“MONDAY morning broke still and clear,” began the Darlington & Stockton Times’s report of the execution 150 years ago yesterday of Britain’s most prolific female mass murderer. “The morning was damp and misty,” said the Durham County Advertiser as it told of the execution of Mary Ann Cotton.
Perhaps wisely, The Northern Echo’s reporter didn’t fall make any observations about the weather in Durham on Monday, March 24, 1873, but instead, he crammed in plenty of other details about the grim proceedings that unfolded in front of his eyes.
He arrived at the gates to Durham jail (above, in the 1950s) at about 7am, and was admitted along with the executioner, William Calcraft (below), and his assistant – “a tall, sallow, lank, cruel-looking individual”, according to the D&S Times – whom the reporter did not recognise. We now know this was Robert Evans, a peculiar Welsh doctor who had a morbid fascination and who paid Calcraft so he could be present for this execution.
The reporter knew that Mrs Cotton was to be the first female executed at Durham since Mary Nicholson on July 22, 1799. Servantgirl Nicholson was guilty of poisoning her mistress at Little Stainton, between Darlington and Stockton, and when she hanged, the first rope snapped, giving her an additional 45 minutes of life to chat to her relatives before a second, stronger rope was found.
The reporter also knew that Mrs Cotton would be despatched over the deep pit which had been dug on Calcraft’s instructions in the exercise yard of the jail to provide the necessary drop for him to execute the Spennymoor murderers, Hugh Slane and John Hayes, on January 14, 1873.
The Echo’s reporter then picked up a sinister snippet: a piece of soap had gone missing the previous week in the condemned cell. Mary Ann denied all knowledge, but when a second search failed to find the soap, a wardress examined her and found the soap secreted “up her sleeve on the inside of her arm at the elbow”.
There was speculation that Mrs Cotton had intended to give surreptitiously fed the soap to the baby, whom she had given birth to in the cell two months earlier, to make it ill so that it couldn’t be taken from her. The vigilance of the wardress thwarted this plan, if it existed, because the baby, Margaret, as Memories told last week, was given to Sarah and William Edwards, of West Auckland. In a heart-wrenching final scene, Mrs Cotton, the mother, had taken the black-and-white checked shawl off her back, ripped it in half, and wrapped the baby in it as she handed it over.
Mary Ann Cotton in her black and white checked shawl
The reporter then learned that on her day of death, Mrs Cotton had woken at 3.30am. She had had a cup of tea at 5.30am saying that she couldn’t face breakfast. Three local Methodist ministers had brought her a degree of comfort, but still she insisted she was innocent, saying only that she might have accidently administered the poison as she had been mis-sold it as a restorative by the village grocer.
Thomas Riley's grocery shop was said to be on the corner of Darlington Road and the green. It was here that Mary Ann Cotton said she got some dodgy arrowroot which she gave to her stepson Charles as a pick-me-up. It turned out to be arsenic which killed the boy, she said. Riley had been one of Mary Ann's earliest accusers, so she may have been pointing the finger of blame at him in a form of revenge
The reporter then took umbrage when, because of a “scene” in the pinioning room when the Spennymoor murderers were executed, Calcraft refused to allow the reporters to witness his preparations. “In a crabbed tone of voice which sounded like the snarl of a dog, he spat out the words: ‘Shut the door’,” said the Echo. “A hangman made nervous by honest men, forsooth!”
At 7.50am, the passing bell of St Oswald’s Church began to sound mournfully, followed by the prison bell – “the death knell of a living woman” – and at that moment, the prison authorities, led by Under Sheriff Richard Bowser, of Bishop Auckland, entered Mrs Cotton’s cell. They formed a melancholy procession into the exercise yard, where the two dozen reporters had been stationed four deep in a military phalanx.
Somehow Mrs Cotton, sobbing and trembling, found the strength to walk herself about 80 yards to the gallows – a chair had been prepared so that she might be tied to it and carried should that prove necessary.
The reporter noted how her “pious ejaculations (were) being uttered in a low fervent voice which broke the silence and fell startingly on the ear; strange words they seemed to come from a murderess’s lips: ‘Heaven is my home.’”
The D&S reporter said: “She was dressed in a black stuff dress, and over her shoulders was thrown a black checked shawl, which effectually concealed the straps with which her arms were pinioned.” This was the remaining half of the chequered shawl that Mrs Cotton had wrapped her baby in.
The D&S said: “Her face was rather pale and worn, and her hair was knotted tightly around her head.” But the Advertiser said: “Her head was bare, and her long black hair fell loose about her face.”
