Table Of ContentREFLECTIONS ON HANGING
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Novels
THE GLADIATORS (1939)
DARKNESS AT NOON (1940)
ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE (1943)
THIEVES IN THE NIGHT (1946)
THE AGE OF LONGING (1951)
Autobiography
DIALOGUE WITH DEATH (1937)
SCUM OF THE EARTH (1941)
ARROW IN THE BLUE (1952)
THE INVISIBLE WRITING (1954)
THE GOD THAT FAILED (with others, 1950)
Essays
THE YOGI AND THE COMMISSAR (1941)
INSIGHT AND OUTLOOK (1949)
PROMISE AND FULFILMENT (1949)
THE TRAIL OF THE DINOSAUR (1955)
Theatre
TWILIGHT BAR (1945)
REFLECTIONS ON HANGING
by
ARTHUR KOESTLER
The Light of Lights
Looks always on the motive, not the deed,
The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.
W. B. YEATS
LONDON
VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD
1956
To tHE MEMORY OF
ROY CALVERT
Printed in Great Britain by
The Camelot Press Ltd., London and Southampton
CONTENTS
Page
PREFACE 7
Part One: Tradition and Prejudice
The Heritage of the Past 9
II The Hangman’s Protection
53
Part Two: The Law
III Reflections on the Hanging of a Pig 71
IV The Precedent without Precedent
75
The Case of the Mace-bearer 85
VI Free Will and Determinism 92
VII Lord Goddard and the Sermon on the Mount 102
VIII Doomed by Mistake 109
Part Three: The End of the Nightmare
IX The Alternative to Hanging 139
The Monthly Sacrifice 163
APPENDIX ONE: The Experience of Foreign
Countries 171
APPENDIX Two: Length of Detention of Re-
prieved Murderers 178
REFERENCES AND SOURCES 180
INDEX 189
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My crarerut acknowledgements are due in the first place
to the editors of Hansard, from 1808 to the present; next, to the
Parliamentary Select Committee on Capital Punishment of
1929-30 and the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment of
1949-53. These two monumental documents I regarded as the
Old and the New Testament of my text, with the Select
Committee Report of 1819 and the Royal Commission Report
of 1866 playing the part of the Apocrypha. With one exception,
their admirable and moderate recommendations were never
implemented, the governments who appointed them having
taken the view of the Pasha in a novel of Mr. P. H. Newby:
““Monsieur Perry is a fanatic. I can see that he is the sort of
man who prepares a report and then thinks it ought to be
carried out.’ Next in documentary value come Leon Rad-
zinowicz’s History of English Criminal Law and Messrs. G
Gardiner’s and N. Curtis-Raleigh’s pioneer work on The
Judicial Attitude to Penal Reform. 1 am indebted to Mr. C. H.
Rolph for his advice on procedure at identification parades,
and to Mrs. Cynthia Paterson Jefferies for her patient help
with the manuscript and proofs.
PREFACE
In 1937, DURING the Civil War in Spain, I spent three
months under sentence of death as a suspected spy, witnessing
the executions of my fellow prisoners and awaiting my own.
These three months left me with a vested interest in capital
punishment—rather like “‘half-hanged Smith”, who was cut
down after fifteen minutes and lived on. Each time a man’s or
a woman’s neck is broken in this peaceful country, memory
starts to fester like a badly healed wound. I shall never achieve
real peace of mind until hanging is ‘abolished.
I have stated my bias. It colours the arguments in the
book; it does not affect the facts in it, and most of its content is
factual. My intention was to write it in a cool and detached
manner, but it came to naught; indignation and pity kept
seeping in. This is perhaps just as well, for capital punishment
is not merely a problem of statistics and expediency, but also of
morality and feeling. Fair pleading requires that one’s facts
and figures should be right, that one should not distort or
quote out of context; it does not exclude having one’s heart
and spleeni n it.
Some of the learned friends who helped with the material for
this book, warned me against offending certain venerable
prejudices and traditional susceptibilities concerning judges
and juries, the notion ofa fair trial, the handling of the preroga-
tive of mercy, and so on. I have disregarded their warnings
because appeasement never pays, and because I believe that the
case for abolition has been weakened by lack of outspokenness.
