Wandsworth Prison looms large in the annals of London’s criminal history, as well as featuring in the story.
It was, for example, at Wandsworth Prison that Jack the Ripper suspect George Chapman was executed.
The Portsmouth Evening News, in its edition of Saturday the 21st of September, 1895, provided readers with a peek inside the prison and at the las days awaiting the condemned held therein:-
A MURDERERS’ GRAVEYARD AND HOW THEY GO TO IT
It would be difficult to find, by way of illustration, a picture uglier or more commonplace than the one which is the subject of this article.
But it is a curiosity of its kind.
The place itself is very rarely seen, and I believe that it has never before been “taken” by pen, pencil, or camera.
The reader may count thirteen small patches of whitish paint on the face of a dull brick wall. They are the “tombstones” of thirteen murderers.
There are fourteen patches on the wall now, for another was added to them about twelve noon the day after the present writer saw them.
This, in a word, is the murderers’ graveyard, within the precincts of Wandsworth Prison.
A BRIEF RECORD
The record which the murderer leaves behind him (or her) in this silent, decorous, and dreary spot is as brief as may be; the initial letters of the name borne in life, the date of the sudden and final disappearance, and the distance – fourteen inches all cases – between the boundary wall and the head of the flat, untended grave.
This is “the end of the passage,” so far as the relations of the murderer go with the world which has pitched him out.
MARCHING THROUGH HIS GRAVEYARD
A gravel path divides the grassplot from the gallows shed, the insignificant proportions of which are completely dwarfed by the great block of prison cells that shadows it.
It is a common little drab-painted shed, which, when the folding doors are closed, looks as though it might be a place to keep garden tools in.
Nowhere here, where the last scene of is hurriedly enacted, is there anything to enhance the terrors of sudden death by the hangman’s hands. The victim, his way to the gallows, would never guess that he is marching through his graveyard, unless by chance he caught sight of the narrow pit newly opened at the end of the row.
Approaching it from the back, as is always done,he would not recognise the gallows itself until the instant at which he turned to face the rope dangling from the beam in the shed. He would catch no sound from the outer world, no echo of the busy life within the prison; above the voice of the chaplain, he would hear only the death-boom of the prison bell
IN THE CONDEMNED CELL
The condemned cell at Wandsworth is at the end of a corridor quite close to the central hall of the prison, but the occupant of that roomy and not uncomfortable chamber knows nothing of what is around him all day long; nor, unless by accident, is it known to the other prisoners that a felon under sentence of death is lodged with them.
He is exercised in a quiet yard or garden of the prison, unseen save by the two warders who are always with him.
INSPECTING THE CONGREGATION
If he attends the morning service in the chapel, he no longer occupies a place of shame where every eye may observe him, and his two warders sit alone in a gallery, effectually hidden by a thick red curtain from all the rest the congregation; he is brought in before the prisoners have assembled, and does not pass out until they have left.
He would never in these days hear a sermon preached at him by the chaplain, which seems at one time to have been the almost invariable custom on the Sunday before the execution.
Apropos, the Rev. J. W. Horsley told me some years ago of a singular and painful experience which befell him at Newgate one Christmas morning.
He had gone to take the service for the prison chaplain, but there had been a clearance of the gaol a day or two earlier, and his congregation consisted of two warders and a man who was to die on the gallows the next day.
An inspiriting audience for a Christmas homily!
HUMOURED AT THE LAST
Under the modern regime a condemned criminal may pass the time in his cell pretty much as pleases him.
His diet is nominally the ordinary prison fare, but the doctor can, and always does, modify it to suit any reasonable liking of the prisoner.
Books and writing materials are freely supplied, and it may be remembered that a murderer who was hanged not long since spent almost the whole of his last days in the composition of a comic opera.
HOW MURDERERS FACE DEATH
Curiously Or not, the demeanor of most prisoners under sentence of death is quiet and orderly in the extreme.
A certain number stunned by the prospect of an hourly approaching fate, seem to pass their days and nights in a kind of stupor from which they are scarcely roused, even by the arrival of the executioner on the morning of death; their conscious existence has ceased almost before they are placed beneath the gallows beam.
MY VISIT TO WANDSWORTH
When I visited Wandsworth Prison the condemned cell was tenanted by a man who was to be hanged at nine on the following morning.
I passed the cell three or four times, always with a nightmare feeling, and I had the curiosity at last to ask the Chief Warder, Mr. J. H. Ward, what he supposed the unhappy creature was doing.
“When I was last in his cell,” said Mr. Ward, “he was sitting with his hands in his pockets and a pipe in his mouth.”
SOME OF THE EXECUTED
Wainwright, executed for the murder of Harriet Lane, kept up to the last an air of reckless effrontery.
He was allowed a cigar, says Major Arthur Griffiths, the night before execution, which he smoked walking up and down with the Governor of Newgate, and recounting his “extraordinary successes” with women.
He stepped briskly to the gallows, with a smile on his lips.
Kate Webster, hanged at Wandsworth for poisoning her mistress, showed neither remorse nor penitence, nor fear.
Mr. Ward, who assisted the execution, told me that he well remembered her, as she stood upon the drop, putting her pinioned hands up to her throat to adjust the rope more comfortably.