Come Here To Me!

Newgate Prison from Robert Pool & John Cash. Views of the most remarkable public buildings, monuments and other edifices in the city of Dublin; 1780 (Dublin City Council)

Though a grim thought to us today, many eighteenth century Dubliners regarded public hangings as public spectacles. While some voices maintained that nothing of merit could come from “bringing unhappy wretches through a city, amid the sighs, and too often the commendation, pity and tears of the common people”, others reveled in the scenes and crowded streets.

I’m currently reading Brian Henry’s study Dublin Hanged: Crime, Law and Punishment in Eighteenth Century Dublin. Published 25 years ago this year, it is a masterclass examination of crime and responses to it in the Irish capital, drawing heavily from the eighteenth century press.  It’s interesting to note how punishments changed over the course of a century, and likewise how the attitude of Dubliners towards very public spectacles of death changed too.

By the end of the century, the authorities wished to put an end to the centuries-old spectacle of hanging processions in the city,  which essentially witnessed the condemned riding in a cart through the city – followed by family, friends, the generally curious and the more than occasional jeering spectator – towards the “fatal tree” in the vicinity of Stephen’s Green. These were, Henry notes, “well publicisied affairs and attracted huge numbers of people.”

By Janaury 1783, it was time for change, with the Lord Lieutenant ordering that future executions occur instead on the city’s northside outside of the Newgate Prison beside Green Street. The site of the prison is today occupied by St. Michan’s Park, where a monument commemorates John and Henry Sheares, two prominent United Irishmen. Following their betrayal by a paid informer, they were hanged outside the prison in 1798, walking to the gallows holding hands, comrades and brothers until the end. The inscription on the monument notes, “within this park once stood Newgate prison associated in dark and evil days with the doing to death of confessors of Irish liberty, who gave their lives to vindicate their country’s right to national independence.”

Erin reflects in the playground of St. Michan’s Park.

Not all who went to the gallows of Newgate prison were “confessors of Irish liberty.” The first man to meet his end there was Patrick Lynch, hanged on 4 January 1783. Lynch was tried and sentenced only a day earlier for robbing one Mr. Dowling and firing two pistol shots at him in the process. Lynch was sentenced under the Chalking Act, under which those convicted “were to suffer death without benefit of the clergy, a medieval term which came to mean loss of regal recourse. In 1784 the Chalking Act was amended and those convicted under it were to have their bodies, after hanging to death, delivered to the surgeons in Dublin or the anatomists at Trinity College, Dublin for dissection or anatomisation.”

If the intention in moving hangings from the Stephen’s Green area to Newgate Prison was to prevent a public spectacle,  it was a colossal failure. The area in the vicinity of Green Street was a long established market district, beside the Ormond fruit and vegetable market and amidst a warren of streets occupied by small shops, making it a hive of activity. Warburton, Whitelaw and Walsh, in their classic history of Dublin, were scathing of conditions in the prison and its locality, noting that it was “environed by dirty streets,and in so low a situation as to render the construction of proper sewers to carry off its filth impracticable.” To them, it was quite simply “a disgrace to the metropolis.”

Less than 24 hours after his conviction, Lynch, a member of a sizeable criminal gang in the city who had been tried previously for several robberies and burglaries, appeared on the front steps of the prison. The executioner fixed a noose around his neck, attaching it to a mechanical apparatus on the first landing, then “Lynch was suddenly hoisted up in the air by a pullet affixed to the window just above the front door.” The Dublin Evening Post described the hanging apparatus thus:

A tremendous apparatus for the execution of criminals is fixed at the front of the New Gaol in the Little Green. It consists of a strong iron gibbet with four pulleys of the same metal, underneath which is a hanging scaffold on which the fated wretches are to come out from the centre window and on a signal the supporters of the scaffold are drawn from under it and the criminals remain suspended.

His body swung there from noon until four in the afternoon, witnessed by thousands of people. It was a grim spectacle, to such an extent that in its aftermath it was decided bodies should not be suspended for more than an hour at future hangings. The manner of hanging was brutish, Dubliners christening the “city crane” which so violently lifted men to their deaths. It was quickly replaced by a drop platform system, ensuring that the Newgate’s second victim met a quicker end.

Not long after Lynch’s death, reference was made in the press to troublesome young men who were “loose, idle and very profligate fellows…belonging to the gang of that heinous offender, Lynch, who was lately executed in that exemplary manner.” Patrick Lynch was the beginning of a tradition of death by hanging at the Newgate that would continue into the nineteenth century. The site gained a certain romanticism because of the death of prominent United Irishmen there. In 1898, nationalists marked the centenary of the United Irish rebellion by parading at the site of the prison and playing the ‘Marseillaise’ to the memory of those who had died for the ideals of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’. Yet most of those who were hanged at the prison were lowly criminals like Lynch, and there was no romanticism in their deaths before the Dublin crowds. The prison finally closed in 1863, and was demolished thirty years later.