Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society The Hangwoman of 18th Century Ireland About this episode Imagine an executioner. Are they big, strong, cloaked and masked? Are they male? Probably - because most executioners in history have been. Today, though, we're meeting a woman who broke the mould.
Journalist and writer Clodagh Finn joins Kate to explore the life of Lady Betty, the Irish executioner of the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as some other Irish women who have defied the boundaries of their gender for obscure reasons.
Clodagh writes ‘An Irish Woman’s Diary’ for the Irish Examiner and has authored a number of books including ‘Through Her Eyes: A New History of Ireland in 21 Women’.
This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.
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0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
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2:32 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwixt the Sheets. But before we can continue together, I know what's coming, you know what's coming, the lawyers know what's coming. It is the fair do's warning, and here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. I'm so glad we got that out of the way. I feel less triggered. Do you feel less triggered? Right, on with the show.
3:02 Kate Lister? Roscommon is busy today. Of course it is. It's execution day, a big day out for all the family. A crowd has gathered in front of the old jail in the main square of the town. Hawkers are selling their wares. Children are atop of their parents' shoulders, just struggling to get a glimpse of the third floor window, outside of which a wooden gallows is built. This is a particularly long drop, but that is not the most unusual thing about this particular execution site. The crowd draws breath as the executioner appears, unmasked, undisguised, and very much a woman. A woman known as Lady Betty.
3:51 Speaker 04 What do you look for in a man?
3:52 Speaker 05 Oh, money, of course.
3:54 Speaker 06 You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.
3:56 Speaker 05 I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing a button.
4:08 Speaker 06 Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
4:11 Speaker 07 Goodness, I feel so damned. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derek.
4:19 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Until 1973, women in Ireland were no longer allowed to work a civil service job once they'd got married. Until 2002, these same women couldn't buy a pint in a bar, but they could buy a brandy or half pint. So you could still get hammered. The search for equality has been ongoing for many, many years. And as we look back through history, we can see the people who've always been there, breaking those boundaries. In this episode, we are meeting one of the more unusual... I don't know if we could go as far as to call her a feminist, but she's certainly a trailblazer.
5:01 Kate Lister? We are talking about one of the few female executioners in history. And I am joined by the fabulous journalist and writer, Clodagh Finn, who is going to introduce us to this rather incredible, not to mention terrifying, woman. I am ready to do this, if you are.
5:21 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's oddly Clodagh Finn. How are you doing?
5:28 Speaker 05 Good morning. It's great to talk to you this morning, Kate. Really looking forward to telling you some stories of rule-breaking women.
5:35 Kate Lister? I had never, ever heard of this person before. It's my favorite type of episode, when I just look at it and I go... What on earth, a female executioner? I've never heard of that before. This is an amazing story and I'm so pleased that you're here to tell it to us. I'm not sure if I'm going to get her surname right, but this is Elizabeth, is it Segru? Segru?
6:01 Speaker 05 Yes, it's Segru or Shacru, we say both here, yeah?
6:05 Kate Lister? Fabulous. Can you tell me first, how did you even discover this person? Is she well-known in Ireland?
6:12 Speaker 05 She's not very well-known, but at the same time, it's such an unusual story and she's such a one-of-a-kind that her story has been used in theatre, where she was the executioner in Roscommon, which is kind of in the Midlands in Ireland. She would be very well-known there and if you didn't do what you were told, Kate, they would say Lady Betty, as she became known, would come and get you, you know? So the story of her became very embroidered down through the decades. And in Roscommon, actually, they even had a Lady Betty Week a couple of decades ago. But like so many stories, they need to be told and retold.
6:57 Speaker 05 And I suppose she came into my awareness last year. We have this wonderful resource in Ireland called the Dictionary of Irish Biography and every so often they update the stories of Irish men and women going back millennia. I had a particular interest in her because I had heard of her and I knew that she was born somewhere where I'm from, which is in County Kerry. And she was born, we think, around 1750. And I was very interested in this woman who was born around 1750. She was the wife of a tenant farmer and I suppose Ireland in the 18th century at that time was a time of political and economic turmoil.
7:39 Speaker 05 It was still under British rule and you had a lot of Irish tenant farmers who were agitating, you know, for better rights. And one of the stories goes that this woman lost her husband and she set out on foot with her children for Kerry to Roscommon. And just to give your listeners an idea, that's from the southwest of Ireland to kind of the middle of Ireland, and it's a journey of several hundred kilometres. And on the way, she apparently lost children to hunger and and exposure and starvation. So you have this image of this woman setting out on foot for some reason to find a better life. So, you know, you just, I I was very taken by that story.
