The rise and fall of a genius editor (Part 3)
In which the budding journalist J F Archibald reports in gory detail the execution of two Bushrangers in Sydney in 1880 - and also interviews their hangman
By DAVID MYTON
This is the third extract of chapters of a thesis I wrote several years ago on John Feltham (aka Jules Francoise) Archibald 1856-1919, founding editor of The Bulletin – one of the most popular newspapers in Australia’s history. He was also a successful promoter of Australian literary giants such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson. An excellent editor and journalist, his name lives on in the Archibald Prize (awarded annually for Australia’s best portraiture) and the Archibald Memorial Fountain in Sydney’s Hyde Park.
The first issue of the Sydney Bulletin in January 1880 didn’t look much. Later in life its editor, JF Archibald, described it as “a poor thing indeed”.[i] The text type is small, perhaps 7 point; the layout is both modular (front page) and vertical (the rest). Headlines are a mix of caps and lower case, usually just one or two decks of type. Visually, it’s a bit of a mess.
However, revealing Archibald’s genius as a sub-editor, the copy pulses with humour, irony, mischief, criticism and, rarely, praise. It carries poetry, stories, short information paragraphs, and news overseas news. By the end of 1880, it is a sell-out success: “We have had the good fortune to hit the popular taste from the outset, and the success which has attended our venture has been unprecedented in the annals of Australian journalism.”[ii]
The most extraordinary, most gripping of the stories in that first edition was spread over pages four and five, spilling to page six. It is in-depth coverage of an execution. It is headlined:
WANTABADGERY BUSHRANGERS
THE CLOSING SCENE: EXECUTION OF SCOTT AND ROGAN
STRANGE INTERVIEWS AND STRANGE REVELATIONS
THE PAST AND PRESENT OF DARLINGHURST GAOL
The text and illustrations centred in pages four and five present a macabre psychodrama. As Archibald writes … “death by the hand of the executioner is the most terrible of all spectacles”.
It is terrible for the victims, of course, but it is also terrible for him as reporter. His writing is personally revealing. He is no disengaged, neutral observer. He is a part of this haunted theatre of the damned. He tells us what happens, and how he feels about it. The execution of Scott and Rogan is decisive in shaping his psychological and emotional responses to the law, religion, colonial governance and in his rejection of the “Victorian ethos of social hierarchy and deference”.[iii]
Andrew George Scott, aged 37 – a former Church of England stipendiary lay reader - and Thomas Rogan, aged 23 – members of the Wantabadgery Bushranger gang - were hanged at Darlinghurst jail, Sydney, at 9am on 20 January 1880.
After serving a prison sentence for robbery at Pentridge gaol, Scott (alias Captain Moonlite) was released in March 1879, and on 16 November 1879, with a gang of five men he held up Wantabadgery sheep station near Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, for two days.
He used the two children of the near-by hotelkeeper as hostages, separating them by force from their parents. Two of the gang, James Nesbitt and Augustus Wernicke (a boy of 15), and one trooper, Constable Bowen, were killed when the police attacked the homestead at noon on 17 November. [iv]
Scott, Thomas Rogan, Thomas Williams and Graham Bennett were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death at the Central Criminal Court on 11 December 1879. Williams and Bennett were reprieved and their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.[v]
What catches the eye immediately in the coverage is artist William Macleod’s gothic horror illustrations. At least, horror is the impression they make on a 21st century viewer. Perhaps they would appear every-day normal to the readers of the time – this is what people did, and this is what people had done to them. To us it is a theatrical spectacle played out on a stage called “the past”, to them it was life-experienced reality.
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’.
On the left page is a montage of five drawings, in the top two frames one of a newly clean-shaven Scott and the heavily bearded Sheriff; in the middle two frames is a stylish young woman sitting with needle and thread at work on the hoods that will be placed on the condemned men as they stand on the gallows; in the right frame two vigorous looking men sit opposite each other stretching the rope in order to ensure its efficacy.
The bottom frame comprises a drawing of “the common hangman”, the noseless Nosey Bob and a solemn man identified as The Late Hangman. They are separated by a noose that dangles from the line above.
On the right-hand page (p5) is a double-column vertical illustration showing the two condemned men on the gallows above a large gate - standing on the trapdoor, nooses around necks, arms and legs pinioned, white hoods over heads. Two clergymen minister to their charges as the Sheriff and the hangman stand by. Eight onlookers gaze up from a courtyard, into which the condemned will drop - although according to Archibald there were 40 persons present, making it a very public execution.
The article begins with an interview with 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 conscientious and successful cabman in Sydney. However, one of his horses kicked him in the face, smashing his nose and disfiguring him for life. Subsequently unemployed, “Nosey Bob” accepted the unwanted post of the State’s first salaried hangman at 170 pounds annually. [vi] Previously the hangman had been paid a fee for each execution. Howard carried out 66 executions at Darlinghurst Gaol, even acting as “guest” hangman in other states and in New Zealand. As NSW State hangman he also hanged seven men at Old Dubbo Gaol.[vii]
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 a month,” he says, adding: “I’ve got as good a garden as there is anywhere – I’ve got the prettiest garden in Paddington – the biggest cabbages and the finest flowers.”
