Pierrepoint by Steven Fielding

home that night having received his fee in full – a practice the English authorities didn’t adopt from their Scottish counterparts. (In England, no execution meant no fee for the hangman.)
    Thomas Bone’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he was transferred to Perth Gaol to serve out his sentence. Four years later, after smashing all his personal property in his cell, he hanged himself with a bed sheet, achieving the outcome the authorities had denied him at Ayr.
    Harry and William Willis were on duty on a sunny July morning when they executed Fred Ballington at Manchester’s Strangeways Prison. Ballington was a Glossop butcher who had cut his wife’s throat in a carriage at Manchester’s London Road railway station after she refused to give him some money to buy more drink.
    Like Lawman, whom Harry had hanged at Durham earlier that year, Ballington had also tried to cut his own throat after committing the murder. He was given a drop of 7 feet and died instantly.
    A week later Harry carried out two executions in two days. On Tuesday, 4 August, he was at Hull Prison for the execution of Thomas Siddle, who had killed his wife by cutting her throat after she took out a commitment order against him. After hanging Siddle, he travelled north to Durham, where he met up with his brother.
    Matthew Dodds was a miner from Hamsterley, near Bishop Auckland who had been convicted of murdering his wife. Mary Dodds had inherited a substantial amount of property and made a will, leaving it all to her husband. Following a series of quarrels she made a new will, this time leaving Dodds just a small allowance, but in January 1908 she was persuaded to make a third will reverting her inheritance back to her husband. A few weeks later Dodds hurried round to a neighbour and said that he had found his wife lying dead in the fireplace. The coroner recorded an open verdict – that death was due to the burns she had received during the fall – and she was buried without a police investigation. Following information received from an anonymous tip-off, however, the body was exhumed, whereupon a pathologist found that cause of death had been strangulation.
    At his subsequent trial, Dodds was convicted and sentenced to death. However, the Criminal Appeal Act had recently come into being, and this gave him some hope. Prior to this Act, those condemned did not automatically have the right to appeal and often had to hope that a reprieve or commutation of sentence came from some other means. Matthew Dodds became the first man allowed an appeal under the new Act. His defence claimed that the judge at the original trial had omittedevidence in his summing-up. The appeal was dismissed, however, and the death sentence confirmed. Dodds had been due to be executed on 21 July, but this date was changed when he made the historic appeal. Harry was notified of the new date but wrote back explaining that he was unable to attend on 4 August as he had accepted an engagement at Hull for that day, though he would be free to officiate on the following day.
    Unaware that the hangman had extended his life by one extra day, Dodds was reading when Harry peeped into his cell. The first thing Harry noticed, and which he had up until then had no notification of, was that the condemned man had a wooden leg. This required some thought and Harry and Tom retired to their quarters across the corridor, barely six paces from the man waiting to hang, where Harry put on his ‘study cap’ as he pondered the problem. Consulting the officials he had been told that they believed Dodds was unable to walk without a stick, but when the question was put to the prisoner later that afternoon, he said he would be able to walk if he had his wooden leg. It was decided that in order to avoid the flight of stairs that led down to the gallows room, on the following morning he’d be taken to a holding cell that was on the same level.
    Dodds was regularly observed the rest of that