I’ve thought a fair bit about public executions,
Visited the remaining Newgate wall,
At Amen Court just by St Paul’s Cathedral,
For a public reading about Jack Sheppard
(18th century jail-breaker par excellence),
From the pages of Confessions of the Fox,
Jordy Rosenberg’s meta-fictive text:
‘A cannonade pf boots stomping ‘round the cart. “The hour of reckoning
approaches!” shouts the Yoeman as he clasps one hand on Jack’s shoulder and releases the harbinger pigeon into the sleety late-afternoon Sky.
The pigeon lifts into the drizzle, shedding mites and fleas upon the crowds packed at Tyburn, buzzes through the mist over the red-bricked streets towards Holborn Bridge, left at the Smithfield butchers’ stalls, and arrives at Newgate to land on the Warden’s stern uniformed shoulder … the bell-ringer clangs the Newgate toll … Four times for execution-close-to-hand. The dark Reports reverberate across the prison yard.’
And when I travel on the Central Line
From Chancery Lane to Marble Arch,
I’m mindful that I am following the route
High above our crowded heads,
That Jack’s cart would have taken to Tyburn,
The Site of Tyburn Tree at the junction
Of Oxford Street, Park Lane and Edgeware Road,
Picturing William Blake’s Albion:
‘He sat by Tyburn’s brook, and underneath his heel shot up
A deadly Tree: he nam’d its Moral Virtue, and the Law
Of God who dwells in Chaos, hidden from the human sight,
The Tree spread over him its cold shadows (Albion groan’d),
They bent down, they felt the earth and again enrooting
Shot into many a Tree, an endless labyrinth of woe.’
And when back home in the West Country,
I’ve often followed the deeds and death tracks
Of Wiltshire Captain Swing farm labourers,
And textile workers such as Thomas Helliker,
But even so, none of any of this
Prepared me for the story about to come,
Gleaned from the research of Steve Poole
In Wiltshire’s Radical History,
The tale of Robert Watkins’ public hanging,
1819: the year of Peterloo,
In ‘the tiny hamlet of Purton Stoke’:
‘He was launched into eternity exactly at a quarter past 2 o’clock, and he died without a struggle. Almost at that instant of time, and before the last convulsions were over, a loud clap of thunder burst over the spot where the innumerable multitude had collected, and for half an hour afterwards, re-doubled peals reverberated awfully through the heavens. The crowd, who behaved throughout with great propriety, then quietly dispersed. The body of Watkins, after being suspended the usual time, was delivered to Mr Wells, a surgeon, for dissection.
Considering the shortness of the notice of the execution, the concourse of persons who attended to witness it was truly wonderful; it is supposed that between 10,000 and 15,000 persons were present. Two hundred special constables were sworn in on the occasion, and the awful ceremony was gone through in an orderly and quiet manner, making, apparently, a suitable impression on the numerous spectators.’
(From the Morning Post August 3rd 1819)
It was late May when I ventured forth to the scene
Of both the crime and the execution
For a tale of turnpikes, canals, rivers, wharves,
A pistol and a riderless, cantering horse;
But firstly, remembering past visits
To the Goddard Arms, in Old Town, Swindon,
Where Robert Watkins spent his last night,
Under the same roof as his hangman …
Then on to the 53 Bus towards Purton Stoke,
Looking for the obvious bend in the road
Before you reach the crossroads and the Bell;
It was named Moor Stones in 1819,
But now has a different toponym:
Watkins Corner –
But ‘Hangman’s Corner’ in conversation,
Or ‘Hangman’s Bend’ as I was later told in the White Hart,
By the local studying form and placing bets …
But my first port of call was the Bell,
Where the body of the murder victim
Had been laid out in May 1819:
‘Mr William Wells, a surgeon of Cricklade, was called upon the 7th of May … saw the body on the spot, but did not examine it till it was brought to the Bell; the body was warm; there was a gun-shot wound in the middle of the chest …
On the Sunday following … I opened the body, there were three wounds, one large and two small ones … Before I opened the body, a female attendant, gave me a bullet and two heads of nails; a brooch had been driven in with part of the breast bone, and had ruptured the principal ascending artery; further in, I found the heads of horse nails …’
I was directed down the road to the bend,
Now furious with constant traffic,
Gazing at the buttercups in the meadows,
Trying to imagine a throng of thousands …
Now call it pathetic fallacy,
Or coincidence or apophenia,
But it suddenly started to rain when I got to the bend,
The trees creaking in the strengthening wind …
‘There used to be the tree there where he was hanged.
But it’s been cut down now’ …
I took a few photos, dodging lorries,
And made my way towards the quite lane,
That was once the main north-south turnpike,
That ran from Cheltenham to Salisbury,
And saw, like some eerie palimpsest,
A rope hanging and swinging in the wind,
From a tall tree, standing sentinel,
In an adjacent farmer’s field …
Now call it pathetic fallacy,
Or coincidence or apophenia …
I made my way along the old turnpike,
And along Dance Common by the old railway,
To reach the White Hart at Cricklade,
I chatted with staff and topers and read from my phone,
A message from my brother-in-law, Rod:
‘When Watkins was cut down, a man named Matthews cut an ear off the corpse. Thereafter know as “Crop Matthews”.’
Rod got that from his old Purton mate, John,
(Who was the model for the driver of 2516
In the STEAM Museum in Swindon btw)
But nobody had heard of this tale.
And nor does it feature in any of the links below.
So, I don’t know what to believe …
But, anyway, have a read from the below …
Could it have happened?
‘Crop Matthews’?
I’ll have to ask John.
