A STORY OF WAPPING STAIRS.

Evening Post, Volume LX, Issue 120, 17 November 1900, Page 1 (Supplement)

A STORY OF WAPPING STAIRS.

In a series of articles upon Old London, written for the Century, Sir Walter Besant, writing of the district of Wapping, tells the following story : — Next to Wapping Old Stairs is Execution Dock. This was the place where sailors, mutinous or murderous, were hanged, and all criminals sentenced for offences committed on the water. They were hanged at low tide on the foreshore, and they were kept! hanging until three high tides had flowed over their bodies. Among the many hangings at' this doleful spot is one which is more remarkable than the others. It was .conducted up to a certain point with the usual formalities. The prisoner was conveyed to the spot in a cart beside his own coffin, while the ordinary sat beside him and exhorted him. The prisoner also wore the customary white nightcap and carried a prayer-book in one hand, while a nosegay was stuck in his boson. He preserved a stolid indifference to the exhortations. He did not change colour when the cart arrived at the head of the stairs ; but it was remembered afterward that he glanced round quickly as if expecting something. They carried him to the fatal beam, and they hanged him up. Now, if you come to think of it, as the spot had to be approached by a narrow lane the constables on guard could not have been many. On this occasion,, no sooner was the man turned off than a boat's company of sailors armed with bludgeons appeared most unexpectedly, rushed upon the constables, knocked down the hangman, hustled the chaplain, overthrew the sheriff's officers, cut down the man, carried him off, threw him into a boat, and were away and in mid-stream befpre the officers understood what was going on. When they picked themselves up they gazed stupidly at the gallows with the rope still dangling. Where was the man? He was in the boat, and the boat was already a good way down the river, and, by that kind of accident which often happened at that time when the arrangements of the executive were upset, there was not a single wherry within sight or within hail. As for the man, that hanging was never completed, and those rescuers were never discovered.