by Carol Baxter
Australian Star
While only a small detail, it made the abolitionists feel worse about the coming barbarity: Louisa was to be the first woman executed at Darlinghurst Gaol.8 Lots of men had been slain, of course—indeed, there would be an average of one per year over its seventy-two-year history—but no women . . . until now. As the date for this first female execution drew near, the public wanted to know more about the death penalty. Was hanging painful?
Once, no one had cared whether executions were painful or not. Pain was something that everyone had to endure. The ability to withstand pain, or at least rise above it, was seen as evidence of physical and moral fortitude. Thus, the physical and psychological pain suffered by those who died on the gallows was considered part of the punishment ritual, a sign of God’s retribution, of the eternal fires of hell. After the benefits of ether were discovered, pain came to be seen as an evil needing to be overcome. By extension, society came to believe that the evilness of pain also needed to be eliminated from the law’s violence so it could appear cool and rational—humane—in contrast to the hotheaded viciousness and cruelty of the law-breaker. People needed to believe that the ultimate punishment was instantaneous and painless rather than a form of judicial torture.
The Australian Star endeavoured to quell concern by providing a simple answer to the ‘pain’ question. If Louisa’s neck broke and her spinal cord ruptured, death would be immediate and effectively pain-free. If, however, her execution was bungled and she strangled to death, it wouldn’t be painless. Not that the Star mentioned Louisa personally; rather, the word ‘it’ was used liberally as if she were an animal being butchered. The article also failed to mention that Louisa would be hooded and pinioned to ensure that the spectators couldn’t see her facial contortions or her hands clawing at her neck.
The Star also mentioned the French custom of reprieving prisoners when the rope broke, which allowed them to discuss their experiences. Most said that they hadn’t experienced any pain at all. One man mentioned seeing a bright light then blackness while another recalled that the sensations were rather more pleasurable than otherwise.
It wouldn’t be public of course. The salaciousness and savagery of the mobs drawn to public executions—the ‘hanging sports’ as they were called—had helped to drive the spectacle indoors. Nonetheless, concerns had been expressed about the dangers of private hangings, including the potential for governmental abuse. The uncondemned might find themselves swinging, perhaps for reasons of expediency, while the moneyed and powerful might escape their legally mandated fate. Thus, the pressmen’s pens served as the community’s eyes, reflecting the public’s right to see for themselves that the death ordered in their name, the death ordered for their protection, had taken place in an orderly and efficient manner. Unfortunately, it was a ‘right’ the pressmen rarely wanted. Few volunteered for such a duty.
Others would join the pressmen at the gallows site, including Darlinghurst’s gaolkeeper, chaplain and surgeon. Female warders would attend Louisa; however, the women’s petition had failed to sway the authorities in terms of the hangman himself. Frederick Lee had told the governor, as he handed over the women’s petition, ‘If a woman ever has to be hanged, another woman should be deposed to perform the ceremony. It is a most repulsive idea that a man should perform such an office on a woman.’ Of course, to most people, the idea of having a woman act as the hangman was even more repulsive. More to the point, how many would volunteer? Any woman who did so would become a social pariah. Instead, the state hangman, Robert Howard—‘Nosey Bob’—would preside.
His was a sad story. He had once been a Sydney cabman until a horse kicked him in the face and smashed his nose, leaving the ‘noseless’ man unable to find any work. Desperation led him to take the unwanted job of serving as the colony’s first salaried hangman. As he soon discovered, the judge who sentenced a prisoner to death was revered, but he who carried out the decree was despised. Worse, those who demanded the blood of convicted criminals were among the most vocal complainants when he spent time among them, when he travelled on public transport or sat in public bars—his second home in the days before an execution.
Nonetheless, he took pride in his work. ‘He has just the same eye for a neck that a painter has for a pretty scene,’ remarked an interviewer, having noticed Nosey Bob eyeing the throat of a new acquaintance as if he were thinking about the size of the required knot.
After an execution, he would rub his hands and ask the gentlemen of the press to bear witness that the criminal had been executed in a prompt and workmanlike manner—if there wasn’t a bungle. In recent years, there had been too many bungles for the pressmen’s liking, another reason why there were few volunteers to attend the spectacle. Hopefully, Louisa’s would be a ‘workmanlike’ turning off rather than a horror to be imprinted on their minds forever.
• • •
Would she confess? It was part of the hanging ritual, the ‘dying confession’ that offered truth and clarity, that proved the wisdom of the community’s judgement and condemnation. Not that a ‘dying confession’ had the same impact now that executions were hidden from the public. Still, there were practical reasons in Louisa’s case. There was too much reasonable doubt: about the execution, the conviction, even whether she was guilty or not. A confession would ease the minds of the populace.
Most thought it unlikely that she would confess. ‘In view of her extraordinary manner, it is quite possible that she will meet her fate with her lips sealed and with a cool indifference,’ declared Victoria’s Gippsland Times.
Sydney was not alone in its fascination with Louisa’s case. With the benefits of the instant telegraph service, all of Australia was waiting to hear what would happen as the gallows clock continued its unrelenting countdown.
Thou shalt not kill.
