The case attracted enormous public interest especially because of the sexual intrigue and scandal element, which was much rarer then. Maria was perceived as the dominant partner in the marriage and the prime mover in the murder, two other unusual features of the case. Most murders, then as now, were simple and sordid affairs with little of real interest in them. There were the attempts at escape and the brutal nature of the crime too, to add to the interest. By 1849 there was also media, in the form of newspapers, and their case made the headlines. Sexual intrigue was considered much more shocking in Victorian England. It was convenient too that Maria was Swiss born and therefore a foreigner. As one spectator at her execution remarked in a letter to the Times, "Thank God she wasn't an English woman" - in other words the reputation of England was unsullied by the crime. People really did believe that sort of thing at the time.

One feels that Charles Dicken's indignation was far more due to the attitude of the crowd towards the hanging than by any concern for the Mannings and their sufferings. People at that time thoroughly enjoyed a "good hanging" and when the prisoners were a husband and wife from reasonable circumstances it was an added bonus. Some of the wealthier spectators had paid a lot of money to get good vantage points over looking the scaffold, and fashionable ladies were using opera glasses to get a better view. It is probable that many in the crowd were disappointed by the fact that both of them died easily.

This was certainly the case at the execution of the famous Dr. William Palmer, hanged at Stafford in 1856, who died without a struggle, to the disgust of the crowd. Victorian England was full of hypocrisy and publicly expressed disgust at this sort of prurience while privately enjoying it immensely. Public hangings had several obvious advantages in this sense - they were a perfectly legal form of sadistic and voyeuristic entertainment and after all the victims were murderers so one could justify going to watch their punishment as it was a good moral lesson! It is unlikely that many in the crowd felt any sympathy for the Mannings, in their final moments but rather just a morbid fascination with the "show". Even the "stars of the show" often entered into the spirit of the event somewhat, by wearing their best clothes. What Frederick wore was not recorded but it was probably his best suit. Maria chose, and was allowed to wear, the fashionable black satin dress and veil, to ensure she presented a good appearance at the end. Black satin, as a dress material, apparently went out of fashion and stayed so for nearly 30 years as a result.

Maria also made it into Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors and it is probable that Calcraft sold them the dress she had worn for her hanging. Tussaud's would most likely have sent an artist to court to draw her face to be sure of getting a good likeness.

Capitalpunishment.org

MANNING, Maria (England)

Despite being married, Maria, an alluring 28-year-old Swiss woman, fell in love with Patrick O’Connor, a middle-aged money lender, a relationship that was accepted seemingly wholeheartedly by her husband Frederick.

O’Connor, using his business acumen, recommended that the Mannings should rent a public house in Shoreditch, but when the concern failed to make any profit, Maria accused O’Connor of cheating them and demanded compensation.

On 8 August 1849 she invited him to visit them at their home at No. 3 Minerva Place, Bermondsey, in order to discuss the situation; instead she cold-bloodedly shot him through the head. It would seem that the couple had formulated their plan in advance, for when O’Connor appeared to be still alive, Frederick picked up the crowbar he had bought with the intention of using it to bury their victim, and proceeded to batter O’Connor to death. He then used the makeshift weapon to lever up some of the paving stones in the kitchen, and with Maria’s help, concealed the body beneath them.

Whether Maria then deliberately decided to double-cross her husband, or whether she panicked at the murder they had committed and made up her mind to go abroad, is not known, but, saying nothing to Frederick, she went to O’Connor’s house and after stealing cash and valuables, including some railway stock, she caught the train to Edinburgh. Meanwhile their victim’s absence had been reported to the police and on tracing O’Connor’s last movements they visited the Mannings’ residence.

During a detailed search of the premises one of the officers noticed the fresh cement around some of the flagstones in the kitchen and, on lifting them, they discovered a man’s body, his wrists bound behind him, his legs doubled up and tied to his haunches. Quicklime had been poured over the corpse in an attempt to prevent any identification, but dental checks on the set of false teeth found in the remains confirmed that the victim was indeed O’Connor. That the death was not accidental was evidenced by the single bullet discovered within the mutilated skull.

On reaching Scotland, Maria later attempted to sell the railway stock she had stolen, and, the alarm having been raised among the brokers, she was arrested. Frederick, realising that his wife had deserted him, also took to his heels, only to be similarly taken into custody in Jersey.

At their trial each blamed the other for the crime, although the facts that the shares were found in Maria’s possession, and that she could not possibly have buried O’Connor’s body single-handed, left the jury in little doubt that both were equally culpable. After just 45 minutes a verdict of guilty was announced.

Defending herself to the last, Maria furiously declared that she was innocent, and the only man she would have killed would have been that man – pointing to her husband – who had made her life a hell on earth. On both being sentenced to death, Maria gave vent to a furious tirade against Judge Cresswell and British juries, claiming that such an injustice would never have happened in Switzerland! Her outburst was ignored by His Worship; ‘Take them down,’ he ordered, and the couple were escorted below, and from thence to Horsemonger Lane Gaol, the county gaol for Surrey, situated near the Elephant and Castle in Southwark, there to await execution.

Even in the condemned cell Maria refused to give up her fight for freedom. She had once been a servant in the household of Lady Blantyre, whose mother, the Duchess of Sutherland, had been a close friend of Queen Victoria, so she sent a letter to Her Majesty, appealing for mercy. Not receiving a reply, desperately she attempted to take her own life. Taking advantage of a moment in the middle of the night when her three

wardresses were dozing, she tried to pierce her windpipe with her sharp pointed fingernails. One of the wardresses, waking up, realised what was happening, and it took the efforts of all three to tear her hands away from her throat and subdue her.

On Tuesday morning, 13 November 1849, the doomed couple met in the prison chapel and it was reported that as they stood before the altar, Frederick expressed his wish that they should not part in animosity; she replied that she had none, and then kissed him. The Ordinary administered the last sacrament, after which Frederick said, ‘I think we shall meet in heaven.’

The veteran executioner William Calcraft then appeared and pinioned the arms of his prisoners. It was a bitterly cold morning and the hangman tried to show some solicitude for his female victim, urging her to allow the wardress to wrap her cloak around her, but Maria refused; instead she asked that her black silk handkerchief be tied about her eyes beneath the black veil she already wore, so that she would not have to see the waiting gallows, or the vast crowds, whose hubbub she could hear in the distance. Thus blindfolded she was led by Mr Harris, the surgeon, in the sombre procession, the sonorous bell tolling the while along the seemingly endless passageways and up the steep steps to where the scaffold had been erected.

Horsemonger Lane Gaol had a flat roof and so provided a perfect stage for the drama due to take place. Below was a veritable sea of upturned faces, more than 30,000 spectators filling every available space on the cobbles, in balconies and clinging to chimney stacks on rooftops, with no fewer than 500 police constables attempting to maintain some semblance of order.

Journalistic hyperbole, not necessarily factual, was extensively used in the newspapers of the day when describing an execution, but this time a more authoritative description was penned by none other than Charles Dickens and printed in the next edition of The Times. He wrote:

I was a witness to the execution at Horsemonger Lane this morning. I went there with the intention of observing the crowd gathered to behold it and I had excellent opportunities of doing so at intervals throughout the night, and continuously from

daybreak, until after the spectacle was over. I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd could be imagined by no man, and could be presented in no heathen land under the sun. When I came upon the scene at midnight, the shrillness of the cries and howls that were raised from time to time, denoting that they came from a concourse of boys and girls already assembled in the best places, made my blood run cold.

When the day dawned, thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians and vagabonds of every kind flocked on to the ground, with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistling, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police, with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment. When the sun rose brightly – as it did – it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore, and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the Devil.

His account was endorsed by a Times reporter, who described ‘the disorderly rabble smoking clay pipes and muzzy with beer, pickpockets plying their light-fingered art, little ragged boys climbing up posts, a ceaseless din of sounds and war of tongues’.

He went on to paint a picture of the couple’s last moments:

And when Frederick Manning ascended the steps leading to the drop his limbs tottered under him and he appeared scarcely able to move. Upon his wife approaching the scaffold, he turned round, his face towards the people, while Calcraft proceeded to draw over his head the white nightcap and adjust the fatal rope.

The executioner then drew another nightcap over the female prisoner’s head and, all the necessary preparations being now completed, the scaffold was cleared of all its occupants except the two wretched beings doomed to die.

The mob fell hushed and silent as Calcraft swiftly drew the bolt, all eyes fixed on the two hooded and noosed figures silhouetted against the morning sky; the trap opened and the bodies dropped, swaying and twisting slowly with the momentum of their fall, and dying almost immediately. Dickens, with his literary flair for words, wrote how ‘the woman’s fine shape, elaborately corseted and artfully dressed, was quite unchanged in its trim appearance as it slowly swung from side to side’.

After an hour the Mannings’ corpses were cut down and buried, ironically enough, beneath the same type of paving stones within the prison as those under which they had buried Patrick O’Connor. And the multitudes of scaffold aficionados slowly drifted away, savouring the morbid memories of what they had just witnessed, and looking forward with sadistic anticipation to the next occasion on which human beings would be so primitively dispatched into the next world.

Surely though, nothing could be more appropriate for the victim than to wear black for her execution, yet when Maria Manning appeared on the scaffold clad in an ankle-length black satin dress edged with black lace, with black silk stockings completing her ensemble, and hangman William Calcraft allowed her to have her eyes covered with her black handkerchief beneath the black veil she wore, it is hardly surprising that material of that colour rapidly went out of fashion for many years to come.

One satirical magazine quoted a model in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors saying to another, ‘I’ve got a nice black dress I’ve only worn once!’ And Punch printed an acerbic item entitled ‘Fashions for Old Bailey Ladies’ reporting, tongue-in-cheek, how: ‘At the elegant reunion on the occasion of the late Matinée Criminelle at the Old Bailey, the lovely and accomplished Lady X […] carried off les honneurs with her lovely Manteau á la Mannings, trimmed with ruche en gibbets and têtes de port bouffonées. The neck is surmounted with a running cord, la Calcraft, which finishes in a noeud couland in satin, under the left ear.

With the chapeau is worn a bonnet de pendue; this sweet cap can be arranged to cover the whole face and is likely to be thus worn during the approaching season.’

Amazing True Stories of Female Executions by Geoffrey Abbott

Maria Manning

Frederick Manning

Signature of Maria Manning on letter from Horsemonger Lane Gaol.