Beachcombing has a file on ‘failed executions’: men and women who were sent to meet their maker but whom, thanks to chance, and, more often than not, the stupidity of their executioners, lived to die another day. Of course, survival rates were always small but the odds of making it through depended on the form of execution. Garrotting, beheading, being drawn and quartered not to mention death by elephant really it happened… left no room for hope. But if the prisoner had a handful of four-leafed clovers and was shot, stoned or hung then there was just the slightest, slightest fraction of an outside chance that he or she might wake up on this side of the walls of eternity. Beachcombing being a patriotic sort – actually it was just the biggest part of the file – thought that he would begin with Britain’s preferred method of death, hanging.
read more Surviving Hanging – Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog.
Leave a Reply