DIARY OF A HANGMAN

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 219, 16 September 1939, Page 6

DIARY OF A HANGMAN

The Gallant Murderer — The Man Who Lost His Job —And The Vengeful Sailor

One of the Most A mazing Documents in the History of Journalism.

ON September 3, 1922, the s.s. Morea arrived at Tilbury from the East. It is unlikely that anyone on board her welcomed that event with more wholehearted eagerness than a certain young clerk in the steward's office. lie whs 2D iiml in love, lie had a fort--11 iu'it.'s leave; and lie Vnciv tlint within the next few hours, utter tliree months' absence. lie would he enjoying the caro«<cs of a woman whose passion was oven pi-eater than his own. What lie did not know was that bofore the end of a fortnight, he would he in the hands of the police on a charge of murder. I lie young man's name wns Frederick Hvwn tors. The liisf. incident in the series of event* which was so soon to end on the gallows had occurred in June of tlio previous year. He wns on leave and had accepted the invitation of some now friends, the Thompsons, in spend his holiday with them at Shanklin. The Thompsons had been married seven years: the wife wns 2!> and her husband a few years older. They had no children, and their marriage from the first had been an unhappy one. The husband wns a shipping clerk, the wife a cashier in a wholesale millinery warehouse in the rity; for both of them therefore the days were fully occupied, which alone can explain the fact that they lifxl contrived for so long to live together. It would have been difficult to find a more ill-assorted couple. Mr. Thompson was a dull but worthy fellow, a little dictatorial perhaps, but too phlegmatic to be actively unpleasant. The sort of man one speaks of a« "quite all right." Mrs. Thompson was almost his exact antithesis. Though not precisely lovely, her big, wide-set, shadowed eyes and full-lipped mobile mouth continuously reflected a sensuous, imaginative and vivacious temperament. She was, too, both in her face and hody, supremely and essentially feminine, the architvpe of the woman who, irrespective of looks, has an immediate and irresistible attraction for the normal male. Bywaters was nothing if not a normal male. With his high spirits, virility and good looks, the result was almost inevitable. Before the end of that holiday nt Shanklin, Mrs. Thompson and he were on terms of intimacy. When the Thompsons returned to 11ford, Bywatcrs went with them to their house as a lodger, Mr. Thompson, dull though he might be, was not so obtuse as to be unaware of what was going on under his very nose. By waters had to go, and from this time onwards he and Thompson were on terms of the bitterest enmity. If Thompson had consented to divorce his wife, all might have been well, but on this point (like maTny another husband who has paid les9 dearly for it than he) Thompson let his jealousy over-rule both his sense of fairness and his pride. Ho could do nothing to stop this love affair, but he could prevent it being put on a decent basis, and he was determined to exercise that power to the last. What his home life must have been, shared as it was with a woman to whom he stood for nothing but the one barrier

