Britain's Most Notorious Prisoners

by Stephen Wade

  Casement was asked if he had anything to say before a decision was reached and a sentence passed. He had had three weeks in prison in which to prepare a speech. His defence counsel, Sullivan, had tried to argue that no matter what a man did, at the time the 1851 statute was passed, he was out of the King’s realm and so could not be tried for treason. Darling and the other judges disagreed.

  Casement went back to Pentonville and just a short time before he was hanged he was accepted into the Roman Catholic church. In his time in the prison, two of his cousins wrote to the prison to ask permission to visit him and to send some clothes. The requests met with no answer, but Gavan Duffy kept fighting to have these requests accepted and considered, and finally Casement was allowed a visit. But when they did arrive there, he still had on the clothes he wore on being arrested. They had sent clothes but he had not had them. It took another complaint for the clothes to be found and then for him to put them on.

  The man with the task of hanging Casement was the Rochdale hangman, John Ellis, who had executed Dr Crippen. A local man in Rochdale was asked what he thought about the Casement affair and Ellis. He said, ‘Jack were very patriotic you know. He said he’d willingly give £10 to charity for the chance to hang Casement. He wer’ as pleased as Punch when he gott’job. He went off to London as happy as a schoolboy.’ The hangman went to Pentonville and there he went with the Governor to watch Casement, pacing in his cell; the purpose of that inspection was to ascertain the right length of drop for the man’s height and weight. Ellis decided on a drop of 6ft 5ins.

  On the last evening of Casement’s life, a Father McCarroll stayed with him; the prisoner could not sleep and before eight the next morning he was in the chapel, and he prayed with the priest until his death at nine. This was on 3 August. Casement’s last words were, ‘God save Ireland! Jesus receive my soul …’ Ellis reported that Casement went to his death with great courage.

  The Times reported on the end: ‘By 8 o’clock a crowd had begun to assemble in Caledonian Road, which runs in front of the gaol … about 150 people, chiefly women and children from the immediate neighbourhood, stood on the footpath and fixed their gaze on the prison walls … Near to where they had stood was a group of workmen, who on hearing the bell raised a cheer. Five minutes afterwards the crowd had disappeared and the street resumed its normal appearance.’

  The usual official notices were posted outside the prison, confirming that the judgement of death was executed. Then there was an inquest, held in the prison, supervised by Walter Schroder. Gavan Duffy, a friend of Casement, identified the body, and then asked if he could read a statement. This dialogue then followed:

  Coroner: The order for the burial is issued by me and handed to the governor. As to any other matter in reference to the burial of the body, any application must be made to the authorities.

  Duffy: I appreciate that, Sir, I have applied to the Home Office for permission to have his body. I consider it a monstrous act of indecency to refuse it.

  Coroner: On that I cannot express any opinion.

  There was clearly a great deal of bitterness at the whole affair. Duffy wanted to know whether Casement had been considered to be insane during his time in gaol, and Dr Mander, senior medical officer at Pentonville, said that there was no truth in that.

  What could have been more banal after that than the simple statement that, at the coroner’s hearing, a verdict of ‘death by execution’ was confirmed. A petition for a reprieve had been put together in Ireland, and after his death there was clearly a great deal of ill feeling in his homeland.

  Yet, the Casement story lives on in another dimension, and that is related to the so-called ‘Black diaries’. These diary entries may or may not have been genuine, but the effect was to malign Casement. The gist of them is that they show him as a promiscuous and depraved man, and in the eyes of the public at the time, as a homosexual: we know what happened to Wilde a few years earlier, so the effect of that is easy to guess. The diaries seem to have come into the possession of the government by way of a sailor called Christensen, who was a kind of servant to Casement. It appears that at first, the government tried to use these entries as part of an argument to show that Casement was insane, but that was abandoned. His defence counsel refused to even look at them. There was certainly a view expressed at the time that there were advantages to Casement being imprisoned as a criminal lunatic than in hanging him and thus creating yet another martyr to the Irish nationalist cause.

