The Patient Assassin

A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj

Anita Anand

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781471174230
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE

'Reads like something from a thriller…colourful, detailed and meticulously researched' Sunday Times
‘Gripping from start to finish' Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads
Hundreds of peaceful civilians were slaughtered in the Amritsar Massacre of 13 April 1919, after British troops opened fire without warning. According to legend, Udham Singh was among the injured that day, and he vowed to take revenge. More than twenty years later, in a Westminster hall, he fulfilled that promise when he gunned down in cold blood the man ultimately responsible, Sir Michael O'Dwyer.

But what happened in the intervening years? In this sweeping narrative that takes the reader across four continents, Anita Anand separates reality from myth to reveal Singh's astonishing story. She brilliantly pieces together his movements, discovering surprising new links that take us from Jazz Age New York to the shady world of international spy rings. The Patient Assassin shines a devastating light on one of the Raj's most horrific events, but reads like a taut thriller. 

CHAPTER 1

THE DROP

LONDON, 30 JULY 1940

Albert was in an odd state of mind. Not frightened, nor angry, nor particularly depressed, just not himself somehow – out of sorts. The 35-year-old, plain-speaking Yorkshireman had been shaken out of his habitual good humour even before he boarded the juddering train from Manchester to London. Though the job waiting for him in the capital would have turned the stomachs of his fellow passengers, it was not the cause of his mood. Albert was on his way to kill a man, and he was fine with that.

He had done it before, and, if the fates were kind to him, he would do it many times again. No, something else was troubling him, something he had no control over. He, Albert Pierrepoint, junior executioner for His Majesty, might die in the next few days. Winston Churchill had told him so.

Albert had been at home the previous day, packing his bags, when Churchill’s jowly voice crackled through the wireless. The war was going to be long and bloody, and London, Albert’s destination, was the Nazis’ imminent target. Simultaneously hectoring and seductive, Churchill’s words filled Albert’s bedroom and his head: ‘The vast mass of London itself, fought street by street, could easily devour an entire hostile army.’

With his next breath, somewhat less reassuringly, Churchill addressed the potential cost to his people: ‘We would rather see London laid in ruins and ashes than that it should be tamely and abjectly enslaved.’¹

The words were vivid in Albert’s mind as he hauled his suitcase off the train and made his way through the press of people on the platform. London might feel like a sprawling, crawling, sooty mess to most of his fellow northerners, but Albert always found magic in the grime. Now, heading towards Pentonville Prison, he looked at his surroundings with different eyes: ‘Newly aware that [the war] might be fought street by street while I was in it.’² Churchill’s words had resonated somewhere deep in his patriotism. The voice from the radio, carried on waves of static, had been clear. Britain would give no quarter: ‘Any traitors that may be found in our midst – but I do not believe there are many . . . will get short shrift.’³

Albert knew all about retribution. He embodied it every time he adjusted a noose.

Men like Albert, who devoted their lives to the penal system, referred to Pentonville Prison as ‘the Ville’, making it sound like a provincial hotel or a friendly local pub. A Victorian brick building of imposing size and colour-draining drabness, the Ville had taught Albert Pierrepoint all he knew about killing. He had learned his trade there eight years before, practising the hangman’s silent walk past the condemned cells, learning the art of measuring, coiling and tightening a rope. The Ville had helped him perfect his lightning-quick ‘capping’ technique, the action of whipping out a white cotton bag from a pocket and pulling it over ‘Old Bill’s’ head before necklacing him with the noose.

Old Bill was the name given to the heavy dummy that trainee executioners used for practice: ‘Cap noose pin lever drop. You’ve got to get it right. There’s no allowance for error. Haul him up and do it again.’⁴

Posted to Armley Gaol in Leeds, Albert showed himself to be a natural hangman. It wasn’t long before people were comparing him to his uncle, the great Thomas Pierrepoint – a legend among executioners. The two became a team; ‘Uncle Tom and Our Albert’, as the Armley staff liked to call them. Together, uncle and nephew were responsible for most of the hangings in the north of England and in Ireland. Tom led while Albert assisted. There was much praise for the calm efficiency with which they despatched condemned men and women.

