If Bishop were to go giving his account of events, it was highly likely that he would implicate others—hadn’t Dr. Williams remembered that Rhoda Head was still in custody on suspicion of being an accessory after the fact of murder?
The vicar of Hendon was astonished but not daunted, and when the party had swept out of Brown’s room and Bishop was brought back in, he asked the killer to pick up the tale—Bishop had just reached the most extraordinary part of it when the interruption had occurred. But Bishop would not go on. He had become dejected again, and said, “It is now of no use to implicate others.”8 He was returned to his cell by Brown,
and the vicar of Hendon went off to see if Thomas Williams had anything to say for himself. He did.
Theodore Williams, the controversial vicar of Hendon, photographed in old age
* * *
At around noon, solicitor James Harmer was informed by Dr. Cotton that Bishop and Williams were in the process of making confessions and that anything they might say could compromise Rhoda. So on Saturday afternoon, Harmer went along to Bow Street and asked Minshull to set Rhoda free, on the legal grounds that she could not be held accountable for any crimes that her husband may have compelled her to commit. Besides, with Rhoda out of danger, the men would feel able to tell everything. Minshull saw the wisdom of this stratagem, and so it was that late on Saturday afternoon, Rhoda found herself in a coach with James Harmer traveling to Newgate. There, in one of the press rooms, “a most affecting scene” (according to the Morning Advertiser) took place, as Rhoda was reunited with Bishop and Williams. All three wept, and she told them that they must feel free to make the fullest confession possible and not worry about her and Sarah.
* * *
James May, the former legal clerk with beautiful handwriting, had expressed himself in verse:
James May is doomed to die,
And is condemned most innocently.
The Lord above, he knows the same,
And will send a mitigation for his pain.
He had written these lines on some sheets of paper on which he was revealing the secrets of the London resurrection world.9 When the vicar of Hendon came calling at May’s cell and urged him to unburden his soul, May told him, “I’ve been guilty of many offences, but I never committed murder.” Even as he faced execution, May was proving unable to supply information on any part of the story before the encounter at the Fortune of War on the morning of Friday, 4 November. He told Dr. Williams everything he had ever known about both Bishop and Williams, but none of it was new or remarkable. And it wasn’t as if May was above snitching: Superintendent Thomas had been among the Newgate visitors on that busy Saturday morning. The superintendent and others had compiled a list of all the London resurrectionists they had ever come across or heard talk of; it numbered fifty men. Thomas placed the list in front of May and asked him to make a pen mark against the name of any whom he considered to be capable of burking. When he handed the list back, May had marked six names.
* * *
Bishop had some surprise visitors too. Magistrates from the Lambeth Street police court applied to him to see if he could help in the case of Caroline Walsh, the supposed victim of Eliza Ross, who was being held on suspicion of murder. No hospital dissecting-room porter had been able to assist with this case, though John Appleton of Grainger’s school had been keen to impress the magistrates by coming forward with a dissecting-room book detailing all the bodies that had passed through his theater (the book must have been a recent addition; it never put in an appearance during the Fanny Pigburn inquiry). The magistrates wondered if Bishop knew anything about Eliza Ross and Edward Cook, her common-law husband. The result of the interview is not known.
A Mr. Evans, the owner of a toy shop in Newgate Street, called to ask governor John Wontner to find out if Bishop knew anything about the disappearance of his nephew. The boy had gone for a walk in Hampstead in July and had not been seen again. Bishop told Wontner the boy’s disappearance had nothing to do with him.
* * *
At nine o’clock on Saturday evening, the statements of all three prisoners, and May’s list and poem, were taken to the London home of Sir Nicholas Conyngham Tindal by Wontner, Cotton, Dr. Williams (whose presence was now being tolerated), James Corder of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, and two City of London undersheriffs. The meeting was to establish whether May had a good case to present to the home secretary, Lord Melbourne, for a pardon or at least a “mitigation” while the possibility of a new trial was considered, with the charge reduced to being an accessory after the fact of murder, not a principal. The other two trial judges, Sir John Vaughan and Sir Joseph Littledale, were summoned too, to give their opinion.
There was no court of appeal (that was seventy-six years away) and pardons were obtained by personal intervention to the home secretary’s department in Downing Street—one reason the judges’ support would have been helpful. The more prestigious the pleader, the more likely a reprieve. “All their proceedings are conducted in the dark,” wrote one law reformer of the Home Office and the Privy Council. “[They] now affect to take every pain in coming to a right decision; but what they do is of an occult nature, and unsatisfactory.”10 Historian Albany Fontblanque thought so too: “In this mysterious supreme court no parties appear for or against the prisoner; no witnesses are called; the convicts have no opportunity of protecting themselves against malicious or erroneous representations.”11
There were four hours of discussion about May’s case—none of which will ever be known since it was “in the dark.” But while Sir Nicholas and Sir John were in favor of granting May a reprieve, Sir Joseph was not so minded. The warrants for three executions on Monday morning were written out in Downing Street.