Exodus 20:13
Chapter 47
Suffer the children.
Matthew 19:14
The thud, thud of a workman’s hammer rang out across the gaol yard. Preparations for an execution began a few days beforehand to allow the executioner time to practise with his ropes and weights. Now, with only one day to go, the atmosphere was tense, as it always was before an execution. Many of the workers and inmates took a moment to say a quick prayer or to lift their faces to the sun, as if the closer they were to the spectre of death, the more intensely they valued their own existence, pitiful though it might be.
The tension, though, was worse than usual, worse than ever before. Some of the female warders—toughened by life even before they took charge of Sydney’s wickedest women—were sobbing wrecks. Louisa had been incarcerated in the gaol for five months so they all knew her. In the past few weeks, in the closeness of her special cell, the relationships between warder and prisoner had deepened. These weren’t friendships, exactly, but more a feeling of mutual dependency and respect. Still, through this enforced contact they had come to know Louisa better. She was no thieving, cursing, drunken whore. Rather, she was an attractive, middle-aged woman who was courteous and respectful, reserved but not unfriendly. She was an enigma, true, but no monster—not from what they could see. Yet on the morrow they would have to walk beside her to the gallows and watch her hang by the neck until she was dead.
Unless the governor decided to reprieve her. Would he? Surely there was still time.
• • •
There were many knocks on the door of Government House that Monday, but one pair of visitors was greeted with astonishment and consternation. Two fair-haired children stood there. They said that their names were May Andrews and Fred Andrews and that they were Louisa Collins’ children. They wanted to talk to the governor, to ask him to reprieve their mother. Could they see him, please?
Who had sent them? they were asked.
Could they have been dispatched by their mother in a desperate ploy to tug at the governor’s heartstrings? Even worse, it might be a piece of despicable underhandedness on the part of the political opposition.
/> The children replied that no one had told them to come. They had made the decision by themselves.
Mrs Collins’ young children? These were the last faces Lord Carrington wanted to see. He told his private secretary that he couldn’t speak to them.
His secretary returned to the room where the children were waiting. ‘I am sorry you have come,’ he said. ‘It costs me a severe struggle to have to tell you. While His Excellency is anxious to do everything in his power for your unfortunate mother, he must carry out the law. Nothing can be done on behalf of your mother.’ Then he escorted the sobbing children to the door.
• • •
The look in Canon Rich’s eyes said it all. Her plea to the governor had failed.
Louisa pushed aside the horror. What now? She asked to see May one last time. She wanted to explain to her daughter that she was to be adopted by the Geehans; she wanted to reassure her, somehow, about her future.
May was a bright child, one who waited and watched and took her cues from those around her. But she was only a child. She’d had no comprehension of the devastating consequences of her testimony—not at the time, anyway. Of course, she knew now that her mother was to die, although she perhaps didn’t fully comprehend the role she had played. What would life hold for her when that knowledge struck her like a lightning bolt?
May wasn’t alone when she arrived at the cell door. Her brothers Fred and Herbert accompanied her. Had Herbert come from Newcastle to make peace with his mother on her ‘deathbed’ or to demand answers to those unanswerable questions?
There was one beloved face missing: Arthur, her favourite, to whom she had left all her trinkets; Arthur, whose words had also condemned her to death.
Soon, too soon, her children left the cell, their bewildered faces turning back for one final glimpse. And the remnants of her fortitude finally crumbled around her. She wept.
Chapter 48
There is nothing more abhorrent to my sense of feeling than the strangling of a woman. A woman! from whose breast the nurture of life is drawn by the human frailty; a woman! who presides over the paths of our little children; a woman! who is the very centre of everything that is gentle and lovable in social life.
Sir Henry Parkes
As night’s gloom started to dissipate around four-thirty on Tuesday, 8 January 1889, they began to gather outside the gaol, the crowds who refused to abide by the law’s decision to exclude them from these judicial sacrifices. Rattling the gaol gates, they tried to get inside. For once, these barriers were locked and barred against them.
Drunks walking home from an evening’s dissipation joined the revellers. Thirsty wretches tarried as well, awaiting the hour when the first public houses would open. By the time the sun peeped over the horizon, a hundred people were lounging against the gaol walls or scampering up nearby trees in the forlorn hope of seeing over them. The police were already on duty—the masses thronged every time a felon was to be dispatched—and used their might to return the oglers to terra firma.
‘A woman is going to be hung,’ the spectators muttered to each other with glee. It hadn’t happened before in their lifetime—not in Sydney anyway—so this execution had a particular appeal. ‘A woman is going to be hung!’
Women and children were among those who joined the burgeoning crowd. By nine am, some two thousand people were gathered outside the gaol walls, waiting for a sign that another wretch had been slain.
• • •
Louisa had been sleeping soundly, unaware that the ghouls were flocking. She awoke around seven to a fresh but brilliantly sunny morning with not a wisp of a cloud to mar its splendour. It was almost an insult, somehow. When even the elements refused to mourn her fate, there could be no reprieve.
At eight o’clock, the warders told her it was time. She was to be moved to the condemned cell, situated only twenty or thirty feet from the gallows. There she would await her final summons.