8:23 Speaker 05 As with many of these stories, um, they've been so embellished over time. We don't know what's fact and what's fiction. Also, there are so many kind of lacune and gaps in her story. But let's jump forward. She arrived in Roscommon and apparently there are different accounts, but she ran a kind of a coach in there. So already she was a woman who was making best of bad circumstances, you know, and if she did run a boarding house. And apparently she had one surviving son. And this is, this is where it all goes terribly badly wrong. According to some sources, that son went off to join the army either in England, some say he went to America.
9:07 Speaker 05 He left around seventeen seventy. And here's the bit where Elizabeth Shuckru, as she was known, her real character as a nasty woman is revealed. So the story goes, the nasty woman, yes, you know, dark character. And I'll read you out some of the descriptions of her later. But what happened and how she became the executioner was her son came back, and here's a very telling bit. He wanted to see if his mother had reformed her ways. So he checked into her boarding house incognito to check her out.
9:42 Kate Lister? Her son did?
9:43 Speaker 05 The son did, yeah. So doesn't that tell you lots?
9:46 Kate Lister? How, how, what? How could you check in incognito to your own mother's house?
9:50 Speaker 05 Well, I suppose he had been away for a number of years. So maybe he looked a bit different. Yeah, there are lots of gaps in this story and you'd go, well, how did this happen? Anyway, he checked in. She didn't realise who he was, but she did know that he had money. And in the night, she stole his purse.
10:10 Kate Lister? Elizabeth.
10:11 Speaker 05 And murdered him.
10:13 Kate Lister? And murdered him?
10:14 Speaker 05 Murdered him. And then she was rifling through his papers and realised that she had murdered her own son and ran out screaming into the streets of Roscommon and was immediately arrested.
10:28 Kate Lister? Oh dear.
10:29 Speaker 05 Now, you have to ask too, if it wasn't her son, what would she have done? But what is incontestable is that what happened next is true. So she was arrested and on the day, and she was arrested and she was sentenced to be hanged.
10:46 Kate Lister? For the murder of her son.
10:47 Speaker 05 For the murder of her son. Anyway, this poor man is no longer with us. He has clearly found out to his cost that his mother has not reformed her ways. She's arrested, brought before the court and sentenced to death by hanging. And on the day she was to be executed in Roscommon Jail, which is a very particular kind of jail, because people were hanged from the third floor, so it was a long drop jail. The executioner wasn't there. And she said, in the words of somebody who wrote about her subsequently, she said, "Spare me life, Your Honour, spare me life and I'll hang them all."
11:28 Speaker 05 So in the absence of an executioner, she stood up and said, "I'll do it if you spare my life." And whether that is true or not, who knows? But she certainly became the executioner, the hangwoman of Roscommon Jail for many, many years.
11:46 Kate Lister? Wow.
11:47 Speaker 05 And she became known as Lady Betty. She was because they said she was literate and she had some form of education. So you have stories of how she was a very efficient hangwoman. There's a very unsettling story of how she lived in the jail and that every night or however often the executions took place, she would draw with a stick and charcoal a portrait of the person she had executed on her wall. So like this idea of, you know, not as on a belt, you know, so. And there's another. Some people say that she did public floggings as well.
12:30 Speaker 05 There was another story that she gibbeted a man, a man called, we do have his name, called Michael Walsh. Michael Walsh was a member of the secret societies, which were very common at the time. They were agrarian societies and they were agitating against landlords and absentee landlords. And the story was that she held gibbet him, which is to put him in a cage and put him on public display, you know, to show the others what happens if you rise up against the powers that be. And just to show you kind of the public appetite for seeing a spectacle. Some thirty thousand people came to see his body.
13:10 Speaker 05 And I mean, it's a thirty thousand people is a huge number in rural Ireland at the time. So it's a very, very dark story and how we know about it. So I'll tell you the two main sources.
13:24 Kate Lister? Yes, I was just gonna ask you, what are the sources for this?
