THE CAT AT THE SCAFFOLD, EXETER 1869.

In July 1869,  on the drill-square of Raglan Barracks in Devonport,  Private William Taylor of the 57th Regiment, aged twenty-three. did what, at one time or another, most young soldiers are tempted to do.   He shot dead his drill NCO.  His execution, three months later, at Exeter Prison was singlular in that, for the first time in Exeter, it was not to be a public hanging.  Previously tens of thousands had flocked to see the death of a condemned felon.  The reporter of The Exeter and Plumouth Gazette, (26th July 1869) described the nature of the change:

"People opening their places of business. men and boys taking down shutters, were not gossiping of the execution.  There were no groups at corners of streets talking of it; and at half-past seven o' clock outside the prison walls, the only signs of a popular assembly were three policemen, about a dozen loiterers on their way to work, a few schoolboys, and a little girl who had been trundling a hoop."

The same reporter took the opportunity to describe the scaffold:

"There was the black, wooden apparatus, the same that has been used for generations past, erected upon the shingle floor of the court instead of the flat roof where executions used to take place.  The platform was about four feet from the ground, the handrail round it about four feet higher,nd the cross beam eight or nine feet from the platform floor. The ugly, ominous looking pile requires little or no building;  it is put together with bolts, screws, hooks and staples, and the operation of erecting it is something like that performed in putting together the parts of a wooden bedstead. Two or three steps lead up through an opening in the handrail to the platform. and under the cross-beam stood a pair of dwarf steps to enable the hangman to reach the beam and adjust the rope upon it.  There was no one in this little court in the interval beween half-past seven and eight, and not a movement to be seen untril a fine, fat, stealthy Cypress cat ascended the platform, prowled about the floor, scented the beams and left silently as she came," 

Curiously, it is the innocent details that I find lend horror to his account; the little girl trundling a hoop is bad enough but the fine, fat, stealthy Cypress cat (I think he meant a Cyprus cat) scenting the beams....!!!