  CHAPTER 5

  Eamon De Valera: Sprung From Lincoln Prison

  Visitors to the city of Lincoln would never be aware, unless they were suddenly taken very ill, that there was a grand and formidable Victorian prison close to the centre; it stands opposite the County Hospital, dominating Greetwell Road with its long, round-topped walls and castellar gatehouse. Opened in 1872, it replaced the old Georgian prison which was inside the castle grounds. In that long history, there have been very few escapes from Lincoln. George Brewer escaped in March 1943, to be recaptured within twenty-four hours, and in 1966 a man got free using knotted bedclothes. But by far the most notorious escapee was that of the future Taoiseach of the Irish republic, Eamon de Valera.

  It was an amazing story, hitting the national headlines, and The Times reported the bare facts the day after – 5 February 1919: ‘Hue and cry at Lincoln – Eamon de Valera, the Sinn Fein MP for East Clare, with two other Irish prisoners, escaped from Lincoln gaol some time between half past four o’clock yesterday afternoon and nine o’clock in the evening …’ Tall and distinguished, de Valera had been a key player in the Dublin Easter Rising, being captured and imprisoned afterwards, and after spells at other prisons, was sent to Lincoln with other Sinn Fein men.

  De Valera was a scholarly type, a mathematician. One of his friends at college was Charles Walker, and I have been told of a time much later in de Valera’s life when Walker’s text books were given to ‘Dev’ on a day when the famous politician invited Walker’s daughter and grandchildren to tea. It says a lot about the man that he was so welcoming, but of course, his life was full of contradictions and puzzles (what politician doesn’t have such complexities?). He was born in New York but raised in County Limerick by his grandmother; and later educated at University College, Dublin, joining the Gaelic League in 1904 and the Irish Volunteers in 1913. He was involved in gun-running at Howth the year after, and commanded the third battalion of the Dublin Brigade in the Easter Rising of 1916.

  Before ending up in Lincoln, he had been put in Kilmainham jail after the Rising and there he expected to be shot, writing this note to Mother Gonzaga at Carysfort Convent in Blackrock, where he was a maths teacher: ‘I have just been told that I will be shot for my part in the Rebellion. Just a parting line to thank you and all the sisters … for your unvarying kindness to me in the past …’ But he was reprieved and lived to see the inside of several other jails in his long career.

  He escaped from Lincoln with two other men, John Milroy and John McGarry. The description given of de Valera says a lot about him: ‘… aged 35, a professor, standing 6ft 3ins and dressed in civilian clothes.’ The report neatly summarised the fact that tracing the men was going to be virtually impossible: ‘A close search has been made all over the city, but so far as was known at a late hour last evening the escaped prisoners had not been found.’ They were not the only escapees from the Sinn Fein ranks: four men escaped from Usk prison the week before.

  De Valera had been arrested in the ‘round up’ of May that year, stopped by detectives as he went home to Greystones in County Wicklow. He was then taken across the Irish Sea to Holyhead. The forecast by journalists at the time that he would make his way back to Dublin and ‘arrange for a dramatic reappearance in Irish politics’ was quite right.

  How did they manage to escape? Lincoln prison fronts Greetwell Road, but behind at that time was merely open ground, beyond the rear exercise yards, and to the left, along the road heading out of Lincoln, there were merely limekiln area
s then. The escape was arranged so that full use could be made of the vulnerability at the rear. But having said that, there was constant supervision, and of course, they needed a master key.

  A committee of Irishmen was set up to arrange the escape, and they selected a number of men to do the job. The focus was the small patch of ground used as the exercise yard; it was surrounded by barbed wire, armed warders watched in the day-light hours, and an army unit came to patrol at sunset. Sensibly, the first decision was to decide not to try a direct assault – a rush – as there would have been a gun fight. The next plan was to start by finding a way to communicate with de Valera. The answer was to use the Irish language. An Irish prisoner who was working on a garden plot in the jail sang a song, and the words gave de Valera of the planned breakout. The second time a song was sung it was to direct de Valera to have an impression made of the key that would open the back gate. Today such methods would not be possible, but then there was more work outside and so there was a degree of vulnerability with regard to the system. According to one report, the key impression was made with the snatching of a key from a warder to press it into soap, but this seems very unlikely, given the fact that the key would be on a chain and always snapped into a belt-purse when not in use. Far more likely is the theory that a prison chaplain made the impression in soap or in a bread paste. The first two keys made did not fit anyway, and then the third model worked well.

