Armley Jail illustration from the book
‘Hanged at Leeds’ by Steve Fielding
Willie Hall
This song is a local variant of the much older confessional ballad known as Jack Hall or Sam Hall. In this version, which I picked up in Batley, our ‘hero’ called Willie Hall manages not to get hung ‘Cos the trap it didn’t fall’, but he still finishes up in hell with the Hangman for company.
Surprisingly, there are only two reports of the trapdoor failing to drop. The most famous of these being a Devonshire man called John ‘Babbacombe’ Lee, “The Man They Couldn’t Hang” who survived several attempts to hang him. The trapdoor of the scaffold failed to open three times at Exeter Prison on 23rd February 1885, and as a result his sentence was changed from death to life imprisonment. The executioner James Berry, who failed to hang him, was born in Heckmondwike only two miles from Batley. Berry carried out 131 hangings in seven years as an executioner and after his retirement in 1892 he toured as an evangelist. He wrote, two books ‘My Experiences as an Executioner’ in 1892 and ‘The Hangman’s Thoughts Above the Gallows’ in 1905.
