The Capital Punishment UK Facebook page exhumes a ghastly artifact for us in the form of the September 8, 1873 hanging of James Connor at Kirkdale Gaol … and then his second hanging moments later.

A former boilermaker and sometime prizefighter, Connor had accosted a woman on the street with an aggressive proposition, then come to blows with the good Samaritans who attempted to intervene. One of them died from the blade wounds Connor dealt him; the other survived to firmly fix the identity of the rake.

That was on August 11, not even a full month before the man’s execution, and what was paid in haste was also surely paid in full after the stoical condemned instead of dropping to his death crashed into the side of the scaffold. According to the article shared by CPUK, it was not that the rope itself snapped but that “the splicing of the loop through which one end of the rope passes to form the noose had given way with the weight of the man.”

Either way, having built himself up to die game, Connor was somewhat unmanned at the horror spectacle of having his hood removed to behold prison officials scrambling to reset his gallows for a second pass. Per a broadside report,

After utterring [sic] a few deep groans he muttered to Warder Bradley, “What do you do this, do you call this murder?” The chaplain recommenced his ministrations, and entreated him in tremulous voice to keep up. At this point Connor, although suffering terrible physical pain, was heard to exclaim in a feeble voice, “After this you should let me off; surely this is enough. I stood it like a brick the first time.”

Of course, he had to stand it a second time too. Thankfully a third try was not required to accomplish the deed.

It was one of the last executions in the lengthy and botch-prone career of hangman William Calcraft, who was nearing his 73rd birthday at the time. Already he had was being surpassed in his art by the scientific professionalism of Marwood; by 1874, Calcraft was forced to hang up his brittle nooses for good.

On this day..

• 1943: Julius Fučík, Notes from the Gallows
• 1961: Henryk Niemasz, the last hanged at Wandsworth
• 1306: Simon Fraser, William Wallace comrade in arms
• 1914: Thomas Highgate, the first shot in the Great War
• 1292: Johann de Wettre, medieval Europe's first documented sodomy execution
• 1971: Ishola Oyenusi, smiling to his death
• 1686: Jonathan Simpson, merchant turned highwayman
• 1812: Not Pierre Bezukhov, in War and Peace
• 1999: Double execution in Arkansas
• 1790: Johan Henrik Hästesko, Anjalaman
• 1820: John Baird and Andrew Hardie, for the Radical War
• 1642: Thomas Granger and the beasts he lay with