  The impression was wrapped in brown paper and thrown over the wall. Then came the hard part. De Valera would be able to walk through from the main prison building, but there were the sentries to consider. They would have to be distracted, and the way to do that was to use female allure. Two girls from Ireland were used, as the local girls may well have split on them. The Lincolnshire Echo reported that they were ‘attractive, vivacious Irish girls, both university graduates, and they were directed to flirt with the guards’. On 3 February, four cars were sent around the country around Lincoln, to create decoys and keep the police occupied, then at dusk, the Irish girls began to work on the guards. They lured them away from the prison recreation area and the Sinn Feiners then cut through the barbed wire and waited for de Valera to appear: he did, after some initial trouble. The key broke in the lock from the outside, as Michael Collins, who had come to lead the attack, tried to force it, but luckily de Valera, from the inside, managed to force it out.

  They had to move very quickly, because Collins and Boland drove straight to the city railway station and caught a train to London. But de Valera and the others split and drove to Manchester.

  The conclusion given by the prison authorities about the escape was that it was facilitated by the fact that the internees were allowed to associate much more closely than ordinary prisoners, and were not subject to such close supervision. Shortly afterwards, Terence MacSweeney was released on parole from Lincoln as his wife was seriously ill.

  In their time in Lincoln, the Sinn Fein prisoners were treated very well. The journal of the prison doctor records his examinations of them, and there are regular entries in that book. For a long period, several were on hunger strike, and the doctor records his comments about each one, as well as noting their weight. Paradoxically, one of the prisoners put on weight during the hunger strike – a footnote to history perhaps not widely known, and a fact that adds a humorous dimension to those troubled times.

  CHAPTER 6

  Her Ghost Haunts the Death Cell

  Officers at HMP Hull often speak of the ghost of a woman who wanders the landings and the death cell late at night. Some have said to me, ‘Oh it’s Mrs Major’ or ‘It’s Lily.’ The death ‘suite’ still survives there, at least in terms of the rooms involved, if not the noose and the trappings of gruesome official hangings. Being there today, one can see the death cell, and then just six paces from its door to the space where the trapdoor was waiting. This is one of the ‘twos’ – the second level. Ethel Lily Major would have fallen down through that space, her legs kicking as she fell to her death down to the ground level – the ‘ones.’

  There are dozens of reasons for calling this case the most significant and contentious in the history of crime in Lincolnshire. Reappraisals of the reasons why Ethel Major was hanged for the murder of her husband when she mounted the scaffold in Hull prison a few days before Christmas 1934 have been made regularly over the years. The problem is that nothing can turn the clock back, and re-examining this case is a painful business.

  The outline of the case is reasonably straightforward, but a controversy will follow. The Majors, lorry driver Arthur and wife Ethel, lived in Kirkby-on-Bain, near Horncastle with their fifteen-year-old son. They were not happily married; she was forty-two and her husband forty-four. Arthur had a drink problem and he was very difficult to live with. He also appeared to be having an affair with a neighbour, a Mrs Kettleborough, and Ethel said that she had seen two love letters written by this woman to her husband. Hard though it is to believe in hindsight, Ethel Major showed these to her family doctor and said these words to him: ‘A man like that is not fit to live, and I will do him in.’

  Arthur Major died as a result of what was defined as an epileptic fit, but then, before the funeral could take place, this anonymous letter arrived on the desk of Inspector Dodson of Horncastle police:

  Sir, have you ever heard of a wife poisoning her husband? Look further into the death (by heart failure) of Mr Major of Kirkby-on-Bain. Why did he complain of his food tasting nasty and throw it to a neighbour’s dog, which has since died? Ask the undertaker if he looked natural after death? Why did he stiffen so quickly? Was he so jerky when dying? I myself have heard her threaten to poison him years ago. In the name of the law, I beg you to analyse the contents of his stomach.

