Capital Punishment

 We had a couple of beers in an old pub in Wapping called The Prospect of Whitby. We sat out above the river Thames and enjoyed the view. The pub claims to be the oldest pub in London. There is some connection with the place of execution of pirates--hanged beside the pub or at low tide on the shoreline below the pub. There is a noose hanging below the pub.

I have always been disturbed by capital punishment, and sitting there thinking of the pirates being hanged, I thought that over the millennia there must have been millions of executions--multiple hangings at Tyburn in London, where crowds came out to watch: soldiers shot as deserters: witches burned: heads cut off: garottings: and other cruel and unusual methods of taking lives. I was not thinking of genocides, or holocausts, or mass slaughters, so much as individuals sentenced to death who had to live for a period knowing that their lives were to be ended by their execution.

My reaction to what I saw as the horror of judicial execution started when I was a boy. Britain had capital punishment for murder until 1965. The method was, in the words of the judge's sentence..."to be taken from here to a place of execution and hanged by the neck until you are dead." Executions took place at 8.00am, and often when I came down to breakfast as a boy I would be faced with the front pages of The Daily Telegraph, which my father read at breakfast, and there would be a headline "Reprieve Denied," which meant that a murderer would be hanged at 8.00am that morning. I would look at the clock---ten minutes, five minutes to eight o'clock, and I would think "They are doing it to him now, and he knows he'll be dead in a minute or two." and I would think of the terror I would feel if it was happening to me.