The long drop

(WARNING: This post contains photographs of a mechanism of legal execution.)


Embiggen

This is the gallows within the grounds of Fremantle Prison in Western Australia.

The prisoner was brought in through a door out of frame to the right of this picture, escorted by the chaplain and prison warders. He was made to stand on the closed platform of the gallows. The hangman and his assistant, the doctor and the prison governor came in through the second door, in the back right hand corner of the building. The total of people present in the building was thirteen, twelve and the prisoner.




Most hangings at Fremantle Prison were carried out on a Monday morning at 8AM.

The gallows building contains nothing else. It's a tiny building next to the small block of solitary confinement cells, almost unnoticeable in the maze of buildings within the prison walls.

Before the prisoner was brought in, the hangman and his assistant had to test the trapdoor to make sure it would open when the lever was pulled, make sure the rope wasn't stretchy, work out from the prisoner's weight and height how long to make the rope and a few other things.

There was no drawing the thing out. It was to be got over and done with carefully but fast. "Once everything was in place the event happened very quickly. The time from leaving the condemned cell in Solitary Confinement to the actual hanging was around 60 seconds." (Freo Prison website)

The chair was to support a prisoner too sick or too frightened to stand.

The rails were for the prison warders. They each hung onto a rail with one hand and onto the prisoner with the other, boxing him in to keep him from struggling while the noose was fitted about his neck.

There were no family members or press present, no witnesses other than the official ones and the minister of religion requested by the prisoner.

Around the rope of the noose is a sleeve of leather. It prevented rope burns on the neck of the hanged man. This was a consideration for the family of the prisoner. After the hanging was officially declared the body was handed over to the family outside the gates of the prison.



Embiggen

It is from the gallows the expression "the long drop" comes and this picture shows you just how long a drop it was. Thirteen feet from the platform (open in these pictures) to the floor below. Such a long drop is to help make the hanging quick.

After the drop the hangman and the doctor went down the thirteen steps into the pit and checked that the prisoner was fully dead. The last rites were then carried out by the chaplain or whatever minister of religion had been nominated by the prisoner.

The gallows building in Freo Prison was "only place of legal execution in Western Australia between 1888 and 1984. During that time 43 men and 1 woman were hanged there."

Every prisoner hanged was hanged for murder.


The only woman hanged at Fremantle was Martha Rendell. She was tried in 1908 and hanged on the 6th of October 1909. She was convicted of the murders of her children by "swabbing their throats with hydrochloric acid after they had complained of sore throats because she was jealous of the attention her husband gave them. Rendell protested her innocence to the last." (Freo Prison website)


Eric Edgar Cooke was the last person hanged at Freo Prison. They did him on the 26th of October 1964 and he's buried in an unmarked grave at Fremantle cemetery. Same cemetery where most of my family are buried.

Cooke was a serial killer. My Nana used to tell us horror stories about this guy when we were kids. In Perth in January 1963 there was a series of random shootings in the wee hours of the morning.

It was summer and people didn't lock their doors then apparently. Perth was considered a very safe place to live. On the hottest nights some people even slept out on their verandas. Cooke went round with a rifle and shot random strangers, most of them in their beds asleep. People were terrified and locksmiths were suddenly doing a roaring trade and politicians and police commissioners were hauled over the coals in the newspapers every day.

They caught him in November that year and tried him for a single murder. He confessed to more than eight more murders and five hit-and-runs. (ADB)


After Cooke, sentences for hanging were commuted to life imprisonment and no-one else was hanged in Western Australia. Capital punishment was taken off the WA law books in 1984. (Freo Prison website)


The last person hanged in Australia was Ronald Ryan in 1967. He was hanged in Pentridge in Victoria.

Ryan went straight after a bit of teenage petty theft but in his late twenties he got into debt gambling and started forging cheques. He was convicted but got a good behaviour bond instead of a stretch in the nick. But he kept offending and lead a break-and-enter gang turning over shops and factories. He was picked up again twice in the next few years and his missus divorced him while he was inside the second time.