13:27 Speaker 05 The sources are William Wilde, who's Oscar Wilde's father. An Oscar Wilde's father, yeah. He was a prominent eye surgeon in Dublin, but he was also a historian and an antiquarian. And he wrote lots of very interesting things. And he, his account is, he quotes people who, who apparently knew her. So, you know, he was saying, I am going by the account of people who are aware of this woman. And mind you, he, he's writing in eighteen fifty two, almost five decades after her death in eighteen oh seven. But it's interesting because here's his account. He said that she officiated unmasked and undisguised as hangwoman for a great many years.
14:13 Speaker 05 And she was, he described her as middle aged, stout made, dark eyed, swarthy complexion. But by no means was she a forbidding looking woman. She was a person of violent temper, of course she was, though in manners, he said, she was rather above the, the common and possessed some education. So that's how she became known as Lady Betty, because she was this woman of learning, inverted commas, let us say. And then we have another little vignette into her life, or the circumstances under which this woman became the hangwoman, or the queen of the long drop was another name she was known as in Roscommon.
14:56 Speaker 05 And it's Charlotte O'Connor-Eckles, who's a very interesting woman. She's a 19th century writer and journalist who's from Roscommon. And she's writing a little bit later than William Wilde. And she's the one that puts words in his mouth, in her mouth, saying, Your Honour, I'll hang them all if you save me life. But what she says, she was very well known, this is O'Connor-Eckles, was very well known as a social commentator. And I, I think it's very interesting what she says, what happened to Lady Betty. She says, and I quote, "She was crushed by bitter, hopeless poverty, which seemed to act like frost on her soul,
15:38 Speaker 05 killing and freezing the fault of kindness that springs in every woman's heart." So she's kind of making the, the assumption that every woman is born with this feminine ideal of having a fault of kindness. But this woman, this bad woman and, and this unfeminine individual was made so by the harsh circumstances of her life. And there's no doubt that she had harsher circumstances, you know. If the story of her, you know, setting out on foot from County Kerry to Roscommon and losing children on, on her way. But I suppose it's a fascinating story because here's this woman who spots an opportunity,
16:23 Speaker 05 albeit a really dark and forbidding opportunity. And she uses it to save her life, save her own skin and then make a living for herself. It's an incredible story, which has carried on down through the decades. You know, you see in the 1930s, we had a very interesting experiment, not really an experiment here in the 19- 1930s where they decided to do a schools survey and ask children in the schools all over Ireland to tell the stories of their district. And so it's a fantastic source now. So you can go back and you can see what the folklore and the people of the district, who they were.
17:05 Speaker 05 And she looms large in the stories of Roscommon in 1937. You can get some of them online. Dukos, which is heritage, the Irish word for heritage. Dukos.ie has all these stories online and you can read in the copybooks, the story of this, you know, formidable woman. And if you step out of line, she'll come and get you. We've loads of those stories about the evil woman who'll come and get you if you don't behave.
17:38 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Clodagh after this short break.
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20:56 Kate Lister? I've never heard of another female executioner. Is she unique? Have you found any others?
21:04 Speaker 05 I have not found any others. I've seen a reference to say that there could have been another one, but when I looked, I did not find her. So she is unique? As far as I know, certainly in an Irish context. I wonder if you go to France and the guillotine is being practiced, would we find one there? Somewhere else.
21:26 Kate Lister? There's the fabled Madame Guillotine, isn't there?
21:29 Speaker 05 Yes.
21:29 Kate Lister? But I don't know if she's real, actually. I don't know if she's just a myth from the French Revolution. But I've never heard of another woman executioner. How big was Roscommon at this particular time? I'm just trying to get a sense of the community that she was living in.
21:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, Roscommon is is quite a small town. Even now, you know, it's not like a city, it would be called a town. I'd have to look up the the population, but you know, you're talking thousands. You would be talking, I would say, not more than a thousand at the time.
22:01 Kate Lister? Okay.
22:02 Speaker 05 It's not huge and it was in, really, it's really quite a rural area. So the idea that you have this woman, I suppose it wasn't unusual for women to be in business or to find ways of making a living. But I also find it interesting that she ran a boarding house, you know. There's a certain amount of agency and power there. Some accounts say she was a widow by the time she came to Roscommon. So what do you do, you know, in the late 18th century to survive in rural Ireland? It would have been rural Ireland. So she was quite a character.
22:39 Kate Lister? So a small town, but it would have had a jail. Were people from the surrounding area brought to Roscommon jail?
