John Ellis: The Softspoken Barber-Hangman Whose Final Execution Was Self-Inflicted

In John Ellis’s twenty-three years as a hangman for the British government, he executed 203 people including the famous Dr. Crippen, the WWI traitor Roger Casement , the housewife Susan Newell (the last woman ever hanged in Scotland), and James Howarth Hargreaves, with whom Ellis “had often passed the time of day in conversation” at the dog races in Lancashire but who went to the scaffold never recognizing his hangman as an old acquaintance. For each execution, Ellis was paid £10 plus expenses, £15 for a double hanging, to supplement the income from his Rochdale barbershop. At the age of 49, he submitted his resignation. At 50, he tried to blow his brains out but managed only to wound himself in the jaw, for which he was hauled before a magistrate on charges of attempted suicide, to the delight of the newspapers. At 57, he got drunk and slit his throat with a razor; the coroner attributed the suicide to an “unsound mind.”

Judging from the self-portrait in Diary of a Hangman , no executioner was ever less likely to kill himself from the strain. Ellis the narrator is a perfect professional, an unremarkable instrument of the state who made only two small contributions to deaths that were, morally speaking, collaborative: measuring out the correct length of rope for the prisoner’s height and weight — give a thin man a short drop and his neck won’t break, leaving him to strangle; give a fat man a long drop and his head will come right off — and getting the condemned man from his holding cell to instantaneous death in as little time as possible, usually under a minute. He took pride in the fact that his expertise helped make their deaths swift and painless. (His third contribution, equally merciful in intention, was to insist that every prisoner be given a stiff drink of brandy five minutes beforehand.) He was the sort of hangman who never attended murder trails for fear he would be recognized and accused of unseemly anticipation.

The nearest thing to sentimentality in the entire book is this sentence, which describes a pathetic murderer named Davis crying on his way to the scaffold:

I must say the expression on his face wrung my heart, and I’m not by any means addicted to emotionalism.

But there was obviously a great deal of emotionalism simmering below the phlegmatic surface, and in Ellis’s detached observations about his profession it is possible to detect something like fascination. He never speculates on abstractions like justice or death, but generalizations about condemned murderers seem to interest him very much: for instance, tall and burly men tend to die like cowards while short and wiry ones usually die bravely; almost everyone gains weight in the weeks leading up to their execution; and men who die smoking always die smiling. Ellis was not above keeping macabre little mementos either. He pocketed the last cigarette of a violent Irish drunk called Big Dan — who, incidentally, has the funniest line in the book:

“There’s his last cigarette,” said the warder, producing a half-smoked stump. “He gave it to me just now, saying he was giving up smoking.”

We know for certain, from contemporary reports, that Ellis hated to hang women — especially Edith Thompson, who Ellis suspected was innocent. Edith’s husband Percy was stabbed on the street by her young lover, and she was convicted as an accomplice on the basis of her love letters, in which she claimed she had tried to kill Percy several times. But Edith was a passionate reader of escapist romance novels and her lover, a young sailor, was spending a whole year at sea when her letters were written, so Ellis assumed her murderous stories were simply the fantasies of an imaginative and frustrated housewife. For what it’s worth, the killer claimed to the end that Edith never knew anything about his plan. It was around the time of the Thompson hanging that Ellis started drinking, though the chapter about her in Diary of a Hangman  is a model of English reserve.

The lesson we would expect Ellis to have learned from his career, once he had set his mind on killing himself, is to face death stoically. In all his years on the job, only one prisoner ever physically struggled against being escorted to the gallows; everyone else simply acquiesced to the inevitable. But Ellis’s own suicide was quite different — he menaced his wife and daughter with a razor, saying he was going to murder them, and when they fled and fetched his son, who lived a few doors down, Ellis waited to slash his own throat until his son was in view. For a man who dedicated his life to minimizing the fuss of other people’s deaths, he certainly tried to make his own as dramatic as possible.