  This was signed, ‘Fairplay’. A coroner’s order stopped the interment and Major’s body was examined again. The coffin was actually removed in the presence of the mourners. Ethel was in her house with relatives, including Arthur’s two brothers, when the police arrived. ‘It looks as though they’re suspicioning me’ she told her father, and he agreed. Ethel, small, spectacled and short-sighted, was an unassuming woman with some quirky habits and a complicated nature.

  It soon emerged that indeed the dog, a wire-haired fox terrier, had died after having muscular spasms. The pathologist, Dr Roche Lynch of St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, also confirmed that Arthur Major’s body had the quantity of strychnine sufficient to kill the man. On examination, the surface of his body was blue, and almost any contact on the skin would initiate a spasm. Arthur’s body had 1.27 grains in it and the dog had 0.12 grains. The average fatal dose for a man was between one and two grains. Lynch opined that Major had taken two doses: one on 22 May and the fatal one on 24 May. To dismiss any possibility of suicide, Lynch said, ‘On account of the awful agony he would go through, I do not think that any would-be suicide would take it a second time, unless he were insane.’

  It had been a terrible and agonising death. His son Lawrence saw Arthur walking into the front room with his head between his hands, then as the man went outside, Lawrence saw him fall over. He was put to bed, and when Tom Brown came later, he saw Arthur foaming at the mouth and in the throes of violent spasms. Later, when Dr Smith came, he made up his mind that this was epilepsy. It was going to be a long process of dying for the man, and in court it was revealed that Ethel had left him alone for the night, then in the following morning, she had gone shopping. Later in the day he seemed to recover and he actually drank some tea, but then there was a relapse. Virtually the last words Arthur Major spoke to his wife were, ‘You have been good to me.’

  Ethel Major was interviewed by Chief Inspector Hugh Young of Scotland Yard, and he has given an account of her in which she stated that her husband had died of eating some corned beef. ‘She appeared over-eager to impress me with the fact that she had nothing to do with providing his meals, explaining that for a fortnight before her husband’s death she and her son had stayed with her father …’ Young was eager to poin
t out that Ethel was a cool and resourceful woman and that she ‘showed no pangs of sorrow at the loss of her husband’.

  The crucially important statement made by Ethel to Young was, ‘I did not know my husband had died from strychnine poisoning’ and Young replied, ‘I never mentioned strychnine poisoning. How did you know that?’ As H Montgomery Hyde pointed out in his biography of Lord Birkett, that in Birkett’s time poisoning ‘was considered such a repulsive crime that convicted prisoners were practically never reprieved’.

  When Ethel Major was arrested and charged, the full story emerged and Lord Birkett, talented as he was, knew that he would lose this case. There was too much evidence against her. At Lincoln Assizes, on 30 October 1934, she appeared before Mr Justice Charles. Richard O’Sullivan and PE Sandlands prosecuted, and Ethel pleaded not guilty.

  One of the most convincing pieces of evidence against her was the fact that she had a key belonging to a chest her father, Tom Brown, used to store strychnine; this was used to kill vermin. Tom Brown testified that he had lost the key to his chest some years before and that he had had a new key made. When Sandlands brought out a key, Brown confirmed that it was the one he had lost. This key had been in Ethel Major’s possession. There was also a hexagonal green bottle for storing strychnine; this had been found in the Majors’ house. Then came further information about the access Ethel had to her father’s house. She had known where a key was hidden outside, and a purse she had containing the key to the chest was confirmed as being one that belonged to her mother.

  Tom Brown was questioned about this key. Here is a point of real fascination: the father was testifying against his daughter. Lord Birkett must have seen this as another nail in the coffin for his already flimsy defence. There he was in the witness-box: a whiskered old countryman. Regarding the key, the prosecution pointed out that the last key had turned up ‘shining as though it had been recently polished’ in Ethel Major’s possession. Birkett desperately tried to retrieve the situation by saying that lots of women carried trivial objects and mementos around in their handbags. In other words, she may have had the purse and key, but not the strychnine. Tom Brown had looked at the little bottle and suggested that it seemed to have the same amount in it as it had had the last time he looked at it.