London's Prisons in 1900: Newgate: Execution Yard

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Arthur H. Beavan, in Imperial London, first published 1901, continued his survey of London's Prisons with a look at Newgate's Execution Yard:

A certain iron-studded door with stepless threshold two or three feet from the ground, can be seen in Old Bailey, north of the Governor's house.

It is the Debtors' Door (for debtors were at one time confined in Newgate), and communicates with the Press-Yard, where those who refused to plead were slowly pressed to death by iron weights placed on their chests.

Felons, on the morning of their exit from this life, used to be conducted through the yard by way of this door, to the scaffold outside; but now they pass through another mailed door, equally sombre and fateful, along what is called the "Dead Man's Walk," a narrow alley with just a glimmer of light at the far end.

In the execution-yard is a kind of shed resembling a large tool-house, whose sole furniture is a tall chair placed against the wall to support the condemned criminal until the fatal moment arrives.

When its lethal mission is fulfilled, the trap is raised by pulleys and ropes fitted to the uprights, and fastened below in a peculiar manner in connection with a lever that stands upright at one corner of the trap­door.

When the hempen rope is attached to the iron links; when, as the clock strikes eight, some trembling wretch - securely strapped with leathern thongs, the white cap closely drawn over head and face, with fatal noose around his neck-stands upon that treacherous planking; when, as certain solemn passages in the Burial Service are being spoken, that lever is pulled back by the hangman, and the bolt drawn, the criminal bids farewell for ever to this world!

Shrouded in quicklime, buried without ceremony at eventide, his body is placed in a dishonoured grave (distinguished but by a numeral) in an awful corridor - whose bare granite walls are scribbled over with the initials of dead-and-gone prisoners - where bodies of scores of other murderers have crumbled away since the year 1820, when the corpses of Thistlewood, and the Cato Street conspirators, inaugurated the gruesome spot.

Next: London's Prisons in 1900: Holloway