22:48 Speaker 05 They clearly were. Yeah, they clearly were because that was the central jail. It was a big jail and a lot of the people, they would have been tried for crimes like theft and sheep stealing. And there would have been a huge element of political prisoners as well. You were, as I say, you had the white boys and you had that man I spoke to was a ribbon man. So they were involved in secret agrarian societies who were claiming rights or trying to find rights for tenant farmers. At the time, the Catholic penal laws were in force. So, for example, if you were a woman, you couldn't get, Catholics couldn't get education. At the other end of the country, we had a woman who is kind of revered now.
23:33 Speaker 05 She's, her name is Nan O'Nagel. But she, with great risk to herself, used her fortune to set up secret schools to educate girls in Cork City. And she went on to found the Presentation Order, and that's where I went to school, you know. So you had women like this working as well. I suppose what interests me is you look back and these feminine roles, even in the 19th century, you had this journalist, you know, Charlotte O'Connor-Eckles, saying, "The fount of kindness that springs in every woman's heart, that women were supposed to be particular things and work in particular areas.
24:13 Speaker 05 But when you scratched the surface, you found women doing all kinds of different things", you know. And I was going to tell you as well about, she's known as Lady Betty, and that was just a name given to her. But around the same time, and also in the same place, from County Kerry, there's a real lady, Lady Arabella Denny, who interests me as well. I'm going to start with the end of her life, because as we're dealing, you know, with the rather Gothic and gruesome stories of execution, there were many things about Lady Arabella Denny that grabbed my attention. But the first one was the manner of her death, or the instructions she left for after her death.
24:56 Speaker 05 So I would say, if you have squeamish listeners, to turn off now, you know.
25:02 Kate Lister? You have been warned.
25:03 Speaker 05 You have been warned. She had this terrible fear of being buried alive. And before she died, she said, and I'll read out what her desire was, "I desire that I may be put in a leaden coffin, and my jugular veins opened, and then enclosed in an oak coffin, and conveyed to the church of Trilly on a hearse, but one morning, coach". I'm from Trilly, and I remember thinking, gosh, here's this woman who said, you know, "Make sure I'm bled to death, and then put in this leaden coffin and buried deep", which is kind of a contradiction, because you, you know, if you are afraid of being buried alive, you'd want a shallow grave, but she wanted to make sure she
25:45 Speaker 05 She was absolutely dead before she was buried in this grave that I I passed every day. And I had no idea of what she did. So she would be um in some ways the very opposite of Lady Betty for many reasons, because she was probably one of the greatest philanthropists of the eighteenth century in Ireland. Having said that, she was also a rule breaker. So she was born to the Lord of Kerry, who became the Earl of Kerry. So she was an aristocratic woman who was a woman of means and she was born in seventeen oh seven. And then she married a man called Arthur Denny, who was an MP for County Kerry.
26:30 Speaker 05 And it kind of gets interesting when she's made a widow. So she's widowed at the age of thirty five. And unlike poor Lady Betty, who who had to try to eke out a very gruesome living. Arabella Denny had some means and she left for Dublin and she started a life that really challenges so many stereotypes. The first thing I found interesting about her was she said she didn't want to marry again. Quote, too much experience ever to become a slave again, she said.
27:04 Kate Lister? Smart woman, smart woman.
27:06 Speaker 05 Smart woman. And you know, there's another story that when she was married, apparently her brother in law used to bully her. So she took up shooting lessons and she made it known that she would practise her shooting if he didn't leave her alone. And guess what? He left her alone.
27:24 Kate Lister? My Betty did.
27:25 Speaker 05 He did. But when she came moved to Dublin, she came into her own. And she was a woman who was interested in the science and the arts and innovation. She was interested in um she had set up a nam's house for the poor in Trilly, where I'm from. Two hundred miles away in the capital city, she started to get involved in charity as well. Princess Dashkova, who's one of the lead figures of the Russian Enlightenment. Used to visit Dublin and she knew her, she knew Jonathan Swift, one of the great writers here. So she was a woman of influence and also she became a woman of means. Her uncle died and
28:08 Speaker 05 left her money, but she used it to improve the conditions in the Dublin Foundling Hospital. She went in herself and she rolled up her sleeves and she says, no, we have to have a system here.
28:20 Kate Lister? So she's a good egg.
28:21 Speaker 05 She's a good egg, but there's more, there's a little twist in the tale. She is a good egg.
28:25 Kate Lister? Twist away, yes.
28:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, we love a twist. She is a good egg. She's an absolutely good egg, but she is also the woman who set up the very first Magdalen asylum in Ireland.
