The Last Public Execution in Edinburgh

By C. A. Asbrey

These brass plates, one set into the pavement, the other inscribed plate mounted on the wall, mark the spot of Edinburgh’s last public execution on June 21st 1864. They can be found at the corner of George IV Bridge and The Lawnmarket, and they mark the spot were George Bryce was hanged for the murder of Jeannie Seaton. The brass plates mark the foot of the gallows.

I’ll look at the murder in another post, but the execution itself became the stuff of legend for all the wrong reasons.

Bryce’s crime was both public and savage, causing public outrage, so by the time he was due to be hanged, the public appetite for revenge was ripe. Public executions in Scotland had become less common since the 18th century, but they still took place. 273 people were publicly hanged in Scotland between 1800 and 1868, comprising 259 men and 14 women. A further 207 were sentenced to death, but reprieved or respited. It’s worth noting that Scotland had fewer capital crimes on the statute books than England, and fewer hangings, reflecting a differing societal approach to crime and punishment. Even though they had over two hundred crimes for which you could be hanged, most were commuted to either imprisonment or transportation. At its highest, Scotland was hanging roughly four people a year in the 19th century. Compare that to an average of sixty per year in England—it was rarer, but it still happened—and that added to the pageantry of the occasion.

And as you probably know, public hangings were a spectacle. People flocked to view these hangings for miles around. Stalls were erected to sell every kind of produce, and peddlers mingled with the crowd selling food, drink, and even quickly made keepsakes of the crime or the accused murderer. They attracted criminals too, being a great opportunity for pickpockets.

Scots called an executioner ‘the lokman‘ and sometimes ‘the doomster‘. It’s easy to work out the origins of ‘doomster‘ as the man who sent you to your doom, the origins of ‘loksman‘ are a bit more obscure. A lock was an old unit of measurement, equating to a handful. It’s the origin of the term lock of hair. This referred to the way the executioner was paid; by a lok of the taxation of the goods brought into the city for each execution. During The Witch Trial craze the city locksman made £5 18s 6d, equivalent to over £1,250 ($1,451.69)in modern currency. Adjusting for inflation that equates to £175,911.37 today, made in one year alone. In later times, it also came with a furnished house on Fishmongers Close. However, by the time George Bryce was hanged, it was no longer an expense the City Fathers wished to bear. So few hangings took place it didn’t seem worthwhile, so they sought out a hangman from another area to do the job. Even though around four executions took place each year, that was spread over the whole country, and often did not affect Edinburgh at all. The parsimonious officials went for the cheapest tender for the job, but when they selected Thomas Askern from York, they made a mistake. Like all of York’s hangmen, he had been drawn from the prison population, and had been in jail for debt when he embarked on his new career. He does not seem to have been the competent hangman, with at least two broken ropes, and a few slow-stranglings meaning that various authorities refused to employ him, but Edinburgh selected him nonetheless. That set the scene for what was going to unfold on execution day.

On the day of the execution, thousands (some say twenty-thousand)had gathered to watch the end of a savage killer, and the atmosphere was high with a need for vengeance. Part-carnival, part lynch-mob, people were baying for Bryce to be dispatched, as the whispered gossip of the crime had been exaggerated in the telling and re-telling until the public outrage was at fever pitch. Bryce was pelted with stones and rotten produce as he was led to the gallows, and even as he stood on the trapdoor itself. Leather straps were fastened around Bryce’s limbs by hungover hangman, his fingers fiddling with the buckles as he was still dulled by drink from the night before. Askern had fitted the rope to the gallows at first light, sunrise having taken place at 3.31 that day. He had come straight from the pub. The abuse didn’t even stop when the minister tried to lead the condemned man in his final prayers. An uneasy hush descended as the final signal was given, but even that was punctuated by a few hoots of derision.