In 1965 Ryan and another prisoner broke out of Pentridge nick and killed a warder in the process. They were picked up in 1966. It was Ryan who picked up the rifle and fired the shot and it was Ryan who was done for murder. The other guy got manslaughter.

Ryan was hanged at 8AM on the 3rd of February 1967 in Pentridge gaol. "Calm and composed on the scaffold, he addressed his last words to the hangman... 'God bless you. Whatever you do, do it quickly'. He was buried with Catholic rites in an unmarked grave in the grounds of Pentridge gaol." (ADB)

On the inside

(Freo Prison again. Loved that place.)



In the final year of the prison's life (1990) the prisoners were allowed to paint on their cell walls. These paintings area all prisoner art and it will come as no surprise to you that every single painting is of an outdoor scene.










These drawings are from the colonial period. In the post-colonial period the cell was used as a broom closet. The drawings were found when a patch of paint was accidentally knocked off. There's Perspex over the walls now to protect the drawings from the grubby paws of tourists.




The cell once housed a convict who had been trained as a commercial artist. 19th century commercial art training involved drawing certain classics over and over until you got them right.




There in his cell he drew from memory, using whatever he had that would make a mark. How he kept the drawings hidden is an unsolved mystery.


Doldrums

Went off yesterday for a end-of-Dr-Who-season barbie and got a wee bit smashed and sunburnt. Other than that I've been head down arse up since I got back working. Another long day of it tomorrow then there might be a day or two off.


Bungalow alert



For sale. Railway Street Woy Woy. Dunno if it's been been sold yet so be quick. And if you buy it then do evil renovations to it, I know where you live.

Mucking out

The indignity starts here.

Get yer gear off, stand on the H and grasp yer knees while the warder puts the latex glove on.

This is the intake area of Freo Prison, built in the 1940s, used until 1991.

Your particulars were taken down, you were photographed, made to strip, cavity searched, deloused in the showers through that white door on the right, issued a green shirt and trousers and a slop bucket, and banged up.

(The bloke in the Driz-a-bone is the tour guide. And an otter*.)



Interior of One Division or Two Division

Muster was at 7AM. You had 15 minutes to get dressed, grab your razor and your slop bucket and stand by your door.



Left to right: 1850 to 1960s, 1970s, 1970s to 1991.

Yer looking here at the toilets used by convicts and prisoners in Fremantle Prison from its opening 1850 to its closing in 1991.

The one in the middle is a chemical loo, introduced in the 1970s. Wasn't a huge success. The prisoners either smashed them up or drank the chemicals.

After the fiasco of the chemical toilets in the 1970s, it was back to the bucket system. The only upgrade was from metal to plastic.

You and yer slops bucket and water bucket spent 14½ hours of the day and night together in a cell, and God help if you pissed in the wrong one at 3AM.



Division Yard

After muster you marched into the division yard with your razor and slops bucket, emptied the bucket into an open drain and had a wash and a shave.

The yard was where you stayed all day, rain hail and blazing bloody heat. In the yard there was an open drain. You emptied yer slops in there and it was also the daytime dunny. Buckets were cleaned by the new guy.


This is Two Division Yard, dining room and outdoor bathroom. You spent your day in it with around 100 other men plus one warder in that mesh cage in the back right hand corner.

The roof wasn't added until the 1980s or '90s so you got wet in winter and roasted in summer. Behind the camera are the drinking trough, the open drain-cum-toilet, the slops buckets cleaning spot and the wrecked plumbed dunnies of the 1970s.

Other than your morning shave and wash behind the earholes at the trough, you got 3 showers a week, in one of them big open-plan tiled mass shower thingies. Like the one on Oz but with half-wall stalls. Mind you, 3 showers a week was a fucking luxury compared to the convicts, they got a bath once a week. Christ.




In the 1970s portable chemical dunnies (toilets) were put in cells and plumbed dunnies were built in the yards, against the back walls. Trouble was the prisoners either rammed things down them, smashed them up or, and I'm quoting the guidebook here, "drank the chemicals". Hopefully before someone had weed---I think we'll stop that train of thought right there!

