Hangman's Brae by Norman Adams

Author:Norman Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845026226
Publisher: Black & White Publishing
Published: 2012-12-28T16:00:00+00:00

As her unconscious victim lay buried in sleep, with open mouth on the bed, which she had shared with him for 33 years, she appeared softly near the midnight hour with the instrument of death in her hand, and, steeled to the feelings of pity and remorse, administered the fatal draught which was to burn up the sources of life.

On the day after her trial, Kate confessed her guilt, saying that she had been driven by jealously and malice excited by the misconduct of her husband and dislike he bore towards her. On the eve of her execution, Kate had barely twenty minutes’ sleep because of the hammering by carpenters as they built her gallows in Castle Street. Mrs Shuttleworth was also disturbed in her sleep by violent strokes on the gibbet but hooligans rather than carpenters were to blame. (The noise of workmen building murderer William Allan’s gallows at the door of Aberdeen tolbooth on his final night ‘seemed to shake his very soul’. On the day of his execution, 10 February 1826, he fainted three times while being led to the scaffold – the last time on the drop itself.)

‘O, it’s a sair thing to wash for the gibbet; but I hope I will be washed in the blood of my Redeemer’, groaned Kate, as she prepared for the scaffold. At 2.30 p.m. on Friday 8 October 1830, Kate Humphrey (51), ‘genteelly dressed in black’, was led from the nearby East Jail on the arms of her jailers. The first stop was the old courthouse where the Lord Provost and magistrates were gathered. The 51st Psalm, part of which Mrs Shuttleworth had objected to, was sung. Drink, Kate told them, was her downfall. But did they heed her warning as they gathered in the nearby Lemon Tree Tavern for a post-execution dram? In a clear, firm voice she went on, ‘Gentlemen, you who have it in your power should look to the public houses in the quarter where I lived, for many of them are in a bad state and have much need to be looked after.’

Expressing a desire that the world would take warning by her case, Rev. Kidd, who had prayed with Kate in her cell, endorsed what she had said, adding, ‘That if such houses were not put down there would be a dissolution of society.’ (This warning appears to have gone unheeded for seven years later Aberdeen, with a population of just 60,000, had 870 premises where drink could be bought. There was one public house for every eleven families in the parish of Greyfriars.) Kate was close to fainting as she was positioned on the drop by hangman John Scott, the assistant hangman in Edinburgh who would later become the Aberdeen executioner. She never once lifted her eyes to look around at the huge crowd that pressed around the scaffold and stretched back as far as St Catherine’s Wynd in Union Street. She dropped a napkin as a signal to Scott, who ‘proceeded to do his duty’.

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