Bob adds that he brings up his children well, and sends them to school every day – “and the children belonging to the first gentleman in Paddington, aren’t neater, nor cleaner, nor more mannerly”.
Moving on to the execution, Archibald records that at precisely at five minutes to nine the convicts were “handed over to the hangman by Mr Read, the Governor of the Jail”.
Scott’s face paled at the sight of the executioner, he writes, by whom 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. Rogan, a Roman Catholic, was attended at the gallows by the Rev Father Ryan. Scott’s spiritual comforter was the Rev Canon Rich. Archibald continues:
“When he came out to die Scott’s heart seemed to fail him. He appeared to endeavour to look unconcerned, and muttered mechanically ‘What are all these people doing here?’ He 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.
“The convict’s wasted frame, his sunken eyes, his white face, the helpless, doubled-up appearance given him by the pinioning of his arms, were as he stood beneath the beam and for a second regarded with a kind of absent-minded and 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.”
Archibald moves back to Nosey Bob, whom he describes as fascinatingly horrible – “a human ghoul, a fiend incarnate … No frontispiece to Paradise Lost ever contained so vivid a representation of the Evil One, no nightmare ever presented to the dreamer a spectre so hell-like”.
If the executioner looked terrible to the lookers-on, asks Archibald, what must have been the convict’s feelings when for the first time he found himself confronted by the man who was to slaughter him: “Who could not help trying to put himself in the culprit’s place as he walked the few paces intervening between his cell door and the drop?”
Archibald puts the reader into the frame by personalising the condition of Scott:
“If Hades be not a thing of a future state, but of the earth – if the supreme punishment be after all the unquiet conscience, the racked brain, the terror-stricken soul, the fear of the Unknown, then must it be admitted that even in this world Scott expiated every offence it were possible to commit against humanity.”
Again, he asks the reader to imagine the terror of execution.
“There is no sound more appalling than that of a body falling from the drop.
“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.
“Have you ever in a dream fancied that you were falling from a great height?
“Have you ever in your waking hours, found the rung of a ladder give way as you were descending a shaft hand over hand … some such feeling as that must be experienced by the wretch as the hangman, to use a hackneyed phrase, ‘launches him into eternity’.
“His arms are tied and can grasp at nothing; his feet suddenly lose their support, his hands only are free … He must feel as if it were all a horrid dream, and – years being crowded at such a time into a second – as if he were falling thousands of feet without having the hideous sinking feeling which made his heart jump and then stand still, relieved by the touch of a single material object.
“So it must be with the man who drops from the scaffold; he 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.”
As criminals convicted of murder, Archibald has no sympathy for Scott and Rogan. Scott in particular was an “utterly unprincipled man of good birth, excellent education and of high but ill-applied ability”, and a man dangerous to society and utterly incapable of reform. But he does not think they should be put to death. The gory details of the article are there to make a point – execution is not the way Australia should administer its justice.
A few years later, Archibald publishes a piece in the Bulletin denouncing hanging as a barbaric British practice and condemning British law as “savage and revengeful”.[viii] The gallows must go, the article asserts: “It must be consigned to the limbo of the past, with the rack and the thumbscrew, the block and the faggot.”
At the gallows, in the slums of London, as a witness to government in Britain and Australia, there was forming in Archibald the seed of a vision for his country and his paper – as “radical, republican and nationalist”.[ix]
As I will argue, however, his vision, was much broader and generous than many have given him credit for. I will also attempt to show that these early experiences contributed to his psychological problems – such as anxiety and obsessional behaviour – that saw him confined to Sydney’s Callan Park Hospital for the Insane.
[i] J F Archibald, ‘The Genesis of The Bulletin’, The Lone Hand, Sydney, May 1907, p53
[ii] Bulletin, January 22 1881, p1
[iii] William Philpott, Bloody Victory. The Sacrifice of the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century, Little, Brown, London 2009, p46
[iv] 'Scott, Andrew George (1842–1880)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/scott-andrew-george-4546/text7451, published in hardcopy 1976, accessed online 9 May 2014. This article was first published in hardcopy in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 6, (MUP), 1976
[v] ‘Australian Executions 1870-1967’ – accessed through http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/aus1900.html
[vi] Bulletin, April 24 1893, p6
[vii] ‘Robert “Nosey Bob” Howard (1832-1906)’ - accessed through http://www.waverley.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/8732/Robert.pdf
[viii] ‘Padding the Gallows’, Bulletin, June 23 1888, p4
[ix] Richard White, Inventing Australia. Images and Identity 1688-1980, George Allen & Unwin, 1985, p83