Martha Brown became the last woman to be publicly hanged in Dorset. She is largely remembered as the inspiration for Thomas Hardy’s famous novel “Tess of the D’Urbervilles“.
Elizabeth ‘Martha’ Brown(e) was an ordinary woman of humble birth who born to to John & Martha Clark, a dairy farm labourer and his wife. The 1851 census indicates that Martha was born in Whitechurch in 1810/11 and that her father was born Netherbury about 1775. Martha worked as a servant.
First marriage:
Aged 20yrs, Martha was married to a widower, Bernard Bearn who was 39 years of age at that time. They were married at St. Mary’s church in Powerstock. Martha signed the Church Marriage Book with a cross as she was illiterate. Her husband was a butcher at that time by trade selling his meat at several markets in the area. He had already had a rather tragic life. Bernard died sometime during 1841/42. He left Martha the sum of £50 in his will.
In the next few years Martha made her living from being a housekeeper at Blackmanston Farm in Steeple, Dorset. This is where she met John Anthony Brown.
Second marriage:
Martha was nearly 20 years older than her second husband, John Brown, and they had met when they were both servants together. John had been born at Bettiscombe. They were married on 24th January 1852 at the registry office at Wareham. Martha was 41 years of age. It was claimed at the time that John had married her for money, as well as for her looks. They lived together at Birdsmoorgate, near Broadwindsor in Dorset.
The marriage was problematic and Martha caught John in bed with a neighbour’s wife, Mary Davis. A quarrel naturally ensued and later that day erupted into violence when John came home drunk and without his hat. Martha believed he had been with Mary Davis again and she remonstrated with John who replied by hitting her with his whip. This was the last straw for Martha who retaliated by hitting him over the head with the wood chopping axe, smashing his skull and killing him.
Martha’s Arrest:
Martha was arrested on 5th July 1856 for the murder of her husband John but she claimed that her husband’s death had been caused by being kicked in the head by a horse. The police did not believe this and thus she came to trial at Dorchester Assizes, as Dorchester is the County town of Dorset.
The Inquest:
The inquest soon followed Martha’s arrest and was held on Monday 7th July 1856 at 5pm in the ‘Rose and Crown Inn’ in Birdsmoorgate before Samuel Skinner Cory, a magistrate from Bridport. He took statements from Martha Brown, Richard Deamon, Harriet Knight and George Fooks.
Police Museum records show that a surgeon from Bridport, Henry Strangeway Hounsell, examined John’s body and found six wounds to his head about one inch in length exposing the skull, the frontal, both parietal and the left temporal bones were much fractured, with protrusion of brain at the frontal wound. On the face over the eyebrow he found a wound more than an inch long and a bruise over the nasal bones, there was a bruise on the back of the neck. Other parts of his body were without any mark or wound except for a slight injury to one of the fingers of the left hand and an abrasion over the right shoulder.
The Trial:
Martha was tried at the Dorchester Assizes on 21st July 1856 before Sergeant William Fry Channell aged 51 years. The prosecuting barristers, Mr. Stock and Mr. Compton, outlined the case against Martha. A Mr. Edwards appeared for Martha. The trial lasted just one day but went on until 10pm. The jury, consisted of ten men:
They did not believe Martha’s horse story either and brought back a guilty verdict. The mandatory death sentence was passed on her and she was taken to Dorchester prison to await her execution some three weeks later.
There were obvious mitigating circumstances which led to substantial agitation for a reprieve. Reprieves even for murder although rare, were by no means unknown at this time. There was, however, much public sympathy for her in view of the abuse she had suffered at the hands of her husband. The Home Secretary, however, refused a reprieve even in view of the evidence of obvious provocation, perhaps because Martha had made the fatal mistake of maintaining, virtually to the last, the lie that John had died from a horse kick. Martha became “locked into” this lie as so many have before and since. Ultimately, in the condemned cell, she confessed that she had killed him with the axe and, therefore, was responsible for his death and accepted her fate with great courage. Diminished responsibility was not a defence open to her in 1856, it would be another 101 years before that was recognised in English law.
Only just before her execution when she seemed to have ‘found religion’ did she actually confess to his murder, this is her statement that was published in Weymouth Journal – Daily News (London, England) on Monday August 11th 1856.
