Colonial Elites, Public Executions, and the Crowd

The result of this relatively high level of mobility and ready access to the latest literature from England is that colonial Australians higher up the social scale were more likely to know about, and be updated on, developments in England and elsewhere regarding capital punishment.^[357] Colonists knew about William Ewart's push for the total abolition of the death penalty in mid-nineteenth-century England. They were highly knowledgeable of Charles Dickens' influential letters to The Times about the public execution of the Mannings in London.^[358] Indeed, a discomfort with the violence of executions and its perceived effect on those who watched (discussed further below) was analogous to many discussions that prominent reformers were already having in England.^[359] These influ­ences obviously had an impact in Australia since some of these worldly colonists of high social rank had time spare to write down their thoughts on executions in a published format.

Peter Cunningham, John Dunmore Lang, and Nathaniel Kentish were three such writers who, to varying degrees of brevity, displayed concerns over the way executions were carried out. All were highly literate, white collar, well-heeled and connected Australian colonists, very far removed in their personal circumstances from the level of the perspiring labourer. All three were united in their opinion that witnessing violence demoralised the onlooker and searched for solutions to a problem framed in those terms. Together they represent some of the earliest published evidence in Australia (outside of the colonial newspapers) that sought to banish forms of execution that took place in full view of the public due to their influence on the crowd. It is a window into the cultural beliefs of a social group whose opinion carried much weight in the colonies but one that was not far removed from that of journalists and lawmakers. It also provides a welcome opportunity to investigate why the middle to upper end of colonial society tended to dislike the sight of public executions in city streets and largely stayed away from them.

Peter Cunningham was a well-travelled ship's surgeon who settled briefly in New South Wales in the 1820s after having leased farming land on the Upper Hunter River.^[360] During his time in Australia he wrote a popular series of published letters containing his thoughts on the colony of New South Wales. The book went through three editions in just two years and was even translated into German. One of these letters penned in New South Wales and sent home to England expressed his disdain for public punishment in much detail.^[361] Cunningham's belief was that public executions hardened the spectator and acclimatised them to violent acts. It was an effect that he could personally relate to:

A man who has been in the habit of witnessing public punishments of any kind must feel with what different sensations he contemplated the first instance to the last...

Cunningham thought that being an eyewitness to the death penalty only served to harden the spectator rather than deter future crime. His solu­tion was therefore to play on the imagination of the spectator rather than rely on the graphic reality of the death itself. To achieve this end the symbolic elements of the death penalty would need to be heightened:

Every effort ought to be made to impress powerfully upon the imagi­nation of the multitude the terrible nature of our punishments, without permitting them to be actual spectators thereof. The having [of] a black board, bearing in large letters the names, ages, and crimes of the delin­quents, posted up conspicuously before the prison; a black flag with emblems of death hung out; a minute-bell tolled until the criminals [are] issued from their cells; and the clergyman to appear briefly with them on a stage in front of the prison, and kneeling with them to call upon the multitude to join in prayer on behalf of the unhappy culprits: — I think it might be at least worth the serious consideration of the legis­lature whether these solemnities, or such as these — this display of the �pomp and circumstance’ of death — this appeal, in fact, to the imagi­nation (whose peculiar property it is to exaggerate), — may not be far better calculated to answer the purposes of warning and deterring than the actual brutal exhibition, notoriously turned by the reprobate into a disgusting joke.^[363]

Cunningham’s suggestion of a new mode of execution, penned while in the penal colony of New South Wales, shares much with a later account by John Dunmore Lang.

Better surely that the system of Venice—revolting as it seems to Britons— should be revived... that the criminal should be conducted at midnight over the Bridge of Sighs, and the work of death performed by torchlight and in solemn silence, in the presence of no other witness than the jailer and the sheriff!^[367]

Taking the suggestions of both Cunningham and Lang together, they identify a shared problem with public executions. Namely, it hard­ened the innocence of the spectator, accustomed them to violence and had the possibility to incite future criminal behaviour. Moreover, their solution was, though taking on different forms, aimed at achieving the same outcome. Both Lang's support for midnight executions and Cunningham's focus on the symbolism rather than the reality of death itself sought to shield the spectator from the raw violence of the hanging.

If there was a sense of paternalism underlying an upper class dislike of public executions then it reaches its logical conclusion in an abolitionist essay written by Nathaniel Kentish in 1842. Kentish was also a member of that transient class of colonists in Australia.

A lengthy poem was included in Kentish's Essay that included a key stanza focusing on the disgust he felt towards public executions. Penned in Adelaide and published in Hobart, it implies that those colonists who delighted in �scenes of blood' had lapsed into a fallen state, despite being given all the tools by God to advance beyond mere barbarism:

Emerging gradually from a bar'rous state,

In which it pleased his Maker, to place Man

With organs, faculties, and reas'ning powers,

By exercise of which he might attain

To all the comforts, pleasures, virtuous joys

In store for him; it not surprising is,

That e'en as he advanced in love of Truth —

OfKnowledge, Virtue, and Religion too,

His fallen nature should the seeds retain

Of cruel habits sown �midst scenes of blood.^[370]

In the latter half of the stanza Kentish laments the large number of people attending the �scaffold scene' calling them a stain on �Britain's character':

What but this habit and a horrid taste

For tragic scenes, could cause so foul a stain

On BRITAIN'S character, for valour famed,

As that attached to every public scene

Ofwoe and shame? BRITANNIA'S DAUGHTERS, blush!

Blush deep for what is said — and hear, and weep!

What's said, alas! Is true — to your reproach —

Your Fathers' — Brothers' — Sons'! The Scaffold scene —

The gibbet where the trembling Culprit hangs —

The scene of ignominy, guilt, and shame —

Of woe commencing — (who knows when to end Or where?) — this is the spectacle which draws The largest concourse of my Country’s Sons!

I weep to own it — of her Daughters too!¹.^[371]

At the conclusion of Kentish’s publication he includes a proposed �Peti­tion to the Crown’ to abolish capital punishment that also reveals his fears over the negative effect that violence has on the onlooker.

The thoughts of Lang, Cunningham and Kentish indicate that a person who would actively choose to watch violent spectacles offended something deep within what might be termed the �middle class' cultural sensibility of colonial Australians. Henry Kingsley, for example, was a novelist who lived in Victoria from 1853 to 1857 and assumed the �supe­riority of upper-class Englishmen’ upon arrival.^[373] In an outline of his life it was noted how he was briefly in the mounted Victorian police but soon quit: �compelled by duty to attend an execution, he was so much affected that he threw up the appointment in disgust’.^[374] Similarly, a �popular pressman’ named �Bob’ O’Toole, active in Melbourne during the late 1890s, was said to avoid reporting on executions at all costs:

There are one or two things upon which he [O’Toole] prides himself, one of which is that he has always managed to escape reporting an execution. He draws the line at seeing the common hangman draw the bolt, and the Free Lance congratulates him upon his excellent good taste.^[375]

Even as early as 1855 executions had become, for many respectable colonists, �A thing to shudder at, not to see', according to the The Argust'

Even the very sight of the gallows itself was enough to disgust well­to-do colonists. After one of the 1842 executions in Port Phillip, the administration back in New South Wales had instructed Superintendent Charles La Trobe to leave the gallows permanently erected to save on the £5 cost of repeatedly assembling and dismantling the cumbersome struc­ture. La Trobe obliged, leaving the gallows where they stood for months outside the gaol. However, the public and press were so outraged by the very sight of the idle structure that he soon ordered it to be taken down without seeking permission from Sydney.^{[376] [377] While the gallows stood erect in Melbourne’s streets the press viewed it as a â€?standing eye-sore' and an â€?outrage upon public decency’.[378] Edmund Finn was another who called the gallows an â€?uncouth and repulsive looking object’ when recounting this story in his own work.[379]}

It is an interesting thought as to whether outwardly registering a lowly opinion of public executions had some kind of social utility. �In the “Antipodes” as at “Home”’, writes the historian Penny Russell, �manners served to define social position in an unstable world, providing grounds for exclusion from the elites, as well as mapping the road into them’.^{[380] [381] Condemning the �barbarity’ of public executions may have played some small part in defining oneself in the muddled social world of the Australian colonies in the same way that manners and bodily conduct would in many other situations. Bold displays of morbid curiosity by the scaffold crowd as well as the persistent thought that their innocence was being corrupted were very troublesome to the colonial elite.}

With all this in mind, it comes as little surprise to find that the middle and upper echelons of colonial society are not mentioned as frequenters of public executions. Stay away from the public gallows, The Argus of Melbourne warned its readers, less you be â€?ranked amongst the hopelessly-depraved classes of society'.²⁹ In the South Australian Register it was written that, â€?People of refined morals or cultivated taste would feel themselves entirely out of place in the vicinity of the scaffold, which is consequently abandoned to the profligate, the thoughtless, and those whose minds are morbidly disposed'.³⁰ The result of this tendency for the middle classes to avoid setting foot near such â€?demoralising' specta­cles was very damaging to the legitimacy of public executions as a whole. It was only natural that a civil ceremony without the presence of the community's more esteemed citizens was destined to disintegrate into its very worst incarnation—a â€?kind of satanic high festival' as The Argus labelled public executions in 1855.³¹ Those lower down the social rung, meanwhile, voted with their feet and continued to engage with the spec­tacle of public executions until their abolition. To the last they came to watch public executions, secure in the knowledge that their attendance would be severely censured by colonial periodicals and those higher up the social ladder. Now that the dislike of the scaffold crowd has been registered among colonial elites and that they (outwardly at least) claimed not to attend, it is necessary to look deeper into the anxieties that the public execution crowd could provoke.