When Sarah Ann French was hanged in public in 1852 outside Lewes prison, a crowd of around 4000 gathered to watch her die.
When convicted murderer John Holloway’s body was put on display in Brighton in August 1831, 25,000 turned up to look at his corpse.
The importance of Gala Day, or Gallows Day as it was originally called, was exemplified by John Holloway’s path to the noose.
He was convicted in Lewes, hanged in Horsham then his body was taken to Brighton to dramatically be put on public show.
Pretty gruesome by our standards but then 19th century society had different ideas about social injustice than we do today.
Holloway was found guilty of murdering his wife Celia. But she was only his wife because he had been forced into what would have been called in the early twentieth century, a shotgun marriage.
And who held the shotgun? An angry father, an outraged brother, a sanctimonious family relative?
None of the above.
It was the State.
Holloway had met Celia on a day at the races. Not much of an Adonis, Holloway seemed to have a charm that attracted women and soon talked her into bed, making her pregnant.
Celia was from Ardingly, a village not too far from Lewes, and was a chambermaid. Holloway worked on the now defunct Chain Bridge in Brighton, as a painter.
When he refused to marry Celia because his salary of two shillings a week wasn’t enough to pay maintenance, the court slung him into Lewes gaol to think things over.
Holloway tolerated the prison food for almost five weeks, before relenting and agreeing to wed Celia. Released, he took his pregnant bride back to Brighton where they lived together until Celia sadly gave birth to a stillborn child.
Holloway was a bit of a playboy, despite his lowly and badly paid job. He publicly claimed that he didn’t want Celia, that she didn’t turn him on and that he would like to be shot of her. Despite his protests, he made her pregnant again and to avoid another stint in Lewes prison, and its filthy food, he decided to push off to sea, leaving the pregnant Celia to fend for herself.
But playboys can’t keep their zippers up for long and Holloway not only impregnated another woman but bigamously married her.
Goodness gracious me. Holloway was faced with two pregnant women, a bigamous marriage and another stint in gaol. Obviously the lack of culinary expertise in the Lewes lockup drove Holloway to find another solution. He apparently consulted with his second wife, Ann Kennett and the two decided Celia just had to go.
Such was his hypnotic power over Celia, he lured her to a broken down Brighton tenement and there, as he embraced her with promises of a new life together slipped a noose around her neck and with the willing help of bigamous wife Ann, strangled the poor woman to death.
Holloway had once worked in a butcher’s shop and had picked up certain dismembering skills.
He now used them, not on an animal’s carcass but on Celia’s body. Press reports at the time said the body parts had been amputated with some considerable skill, as sinister Holloway cut off the head, arms and legs to make the corpse easier to dispose of.
19th century slums were no joke and residents kept their business to themselves. So, it was only later that witnesses reported seeing a barrow and a trunk outside the Holloway household.
The murderer and his accomplice took the body to the place on Margaret Street where Holloway had been living and stuffed arms and legs into an outside toilet. But the torso wouldn’t fit, so they took a second trip along a remote lane ironically called Lovers Walk near Preston Park and buried the remains of the corpse.
They didn’t do a very good job at either venue. A fisherman in the park noticed that earth had been dug recently, and looking around, discovered some bloodstained wood near the shallow grave.
The smell of rotting flesh alerted neighbours to the rest of Celia’s body stuffed down the loo and the game was up.
Holloway found himself back eating the prison slop which he had hated so much in his previous incarceration, this time facing the death penalty.
Amazingly, his accomplice Ann Kennett was found not guilty, perhaps because Holloway ended up making several contradictory confessions while in the lock up.
Be that as it may, it turned out to be a lonely lothario, John Holloway who walked his last journey to the gallows, before becoming a public spectacle to the blood thirsty people of Brighton who crowded around the killer’s corpse hanging in front of the town hall.
Brighton was once termed The Queen of Watering Places, but a wag in the 1930’s, just about a hundred years after the Holloway murder, dubbed it the Queen of Slaughtering Places after yet another two bodies-in-the-trunk type murders.
In the first one, the killer got away. A box at Brighton Station left luggage office suspiciously began to smell badly and when opened revealed the dismembered body of a young woman. As with the Holloway murders almost a century before, the lady had been very expertly cut up and only her torso was still in the box.
A widespread search eventually revealed the legs and arms situated in a trunk at Kings Cross station in London.
Suspicion fell on a Brighton abortionist, but he was never convicted and the girl, named ‘Pretty Feet’ by the media because of her petite dancing legs were never identified.
No such luck for a copycat murderer in 1934. Tony Mancini was tried at Lewes Assizes for the murder of girlfriend Violette Kaye.
Violette was a dancer and occasionally sold her body to pay the rent. Mancini was a small time crook. They met in London and moved to Brighton to set up home.
The two were frequently seen bickering and quarrelling. Violette kept the income flowing by waitressing, and Mancini enjoyed the life of a seaside town, even then known for the small hotels in the resort where guests never signed the register.
Mancini and Kaye in fact lived in a seedy Brighton, with a flourishing underworld that Graham Greene describes in his famous novel, Brighton Rock.
The 42 year old Kaye was jealous by nature and there was a flaming row one night when she accused the younger 26 year old Mancini of flirting with one of her fellow waitresses.
The next time she was seen was as a corpse, once again, you’ve guessed it, stuffed into a trunk.
Mancini apparently transported the body from their home at Park Crescent to a new flat he’d rented in Kemptown.
He then proceeded to send a telegram to her sister in law saying she had gone to Paris.
Incredibly, he used the trunk with Violette’s body inside, as a coffee table, persuading suspicious friends and acquaintances that the smell was coming from outside.
Violette’s friends, who were suspicious about her disappearance alerted the police, who started to ask questions. Mancini then panicked and fled back to London.
Luck was not with him. The police were searching premises for clues to the other unknown body in the trunk, when they found Violette. Mancini was then arrested in London and taken to Lewes for trial.
The five day court trial took place in December 1934 and the jury took just two and a half hours to reach a verdict.
So where was Mancini hanged? Well, he wasn’t. The jury found him not guilty after a brilliant defence by a noted trial lawyer of the day, Norman Birkett and a rare defeat for a prosecution including Quinton Hogg, later Lord Hailsham.
It was only in 1976 on his death bed that Mancini confessed to the murder, saying he had thrown a hammer at Kaye in a fight and accidentally killed her.
The one common thread to these stories is that no one knows what happened to the damn trunks!
He embraced her with promises of a new life together then slipped a noose around her neck