“THE Under Sheriff waved a white flag and executioner Calcraft at once drew the bolt,” reported The Northern Echo 150 years ago today. “The floorboard divided in the centre, and both men dropped about two feet. There were a few convulsive struggles from Slane, a nervous twitching of the hands from Hayes, and then all was still.
“Hugh Slane and John Hayes were dead, and justice was satisfied.”
With the Durham coalfield in a state of high excitement, the two Irishmen were hanged at Durham jail for kicking an Englishman to death in a dark alley in Spennymoor on November 16, 1872. Two Irish teenagers had been sentenced to die with them, but a week before their executions, the Home Secretary had commuted their sentence to penal servitude – a life of hard labour in jail.
Durham Crown Court with the jail behind where the executions were carried out
The Fenian movement seems to have been at the seat of the dispute. The Fenians wanted the British removed from the island of Ireland. To escape the poverty of their homeland, many Irishmen moved to places like the coalfield for work, and their politics came with them.
On the night in question, Slane, 32, had gone to a trinket shop in Duncombe Street, off Whitworth Road, run by Jane Waine. He had dragged her husband, Joseph, 39, a streetcleaner, out into the alley and whistled whereupon three accomplices had come running and Mr Waine was quickly kicked to death.
The police immediately rounded up Slane who was hiding in a house nearby with Hayes, 29, who along with Terence Rice, 18, and George Beesley, 19.
The Irish community felt the four were arrested only because they were Irish. Mrs Hayes was so inflamed that at Mr Waine’s funeral, she followed Jane as she walked behind her husband’s coffin, “hooting” at her. Mrs Hayes was sentenced to a month in jail.
At the murder trial in Durham, it took the jury just half-an-hour to find the four guilty, and the judge sentenced them to death without donning his black cap.
The Echo, said the sentences were "richly-merited", but even it was worried by the "slipshod happy-go-lucky style" of the trial.
The defence barristers had not met their clients before the hearing as this would have cost extra, and the only defence offered was that it was too dark in the passageway to see who had done the kicking. No witnesses for the defence appear to have been called, not even Mrs Hayes, who, once released from her own spell in prison, had collected many signed statements from witnesses who said that all but Slane were elsewhere on the night in question. And the prosecution gave no motive for the attack, although gossip said that it was revenge for Mr Waine refusing to support a Fenian demonstration in Bishop Auckland.
The Irish community in the coalfield was in turmoil. About 10,000 attended a “great amnesty demonstration” in Bishop Auckland; about 3,000 marched through Stockton, where Hayes was well known for his Fenian sympathies and was known as “the Tipperary Cock”, and on Christmas Day, about 500 rioted in Sunnybrow, near Spennymoor, where the policeman who arrested the four was shot at.
Against this backdrop, the Home Secretary, Lord Aberdare, reprieved the two teenagers on New Year’s Day, but at 6.30am on January 13, 1873, the two others were were roused from their fitful slumbers to eat a hearty breakfast and meet their maker.
Before that, at 7.30am, they met executioner William Calcraft (above) - "an old, grey bearded man in a black skull cap, carrying in his hand some curious leathern straps" - in the pinioning room. He tied their arms behind their backs.
At 7.50am, "amidst death-like silence, the dull, ominous sound of the deathbell was heard", they headed a grim procession which trudged out of the pinioning room to the gallows, with priests reading prayers to them as they walked.
Hayes, who along with his wife had protested his innocence throughout, shouted through his sobs to the crowd outside the prison wall: "It is a hard thing to die for another man's crime, and one's wife and three little children left, and nobody to earn bread for them."
On the gallows, Calcraft tied the men's legs together, placed a white cap over their heads and put the rope around their necks. The priests prayed for their souls; the deathbell rang; the Under Sheriff waved the white flag to give legal consent to the operation, and Calcraft launched the two into eternity.
"The black flag was hoisted at the prison gates, and the crowd gathered outside, which was orderly and not large, was thus informed that the extreme penalty of the law had been enforced,” concluded the Echo’s report of the proceedings.
The paper then printed a letter Hayes had dictated (he couldn’t write) in the minutes in the pinioning room before his death. He complained about the fairness of his trial and said that he had been convicted by gossip when he had not been involved in the murder.
“May the Lord forgive them who swore my innocent life away,” he said. “I will bid farewell to my dear beloved wife and three little children. I hope we meet in heaven.
“All good Christians pray for me, for I am dying innocent. I have nothing more to say.”
An Edwardian postcard of Spennymoor High Street.
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