The gallows were screened off below the line of the trapdoor, meaning that when the body dropped, it disappeared from public view—or at least it should have. It didn’t. Bryce dropped a mere two feet and was left dangling in full view of the assembled crowd. Askern had failed to measure the rope to a significant degree. Some said that the hangman was still drunk, others said he was deliberately cruel. It is true that he had been carousing the night before, and consumed a significant amount of drink. But so had the crowd. Many of them had stayed up all night, drinking at the local taverns before rolling up to watch the public spectacle.

A decent drop by a skilled executioner would have broken the man’s neck and dispatched him quickly. but instead the man dangled there, suffering slow strangulation. People were horrified, and the longer it went on, the angrier they got. The mob who had been baying for the man’s blood were turning on the authorities for allowing this act of cruelty to continue, but they were legally unable to step in to halt a sentence from being carried out. A Margaret Dickson was hanged in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket in 1724 but later awoke. After that, the words ‘until dead’ were added to the death sentence—making it illegal to stop the sentence from being carried out before the end.

They say it took up to forty minutes for Bryce to slowly expire, and in that time the town worthies found that the missiles were now headed in their direction, and with enough venom to make them flee. Public unrest rose, with fights and violence spreading in the combustible crowd into the streets beyond the site of the gallows. It is said that Askern only just escaped with his life as the mob swarmed the gallows. He left on the ten-fifteen train out of Waverly Station in a compartment blocked off for him to travel alone. Crowds gathered around the train before it left and Askern sat with his back to the window to avoid being seen.

This is where it gets obvious that the power of the press sided with the establishment, and they sought to sanitize the incident and protect the image of Edinburgh—The Athens of the North. Blatant lies were told. Official witnesses said that, “On making the fatal plunge, the body remained in perfect stillness for the space of about thirty seconds, after which a slight tremor of the spinal cord, a clutching of the fingers, and a slight drawing in of the foot were the only movements perceptible. There was no struggle whatsoever indicative of suffering. Dunfermline Saturday Press – Saturday 25 June, 1864 p.4″

“The body fell three feet, and entirely disappeared from the view of the public. Dundee Courier and Argus, June 22nd, 1864″

“Only the rope being seen, the vast crowd began immediately to disappear. The Southern Reporter, June 23rd, 1864″

“The executioner drew the bolt, and, with a few slight struggles, the convict expired. The Times, June 22, 1864.”

It’s clear none of that was true. The image of Edinburgh had to be protected at any price, and the newspapers happily obliged. Nobody in power wanted to be presented to the world as incompetent cheapskates who hired an unskilled drunk to perform a blundered execution, that in turn, spurred a riot that had to be covered up. After all, if you admit to the unrest, you have to admit to the reasons behind it. It’s a brilliant example of fake news and public manipulation. And Edinburgh was the world’s leading light in science and medicine. The City Fathers didn’t want the world to know that they also had a populace who drank all night and rioted at the scene of an execution. More than anything else, they didn’t want their city—a bastion of culture and learning—presented as a hard-drinking, authority-challenging, haven for a heaving underclass ready to turn to violence—even though it was both. Edinburgh had long been a dichotomy— a city of extremes, existing side-by-side.

The town council meeting after the mess also shows that the newspaper reports were total fiction. They had to do something to make sure that the debacle wasn’t repeated, and it led to the end of public executions in Edinburgh. From that point on, they took place in Calton jail, where all the deaths were recorded as quick and merciful. How true that was can only be guessed at, given the reports on George Bryce’s death.

It was not the last public execution in Scotland. That took place on the other side of the country, on Glasgow Green in 1865 when Dr. Edward Pritchard was hanged for murdering his wife and mother-in-law, and was suspected of murdering a maid. That was also a public order disaster, and that hangman let the body down too fast, and it crashed through the baseboard of the coffin, smashing it.

In the face of making execution an unseemly public spectacle, and the authorities looking increasingly unprofessional, public executions in Scotland were totally banned after Robert Smith was executed at 12 May 1867 at Buccleuch Street Prison for the robbery, rape and murder of nine-year-old.