between herself and happiness, it is not pleasant to contemplate. But he stuck to his guns, and for the next 1"> months that vivid, passionate creature who was his wife had to Ik? content with a voluminous correspondence with her lover and such furtive embraces as they could contrive to snatch when the nature of his calling allowed him to return to her. The situation was one which, to such natures as theirs, was in itself unhealthy anil demoralising. ' It was in the letters which passed between them when Ry waters was at sea that the real peril lay for both of them. It was inevitable that at some time or other there must have passed through the mind of Mrs Thompson the thought : "If only my husband were dead everything would be jverfect." If she had left it at that, it would have been harmless enough, but her vivid imagination was too much for her. She made this idea the burden of so many of her letters to Rywaters that it developed at length into an obsession with both of them. It may be that in the case of the woman it served as no more than the basis for morbid and continuous daydreaming. For Ry waters, with hie simple epontaneity, it was a driving force of the deadliest nature. On that first day of his last leave on shore he had been continuously under its influence for many months. On September 29, exactly a week after his arrival, Aire. Thompson and her hueband went to a theatre in town, returning to Ilford by a train which left Ficcadilly at about a quarter to cloven. Bywaters met them as they were walking home. What precisely hapjiened at this interview, and what words passed between the»e three tortured and unhappy people, is a matter only of conjcctiue. Suddenly Bywaters drew a knife from his pocket and stabbed Thompson repeatedly in the back and chest. He then ran away. Mrs. Thompson stayed. She had done her best to prevent the tragedy; her agonised cries of "Oh, don't! don't!" were referred to by several who had heard them; and she did all she could later to minister to her husband. He died in her arms. Bywaters was arrested the following morning and Mrs. Thompson a day or two later. Of tho behaviour of Mrs. Thompson during their joint trial it is happily unnecessary to say little. It is sufficient to say that those letters of hers hanged her. The conduct of Bywaters before, during and after that same ordeal was little short of heroic. At first, on his arrest, he had claimed with unshaken firmness that he was not even present at the time of the murder. Vet the moment he heard of Mrs. Thompson's arrest he abandoned this effort to protect himself and freely admitted his guilt as the only moans that occurred to him of protecting her.

The late William Willis, Britain's executioner, has three more strange stories to tell about crimcs, trials and executions, which he saiv from a peculiar angle— an angle that has never been described before. The series is edited by the famous British criminologist. Dr. Harold Dcarden.

Everyone has Wondered J Vhat the Man With the World's Worst Job Reatlx, Thinks!

Throughout the whole trial nothing could have exceeded his generosity and chivalry towards the woman who shared his awful position. Xeither bv word nor gesture did he deviate from a carefully elaborated story designed solely to shield her. Many of his replies with this end in view during the course of his cross examination were truly pitiful in their futile gallantry. Ho never for a moment lost his selfcontrol. Nor did he weaken afterwards as witness this entry in Mr. Willis' diary: "Weight 1511b on reception; gained six pounds. Smart, well-set man, muscular neck. Smoking cigarette on exercise just after his mother had left him. Asked for a tomato after his breakfast. '"Sent for the governor 27 minutes to 0. Embraced tho chaplain and kissed him 9 a.m." I told him to "look at me and you'll be all right." He walked firmly, but not too quick. Death inst." ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ What strikes one so forcibly in the case of Mrs. Thompson and Bywaters (as indeed in so many of the grim records in this diary) is the pitiful wastage of human life. So many of these people seem to have been enmeshed in freakish and illogical circumstances in the absence of which, in all probability, they would have led happy and useful lives, and died mourned and respected, worthy members of society. A decent husband and father, it may t>e, leaves home one morning, commits one quite harmless error of conduct, and is immediately thereafter swept headlong to the gallows. It is as swift as that. In May, 1925, James Makin, a Lancashire mill operative had been married a little over four months. He was a good-looking, well-built fellow of 25, with a shock of black, wavy hair, and a springy, almost cocky way of carrying himseJf, which was the natural expression of a manly, active, and volatile temperament. His courtship had lasted for over a year; and both he and his wife, who was about his own age, had every reason to be contented with their choice. Hitherto they had been in good employment, for Mrs. Makin worked in .i spinning mill, but the husband, on the day when disaster overtook him, had been out of a job for more than three weeks. He would have said of himself during that period, in the grimly ironical idiom of his fellows, that he was "playing." It was that overlong playtime that cost liiin his life. He was a sociable young fellow and well liked; and if you are to succeed in doing nothing all day for weeks'on end you must be born to it.

Makin. for the first time in his life, had recently begun to drink to excess. One night, after leaving her spinning mill, Airs. Makin went home as usual for tea.

It had been her husband's habit, during these last few weeks of unemployment, to set the table and have the meal ready by the lime she arrived. She was amazed, this time, to find that nothing had been done, and that her husband was apparently not even in the house.

It occurred to lior that he had been for a long walk or something, come home tired, gone upstairs to lie down, and fallen asleep. She called to him from the foot of the stairs. There was no answer.

