Here's a bit more about the history of the Isle of Dogs
By isleofdogslife
One of the more
grisly aspects of the Isle of Dogs in the 18th and 19th Century was
when a set of gallows stood at the bottom of the Island. It
was a familiar sight to many arriving in London by the river to pass by the
rotting corpses of Pirates and other criminals at strategic points along the
Thames.
It was at nearby
Execution Dock in Wapping that many executions took place, however after
the event the corpse was often covered in pitch and tar and put into a Gibbet
and strung up. The Gibbet was built to keep the corpse in place even when
it decomposed therefore a body could be on display for years.
Gibbeting or
"Hanging in chains " as it was called was part of the justice
system that believed murderers and other serious offenders should not have
the benefit of a proper burial but their bodies should either
be used for dissection or be put on public display to act as a deterrent.
Cuckolds Point in Rotherhithe, Blackwall Point opposite Blackwall and
the Isle of Dogs were popular sites for these public display of pirates,
selected for their clear view from the river to remind the many mariners
who passed by the perils of becoming a pirate.
The exact spot of
the gallows on the Isle of Dogs is not known but the 1746 Roque map
shows it clearly marked a short distance from the old Ferry House
opposite Greenwich
William Hogarth in
his Idle Apprentice series of drawings in 1747 offers a much clearer view
of the scene.
The Idle Apprentice
companions are pointing to the gallows as a warning what would happen to him if
he didn't change his ways. The drawing clearly show the windmills on the Isle
of Dogs at the time and the gallows next to the River.
A Reverend Mozely
in his " Reminiscences," remembered travelling past the Island
in 1820.
In 1820, and for many years after,
the only inhabitants of the Isle of Dogs that I ever saw were three murderers
hanging from a gibbet.
Although Samuel
Pepys had christened the Island as the unlucky Isle of Dogs in the 1660s, it
was in the 18th and 19th century that the south part of the Island began
to gain a reputation as a uninhabited windswept marsh with a
ghostly atmosphere. Obviously rotting corpses clanking in chains in the
river mists did little to challenge this preconception.
However some people
benefitted from this grisly spectacle, for many years the
Greenwich pensioners who lived at the Naval Hospital would set up their
telescopes at the top of Greenwich hill and charge people to look at the scene
across the river.
This pastime was
especially lucrative at the time of the Greenwich Fair when thousands of people
crowded in Greenwich to enjoy the revelries.
Charles Dickens
noticed the practice was still going on in 1839 when he visited the Fair.
The old pensioners, who, for the
moderate charge of a penny, exhibit the mast-house, the Thames and shipping,
the place where the men used to hang in chains, and other interesting sights.
Dickens said used
to hang, because a few years earlier in 1834 after new legislation the
gallows had been taken down and the practice stopped. Needless to say many of
the pensioners complained that one of their little sidelines had been curtailed
and some newspapers at the time took up their cause.
In 1858 a newspaper
reporter discussing Public Executions remembered the practice.
Some few semi-barbarities indeed
remained, of which the pillory has but recently disappeared ; that of hanging
in chains, designed as an indignity to the dead and a terror to the living,
was, we think, not extinct till about forty years ago. Old men amongst us will
well recollect the numerous gibbets on the Isle of Dogs, which with here and
there a bone bore witness to the commonness of the practice.
From the
1840s the river front on the Isle of Dogs was developed and ship builders
and factories were set up and all evidence of the Islands grisly past was
destroyed.
Well perhaps not all the
evidence for in recent years a skull and skeleton were found on the foreshore
near Burrell Wharf which would have not been too far away from the gallows.
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