The Executioners - Part 1 of 3: Hangman

This series explores the social history of Capital Punishment in Britain, America and France with a unique perspective through the often-overlooked and shadowy figures of the executioners themselves. Who were these men? What did they do? And what did it do to them?

Episode 1:
Hangman

They were cobblers, salesmen, barbers and landlords. Working men. But they were anything but ordinary. They were the State’s part-time killers; the hangmen.

From 1868 to 1964, their work was shrouded in mystery, conducted, as the state euphemistically put it, in ‘private’. And behind prison walls these common working-men refined the process of judicial executions from an agonising, brutal death to one of the swiftest and most certain anywhere in the world.