Others advised silence regarding the physiological facts about
executions, past and present. That amounts to saying that the
Queen of Spain has no legs and the hanged man has no neck.
We hang on an average one person each month; if this thing is
done in the name of the people, they have a right to know what
is being done.
The reason why, twenty years ago, I made the acquaintance
of the condemned cell was the hopeful belief in the salvation of
mankind by a world revolution; this book aims, more modestly,
at saving thirteen wretches a year the pain and terror of going
through the same experience. Apart from that, there is also a
larger issue involved, for the gallows is not merely a machine
8 REFLECTIONS ON HANGING
of death, but the oldest and most obscene symbol of that
tendency in mankind which drives it towards moral self-
destruction.
A. K,
Lonpon.
October 3rd, 1955.
Part One
LRADITION AND PREJUDICE
CHAPTER I
THE HERITAGE OF THE PAST
The charge is prepar’d; the lawyers meet;
The Judges all rang’d (a terrible show!).
JOHN Gay: The Beggar’s Opera.
1. The Fack-in-the-Box
Great BRITAIN Is that peculiar country in Europe where
people drive on the left side of the road, measure in inches and
yards, and hang people by the neck until dead. To most
Britons it never occurs that there may be something odd
about this custom. Every nation takes its traditions for granted,
and hanging is as much part of the British tradition as counting
in shillings and pence. Generations of children have squeaked
with delight at the appearance of the puppet hangman in the
Punch and Judy show. Four executioners are included in
the Dictionary of National Biography; Jack Ketch, Calcraft, and
“William Boilman’’* were as popular figures in their time as
film-stars are today. There seems to bea jolliness about the
procedure as if the victim twitching at the end of the rope were
not a real person but a dummy burnt on Guy Fawkes’ Day.
The present hangman, Pierrepoint, runs a public house called
“Help the Poor Struggler’’; his former assistant, Allenby, ran
one called ‘““The Rope and the Anchor’’;1 and the present
Lord Chief Justice delighted a Royal Academy banquet with
the story of a judge who, after passing sentence of death on
three men, was welcomed by a band playing the Eton Boating
Song’s refrain: ‘“We’ll all swing together.”’ This was printed in
* Nickname for the executioner, derived, according to Macaulay, from the
custom of publicly boiling the entrails of traitors after they were disembowelled
alive.
10 REFLECTIONS ON HANGING
an amiable “Profile” of Lord Goddard in The Observer,? which
continued:
There is a story of his boyhood, which even though it be
apocryphal, may illustrate the Goddard legend. When he first
went to Marlborough, it was apparently a school custom to
make every new boy sing or recite in his dormitory. Called
upon to sing, the future Lord Chief Justice is said to have
surprised the other boys by chanting in a piping voice: ‘You
will be taken from here to a place of execution and hanged by
the neck until you be dead. And may the Lord have mercy on
your soul.”
It all goes to show that hanging has a kind of macabre
cosiness, like a slightly off-colour family joke, which only
foreigners, abolitionists and other humorless creatures are
unable to share. On November 2nd, 1950, Mr. Albert Pierre-
point was called to testify as a witness before the Royal Com-
mission on Capital Punishment. He was asked how many
people he had hanged in his career as an executioner, and
answered: ‘“‘Some hundreds.’’3
Q. Have you had any awkward moments?—A. No, I have
only seen one in all my career.
Q. What happened ?—A. He was rough. It was unfortunate;
he was not an Englishman, he was a spy, and he kicked up
rough.
Q. He went for you?—A. Not only for me, he went for every-
body.¢
The acting Under-Sheriff for the County of London, Mr. H.
N. Gedge, was also examined by the Commission on the un-
pleasant character who had kicked up rough, and confirmed
Mr. Pierrepoint’s view:
Yes. He was a foreigner, and I personally have noticed that
English people take their punishment better than foreigners.. . .
He just dived at the Executioner with his head, and then he
Just fought with everything he had. We managed to get the
strap on his arms but—again it was unfortunate—it was a new
strap and . . . he managed to get his arms free again. . 6
There you are. Hanging is quite all right for Englishmen;
they actually seem to like it; it is only the foreigners who cause
trouble. The outsider appreciates neither the clean fun, nor
the solemn ritualistic aspect of the procedure, nor the venerable
