All in a day’s work: journalist reports on grim spectacle of Death by Hanging
This eyewitness to an execution wanted an end to capital punishment
By DAVID MYTON
It is 8am on January 20th 1880. The place is Darlinghurst jail in Sydney, Australia. Two men are about to die – executed by hanging.
They are Andrew George Scott, aged 37 – a former Church of England stipendiary lay reader, born in County Down, Ireland - and Thomas Rogan, aged 23.
Scott went by the name Captain Moonlight, and was the boss of the Wantabadgery Bushranger gang of which Rogan was also a member.
They had been found guilty of murder and sentenced to death at the Central Criminal Court on December 11 1879 for offences committed while holding up a sheep station near Wagga Wagga in New South Wales.
We have an eyewitness account of the execution written by J F Archibald (pictured), the 26-year-old co-editor and founder of a new newspaper called The Sydney Bulletin.
Under Archibald’s editorship it will go on to be one of Australia’s most influential and successful newspapers, helping to develop a spirit of Australian nationalism including promoting local artists, writers and poets - some of whom such as Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson remain well-known today.
Archibald’s name is today relatively well known in Australia as he left money in his will to fund a major art award – the annual Archibald Prize for portraiture.
He believed Australia should be an independent country free of the British.
He denounced hanging as a barbaric British practice which should be abolished, and declared that British laws were “savage and revengeful”.
‘Adelong has beaten Gundagai at cricket’
This article, therefore, is not just there for its grizzly shock value – he wants to use it as a means of changing the law.
The article begins on page one and continues inside across pages 4, 5 and 6 and includes chilling illustrations drawn by the London-born artist and businessman, and long-term acquaintance of Archibald, William McLeod.
To place it in its mundane context, when the execution story ends on page 6, directly beneath it is the headline ‘Sporting notes’, recording that ‘Adelong has beaten Gundagai at cricket’.
The execution story begins with an interview of the hangman - Robert Howard, aka Nosey Bob, who was born in Norwich, England in 1832 and migrated to Australia in 1861.
For many years he was a successful cabman in Sydney. However, one of his horses kicked him in the face, smashing his nose and disfiguring him for life. Thus the nickname.
Subsequently unemployed, “Nosey Bob” accepted the unwanted post of the State’s first salaried hangman at 170 pounds a year. He carried out 66 executions at Darlinghurst jail, even acting as ‘guest’ hangman in other states and in New Zealand.
Archibald asks Bob if people think his position as executioner is strange.
“It may be queer to outsiders but here I am,” he replies.
“I’ve got a good cottage and 12 pound 10 shillings a month,” he says, adding: “I’ve got as good a garden as there is anywhere – I’ve got the biggest cabbages and the finest flowers.”
Handed over to the hangman
Moving on to the execution, Archibald records that at precisely five minutes to nine the convicts were “handed over to the hangman by the Governor of the Jail”.
Scott’s face paled at the sight of the executioner and his arms were at once tied with whipcord at the elbows “in an unusually secure way”.
Rogan quietly submitted to the process of pinioning, and was led by the assistant hangman to the drop.
When he came out to die Scott’s heart seemed to fail him, Archibald writes.
He endeavoured to look unconcerned, tried to smile “but his upper lip quivered like that of a dog at bay. Rogan simply looked dazed …
“The executioner took from his pocket the white cap and rapidly drew it over the head of Scott, who at that instant turned to Rogan, and said ‘Goodbye Tom’.”
The cap was then drawn over Rogan’s head, and the rope placed round his neck.
Then “the executioners stole softly from their victims’ sides, the assistant hangman threw his whole weight against the lever, and in a second Andrew George Scott and Thomas Rogan, with their necks broken, were hanging in mid-air”.
Scott died instantly; Rogan’s frame quivered several minutes after he fell.
“The scene at the scaffold was terrible - death by the hand of the executioner the worst of all spectacles, sickening and awe-inspiring,” says Archibald.
“The convict’s wasted frame, his sunken eyes, his white face, the helpless, doubled-up appearance given him by the pinioning of his arms as he stood beneath the beam and for a second regarded with a kind of dreamy, yet keen curiosity, first the dangling cord which was soon to bind him to the grave, and next the perfidious trapdoor on which he stood, enough to strike terror into the heart of even the man who could shake hands with Death in any other form.”
‘He must feel as if it were all a horrid dream’
Then the execution itself:
“First comes the rattle of the trap; then almost instantaneously, the dull fatal sound caused by the rope straining on the beam.
“It is a sound from which there is no echo, and which is invariably followed by a silence as profound as in itself to suggest death.
“His arms are tied and can grasp at nothing; his feet suddenly lose their support, … He must feel as if it were all a horrid dream, years being crowded at such a time into a second … The man who drops from the scaffold feels himself falling, not six or seven, but ten thousand feet. At last his fall is broken – he comes to the end of the rope. The hand of Death is laid upon him and he wakes – in the other world.”
Hanging, declares Archibald, is a barbarous practice of British law, which must be consigned to the past.
“I have always felt that an execution was a cold-blooded brutality, as heinous in its cruelty as the crime which it ‘expiates’.”
More than 1,500 people were hanged in Australia between 1820 and 1900. Between 1901 to 1967 – when the death penalty was removed - Australian states executed 114 people.
Check out my YouTube podcast on the Sydney executions: