Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London by Editors of David & Charles Page A

about instant death by breaking the neck, most prisoners died by strangulation, often taking 15 or 20 minutes to do so and urinating in the process; or, as the spectators called it, ‘pissing when you can’t whistle’. And the spectators were numerous. An enterprising lady erected stands called ‘Mother Proctor’s Pews’, charging as much as £10, a huge sum in the 18th century, for seats with the best view.
    Once merciful death had arrived there would be a stampede towards the corpses, amongst which three rival groups could usually be discerned. First there were those suffering from warts who believed that the ‘death sweat’ of the prisoners would relieve this condition. They sought to collect the perspiration from the skins of the corpses. Secondly there were the beadles of the College of Surgeons and the London teaching hospitals who wanted the corpses for dissection. Finally there were the friends and relatives of the executed who wanted to spare them these and other such indignities. Fisticuffs were commonplace.
    No hanging around
    In 1783 executions were moved from Tyburn to a scaffold outside Newgate (now the site of the Old Bailey) because of public concern about the disorder arising from the Newgate processions. Not everyone was pleased. Dr Samuel Johnson complained that, ‘Executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators they don’t answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the public was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?’ Charles Dickens and William Thackeray both witnessed executions outside Newgate and found them degrading. Dickens wrote of the ‘ribaldry, levity, drunkenness and flaunting vice’ of the crowd, the only decorum occurring with the cry of ‘Hats off’ as the moment of execution arrived. Thackeray, in his celebrated essay ‘On Going to see a Man Hanged’, wrote ‘I have been abetting an act of frightful wickedness and violence.’ In 1868, as a result of such criticisms, executions were moved to within the prison walls itself. One thousand, one hundred and six men and 49 women were hanged within Newgate between 1868 and the demolition of the prison in 1902 when the scaffold was moved to Pentonville where it remained in use until 1961, its victims including Dr Hawley Crippen (hanged 1910) and the Irish Nationalist Roger Casement (hanged 1916).

‘Yours truly, Jack the Ripper’
The Whitechapel terror writes
    O ne criminal who did not meet his end at the end of a hangman’s noose was the murderer who terrorised Whitechapel between August and November 1888 with five gruesome murders; the culprit has become known as Jack the Ripper. The name arose from a teasing letter sent to the press at the height of the frenzy, signed ‘Yours truly, Jack the Ripper’. It is unlikely that the letter was penned by the murderer himself but the name stuck to the mystery perpetrator because of his habit of subjecting his victims to horrific mutilations. The terror lasted longer than the three months of the five murders since other murders were committed in the lawless area of Whitechapel which were doubtfully attributed to ‘Jack’; but the so-called canonical five had sufficient similarities in method to be placed with some confidence at his door. A relatively short walk takes in all the murder scenes. Jack the Ripper was not the first London serial killer and certainly neither the last nor the most prolific but he is surely the most notorious.

    The Whitechapel terror
    All the women murdered were prostitutes plying their trade and all the murders occurred within little more than half a mile of one another. Many street names were later changed either because of the demolition of slums or to conceal the notoriety conferred by the Ripper murders. The first was that of Mary Ann Nicholas on 31st August 1888 at Buck’s Row, now Durward Street, north of the Whitechapel Road. The next