Nine-year old boy is condemned to death for stealing six handkerchiefs from an Oxford Street shop. Shopkeeper had paid five shillings each for them.
The Broadside
This tale comes from a composite sheet giving the results of six cases heard at The Old Bailey on February 17, 1820. Five of the six trials ended with a death sentence. The Gallows Child is my own name for the sheet's untitled Copy of Verses.
The Ballad
Pray give attention to this tale,
Of woe and misery,
To draw forth tears it will not fail,
From every mother's eye,
In Newgate's dismal cells we're told,
In bitter grief doth lie,
A little boy of nine years old,
Who is condemned to die.
When he was sentenced at the bar,
The court was drowned in tears,
To see a child so young cut off,
Still in his infant years,
His father wept, his mother tore,
Her hair in agony,
A heart of stone would melt to hear,
How bitter she did cry.
Be warned my little children dear,
By this poor boy's downfall,
Keep from dishonest courses clear,
And God will bless you all,
Oh think how this poor wretched boy,
Laments his woeful fate,
Locked in a cell: he has no joy,
How dreadful is his state.
The Facts
The prose account alongside the verses explains how Charles Elliott, 9, had stolen six handkerchiefs from Martha Blakeman's Oxford Street shop on February 8, 1820.
His defence was that they'd actually been stolen by another boy, who'd dropped them as he fled. Charles claimed he'd merely picked the handkerchiefs up after the other boy dropped them, but the jury didn't believe him. They returned a guilty verdict, and Justice Richardson pronounced a sentence of death.
The Old Bailey's transcript confirms all these details, just as the broadsheet reports them. Blakeman testified that she'd been in her back parlour behind the shop when she saw a boy run out of the shop's front door. She came through to investigate, noticed six handkerchiefs were missing, and gave chase.
PC Timothy Rickman, who'd happened to be nearby, heard Blakeman shouting “Stop thief”, grabbed Charles and found the handkerchiefs in his hat. “I heard the cry and saw a little boy about my size going along,” Charles said in his own defence. “He dropped the handkerchiefs. I told him he had dropped them. He said 'Never mind, keep them', and I put them in my hat.”
Notes
There's no record of anyone called Charles Elliott being hanged in 1820, so his sentence was almost certainly commuted to transportation. He'd most likely have been sent to Australia.
“Death sentences were certainly routinely passed on 7-13 year olds, but equally routinely commuted,” Richard Clark says on his Capital Punishment UK website. “Girls were typically hanged only for the most serious crimes, whereas teenage boys were executed for a wide range of felonies.”
Clark's site lists 51 confirmed cases of teenagers - 38 boys and 13 girls - hanged here in the 19th Century. The youngest was 14-year-old John Bell, executed at Maidstone in August 1831 for the murder of 13-year-old Richard Taylor. He killed Taylor for the nine shillings the younger boy had just collected from the parish to help feed his disabled father.
“Bell was probably the youngest person to be hanged in the 19th Century,” Clark writes. “In 1833, a boy of nine was sentenced to death at Maidstone Assizes for housebreaking, but was reprieved after public agitation.”
To hear The Hammond School singing Gallows Child, visit the Tindeck music hosting page here.
Sources
* The Trials of all the Prisoners at The Old Bailey (printer unknown, 1820).
* Old Bailey Transcripts
(http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18200217-19-defend300&div=t18200217-19#highlight).
* Capital Punishment UK (http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org).