Gibbet fate for man who killed wife
IN an age when we agonise over smacking it is shocking to remember that once Stockport had a gibbet, and the last man ever to have his body exposed in a iron cage dangled in Great Moor.
This extreme punishment was meted out to John Dean, a Hillgate weaver who battered to death his pregnant wife with a heavy handbrush at Watson Square off Waterloo Road in 1790.
He was arrested and held in the dungeon at the top of Mealhouse Brow. Within weeks his five children also lost their father as he was sentenced to death at Chester Castle and hanged before a large crowd, with the judicial direction that his body be gibbeted afterwards at Stockport.
“I hope that no-one will throw my shameful end in the faces of my children,” he declared from the gallows, “as the fault is all my own.” He claimed he had been ‘upset in my mind after I tarried long with a bad woman of Hillgate.’
He had come home and attacked his wife with the brush, when neighbours heard her screams and his voice yelling ‘what art thou not dead yet?.’
At Brinksway his dead body was hoisted in chains onto a gibbet in a cart and accompanied by 50 soldiers on horseback and an immense crowd to the Black Lake near Cherry Tree Lane, where he was transferred onto the gibbet constructed there.
His carcass was left exposed above ground for several years until the bones were picked clean by birds. Neighbours eventually took down the chains and buried them and the bones.
A member of Stockport Heritage who lived in an old cottage on Castle Farm Lane nearby said he once dug up some rusty old chains in his garden which looked like the gibbet remains. New neighbours on the recent Cherry Tree Hospital housing development may be shocked to know of the gruesome history of this respectable suburb of Stockport.
Once it was part of lonely Stockport moor where townspeople dug peat to burn on their fires, creating the large shallow lake in the diggings.
Dialstone Lane Infectious Diseases Hospital opened here in the 1880s, nearly a century after the clank and rattle of John Dean’s gibbet chains had frightened travellers and made people stay away. »»More tales of horror in Stockport Heritage Magazine available from newsagents, with back copies online stock port heritage magazine.co.uk or at St Mary’s Heritage Centre Market Place.