A Little More on the Execution of Philip Matsell.
Philip Matsell was not executed for the murder of Robert Twyford, (or Twiford,) as is generally believed because Robert Twyford was not murdered. On July 26 1806, he was shot in the chest, but he survived his wound. He died eight years later on 24 November 1814, from an infection caused by a strangulated hernia.
The actual person who fired the pistol is disputed. There seems to have been many at the time who believed it to be Matsell`s paramour, Kate Pedley, who dressed in her lovers clothes, while he lay drunk and insensible in his lodgings and went out and shot Twyford. The story goes that she planned, with some former criminal colleagues of hers, to kill Twyford for the diligent and honest way he undertook his duties, which had forestalled some of their criminal activities. This was angrily denied by Pedley, nor did the authorities believe it. Twyford himself was within a few yards of his assailant when he was shot and his description of the culprit matched that of Matsell. And it is unlikely that, from a few yards distance, he would mistake a woman for a man. Matsell himself could provide no alibi that could be corroborated.
Matsell was tried at Warwick assizes and sentenced to death. Normally he would have been hanged outside Warwick Gaol, on Gallows Hill, but Birmingham`s authorities wanted to set an example to others that assaulting an officer-of-the-law would be punished with death. It was therefore decided that Matsell would be brought back to Birmingham and executed at the scene of his `crime.`
On what was then the junction of Great Charles Street, Snow Hill and Bath Street, a scaffold was constructed about ten feet high with a gallows built in the centre. Matsell was brought from Warwick and just outside the town he was placed in an open cart, and then, sitting on his own coffin, `paraded`on a circuitous route into Deritend, then Digbeth, along High Street, up Bull Street and finally to where the scaffold stood.
Far from being his accomplices, Mr Tatnell was in fact the keeper of Warwick Gaol who had accompanied Matsell on his final journey, while Mr Langham was the religious minister appointed to see to Matsell`s spiritual needs. Langham began praying earnestly when Matsell alighted from his cart much to Matsell`s annoyance. The condemned man listened for a few moments before he told Langham exactly where he could shove his bible! Matsell then noticed, near to the scaffold, his wife weeping in the crowd. Somewhat coldly he asked her, "What are you crying for?" It was a particularly uncharitable and spiteful thing to say to a woman whom he had cheated on, but who still retained enough love for her errant husband to cry and mourn at his imminent death.
According to reports, Matsell arrived at the site of the gallows at 12.30pm, but was not hanged until 1.20pm, which means that for fifty minutes Matsell was left to, (forgive the pun,) hang around. Something in the recording of the timings is clearly wrong. No one in their right mind would delay an execution for almost an hour with a crowd of 40,000 waiting in eager anticipation. For one thing, there always remained the possibility that friends of the condemned man, or even the crowd itself, might attempt a rescue. There was also the worry that the crowd might, out of boredom and restlessness, hang the unfortunate man themselves. Even worse, the crowd might riot, and Birmingham had a history of riots, leading to potential loss of life and destruction of property. There was also a compassionate reason to proceed immediately with the execution, that to leave a man dangling (ahem!) about for fifty minutes before being hung was unnecessarily cruel. It`s almost certain that Matsell was dead by 12.45pm and rather than the later time being twenty past one, it should actually be twenty to one.
Whatever the truth of the time, Matsell climbed the steps to the scaffold and then mounted the ladder to the gallows where the hangman, (whose name was not recorded,) placed the noose around the condemned man`s neck. As he did so, Matsell kicked off his shoes launching them into the crowd, saying that he would not die with his shoes on as he had been told he would do when he was a young lad. When the hangman climbed back down the ladder and was about to turn the ladder so as to cause Matsell to fall, Matsell jumped shouting, "Here goes." Matsell`s reason for jumping was almost certainly to ensure that he died immediately of a broken neck and not slowly strangle to death in agony. Whether his jump succeeded is not known.
If newspaper reports and other eyewitness accounts are to believed, then around 40,000 people crowded around the scaffold and crammed into the surrounding area to get a glimpse of this unique event in Birmingham`s history. Given that Birmingham`s population in 1801 had been almost 74,000 then at least half of the town`s inhabitants witnessed Matsell`s execution.
Folklore has it that the executed man`s corpse was secretly buried by his friends in the graveyard of St. Philip`s Cathedral.
Philip Matsell is the only person ever to be executed publicly in Birmingham. Previous executions had been carried out at Warwick, while about twenty had, over the years, been carried out on Washwood Heath which then was not a part of Birmingham. After Matsell`s hanging, there would be no more executions in Birmingham until 1885 when Henry Kimberley became the first man to be hanged in Winson Green Prison.
Two plaques commemorate Matsell`s execution, one in Ludgate Hill and the other in Great Charles Street. Both contain errors of fact. The one in Ludgate Hill proclaims that it is hung at the site of the last public hanging to take place in Birmingham. This is a confusion with the last public execution to take place in Great Britain which took place at Ludgate Hill, London in 1868. The plaque in Great Charles Street boldly states that Robert Twyford was murdered when in fact he was not. It`s perhaps time that Birmingham City Council replaced these embarrassing mistakes with two plaques that contain the correct details of an event that is and will remain unique in Birmingham`s history.