All agreed, whether her hair was tightly tied or flowing freely, it was a terrible sight. “A more dreadful object has surely seldom been seen under the skies than was this woman being led to execution with her tear-filled eyes upturned to heaven,” said the Advertiser.
On the gallows, Calcraft and Evans worked quickly tying Mrs Cotton’s legs, putting the noose around her neck and roping it up to the iron eye bolt in the crossbeam.
Too quickly, for Evans appears to have pulled the bolt that opened the doors on which Mary Ann was standing before Under Sheriff Bowser had dropped his handkerchief to indicate the state was satisfied the killing should take place.
Never mind, with the words “Lord have mercy on my soul” still trembling on her lips, Mrs Cotton fell three feet, and Bowser, “visibly affected by the awful scene”, fainted.
The Northern Echo's headline from its special edition on Monday, March 24, 1873
“The jerk was terrible, and the victim of the law spun round, and twisted from side to side in a horrible manner,” said the Advertiser, in the most graphic description of the final moments. “Calcraft, however, took hold of her by the shoulder and held her steady, and in a few seconds the facial contortions ceased. The sight was dreadful, and few were unmoved by it. For just three minutes, twitchings, more or less violent, were discernible in the body, and it swung slowly round, but at the expiration of that time, the motion ceased and Mary Ann Cotton had paid the full penalty exacted by English law for her crimes.”
A black flag was raised over the prison wall to notify the crowd of 200 – mostly women – that the deed was done.
The front of the Illustrated Police News telling the story of the execution, including the black flag being raised at the bottom right
At 9am, the body was removed from the gallows, and at 10am, the first special edition of The Northern Echo carrying the dreadful news hit the street.
At 11am, the inquest in the jail concluded that Mrs Cotton, having been found guilty of murdering her seven-year-old stepson in Front Street, West Auckland, in July 1872, had had the death sentence carried out upon her. The only debate was why the rope which had choked the life from her was not in the coffin. Some in the jury expected it to be there, to prevent it becoming a ghoulish souvenir, but the prison authorities said this was not a legal requirement – it is now believed that the rope was spirited away by the hangman’s assistant who had a collection of execution ropes hanging around his dining room walls in Wales.
When the inquest was over, two men from the West Hartlepool Phrenological Society stepped forward. Phrenology was a fad of the day. Phrenologists believed they could determine a person’s character by studying the lumps and bumps on the skull.
They chopped off Mary Ann’s “long glossy black hair” and took a cast of her head from which they made three “capital models”. One model was kept in the prison; a second was sent to phrenological scientists in Edinburgh, and the third was kept by the Hartlepudlians.
Not that a model of the head was needed because the Echo reported that West Auckland pitman William Lowrey, who had briefly lodged with Mrs Cotton in Front Street and remained loyal to her while accepting her guilt, had done a “cursory examination” of her bumps while she was still alive in her cell. He said that the shape of her skull showed she had “no love for children, destructiveness very large, secretiveness very large, calculation good, language deficient”.
The phrenological examination over, every strand of Mrs Cotton’s luxuriant locks was placed in the coffin and the lid was screwed down.
At 2pm, she was buried in the jail yard next to the Spennymoor murderers and, at 3.05pm, Calcraft caught the train out of Durham. When it stopped at Darlington’s Bank Top, the celebrity “finisher of the law” was spotted, and a crowd dashed towards his carriage. “Calcraft drew up the window pettishly, and pulling the curtains forward, screened himself from the impertinent gaze of the curious,” said the Echo.
Calcraft’s day’s work was now done and he could relax. Mary Ann was just another of the 450 people that he legally killed.
But he had conferred on Mary Ann – convicted of killing one but suspected of poisoning up to 21 others – an infamy in death that lives on to this day.
Next week: Ghosts in Auckland and the fate of the baby
THE FULL MARY ANN COTTON STORY AS IT UNFOLDED 150 YEARS AGO:
Pt 1: SENSATION AS MOTHER IS ARRESTED FOR MURDER
Pt 2: SHOCK AS STEPSON'S BODY IS EXHUMED
Pt 3: AMAZING DETAILS AS MARY ANN COTTON APPEARS IN COURT
Pt 4: EXHUMATIONS IN CHURCHYARD OF MRS COTTON'S VICTIMS
Pt 5: MARY ANN COTTON GIVES BIRTH IN DURHAM JAIL
Pt 6: MARY ANN COTTON PREPARES FOR HER TRIAL
Pt 7: MARY ANN COTTON FACES THE SENTENCE OF DOOM
Pt 8: "KISS MY BABE FOR ME": MARY ANN COTTON GIVES UP HER BABY
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