“My husband John Anthony Brown, deceased, came home on Sunday morning, the 6th July at 2 am in liquor and was sick. He had no hat on. I asked him what he had done with his hat. He abused me and said “what is it to you, D..n you? He then asked for some cold tea. I said that I had none, but would make him some warm. He replied “Drink that yourself, and be D….d”. I then said ”What makes you so cross? Have you been at Mary Davis’s? He then kicked out the bottom of the chair that upon which I had been sitting. We continued quarreling until 3am, when he struck me a severe blow on the side of my head, which confused me so much that I was obliged to sit down. Supper was on the table and he said “Eat it yourself, and be d….d”. At the same time, he reached down from the mantle piece a heavy horse whip with a plain end and struck me across the shoulders with it three times. Each time I screamed out. I said” If you strike me again I will cry murder” continued…He retorted” If you do, I will knock your brains through the window”. He also added” I hope I shall find you dead in the morning”. He then kicked me on the left side which caused me much pain, and he immediately stooped down to untie his boots. I was such enraged and in an ungovernable passion, on being so abused and struck, I directly seized a hatchet which was lying close to where I sat and which I had been using to break coal with to keep up the fire and keep his supper warm, and with it (the hatchet) I struck him several violent blows on the head, I could not say how many. He fell at the first blow on his head, with his face towards the fireplace. He never spoke or moved afterwards. As soon as I had done it I wished I had not, and would have given the world not to have done it. I had never struck him before after all his ill-treatment but when he hit me so hard at this time, I was almost out of my senses and hardly knew what I was doing……… Signed Elizabeth Martha Brown.
The utmost efforts were made to save her life. Petitions were sent from several towns in the country and on Friday R.B.Sheridan Esq M.P. and the Rev Dacre Clemetson proceeded to London to wait on the Secretary of State for the Home Department to try and obtain a reprieve but to no avail. Martha was visited in her cell by her sister, and her brother and his wife, and her murdered husbands father.
Martha’s Execution:
The Sheriff of Dorset made the necessary preparations for her execution, appointing William Calcraft as the hangman. He was Britain’s principal executioner from 1829 -1874, the longest serving hangman of all. He was noted for his “short drops” causing most of his victims to die a slow and agonising death.
Martha’s execution was set for 9 o’clock in the morning of Saturday, 9th of August 1856. Calcraft travelled to Dorchester by train and he and his assistant arrived at the prison the day before as required by the Home Office to make the necessary preparations. Martha would have been treated very well in the condemned cell where she would have been looked after by two matrons (female warders) and ministered to by the prison chaplain, the Rev. D. Clementson. Even then there was a strange dichotomy between the harsh sentences of the law, her treatment in the condemned cell, and her cruel and humiliating execution.
The gallows was erected over the gates of Dorchester prison the evening before, on what is today the prison car park in North Square and was a very impressive affair.
The weather was described as being a very hazy wet morning. A crowd of 3-4,000 had gathered for, what was by then, quite a rare event, the public hanging of a woman. To add to the public interest Martha was an attractive woman, who looked younger than her years and had lovely hair. She was also incredibly brave in the face of death. So much so that her local vicar the Rev. H. Moule, regarded it as a sign of callousness. Rev. Moule accompanied Martha to the gallows as the prison chaplain was overcome with emotion and unable to.
Precisely at 8am, the prison bell peeled forth it’s solemn and warning knell. The procession then appeared from the prison slowly wending their way to the scaffold which was situated some distance away. Martha was described as behaving with much fortitude right up to he last moment. Martha had chosen a long, tight fitting thin black silk dress for her hanging. At the prison gates, she shook hands with the officials and began the ascent to the gallows set up over the gateway. Martha walked up the first flight of 11 steps where William Calcraft, a forbidding figure in his black clothes and bushy white beard, pinioned her arms in front of her before leading her up the next flight of 19 steps, across a platform and on up the last flight of steps to the actual trap. Here Calcraft put the white hood over Martha’s head and the simple noose around her neck. He then began to go down below the trap to withdraw the bolts (there was no lever in those days). When it was pointed out to him that he had not pinioned Martha’s legs, he returned to her and put a strap around her legs, outside of her dress to prevent it billowing up and exposing her as she hanged. (The Victorian preoccupation with decency!) While this was going on, Martha stood stoically on the gallows, supported by a male warder on each side just waiting for her death. The rain made the hood damp and it clung to her features, giving her an almost statuesque appearance. It must also have made it hard for her to breath through the damp cloth.
