Appointment with the hangman

ON A GREY January morning 50 years ago this week, a crowd of 300 gathered outside the grim Strangeways Prison in Manchester as, inside, executioner Albert Pierrepoint went about his grisly work.

Though every judicial hanging attracted a gathering at the jail gates of abolitionists, protesters and the curious, this occasion was different.

For the noose that morning of January 12, 1949, was around the neck of a woman - 42-year-old murderess Miss Margaret Allen, of Rawtenstall.

She was the first woman to be hanged at Strangeways since 1926.

Allen was also the first female in the country to be hanged for a dozen years. And she was the first person to be hanged anywhere in Britain for 18 months - while Parliament had been debating remission for those on Death Row and toyed with the abolition of capital punishment.

In that interval, many who had been sentenced to death were reprieved and, had she come to trial even six months earlier, Allen might also have escaped her appointment with the hangman.

But if adverse timing played a deadly part in the fate of the out-of-work former bus conductress, so too, perhaps, did the age in which she lived. For it was a time when tolerance or understanding of the sexual preference that Allen displayed were nothing like they are now, half a century later.

For Allen was a lesbian. Her hair was cropped; she always wore men's clothes - trousers, shirt and tie. She chain-smoked and drank pints in Rawtenstall's pubs, where she enjoyed being called Bill. She often used men's toilets and claimed, untruly, that she had had surgery to turn her into a man, as she clearly longed to be. Though only 5ft tall, she was as strong as most men and boasted that she had once worked as a labourer.

Yet if Allen's odd persona - which, today, might be widely accepted as only being regarded "different" - was any pointer to a confused mental condition when, with a hammer, she battered to death her victim, 68-year-old widow Mrs Nancy Chadwick, it cut no ice with the jury at her trial. They took just 15 minutes to find her guilty.

Mrs Chadwick had been killed four months earlier, meeting her awful death when, seeking to alleviate her loneliness by knocking of people's doors and offering to tell their fortunes, she called at Allen's cottage in near Rawtenstall's cricket ground in Bacup Road.

In the early hours of August 29, her body was found only a short distance away in the middle of the road - by a bus driver taking home a party of colleagues who had been at a late-night trade union meeting.

At first, it was thought Mrs Chadwick had been the victim of a hit-and-run driver. But a murder hunt was quickly triggered when it was discovered she had been dead for around 10 hours and had wounds to the back of her head that had probably been caused by a blunt instrument. And, strangely, her face was covered with ash.

Living close to the scene of the discovery, Allen was among the first to be questioned. But she told newspaper reporters soon afterwards: "I never heard a thing during the night. The first I knew was when the police knocked me up about 8am."

Yet, if the visit of the police ought to have frightened her, seemingly it didn't. Soon afterwards, as police searched the River Irwell behind her home, Allen joined the watchers and shouted out: "Look! There's a bag down there," pointing out the dead women's handbag -which police recovered - that she herself had thrown in the river. But three days later, Allen herself was in the bag. On August 31, the police had taken a statement from her but returned the following day after discovering an omission in her story. A search of her house revealed a shopping bag in the living room cupboard - full of ashes from the fire grate and three pieces of rag. The coal cellar was examined and bloodstains were found there.

Allen was taken to the police station and made a full confession. In it she said: "I was in a funny mood and she just seemed to get on my nerves, although she had not said anything. She seemed to insist on coming in. I happened to look around and saw the hammer in the kitchen .

"On the spur of the moment, I hit her with it. She gave a shout. That seemed to start me off more. I hit her a few times - I don't know how many. Then I pulled the body in my coal house. It was there all day."

That night, awakened from a troubled sleep by "the thought of what was downstairs," Allen decided to get rid of the body. She told the police she had tried to drag it to the river but found it too heavy and so left it in the road.

"I looked in the bag. There was no money in it. I did not actually kill her for that. I had one of my funny moods. I had no reason at all. It seemed to come over me," her statement said.

Such a damning confession left Allen's defence with only one option in support of her not-guilty plea - that of disputing her sanity at the time. The prosecution's case was that cash was the motive as Allen, who had been out of work since January, was deep in debt; £15 4s in arrears with her rent of 6s 4d a week and not having paid her electricity bill for three years. What a modern-day jury and psychiatric evidence might have made of her mental and her sexual state is anyone's guess. But though her trial was told that Allen, the 20th of a family of 22 children, had been under medical attention since 1935, had been hospitalised several times and treated for bouts of dizziness and "queer turns," the jury 50 years ago was evidently more impressed with the evidence of a prison medical officer who found no indication of mental disease, nor any record of it.

There was little sympathy for her back in Rawtenstall over her being sentenced to the gallows - even though she was remembered by many as the one of the best conductresses on the town's buses; one who would, if it was raining, ignore the rules about how many passengers could be carried and who would often let an old person travel for nothing.

Her best friend, Annie Cook, managed to get just four signatures in two hours on the town's market for a petition for a reprieve. Eventually, she managed to get 300 names after knocking on doors. But this and a plea to the Home Secretary by Rossendale's MP failed to save Allen .

As these efforts went on, Allen spent her last hours in the condemned cell playing draughts with the women warders and drinking a glass of beer and smoking a cigarette in the evening. She herself declined to appeal against her sentence, preferring to go to the gallows as she had tried to live - like a man - although she was the last but one woman in Britain to do so.

The last woman to be hanged was Ruth Ellis, in 1955. Hanging was abolished in November, 1965, 16 months after the executioner's rope claimed its last two victims.

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