Memoirs Describe the ‘Perfect’ Execution

Syd Dernley last led a man to the gallows 35 years ago, but he can still see the expression in his victim’s eyes.

“The only thing I ever noticed were their looks--the way their eyes stared,” Dernley, one of Britain’s last surviving hangmen, said in an interview.

“When we walked in there, they looked at us as if they were thinking ‘This can’t be happening to me’ or ‘They won’t do it to me.’ But by the time they’d stopped thinking that, they were dead.”

Nearly a quarter of a century after Britain abolished capital punishment, Dernley, 68, still puts forth a case for hanging as the swiftest and most humane punishment for hideous crimes.

“The truth is that in the 20 years or so before its abolition in Britain, the system of putting a criminal to death had reached a degree of perfection that I believe is impossible to improve on,” he argues.

“The execution was over so quickly that the condemned man could scarcely have registered what was happening to him; certainly he suffered no pain.”

In a new autobiography, “A Hangman’s Tale: Memoirs of a Public Executioner,” Dernley describes in chilling detail the last moments of the convicted prisoner.

“We went into the condemned cell and the man was usually sitting at a table in the corner talking to the parson. I’d tap him on the shoulder to stand up please. . . . “

The two hangmen tied the prisoner’s hands behind his back and walked him the few paces to the execution chamber. His ankles were bound and a white linen hood placed over his head.

Finally the noose was flicked into place and huge clanging trap doors fell away from under the prisoner’s feet. Death was instant. From the moment the executioners entered the cell, the whole process took 10 seconds or less.

Dernley says the prisoners, caught by surprise, seldom spoke or resisted: “They were just resigned.”

Did he ever feel pity?

“No. Like they didn’t feel any pity for their victims. I know it sounds cruel, but it wasn’t. They’d got to go and they went in the most humane way possible.”

Opinion polls show most Britons favor the return of capital punishment, abolished in 1965, but repeated attempts to reintroduce it have always been defeated in Parliament.

The controversy was reignited in October when judges freed three Irishmen and an Englishwoman jailed for pub bombings in 1974, saying police had lied and doctored evidence to obtain their convictions.

Opponents of hanging claimed that the miscarriage of justice had dealt a crushing blow to arguments for capital punishment. But Dernley’s belief remains unshaken.

“I should have been very distressed if it had turned out like that and I’d topped them. But I didn’t, did I?” he said, laughing. “It disturbs me to think that innocent people could be killed, yes. But I’m quite satisfied that I haven’t done any.”

Dernley, a welder from central England, was fascinated by crime and punishment from childhood and had wanted to be a hangman from the age of 11.

He became a part-time hangman in 1949 and carried out 25 executions in the next five years, taking time off from his welder’s job to travel to prisons up and down the country.

The executioner’s fee was three guineas per hanging, equivalent to $5. It later rose to $8.30.

Dernley says he never allowed sentiment to interfere with his work.

“It was not for hangmen to wonder about guilt or innocence or the crime or the sort of man the condemned person was. That sort of thinking created all sorts of problems,” he writes.

The hangmen spent the evening before an execution playing dominoes and drinking their allowance of two pints of beer each. They never mentioned the job they had to do.

Dernley, an affable, white-haired man who is treasurer of his local Conservative Party club, keeps an extensive collection of hangman’s souvenirs, including an unused rope. For a time he had a complete gallows erected in the cellar of his home.

Asked what satisfaction he found in his work, he replies without hesitation:

“I was a craftsman in my welder’s job and I was a craftsman in that job. And every one, as far as I was concerned, was OK. The man had got to go, and we saw that he went in the quickest way possible.”