* * *
Sunday arrived. May was still protesting his innocence; and Bishop and Williams told Dr. Williams, Dr. Cotton, John Wontner, and anyone else who asked them that May had had nothing to do with any killings—that they were not a gang, that Thomas Williams had barely known May, and that when May had come on Friday, 4 November, to extract the dead boy’s teeth, it was the first time he had ever been to Nova Scotia Gardens.
The Reverend Dr. Theodore Williams convened a meeting of Tindal, Vaughan, and Littledale in the private apartments above the Old Bailey Sessions House; Wontner, Cotton, and various sheriffs and undersheriffs were present too. Though Littledale would still not budge, a new request, with copies of the further statements that had been made by Bishop and Williams, was forwarded to Lord Melbourne, at his private residence. At half past four in the afternoon, the home secretary returned his final decision.
Cotton and Wontner went without delay to the press room, where all three prisoners were found with their warders. Cotton opened the dispatches from the home secretary and read first to Bishop, then to Williams, the official decision that they would be hanged by the neck on Monday morning. He addressed May next, telling him “that the execution of the sentence upon James May shall be respited during His Majesty’s most gracious pleasure.” May dropped to the floor as though he had been shot; then his body began to twist and jerk, his arms flailing. Four officers attempted to sit him up and bring him to his senses, but it took a quarter of an hour before May was able to speak. (Bishop and Williams looked on unconcerned, as though the room were empty.) At first he spoke meaningless syllables, then he laughed, then he cried, then he tried to pray but he was shaking too much. Wontner and Cotton had never seen anything like it in all their Newgate years; they told him to calm down, they knew what he meant to say, it was all right. Everything would be all right. May gibbered out his thanks to God, to Wontner, to Cotton, to Dr. Williams. When he calmed down further he said that when Cotton had turned to him to read out his warrant, he had been so earnestly expecting to hear the same words that had been delivered to Bishop and Williams that when he heard the word “respite,” despair had suddenly changed to elation—so suddenly that he lost consciousness. He described it as feeling like his heart had burst in his chest. He had never killed anyone, he said; he knew he had not been a good man, but he had never killed anyone.
* * *
At some point after the final pronouncements had been made, Bishop and Williams were allowed to say farewell to Sarah and Rhoda. No report of the meeting has emerged; but the newspapers pointed out that none of Bishop’s children had been permitted to visit Newgate.
* * *
Later that night, another squabble erupted in the jail. While Dr. Williams appears to have been allowed to stay on at the prison to be with Bishop, Thomas Williams had requested the presence of one of his former confidantes, the Reverend Dr. Whitwort
h Russell, chaplain of Millbank Penitentiary. Dr. Russell had already established a reputation as a dogmatic campaigner for prison reform, and an intense, one-to-one relationship with his charges—in which he urged rehabilitation through repentance and religiosity—was one of his radical measures. Whitworth Russell would soon become Britain’s joint first inspector of prisons and would seek to create a uniform, systematic approach to penal care. Yet Thomas Williams had gone into Millbank a petty thief and emerged a killer.
Thomas Williams had several private conversations with the Reverend Dr. Whitworth Russell in his cell, despite the objections of Dr. Cotton, who was supposed to be the only shepherd of Church of England souls at the jail. Catholics, Jews, and Dissenters could do as they pleased and import their own holy men into Newgate; but Anglicans were to be given succor only by the ordinary. Cotton thought Whitworth Russell’s and Theodore Williams’s approaches to religion were unorthodox and not “useful” to condemned men (though Cotton himself had been criticized for his “condemned” sermons, preached with a coffin placed at the center of Newgate’s chapel, which were said to unduly frighten those who were to be executed). Yet it seemed that only Whitworth Russell had any rapport with Thomas Williams; he had the killer praying fervently at times. Bishop, by contrast, had sunk back into his unresponsive stupor: in Cotton’s words, “he seems to be of a reserved and sullen temper. It was difficult to lead him into conversation, so as to learn anything of his state of mind.”12 One of the guards asked Bishop if he wanted to be read to from the tracts that Cotton had left in the cell, and Bishop said, “Don’t bother me—I was teazed quite enough by the parsons with religious talk during the day and I’ll have none of it tonight. I can say no more than I have said.”
* * *
“I shall now go to bed for the last time,” said Thomas Williams to his warders at half past midnight on Sunday. He knelt and prayed aloud, then undressed, and took to his mat and horse rugs. Nevertheless, he stayed up talking with the guards for a further hour and wrote the following note for the chaplain of Millbank: “Mr Russell, If you will be kind enough to let my brother prisoners know the awful death which I shall have suffered when you read this, it will, through your expostulations, prevent them from increasing their crimes when they may be liberated; and tell them bad company and drinking and blasphemy is the foundation of all evil. Give my brotherly love to them, and tell them never to deviate from the paths of religion, and have a firm belief in the blessed Saviour. Give my love to John Edwards, John Justin and John Dingle, and receive the prayers of the unfortunate and guilty Thomas Head.”