Itching to take the lead, Albert thought he might have finally got his chance when Pentonville’s usual executioner received his call-up papers. Many men were being yanked out of professions to fight at the Front, their spaces providing opportunity for those left at home. It was a macabre way to make your way in the world, but Albert would have seized the chance with both hands.

Much to his disappointment, Albert’s move proved to be sideways rather than up. Pentonville’s own regular assistant hangman was getting the job. To make matters worse, he was someone Albert knew well, and for whom he had scant regard.

Stanley William Cross had trained with Albert at the Ville. As apprentices Albert had seen Cross up close, gone to the pub with him, swapped stories and compared notes. Their friendship was never more than superficial. Albert found his fellow trainee’s temperament unsuited to the ‘art’. Careless and boastful, Cross had a habit of turning ‘jobs’ into entertaining yarns in exchange for free drinks. That kind of behaviour made Albert wince, and for Cross to get his chance before him was galling.

It was therefore with a mixture of satisfaction and alarm that Albert greeted the scene at Pentonville Prison when he arrived. Cross was in a state of total panic, ‘suffering a bad attack of nerves’.⁵ Though the execution was slated for 9 a.m. the next morning, things were in total disarray. That Cross had allowed himself to get into such a mess for this of all hangings was hard to believe.

Executions were like pulses of energy through a prison population at the best of times, with a great machinery swinging into action around the intimacy of the actual killing. Hangings as important as this one required even more meticulous care than usual. Plans were in motion to move the rest of the prison population far from the condemned wing in the morning, setting inmates to work before they even had the chance to have their breakfast. This would give Albert and Cross the time and space they would need to do what they had to do.

Busy prisoners were calm prisoners, but there was an added incentive for distraction this time round. The doomed man had a habit of making speeches at the last minute – incendiary, treasonous speeches – and that was the last thing the authorities needed. They had worked so hard to keep the prisoner’s words out of the press, they did not need some dying diatribe to undo all that.

Though Albert was trained to regard every hanging with the same dispassionate professionalism, he knew the execution of Udham Singh, or ‘Prisoner 1010’ as the chalkboard outside his cell identified him, was the most important in his career. From India to Great Britain, this man had dominated headlines for weeks. His grinning face had been splashed over countless front pages, and his crime had shaken an already unstable world.

Despite acres of coverage, analysis and condemnation, most remained incredulous that this brown-faced foreigner had, at a time of heightened wartime paranoia, simply sauntered into a meeting in the heart of Westminster, close to the Houses of Parliament, and emptied his pistol into some of the most important men of the realm. His victims had included the secretary of state for India himself, but it was the slaying of one man, a former lieutenant governor of Punjab called Sir Michael O’Dwyer, that had dominated the news. Shot straight through the heart at point-blank range, there seemed to be something almost operatic about the murder.

For some, the shooting of Sir Michael was merely the callous murder of an old and defenceless man. To others, it threatened the very foundation of the British Empire. Sir Michael was a stalwart defender of the Raj, and many in Britain agreed with his hardline policies towards India.

Conversely, millions in India itself regarded the murderer as an avenging angel, who, after twenty-one long years, had settled a terrible score. Thanks to Udham Singh, the name ‘Jallianwala Bagh’ was being spoken all over the world once again. It was a name the British would rather have forgotten – a portal into a nation’s shame at a time when the country needed to be both shameless and fearless.

The Home Office, Special Branch, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), MI5, the Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), as well as the prison and prosecution services, all knew the importance of Prisoner 1010. They agreed he had to die quickly, with as little fuss as possible. Cross must have known all this. How had he managed to mess things up so badly?

Instead of taking his own measurements, Cross appeared to have relied heavily on the prisoner’s paperwork. According to 1010’s file, he was ‘stocky’, ‘heavy built’ or ‘well built’. It described a man 5 feet 8 inches tall, ‘weighing 172 lbs’ and ‘generally sound and healthy’. The man Albert saw through the spyhole in the cell door seemed like a different person entirely. Udham was thin, sallow and sickly, nothing like the iconic picture of him that had run in so many newspapers.

Udham had been held on remand at Brixton Prison for months before his transfer to the Ville’s condemned wing. There, the senior medical officer, a man called Dr Hugh Grierson, had been tasked with keeping the prisoner alive long enough to hang him. Udham had not made it easy. From the moment he arrived at Brixton, he had been trying to kill himself. When his attempts to slit his wrists or take poison were discovered, he pushed his food tray away. Udham had tried to starve himself to death. Weeks of hunger striking did terrible things to the human body.

