The Hanging Club

Author’s Note

Strangely enough, Newgate Prison is still down there. It is true that not much remains of the country’s most notorious prison, but all that Max Wolfe discovers – the condemned man’s holding cell and Dead Man’s Walk, where the ceiling and the walls contract like a corridor in a nightmare – is, rather incredibly, still buried deep beneath the Old Bailey.

What remains of Newgate is not preserved or conserved, for nobody was ever proud of the London’s most notorious prison – chamber of horrors for eight hundred years, the human zoo, ‘the grimy axle around which British society slowly twisted’. As Max suggests, no doubt one day it will all be swept away in a mad fit of rebuilding, but for now, it is still down there. You just go down to the basement of the Old Bailey. And then you keep going.

As for Albert Pierrepoint, whose name and image is appropriated by the Hanging Club, he was of course the nation’s executioner in the middle of the twentieth century, hanging 435 people, including 202 Nazis found guilty of war crimes.

Pierrepoint, by this time sickened of capital punishment, retired to work as a publican. He wrote in his autobiography, ‘Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge.’

No doubt this is true. But as Sergeant John Caine asks Max Wolfe up in the Black Museum – ‘What’s wrong with a bit of revenge?’

Tony Parsons,

London, 2016.