She ran up the stairs and looked into their bedroom. On the floor lav a woman, a stranger, dead. Mrs. Makin rushed screaming into the street. At almost the same moment, and but a few hundred yards away, her husband was giving himself up to the police. He told his story with the utmost lrankness. On his way home that afternoon a woman had spoken to him as he passed her in the street. He did not know her, but he was fuddled with diink. He took her home with him, and cUtei a while they quarrelled. "I went downstairs and got a knife," he said, "thinking to frighten her. She rushed at me, and we fell on the floor, the next tiling I remember was that she was lying there bleeding." Then it appears, he washed, changed ns clothes and walked round to a public house where lie knew he would find a cer am fnend of his. He called tins man out.

"I'H be under arrest in a minute or drmo S ' U • " IL ' S r ' sht - lve j»*t done a woman in.

staled at him in amazement. "Surely not your missus?" "Xo shes all right," he replied. "Give her these for me, will your" He thrust £9 into the others hands and went at once from there to the police station. There, it seems to me, one has'a vivid picture of an ordinary human being much like oneself, who, suddenly realising that in some inexplicable manner bottom lias dropped out of his world, is doing the best he c;.n to face up to that fact and let others suffer as littlo as ma v ho.

And Mr. Willis' diary presents a similar picture.

"Saw him on exercise," he says, "smoking a cigarette. Smart little fellow, walked very swanky and upright. "Medical officer afraid he would crack up in the morning, but he hoped not. Chaplain said lie thought he would be all right. He ('J.M.') thought the warder sitting with him was me, sizing him up; said the last day was soon enough.

"The chaplain told him he was mistaken, it was not me, and that I should not see him till I came for him, and he would not see me.

"Said he would be satisfied if the chaplain would not leave him. Chaplain said: 'I'll not leave you till you leave me.'"

"I told chaplain if he could not get him ready no one else could, and 1 thought he would be all right after he had had an hour with him. It came *s we expected. He walked as firm as t rock, and quick." Mr. Willis adds a footnote with regard to the crime. "They quarrelled and she said. 'All right, I'll stop here till your wife comes.* That did it. He says when she mentioned his wife he lost himself, and the result is well known." ♦ + + + It is a truism to say that man is neither wholly good nor wholly bad; but to none can this be more impressively demonstrated than to prison officials. It must indeed be a strange and sometimes bewildering experience to talk for many hours a day, for a period of weeks, to a convicted murderer, as those warders must d > in the condemned cell. How often, one wonders, does it happen that, when that enforced companionship is ended for ever, they find that they are losing, not a prisoner, but a friend ? That this does sometimes happen is clear enough from Mr. Willis' notes on tho fust execution of his official career— when he was acting as assistant to Pierrepoint. Edward Glynn was a sailor, sft 4Jin in height and 1011b in weight, according to Mr. Willis. He was 20 years old at the time of his crime, and his victim and he had been sweethearts for two years. Hitherto he had enjoyed the universal popularity which one would expect to be attached to an easy-going, powerful young sailor on leave, with money in his ]K»eket and unflagging high spirits. Behind that genial, boyish facade there emerged a different fellow when he came home on one occasion to find that in his absence his sweetheart had transferred her affections to another man. His rage was that of a wild beast, and he made his intentions terrifyingly clear, not only to the girl, but to everyone he knew. The first time he caught her with this other man, he said, he would kill her and swing for it. He fulfilled his threat in the open street. He received the death sentence with the utmost indifference, and was already joking with his warders as he went down tho stairs from the dock to the cells.

Mr. Willis says of him at the lajt: "Very strong neck. Walked uptight to the :-calfold.

"The executioner turned him round, and poor Glynn thought he was being walked off again. This was a thing we had never done before. It was done so that the executioner could have the levjr on his left hand in front of him.

"The warder who was with Glynn up to the day of the execution got very much attached to him, and in fact cried when he left him."