![]() Ellis the narrator is a perfect professional, an unremarkable instrument of the state who made only two small contributions to deaths that were, morally speaking, collaborative: measuring out the correct length of rope for the prisoner’s height and weight - give a thin man a short drop and his neck won’t break, leaving him to strangle give a fat man a long drop and his head will come right off - and getting the condemned man from his holding cell to instantaneous death in as little time as possible, usually under a minute. ![]() Judging from the self-portrait in Diary of a Hangman, no executioner was ever less likely to kill himself from the strain. At 57, he got drunk and slit his throat with a razor the coroner attributed the suicide to an “unsound mind.” At 50, he tried to blow his brains out but managed only to wound himself in the jaw, for which he was hauled before a magistrate on charges of attempted suicide, to the delight of the newspapers. For each execution, Ellis was paid £10 plus expenses, £15 for a double hanging, to supplement the income from his Rochdale barbershop. At the age of 49, he submitted his resignation. Crippen, the WWI traitor Roger Casement, the housewife Susan Newell (the last woman ever hanged in Scotland), and James Howarth Hargreaves, with whom Ellis “had often passed the time of day in conversation” at the dog races in Lancashire but who went to the scaffold never recognizing his hangman as an old acquaintance. In John Ellis’s twenty-three years as a hangman for the British government, he executed 203 people including the famous Dr.
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