Grierson found it objectionable that Udham refused to die the way the British had planned, and talked about him as if he were a stubborn animal or errant child in dire need of training. Udham was ‘uncooperative’ and ‘responded badly to authority’.⁶ In his notes, Grierson observed: ‘There was always an undercurrent of antagonism to everyone, sometimes bordering on dumb insolence. He was untruthful, and I could not rely on anything he said.’⁷

Adamant that Udham Singh should not escape the hangman’s noose, Grierson ordered a regime of force-feeding. Three times a day in the weeks leading up to his trial, warders entered 1010’s cell and pinned his body to a gurney. They forced a feeding tube into his mouth, down his throat and into his stomach. His teeth clenched on the rubber gag that prised his jaws apart. Denounced as a form of torture for decades, ever since harrowing accounts of the procedure had been made public by the suffragettes, force-feeding was rarely used in Britain by 1940. Prisoner 1010 was subjected to ninety-three of these brutal acts during his time at Brixton.

Grierson had been at pains to play down the impact on his prisoner, insisting that he had taken it all surprisingly well. Even if the true horror of the experience had been made known, few would have cared. Udham Singh was one of the most hated men in Britain. Most were counting the days till he dangled from the end of a rope.

Grierson’s troublesome prisoner only decided to eat again after the judge passed the death penalty on him, but by that time his weight had plummeted. As he accepted meal trays again, he slowly put the pounds back on, but Stanley William Cross had no idea what he actually weighed at this moment, on the eve of his execution. To Albert’s disgust, Cross had ignored the hangman’s code, drilled into them both all those years ago when they had trained at this very prison. Nothing should be left to chance. Preparation was key:

Take your time all the time . . . Choose your rope the afternoon before. And that’s the time you test that the drop works smoothly, to your complete satisfaction, when you’ve got word that the prisoner is at exercise, or in the chapel, or wherever they’ve put it in his mind to go. You don’t want to have him hear it, he’s only next door.⁸

Udham was right in front of them now, playing cribbage with a guard, passing the hours till the moment appointed for him to die. Albert knew that, at this late stage, there was no way discreet measurements could be taken. The governor and the sheriff of London were hovering outside Udham’s cell, talking nervously among themselves, showing no sign that they were going to leave. There was no way the two executioners could now breeze in and ask the Indian to step on a set of scales. Not without disgracing themselves entirely.

Cross looked at Albert in desperation. Speaking out of the corner of his mouth, and hoping nobody else could hear, he begged for help: ‘Eh, Albert! What drop shall we give?’⁹

Not entirely displeased by his colleague’s plight, Albert replied: ‘You should know. You’re the boss.’¹⁰ A more spiteful man would have left it there, let Cross’s career go hang with the convict, but his Uncle Tom would not have approved. Besides, Albert was not a man who liked to see needless suffering. If the hangman’s drop was too short, this man would strangle slowly, legs kicking in the space beneath the trap door. If the sandbag attached to his feet was too light, his spine would fail to sever cleanly and painlessly, and the end would also come slowly. If it was too heavy, his whole head might rip off. Albert understood that this was no time to gloat:

I took the paper out of [Cross’s] hand and a pencil from my pocket. The truth was that I had already worked out in my mind an approximate drop from the details of the prisoner’s height and weight which I had heard, and from my inspection of the condemned man. I put the paper up against the wall of the execution chamber, made a fast check that my memory of the weight was right and wrote down a figure. I didn’t bother to look at the Home Office table, because I was already using my own experience.¹¹

Congratulating himself on his superior skill, Albert took a last look at the man they were going to kill in the morning. It was hard to believe that this crumpled creature had caused so much trouble.

But people had been underestimating Udham Singh all his life. There is no record of how long it took 1010 to die. In his memoirs, Albert Pierrepoint would only say: ‘We duly carried out the execution next morning, took the body down, stowed the gear and reported to the governor.’¹²

Confidential prison files indicate that Udham Singh’s last moments were anything but easy, suggesting that Cross either misunderstood or ignored Albert’s advice. Details, deemed so potentially embarrassing they were ordered sealed in perpetuity, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Preface
• Part One
• Part Two
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright