Taken from the New Statesman archive, 16 May 1959. Ronald Marwood, a Londoner aged 25, had stabbed a policeman while drunk, later giving himself up and confessing. He was one of

six men executed in 1959; a further 20 would be hanged before the death penalty for murder was abolished in 1965. This account of the coverage of events surrounding his death was one of the "Fleet Street" columns that Williams, once press adviser to Clement Attlee, wrote for the NS over many years - Brian Cathcart