Bettany
So how would the condemned men actually have got to Tyburn?

Ruth
Well, they would have been in Newgate which is about three miles that way, along Oxford Street. And they would be brought out in a horse-drawn procession. Quite an elaborate procession with the sheriff, the sheriff's officers, and the condemned men actually in a cart. There would be so many people out in the streets wanting to see the condemned men, offering them drinks, possibly offering them flowers and gifts, and the carts.

Bettany
They'd have driven right up to Tyburn?

Ruth
Right up towards Tyburn which is along here.

Bettany
So presumably in the 1760s this would have been right on the fringes of society.

Ruth
This is all open fields in 1760. In fact it's so open there were cows and everything kept here and a lady who had a cow field here, a woman called Procter, used to build seats and rent them out to people so they could watch the executions in comfort.

Bettany
And this is the site of the gallows, is it?

Ruth
This plaque commemorates the site of the actual gallows, Tyburn tree, the hanging tree. It's a nasty, brutal way to die. If you want to terrify your populace, this is a fairly effective way of doing it.

Bettany
A week after the run-of-the-mill hanging of Guest and the others, Tyburn played host to the execution of the century when the aristocrat, Earl Ferrers, was hanged for murdering his bailiff. Ferrers' trial at the House of Lords in 1760 caused a sensation, and the interesting fact about the case is that the jury was made up entirely of Ferrers' fellow peers. To find out more, we went to the House of Lords Record Office to look at a scrapbook of material relating to the event.

Ruth
First thing you get is all the sort of sub-committee work. How are we going to do this? I mean it was going to be a very theatrical event. There are going to be, not simply seating, but boxes.

Bettany
Do you normally have an audience at a trial?

Ruth
Trials are very popular, yes. People do turn out to see a good trial, but they don't turn out in the numbers that require people to issue tickets. We have a ticket here. Absolutely beautiful.

Bettany
It's very elaborate, isn't it?

Ruth
Yes, in keeping with the status of the Earl, it's beautifully engraved. It’s got a seal to make sure it's original. No forgeries. And it's numbered. This is ticket number 1487. They decided to allocate tickets on a sort of cup final basis. If you have your season ticket to the Lords, you get a better chance of having tickets, and we have further on this scrap book, we have some lovely letters for people who want to make sure they get their ticket. The Earl of Sutherland writing in: "I hope your Grace will pardon this trouble, but if you could be good as to give me", and then he sort of messes up his pen, and we can't actually quite read that.

Bettany
Can't spell ticket.

Ruth
It does look very much as though he can't spell ticket. "If you give me a ticket or two, I shall be singly obliged your Grace."

Bettany
'Because they found him guilty, didn't they?

Ruth
Yes. The verdict was returned and each Lord was asked individually, it wasn't a mass verdict. Each Lord was asked to return their verdict individually and every single one of them declared him to be guilty.

Bettany
What did the press of the day think about it?

Ruth
Well, we have what the press of the day thought about it further on. The scrap book has extracts which include this lovely picture, which I think is as engraving taken from a portrait which may still exist in the family.

Bettany
And a picture of him being hanged as well.

Ruth
And there's Tyburn. This is Mother Procter's pews that we were talking about earlier on. And there he is, dangling in the middle.

Vic Gatrell
Prosecutions had some symbolic value and a lot of mileage could be made out of the fact that Earl Ferrers, for example, was hanged in 1760 for murdering his steward, a case that's always quoted as evidence of the equality of English law in the 18th century. But he is one Ferrers against countless thousands of people who were condemned to death, whose names are lost to history.

Bettany
Not lost to history are Rob Davey's ancestors. He's discovered the original records of the crimes of Job Cobcroft and Richard Ridge, and the original witness statements. But the crimes aren't quite what he expected. John Cobcroft was an armed robber.

Rob
He robbed a cart of William Frost's family on Edgware Road with two others at gun-point. The report had him holding a pistol at the time. He was a footpad which is an old highwayman apparently without a horse, so they were on foot. Now the witness reports for Ridge stated that he actually robbed Miss Susanna Jewel of a quantity of wearing apparel from her shop and later that night robbed a Mr William Cole of nine geese which I had to have a little chuckle actually because I sort of tried to look for quality information on this ancestry and he's chosen geese.

Bettany
So does Rob think the search has been worthwhile?

Rob
I think once I get home and go through what I found to the rest of the members of the family, they'll be very interested in what I've turned up. I've made sure that I've made copies of everything I've found, so it'll make for some interesting stories once I hit the shores of Australia again.

Bettany
By the 1830s, transportation was becoming increasingly rare. Capital statutes were being repealed and the squeamishness of polite society meant that a public hanging was no longer universally thought to be effective. But the courts were still filled with suspects and, once convicted, the criminals had to have something done with them. Prisons were to be the solution.

The modern era had arrived and, with it, new technologies that began to broaden the scope of criminal records. These days, the sheer volume of recorded information can seem impersonal, but in each and every case, there's a story to tell.

Vic Gatrell
It's really when you get eyeball to eyeball with the petitions for mercy, for example, or the photographs in the Public Record Office of the felons kept in Wandsworth Prison in 1878. Or the indictment papers, the crinkly parchment, that you suddenly realise that you're engaging with real people, with real lives, very often with complicated tragedies, complicated injustices, a hit and miss justice at the best of times.

Bettany
Few people would say that our criminal justice system is perfect but the records that we've looked at have clearly shown that it's more humane now than it used to be. Judges and juries might have survived for nearly 800 years but the severity of punishments has changed considerably. There are no more whippings or brandings and the days when you could be hanged for stealing shoe buckles are, thank heavens, long since gone.

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