Meanwhile, a deathly silence hung over the gaol, broken only by the sobs of sympathetic women. All of the inmates had been ordered to cease their work and return to their cells. The gaol would remain locked down until after the execution was over.
An eerie emptiness surrounded the little troupe as it began the long walk across the courtyards, past the governor’s imposing mansion, past beds of bright, summer flowers. Louisa’s step was steady and firm, as if she were making her way to her Sunday church pew rather than to the hangman’s altar.
• • •
Around twenty to nine, the gate to Darlinghurst Courthouse opened. Only those with special permits were allowed through. The Minister for Justice had decreed that the first execution of a woman at Darlinghurst Gaol was to be a strictly private event and that the well-endowed and well-connected would not be granted approval to attend. He wanted no prurient eyes watching this disturbing scene.
Warders guided the select few through the subterranean tunnel that connected the courthouse with the gaol: a surreal experience, as if they too were to meet the ferryman. It was a relief to reach the gaol-side door and to climb the sunlit stairs. When they reached the gaol’s inner courtyard, they were told to halt and wait. Others soon joined them there, including Inspector Hyem, the police’s representative.
Soon after nine a warder stationed on a balcony adjacent to the condemned cell called out, ‘All right.’ The waiting men proceeded to a courtyard—an exercise yard—in front of a triangular first-floor gallery that faced the north-eastern gaol wall.
The men saw a stoutly built platform. A massive beam sat on two solid uprights about eight or ten feet above the platform, all painted a forbidding black. Hanging from the beam was a rope ending in the distinctive menacing loop.
Those who had attended previous executions knew that Nosey Bob would have greased the rope above and below the loop’s knot to allow the knot to slide freely when the noose was tightened around Louisa’s neck. Currently, the noose was resting on a piece of carpet lying over the top of a chair sitting to one side of the scaffold. The chair was there to hold Louisa in the event that she collapsed before the deed could be carried out.
In the centre of the gallows was a trapdoor consisting of two flaps that met in the middle. They were kept in position by a bolt, a drawbar attached to the underside of the trapdoor. The flaps had hinges on their outer edges and were opened by pulling a lever located on top of the platform. When the lever was pulled and the bolt withdrawn, the weight of Louisa’s body would force the flaps to swing down and away from each other. Heavy weights prevented the flaps from swinging back again.
Underneath the gallery on the courtyard level was an open door. As soon as the bolt was withdrawn, the spectators would be able to see Louisa’s body falling through the trap and hanging underneath.
To ensure that the trapdoor did not open prematurely, Nosey Bob had placed a small iron pin in the bolt lever. The pin would need to be removed before the lever could be pulled.
The spectators knew that the executioner would have tested the ‘drop’ to ensure that it worked smoothly. He would have pre-stretched the rope, most likely by soaking it in water and leaving it overnight with a bag of sand hanging from it, one that weighed the same as Louisa’s eleven stone three pounds (seventy-one kilograms). It was critical to calculate the length of slack rope required to do a satisfactory job.
In the past, a ‘short drop’ of only a couple of feet had been used, with the result that most prisoners had choked to death. The recently implemented ‘long drop’ aimed at a speedier demise. By dislocating the uppermost cervical vertebrae and thereby separating the spinal cord from the brain stem, it caused a quick and painless death. If the long drop was too long, however, death would result from decapitation rather than dislocation.
Over time, scientific calculations and experiments had helped hangmen determine the correct position for the knot’s placement and the appropriate rope-length to pound-weight ratio so as to avoid both decapitation and strangulation. The optimal combination meant that, when the
trapdoors were opened, the body would fall with the force of gravity, with the head’s movement limited by the constraint of the noose. When the rope reached its maximum length, the amount of energy generated by the correct calculation of body-weight and rope-length would cause the rope to jerk up again. If the knot was properly positioned under the left side of the jaw, the rope’s jerk would throw the head backwards and snap the neck, ensuring a quick, pain-free death. Not that all capital punishment advocates wanted the ‘ultimate deterrent’ to be such an easy demise. Rather, they had to make allowances for the suffering endured by those forced to spend interminable minutes watching a fellow human choking to death.
Nosey Bob had decided that Louisa’s drop-length would be five feet six inches, his calculation based partly on her weight, but also on her gender. If he’d been hanging a man of the same weight, he would have allowed a longer drop; however, he recognised that a woman’s neck lacked the same musculature as a man’s and that her tissues had likely been softened by prison discipline and dietary restrictions. Worryingly, as he hadn’t executed a woman before, the allowances he had made might not be accurate.
At six minutes past nine, the spectators heard Canon Rich’s solemn tones as he began to recite the Anglican service for the burial of the dead: ‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live . . .’
• • •
Canon Rich’s hopes of a reprieve hadn’t been realised. He had stayed with Louisa until late the previous evening, praying with her and offering every ounce of spiritual comfort he could summon. He had joined her on her walk to the condemned cell, where they knelt together and continued their prayers. There had been no word from the governor. Louisa was going to hang.
He tentatively broached the subject of a confession. She sidestepped his urgings by claiming to have confessed all her sins to Almighty God and to have begged for his forgiveness.
