"How could my editor not ask me to cover this story?" said a Scandinavian correspondent to the Manchester Guardian reporter outside the gates of Pentonville on the morning Ronald Marwood was executed. "After all, to us it is like something out of the Dark Ages." A reading of the Brit- ish press the following morning, or at any rate a considerable proportion of it, is not likely to have changed the views of the Scandinavian editor.
Few of the details were spared. "MARWOOD HANGED . . . and from the barred window of a cell in Pentonville jail tattered pages torn from a bible flutter down," shouted the Mail across six columns. "Before his five-yard walk to his death", it told its readers, Marwood "shook hands with his warders and thanked them", while "in the prison chapel stood tulips and lilies sent by 20-year-old Mrs Rosalie Marwood . . . who became a widow as she prayed". The Herald ("The Time Is 9 o'clock" across seven columns) had further details - as did the Express ("Marwood Dies Coolly as Rioters Scream") - from a warder, a matter the Prison Commissioners might care to inquire into. The Mirror ("As Ronald Marwood Waited to Die . . ." across the whole of its two centre pages) had three photographs: the caption to one of them "Ronald Marwood had only minutes to live when this dramatic picture was taken yesterday morning . . . in the street outside Pentonville Gaol". "These," reported in the Sketch, "were the ugly scenes outside Pentonville as 25-year-old Marwood walked to the gallows. The crowd stormed barriers crying 'Savages' and 'Murderers' as the police repelled them. Pacifists marched up and down with 'Don't murder Marwood' banners." Only the Manchester Guardian reporter made any attempt to distinguish between the various elements in the crowd. Reporting that "not since the execution of Derek Bentley six years ago has there been such a display of emotions and physical violence . . . During the last 15 minutes of Marwood's life, a mob went wild - punching, kicking, screaming and cursing," he added: "Once again, as at the hangings of Bentley and Ruth Ellis, dozens of men and women had arrived in a state of macabre anticipation". He summed up: "If one has ever wondered about the mentality of the festive crowds that used to line the route to Tyburn, a visit to the gates of Pentonville yesterday showed that there are still many of the same sort of people in our midst today. It is not a pleasant thought." And he pointed out that many of those people could be seen giving interviews to reporters from Europe and America, who were present in force.
The Sunday Pictorial added to Britain's good name by publishing the story of a prisoner in Pentonville, released the morning Marwood was hanged, who the day before was given "the job of scrubbing out the post-mortem room ready for Marwood's body". This man described the scene in the prison the night before. "The lights went out and suddenly the din began. I joined in. I screamed. I smashed my china mug. I hurled my three pieces of cutlery into the yard outside. I ripped my shirt . . . Many prisoners in the hospital went berserk. Five prisoners broke out of their cells. They were stripped and shoved naked into bleak concrete cells." Foreign papers please copy.
And what did the papers themselves think of it all? It will surprise no one that the traditional guardian of morality, the News of the World, was on the side of the hangman. "The Marwood affair," it pronounced, "has occasioned unfortunate hysteria . . . In our view while capital punishment remains, the penalty for murdering a constable must always be death . . . For A LIFE FOR A LIFE is still the great deterrent to killing." Nor will it occasion any amazement that the Daily Express should take a similar view. Came Sunday, and Mr John Gordon: no quavering here. Marrying morality and literary nobility with all the old charm, he rounded vigorously on all "the cranks and crackpots who love to paddle in a sea of sentimental slush". "Should the agitation over Marwood," he concluded in magisterial tones, "stiffen the hostility of the country to any further abolition of the death penalty - as I think it will - the service rendered by his death will be considerable."
The Times was not quite in step with Mr Gordon. It considered that "the grim sequence of events that ended, yesterday, with the hanging of a murderer must give us all grave cause to think". The Observer, deploring "the social evils attendant upon the act of hanging", declared that "a revival of the campaign to abolish capital punishment is overdue". But perhaps the most appropriate comment came from the News Chronicle. In a short leader on the death of Lord Templewood, it quoted from the book he wrote after being Home Secretary: "An execution is an obscene and uncivilised act. However the death penalty is carried out it will be accompanied by scenes that offend and degrade our public standards."
"After the scenes inside and outside Pentonville in the last hours of Ronald Marwood's life, it is," said the News Chronicle, "to say the least, difficult to disagree."
