beside her was her coffin. The procession rumbled up to the scaffold. The soldiers untied the condemned and led her to a position under the noose.
He never forgot. At an early age Thompson was exposed to London’s appalling poverty, made worse by the effects of cheap gin.
This was the execution of Judith Dufour, who they said murdered her two-year-old daughter. It could just as easily have been the hanging of some hapless chimney sweep, who might have done nothing more than steal a sausage from the butcher’s shop. The noose gave little regard to gender or age and accepted anyone who was led up to the elevated platform. On average, in the 1780s, there were two public executions a week within the confines of the city. This was not surprising since there were 350 offences for which one could be hanged in the late 1700s.
On the platform stood the hangman, a clergyman, and a sheriff. The sheriff was presiding as the speaker from the courts. The crowd became still as he, reading from his document, shouted to the assembled. “It is the order of His Majesty’s court that Judith Dufour, found guilty of the crime of murder, be hanged by the neck until dead and thereafter her body is to be buried within the precincts of Newgate Gaol and may the Lord have mercy on her soul.” Judith, it was said, had left her daughter at the poorhouse, where the infant received new clothes and food. The mother later had returned for her child and killed her after stripping her of her new clothes. She then had sold the tiny garments for one shilling and fourpence worth of gin.
“’Ang the bitch!” someone shouted, inciting jeers and demands for justice from the clamouring crowd. Judith, with her wrists bound, was still able to unpin a small crumpled hat from her hair and carefully hold it in both hands. A white hood and noose was fitted over her head as the clergyman murmured his brief recitation. That done, he stepped back. On the sheriff’s signal, the trap door sprang open. There was a brief silence, then roars of approval as her body twitched violently at the rope’s end. Beneath her, a minor scuffle ensued. Souvenir seekers shoved and jostled, hoping to snatch her fluttering hat.
Not far from the gallows and Newgate Gaol, where the condemned prisoners were kept, David Thompson was busy cleaning windows and washing walls. Here, next to Westminster Abbey, was the Grey Coat Charity School for orphaned boys. David, a pupil at the school, was doing his morning chores. Grey Coat was a rare haven from the often brutal life of London’s poor. Most orphans were street urchins, stealing and scavenging to eat and hiding to escape the law. Without family support they were guttersnipes and fell easy prey to London’s unsavoury underworld. David, poor and without a father, was among the usual candidates for the gallows, but at Grey Coat, charity had intervened.
The boy washed smuts from the outside windows and front door of his school. Armed with a rag and a pail of cold water, he carefully scrubbed the door’s wooden panels. He even worked his wet cloth into the corners of the iron hinges in a futile effort to remove the stains. The insidious black fallout from the city’s innumerable coal fires coated everything. It darkened the stone fences, iron gates, and headstones of church graveyards. It coated the walls of Westminster Abbey and settled on the ramshackle hovels of Whitechapel. The soot leached from wet cobble of the market square and drained into black pools in dark alleyways. It shrouded the palace rooftop and stained the backs of white horses pulling fine carriages. It settled on docks and painted warships tied in the river Everything was blackened. On bad days the city’s airborne fume even crept into the school and into the fabric of his clothing.
Worse yet, it blotted the pages of his schoolbooks. After wiping each windowpane, he wrung his rag out onto the cobble. He was careful to keep the splash, now mixed with the street’s horse dung, from soiling his newly washed uniform. But this was impossible. The small thirteen-year-old boy was jostled and nudged in the crowded street by a troupe of jugglers rushing from the market square. He spilled dirty wash water onto his white leggings, yet still he hurried to finish the windows. Now he needed enough time to wash out his clothes before the school assembled for the evening meal.
Cleanliness was essential at Grey Coat. Keeping clean prevented the cane, and anything that helped avoid a painful beating from that stiff rod was worth the attempt. The “rod of chastisement,” as it was sometimes called, was not really a rod or a cane, the orphans reasoned, trying to comfort themselves, but only a dried willow branch. It measured a metre long and was just thicker than the big finger on the headmaster’s podgy hands. The cane was worn smooth from its use on the backs and hands of schoolboys who were found unclean or who broke a rule. And yet, this school may have been only slightly less forgiving than other Charity Schools in the year 1783, and David knew he was fortunate to be here. These few boys, including David, must have felt transported, as if by divine intervention, into another world.
Within Grey Coat’s secure walls, the boys were able to share in the best their era had to offer. Under the tutelage of the school’s knowledgeable clergy, they found themselves to be living in the age of the Enlightenment. They learned of famous Englishmen like Edward Jenner, who had originated a technique he called vaccination, which prevented the dreaded disease smallpox. They heard about the astronomer Edmond Haley, who predicted the coming of comets and forecasted heavenly events that, until then, were only known to the Almighty. They knew James Watt was developing an engine powered by steam. Thomas Adams, a favourite teacher, took them to street demonstrations like the one on the new phenomenon called electricity. The boys saw the first simple generators produce loud cracklings and sparks that ignited trays of heated spirits to the cheers and amazement of onlookers.
Grey Coat’s training emphasized mathematics, astronomy, and maritime studies used for navigation. The school was preparing its students for service in His Majesty’s Navy. The boys were taught about the Royal Society and they learned of John Harrison, whose chronometer was revolutionizing navigation. The students were enthralled by the accounts of Captain Cook who, with sextant and compass, had recently charted unknown Pacific waters. They fantasized that one day, they too might be part of some new exploration. But their reality was, at best, a future in the navy. The navy was in constant need of replacements for those lost in battle, and it was difficult to recruit sailors with enough education to help navigate a fighting ship. Davids chances of becoming an explorer were as remote to him as the throne of England.
Before supper there was an assembly for inspection, and the headmaster examined each boy to look for unwashed hands or soiled shirts. Either infraction could mean no supper and often a caning for good measure. Discipline at the school was harsh, but applied according to the customs of the day. After supper, the orphans sat studying at wooden tables. This was where they spent most of their time when they weren’t cleaning windows, sweeping halls, or scrubbing potatoes. They had little time to do anything else, but sometimes, secretly, using a ruler as a cutlass and a candle as a pistol, they played at quelling mutinies and skewering Spaniards. Some were destined to become midshipmen and would have a chance, although a remote one, of becoming junior ship’s officers like some other Grey Coat boys before them. They were told the King needed trained officers to repress the revolt in the American colonies and to quiet uprisings in India. They would be ready.
For David, now in his final year at Grey Coat, these promises of the navy seemed distant. It had all changed, he remembered, on that cold morning last January. David and Sam had stood nervously in front of the headmaster’s desk. Neither boy was sure why he had been summoned. David half expected a caning, and his mind raced over recent events as he tried to think of what infraction he could have committed. They were seniors, and he knew they would be sent off to sea by summertime. But that was still months away. Just the same, he quietly hoped this was their call to join the navy as midshipmen or, even better, as expedition crew members.
“Master Thompson. Master McPherson,” the headmaster barked from his high-backed chair. “The Navy Board has informed me that with peace again this year, they will not be in need of Grey Coat boys at this time. However, the school has made a generous payment of five pounds sterling to the Hudson’s