Once again, Calcraft went below and pulled the bolts thus releasing the trap doors. Martha dropped a foot or two with a resounding thud. Death was certainly not instantaneous and she struggled for a few seconds and her “body wheeled half round and back“, according to Thomas Hardy, taking a few moments to lose consciousness as the rope constricted the major blood vessels and put pressure on the nerves in her neck. She was left to hang for the regulation hour before being taken down and buried within the prison. Fortunately, anatomisation of the body had been ended by law some 25 years previously.
Martha’s judge, Sergeant William Fry Channell was appointed as by Lord Chancellor Cranworth on the 12th February 1857 to succeed Baron Alderton in the Court of Exchequer and was knighted. As a Judge he was thought to be conscientious, careful and learned, but very severe to criminals.
Martha’s execution in 1856 caused a leading article in the Dorset County Chronicle advocating the abolition of the death penalty. Public executions were abolished in 1868 but abolition of the death penalty itself did not happen until over one hundred years later in 1965.
Thomas Hardy:
Thomas Hardy was a boy of 16yrs when he went to watch this spectacle with a friend and was able to secure a good vantage point in a tree very close to the gallows. He noted “what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half round and back“, after Calcraft had tied Martha’s dress close to her body. It made an impression on him that lasted until old age, he still wrote about the event in his eighties. It was to provide the inspiration and some of the matter for ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles.” It seems possible that Hardy found something erotic about the execution and particularly her body and facial features through the tight dress and rain soaked hood. Charles Dickens, who had also witnessed public hangings and campaigned strongly against them, referred to the “fascination of the repulsive, something most of us have experienced.” During the 1960s, the antiquarian James Stevens Cox interviewed people who had known Hardy. James ran a small publishing company, the Toucan Press, which published monographs on ‘the life, times and works of Thomas Hardy’ including Thomas Hardy and the Birdsmoorgate Murder 1856 by Lady Hester Pinney, who lived at Racedown in the Marshwood Vale. According to Lady Pinney, ‘Mary Davies started to walk the 25 miles to see the hanging, but when she reached the village of Broadwindsor – three miles away – the people threatened to mob her and she turned back.’
James Seale became the last person to be publicly hanged in Dorset when he was executed for the murder of Sara Guppy. He went to the gallows two years later, on the 10th of August 1858, an event also witnessed by Thomas Hardy.
Over 150 years later…
In 2014 and 2015, Dorset based Angel Exit toured and retoured with ArtsReach performing ‘The Ballad of Martha Brown‘ – “with striking physicality, the show delivers wicked humour, an original score, macabre songs and live music, as a grim chorus of hollow-eyed storytellers invite you into their mysterious world where reality and fantasy blur as the events of Martha’s life are played out under the constant stare of the gallows above.”
Over 160 years later…
In February 2017, permission was granted to turn Dorset’s Dorchester Prison into 185 homes. Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes called for all the remains to be exhumed. Speaking to the BBC, Lord Fellowes, president of the Thomas Hardy Society and creator of Downton Abbey, said: “It’d be very disrespectful not to exhume all the bodies. Although they were largely executed criminals, they were human beings.“.
In 2018, it was reported that Martha may be re-buried with others in the Poundbury Cemetery, should she not be buried in the churchyard at Blackdown, where her husband’s remains lie.
In 2020, sisters Fran and Irene, relatives of Martha Brown, featured on a BBC episode of ‘Murder, Mystery And My Family’ (series 4, episode 9). They had been researching and were keen to separate fact from fiction, as the story of Martha famously inspired Thomas Hardy’s classic novel “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” – a tale in which the eponymous Tess is executed for the murder of her husband.
Jeremy Dain QC and Sasha Wass QC looked at the hasty investigation, the pathological evidence, and undertook a psychological evaluation of Martha and John’s relationship. Were they be able to prove that Martha Brown was wrongly convicted?
The programme aired on BBC1, Thursday, 6th August 2020.
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