28:37 Kate Lister? Shit, damn it, damn it.
28:40 Speaker 05 Yeah, yes, you're aware of the Magdalene laundries and these women who were incarcerated for falling and sinning, but when she set it up, she came to that through the Dublin Foundling Hospital, because if you have foundlings, you have women who gave birth to them and where are they and what, what has happened them and why have they, you know, had to give up their children or whatever. So in seventeen sixty five, she set up the first Magdalen asylum in Ireland and it was not, she said, according to the pamphlet, a place of punishment for the wicked,
29:21 Speaker 05 but rather one of assistance and reward for those who have ceased to do evil, there's still the idea of doing evil and are resolved to do well. But actually, an independent researcher, she's a great woman, Rosemary Water, has looked at the entry books. Some of them survive for the Magdalene laundries, are the Magdalen asylum as it was, and they're fascinating because some women are sex workers or prostitutes and some women, they do say they have fallen.
29:53 Speaker 05 And you know, there's this idea of a woman who becomes pregnant has done some awful thing. But there's another woman, she suddenly found out that her husband was a bigamist, had been married before. And she'd know where to go. So she was taken into this place and given a trade. So they were taught weaving and sewing. And the idea was that they would stay there for two to five years. So that idea of incarceration was already there. But that the idea was that they would be functioning and independent and they would go back out into society. But Arabella was there herself, like she had the courage of her convictions and she used to work there and work with these women.
30:37 Speaker 05 Mind you, there was a set of rules, very strict house rules. And if you were having your dinner, they put on an hourglass, so you wouldn't spend more at the table than an hour. There's some very interesting stories. There was another woman, and if you disobeyed the rules, it didn't end too well for you. You know, you were cast out into Dublin city on your own. And I would love to have met a woman called Anne Lee. And she was told to leave because apparently she sat down and said, I seen a ghost. And she scared all the women in the asylum and she was put out.
31:12 Kate Lister? Wow.
31:13 Speaker 05 Yeah, but Lady Arabella was trying to do something different. And even at the time, that was controversial, you know, she was very interested in investing her time and her money with the marginalized in society. She did something that fascinated me as well is that she bred silkworms. She was apparently the first person in Ireland, man or woman, to bring silkworms to Dublin.
31:43 Kate Lister? Well, there's a hobby.
31:44 Speaker 05 Isn't it? And she had them down the road from me in Dublin, because I now live in Dublin. And I'm just trying to picture like what it looked like, or did she have, you know, special room for her silk worms? But she used them to set up carpet weaving industry in Dublin. And she was so admired that she was made a patron of the Irish Silk Warehouse in Dublin. And you'll see little snippets in the papers from carpet weavers who thank her, you know, for being a patron, you know. So she was really a kind of an industrious woman who was trying to improve the lot of people in Dublin, men and women.
32:27 Kate Lister? Was she a contemporary of Lady Betty, the executioner? Did they, were they?
32:32 Speaker 05 She was indeed.
32:33 Kate Lister? Oh, wow.
32:34 Speaker 05 They would have, well, they crossed over. So Lady Betty was born in, in, in the 1750s. Lady Arabella was born in 1707. But at the time that Lady Betty was at work, which is kind of the 1780s and 90s, Lady Arabella, well, she was coming to the end of her life, she died in 1792. But she had, all this was going on in Dublin. She was doing this at this time as well. So I just think how interesting that from Kerry, where I'm from, and Trulli is, is also a small town, even today, there's about 20,000 people in it. You had these two women living lives which broke all kinds of rules.
33:17 Speaker 05 Very different, but both of them challenged stereotypes in very many different ways.
33:29 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Clodagh after this short break.
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34:47 Kate Lister? How was Lady Arabella? She sounds like she, I mean, apart from establishing the Magdalen laundries whoops, but she sounds like she was quite well respected. Do you get a sense that Elizabeth was well respected? Or was she feared? Like what kind of, like you said, two very different women inhabiting two very different roles. How was Elizabeth viewed, being an executioner and a woman?
35:12 Speaker 05 Well, we know of her through the accounts that were written later. And in those accounts, she was feared. But there's, I won't say revered, that is much too strong. But there's this fascination with her. You know, she is-
35:29 Kate Lister? Yeah, I bet.
35:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, a kind of a figure who has power. And there's this idea that she's cast a little bit as a monster who's done something with her femininity that is, it's so alien to a woman. So she's cast as this figure who has- Done something that is very unfeminine. And it reminds me, actually, just to jump a few centuries of another woman. She was a noblewoman, she was a Norman noblewoman who inherited lands in County Louth in Ireland. And her name was Ruïsha de Verden.
36:10 Speaker 05 And she built a castle in thirteenth century Ireland and was known as the only woman to build a castle in Ireland in that century.
36:20 Kate Lister? That what?
36:21 Speaker 05 And at the time, they said, she did something that none of her ancestors could do. The local story is that she hired a stonemason and she hired a designer and they built this great big castle, which is still there, Castle Roche, it's called. And when she was admiring the castle afterwards in the lands, she pushed the stonemason out of the window so that he wouldn't replicate the design.
36:50 Kate Lister? Well, that's not very nice.
36:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, but he wasn't going to replicate the design, was it? So she had this singular design.
36:56 Kate Lister? He wasn't.
36:58 Speaker 05 And that that window is known as the murder hole, still in County Louth. And the echo then of, you know, Lady Betty will come and get you in County Roscommon. The version of that in County Louth is, you better be careful or Ruïsha will come and get you. Isn't that interesting? But then.
37:17 Kate Lister? It is.
37:17 Speaker 05 When she lost her husband, she kept her maiden name. And when she lost her husband, she didn't get married either. And she paid quite a huge amount to Henry the Third, which you had to at the time, so that she wouldn't have to get married. And she made sure this chattelaine, she was a no-nonsense chattelaine, you know, that she was, you know, managing her own estates and she made sure that she kept the fortune for her old children. Before she died, she actually moved to England and joined a convent. And she, I think it's called Gras Dure in Belton. So if you look at her in Belton, she is seen as this pious person.
37:58 Kate Lister? Oh, look.
37:58 Speaker 05 Who went in. The convent, you know, at the end of her days and atoned for her sins, you know. So that's jumping around a little bit, but I think it's a fascinating insight into how we tell the stories of powerful women down through the ages, you know. So certainly in her time, even though there's very little evidence or testimony about it, I'm sure that the executioner of Roscommon Jail was not a popular figure. In particular, if she was conducted public flogging, you know, she would be absolutely reviled, reviled rather than revered.
38:41 Speaker 05 And if that account of this poor man who was gibbered, if she was responsible for that, he would have been seen as a kind of a, you know, a nationalist hero who was trying to improve the lot of local people. And here you have one of our own killing our own, you know. So it's a very interesting, corny story with lots of different angles to it.
39:07 Kate Lister? Executioners, you don't really think about them. I know that there were some sort of more famous ones, like in the 20th century and the 19th century, when it becomes quite like medicalized and professionalized. But you just don't think about it being a profession in like the much earlier periods, but it must have been, and they must have been very heavily stigmatized. You couldn't go down the pub and have a drink with your mates and just have a chat with the executioner, could you?
39:33 Speaker 05 Can you imagine?
39:34 Kate Lister? I mean, maybe you did, I've no idea, but it must have been quite a stigmatized job.
39:38 Speaker 05 That's a really interesting question, you know, I'm thinking of the executioners, as you say, in later years, you know, you have Pierpoint, who's very well known.
39:46 Kate Lister? That's what I was thinking of, yes.
39:48 Speaker 05 Yes, Pierpoint is very well known. And then you have stories of who was it who introduced a particular mechanism that made hanging more humane. But then the other side of that is, I wonder, you know, maybe there was a pub or a tavern for jailers and soldiers and maybe the executioner. Executioner, you know, it was just, it was just another job you did, you know. But Lady Betty, yeah, I, I wonder. And, you know, this story that she used to scratch out these portraits of the people she executed on her wall is very interesting as well. You know, she lived within the precinct of Roscommon Jail
40:29 Speaker 05 and it's really quite a big building that is still there on the market square in Roscommon. That suggests to me that she had some sort of a pride in her work.
40:40 Kate Lister? Oh, yeah.
40:41 Speaker 05 Or maybe she was just marking their passage. It's too strong a word to say she was honoring them, but it seems very gruesome and very grotesque at this remove. Having this woman echo down through the decades to us, it just makes us look at the whole thing. And I suppose now I'll have to say, well, she filled in for an executioner. And isn't it an interesting study, like what was the role of the executioner, you know, in the 18th century, in 18th century and even in the centuries before it, you know? There is another study that we'll, we'll have to look at, Kate, and maybe spread the net.
