The last man to be hanged at Horfield Prison six decades ago
“Do as I say and it’ll be quick and easy,” Russell Pascoe was told just seconds before becoming the last man to hang at HMP Horfield 60 years ago this week. WCT looks back at the case...
RUSSELL Pascoe had a lot of visitors the day before he was due to hang. There was his mother and, according to some reports, his wife.
Afterwards, he sat with the two warders who were assigned to keep watch on him.
One of them, Robert Douglas later said: “I asked Russell if he wanted a cup of tea. He said he didn’t. So I tried to coax him – ‘I’ve brought you a cream doughnut’ – I’d brought him a cream cake each day as a little treat. With that, he perked up a little and said, ‘ah go on then, I’ll have a tea.’
“So we sat drinking tea for a while, none of us really saying anything. Just blathering about nothing to try to fill the silences.”
Later that evening there was a knock at the door and the prison governor entered accompanied by another man. The stranger said to Pascoe, “How do you do, son,” and held out his hand.
Pascoe instinctively reached out and shook the stranger’s hand. The man then just turned and left.
Later, Pascoe asked Douglas, “Who was that came in with the governor tonight?”
Douglas and his fellow warder claimed not to know.
“I bloody knows. That were the hangman.”
It was. Harry Allen, the executioner had shook his hand to size up Pascoe in order to assess the length of “the drop” – the length of rope which would ensure Pascoe’s neck was broken as he fell.
Pascoe had already been weighed and measured, but hangmen usually wanted to meet their victims to assess their build and shape.
At 11 that night there was another knock on the door. The duty officer said that Pascoe’s brother had arrived. He’d set off to travel from
Cornwall to Bristol for visiting time that afternoon; he had had a lift on the back of a friend’s scooter, but it had broken down three times.
The prison authorities decided to let him see his brother. They had an awkward, stilted conversation, not really knowing what to say to each other.
Pascoe went to bed, heavily sedated.
* * * * * *
Russell Pascoe’s crime was committed in Cornwall. He and his fellow-conspirator Dennis Whitty lived in a caravan with – reportedly, three young women – on the outskirts of Truro. One of the women was said to be Pascoe’s wife.
Both men had menial jobs – Whitty at the Truro gas works, Pascoe was a farm labourer – and doubtless dreamed of easier lives. Pascoe said he knew where they could get a lot of money.
Farmer William Rowe, 63, had been a recluse for most of his adult life. He had gone into hiding to avoid being called up in the First World War and had kept a low profile for years afterwards for fear of prosecution. The amnesty for those who had avoided conscription which was announced when Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne made little difference.
Pascoe had worked for Rowe and believed that he kept a large amount of cash hidden somewhere on the farm.
On August 14 1963, Pascoe and Whitty went to the farmhouse armed with a starting pistol, a knife and an iron bar. They attacked Rowe, who probably died of a stab wound to the heart, though he had numerous other injuries too.
As Rowe lay dead or dying, the pair searched for the money, but couldn’t find the fabled stash. They left with £4 and a watch.
The crime shocked the quiet
rural community and the local police threw everything into the investigation. They interviewed hundreds of people and took several in for questioning.
These included Pascoe, who admitted that he had worked for Rowe in the past. Detectives also noted that when Pascoe was working there, there had been a theft from the farm.
Whitty was now brought in as well. Both men were told that they were suspects, and in no time they were blaming each other for the killing.
At Bodmin Assizes, the jury returned guilty verdicts. Mr. Justice Thesiger sentenced both to death.
* * * * * *
Until 1965, a guilty verdict in a murder case routinely attracted the death penalty, but many convicted killers were reprieved, with their sentences usually commuted to life imprisonment.
The men’s lawyers told them they had good reason to hope the death sentences would not be carried out. There would be an appeal, and if that failed they would petition for clemency.
Whitty was taken to Winchester Prison and Pascoe to Horfield Prison in Bristol. Horfield was chosen because unlike most other prisons, it had a purpose-built condemned block.
The procedures for the treatment of condemned prisoners were well-established. Each was assigned a team of six prison officers. These would work in pairs in
round-the-clock shifts so that the prisoner was never alone.
This was partly to prevent prisoners from taking their own lives – one of the details which many among the small but growing number of campaigners against capital punishment found macabre and absurd.
One of the warders with Pascoe was Robert Douglas, who was then working at Birmingham. He was drafted down to Bristol for six weeks. He would later write about this episode in his book At Her Majesty’s Pleasure.
Writing for the Bristol Post in the 1980s, he described the condemned cell, which was about 25ft long and 12ft wide.
At one end was Pascoe’s bed and a bedside cabinet and lamp. At the other end was a table and three reasonably comfortable easy chairs.
On the table was a lamp, which at night we would half cover with a green cloth so we could read while Pascoe slept at the far end of the cell.
At the end of the room opposite the bed was a door to the bathroom, and another to the toilet.
When Pascoe was in the bathroom and toilet we had to be with him and he had to use a locking safety razor.
All clothing had no buttons, only ties, and the prisoner had no belt or necktie.
In the middle of the room was a locked door which led across a narrow corridor to another door, behind which was the execution chamber.
In the cell were a radio, games such as Monopoly and Scrabble, playing cards and library books.
At first, he said, Pascoe was cheerful, presuming his appeal would succeed, but things turned more sombre when this was turned down at the Old Bailey.
His only hope now was that the Queen would commute the sentence or, if that failed, offer clemency at the last minute.
Of course it would not be the Queen’s decision. That rested with the Conservative Home Secretary, Henry Brooke. As things stood, Pascoe and Whitty were both set to hang at 8am on Tuesday, December 17, 1963.