So the cell dunnies were confiscated, the yard dunnies were stopped up with concrete and the slop buckets re-instated until the prison closed in 1991.

The plumbed dunnies in the yards had half-doors. This was so the warders could see if there was one bloke in there or two or three. But of course if the bloke in there stood up, another bloke could easily reach over the top of the door and give him a hand. Thus proving that horny blokes with time on their hands are more inventive than blokes who design prisons.


In the women's part of the prison, which housed up to 16 prisoners, things were about the same. Except that some prisoners were pregnant when they came in so you had stinking nappies and screaming sprogs to add to the delights of being banged up. After a bit the babies were taken away and handed over to relatives of the prisoner or made wards of the state.




Warders on duty in the main yard were allowed to pee. Provided they didn't take their eyes off the prisoners. So their loo was in the middle of the yard and had windows all round. On the other hand it had shelter and shade and wasn't a bucket. Sheer luxury.



Ouch

Some poor bastard fell off Woy Woy railway platform on the weekend. "He was struck by a southbound freight train moments later and killed instantly," says Central Coast Live.

18 years old. Jesus. My sympathies to his family.



* Otter. Hairy bloke. Related to bears. Bears are chubby hairy blokes. But not all chubs are bears. Otters are never chubs but always bears.

The Nick

(Fremantle Prison entrance)

Did a tour of Freo Prison while I was in Freo last week. It closed as a prison in 1991 and opened again in 1992 for tours and stuff.

It was used as a nick for nearly 140 years. Convicts built it in 1850s. It was a limestone hill. They had to quarry the limestone by hand then build their own prison out of it. Talk about yer cruel and unusual punishment.

However, this limestone was pretty soft as rock goes, as Moondyne Joe demonstrated in one of his escapes.


(Only known photo)

Moondyne Joe was a bushranger. He was born in Wales about 1827, transported in 1853 and carked it in 1900. He stole horses and chooks then gained greater fame as an amateur escapologist.

He escaped 4 times from Toodyay nick (pron. Too-jay) then got transferred to Freo and bunged in a cell made specially for him. We looked in it on the tour. Lined with jarrah (very hard Australian wood) and a jarrah door and all of it with iron studs driven in every few inches. Get out of that you scoundrel, said the Governor (words to that effect anyways), and I'll pardon you.

Righto! says Moonie and starts planning escape number 5. Then the Guv goes and helps him by setting him to breaking rocks up in the corner near Fothergill Street with a warder watching him.

Thing is, the rocks he breaks aren't taken away every night. Fresh ones are brought every morning and he's made to stand in the same place every day, on the pile of rocks he's reduced to rubble. This goes on for a bit and the pile of rubble gets higher and higher and eventually all the warder can see of Moonie is his hat. But he can hear him whacking away at the rocks and that's enough to know he's still there.


(Embiggen)

Thing about that is, the rocks he's breaking up are the same rocks the wall is made of. You know where this is going right? Yep, Moonie starts whacking the wall between whacks of the rocks. The wall's a few feet thick but Moonie's got arms like a fucking blacksmith after a few months of whacking rocks and he covers the hole up at night and starts on it again every morning.

So the inevitable happens one day. The whacking stops. After a bit of grumbling the warder clambers up the pile of rubble and there's Moonie's hat perched on the end of the sledgehammer, a hole in the wall and Moonie's buggered off.

He was out for two years that time but eventually got nicked again breaking into a wine cellar. Of course he said to the Guv, you can't hold me you bastard, you said I'd be pardoned if I got out of that bloody cell. Yeah but, says the Guv, you didn't get out of that bloody cell, did yer? You got out through the bloody wall so it doesn't count! Sucks to be you, huh?

No more escapes this time. He sat there like a good boy until they let him out in 1871. Then he went straight, worked as a carpenter and got hitched. But there was no happy ending for Moonie. His missus died in 1893 and he went into the poorhouse (home for the destitute) then off to Freo Asylum just up the road from the nick. He popped off in there in on August the 13th 1900.


Moondyne Joe at the Australian Biographical Dictionary (Straylyan version of Who's Who)

Freo Prison's website