41:21 Kate Lister? What happened to her? Do we know what happened to her?
41:24 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, we know that she died in 1807.
41:28 Kate Lister? Oh, she lasted a while then.
41:30 Speaker 05 She did, yeah, she did. And she killed very many people, you know, she had lots of portraits on her wall. But what's interesting is in 1802, she was pardoned for murdering her son. And it was in recognition of her service as an executioner. So doesn't that give us a little insight into how the executioner was seen? So, you know, the executioner was seen as somebody who was carrying out the law, keeping public order. And she had served very many years as Queen of the Long Drop. And we will pardon you. In eighteen oh two, so how interesting that was.
42:13 Kate Lister? I wasn't sure if the thing about the son was real, because whenever you wanna demonize a woman throughout history, it's very common to bring in this child killing trope.
42:23 Speaker 05 Yes.
42:23 Kate Lister? That they murder babies usually, but they might, I thought maybe it was like an extension of that, but if she was pardoned for it, that sounds like that really did happen then.
42:32 Speaker 05 It does sound, or she was guilty of some crime at least.
42:36 Kate Lister? Yes.
42:36 Speaker 05 Again, the story of her that comes down to us, how did she end up being an executioner? In all the versions, it is that she was guilty of a crime and the crime in all the versions is that she killed her son and that she spotted this gap and said that the executioner hasn't come to work today, I'll fill in, I mean, even to think that.
43:00 Kate Lister? Wow.
43:01 Speaker 05 But I suppose, you know, it just, it's very interesting when you read people on death row, you know, what their last thoughts are, or, you know, if you're finally, if you're put in the spot and it's a life and death situation, what would you do? I can't ever imagine volunteering to kill somebody else, but that's what she did and took to it with such relish and such efficiency, she was highly efficient, apparently, and that she stayed on in that role for several decades, creating, you know, a myth.
43:34 Kate Lister? So as a final question then, if I could give you a time machine and you can go back and you can take Elizabeth Lady Betty out for a drink, what questions do you wanna ask her?
43:45 Speaker 05 Oh, that's so interesting. I would have lots of questions. I want to know, what happened to you? How did you end up here? Tell me about your life in Kerry, this long barefoot walk, I imagine the barefoot, you know, what happened? And what was it like to be an ex, a female executioner, you know, in eighteenth century Ireland? What would you ask her, Kate?
44:11 Kate Lister? Oh, God. I think I would wanna sit down and just like, the, the stories that circulate her, like, was the thing about the son true? Was that true? Okay, I wanna know like the logistics of it. Did she get a house? How did people view her at the time? Was she like a social pariah? Or was there a sort of a kudos to it? How on earth, was there any training to be given for this? Was it just horrendous trial and error?
44:40 Speaker 05 I think there was. You pulled a drop. You know, there was a, it was a mechanical thing. Because that's noted, that she did it with high efficiency. So she was good at this.
44:50 Kate Lister? I guess that's what you want, isn't it?
44:52 Speaker 05 It is what you want. And it was a particularly long drop. The other thing that she did get quarters, so she got her board. She lived in the jail. She had quarters in the jail. So I could see how that would be attractive. So I'd like to ask her too about these portraits that she allegedly did. And did she have any relationship, you know, with the people she executed beforehand, you know? Did they have a hood?
45:17 Kate Lister? Claudia, you have been absolutely fascinating and I'm gonna be mulling over this one for a while now. What was it like to be a female executioner? If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
45:30 Speaker 05 Well, I write a column called An Irish Woman's Diary in the Irish Examiner every Saturday. And that features stories of women from history that you might not expect. I'm also a writer and I have written a number of books about women in history. Through Her Eyes is a history of Ireland told through the stories of 21 women, starting in the Stone Age, going right up to the digital present. And more recently, I've written The Irish in the Resistance with John Morgan. And it's the story, sort of the unexpected story of so many Irish men and very many women who resisted Hitler all over Europe.
46:14 Kate Lister? Thank you so much for dropping by to talk to us. Thank you.
46:19 Speaker 05 It was an absolute pleasure.
46:25 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Claudia for joining us. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. This month, we're diving into what it means to be beautiful and ugly in the past, and you wouldn't want to miss that. But if you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer is Charlotte Long. Join me again, betwixt the sheets for History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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