There was no mass movement opposed to capital punishment in Britain. There were never tens of thousands taking to the streets in protest. Public opinion polls in the decades after its abolition indicated – until quite recently anyway – that most Britons would like to “bring back hanging”.
But following Parliament’s 1965 vote to suspend the death penalty for murder, and its abolition in Great Britain in 1969 (it was abolished in Northern Ireland in 1973) successive Commons votes to restore it have failed.
By 1963, though, pressure to do away with the death penalty was growing among MPs and church leaders. It was becoming a cause among more liberal-minded people. It caused unease among the wider population, too, as a result of high-profile cases.
The 1955 execution of Ruth Ellis – the last woman to hang in the UK – for shooting an abusive boyfriend disturbed many. Then there was Derek Bentley, a 20-year-old with what we’d nowadays call learning difficulties, hanged in 1953 for the murder of a police officer during a botched burglary, even though Bentley didn’t even fire the gun.
Worse still had been the execution of Timothy Evans in 1950 for the murder of his wife and baby daughter at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill. Three years later it became clear that the real culprit was serial killer John Christie. The state had killed an innocent man.
The most prominent case connected to Bristol was that of Miles Giffard, aged 27, executed at Horfield in 1953.
Giffard’s story made headlines because of his middle class background. His father was a lawyer and his mother a prominent Conservative Party activist in St Austell.
Giffard had attended the prestigious Rugby School, and was a talented cricketer who had twice played for Cornwall. However, a psychiatrist had diagnosed mental health issues and was unable to hold down a steady job.
In 1952 he fell in love with a girl in London, but his parents disapproved of the relationship. After a day’s heavy drinking he bludgeoned his parents to death with a length of lead pipe and threw the bodies over a cliff.
The court at Bodmin Assizes was told he was a schizophrenic, but the jury found him guilty after just half an hour. Perhaps a better defence in court, focusing on his mental state, could have saved him from the noose.
The Saturday before Pascoe was due to hang, anti-capital punishment campaigners – “abolitionists”, in the language of the day – took part in a silent procession through central Bristol.
The city was packed with Christmas shoppers. Many men removed their hats as the little procession passed through Broadmead and up the Gloucester Road to the gates of Horfield Prison for a day and night vigil.
This was to last 64 hours – an hour for each year of William Rowe’s life. Someone brought a brazier to fend off the December chill.
Those attending included, according to Post reporter Jeremy Brien, social workers, doctors, college lecturers and school teachers. But there were also two schoolgirls from Monks Park, aged 13 and 15, and a man who had hitch-hiked from Kent.
Some passers-by yelled abuse, and some were sympathetic. The vigil was visited by Bristol South East MP Tony Benn who said he was certain this would be the last ever execution in Bristol.
“I am sure that in 1964 the death penalty will be abolished,” he said. He was only a year out.
On Monday, December 16, Home Secretary Brooke, acting in the name of the Queen, rejected Whitty and Pascoe’s appeals for clemency. On TV’s satirical programme That Was The Week That Was some days later, David Frost said: “If you’re Home Secretary, you can get away with murder”.
A leader column in the Post condemned the decision, writing of “a dark corner of our law, which by its illogical, clumsy definition and its bitter clinging to revenge rather than reform as an essential quality of justice, is an intolerable anachronism.”
That night, around 70 of the abolitionists kept silent watch outside the prison.
At 7am the Bishop of Bristol, the Right Reverend Oliver Tomkins, arrived wearing his robes. He asked the crowd to pray for the condemned man, and to have “a kind thought for the men who hate having to carry out this unpleasant task.”
It was later revealed that the Bishop had paid several visits to Pascoe and had confirmed him.
* * * * * *
An hour later, Harry Allen entered Pascoe’s cell.
“Stand up son,” he said. “Do as I say and it will all be quick and easy.”
Allen’s assistant bound the prisoner’s arms behind his back and two prison officers took hold of his and led him at the double out of the cell and into a room straight across from the cell door.
Pascoe was moved onto a trap door while Allen’s assistant bound his ankles with a leather strap.
Harry Allen pulled a hood over Pascoe’s head and then the noose, tightening the rope, twisting it with the knot to the side of the prisoner’s head.
Allen stepped backwards, signalled the two prison officers to do the same. Allen pulled the lever, the trap door opened and Pascoe fell, jerking to a stop at the end of the rope.
The prison clock struck eight. Every inmate knew what it meant and the entire prison erupted in a cacophony of noise as men banged tin mugs on bars and cell doors.
Russell Pascoe almost certainly died instantly – about 14 seconds after Harry Allen had entered his cell.
Harry Allen returned to the prison officers’ canteen. The cigarette he had lit earlier was still smouldering in the ashtray. He picked it up, took a drag and asked if there was any tea on the go.
Dennis Whitty had been hanged at Winchester at precisely the same time.
Outside, the demonstrators started to disperse, some leaving banners propped up outside the prison gates.
One quoted a Quaker tract: “Let the law of kindness know no limits. Show a loving consideration for all God’s creatures.”
Pascoe’s body was left hanging for 90 minutes, and was then buried in an unmarked grave in a sunless corner of the prison yard, alongside the other 13 men who had been hanged at Horfield over the years.
The following year the last men
to be hanged in Britain went to the gallows, Peter Allen at Walton Prison, Liverpool, and Gwynne Evans at Strangeways in Manchester. Like Whitty and Pascoe, the pair were small-time crooks who had murdered a man during a robbery. Evans had previously spent some time in a juvenile institution in Bristol.
Back in Cornwall, William Rowe’s executors were given a diary the police had found, with coded notes which apparently indicated the whereabouts of various sums of money. The code was successfully deciphered and they did indeed find “several thousand pounds” hidden on the farm.