Seaforde murder led to last execution in gaol

Seaforde murder led to last execution in gaol

20 June 2012

IT WAS a Friday evening no one who worked on the estate would ever forget. The steward, whose job it was to pay the wages, had vanished. The disconsolate men hung around outside their paymaster’s house, fretting as the minutes passed, thinking of the unhappy faces of their wives when they arrived home without their pay, thinking of the beer they could be drinking if only they had their wages in their pockets.

There was no sign of the steward. It seemed he had forgotten them. With feelings of anger and despair, the men began to drift away. The year was 1870; the times were hard. It wasn’t much fun being penniless after a week’s backbreaking work.

The missing steward upon whom everyone’s attention was focused was 60-year-old John Gallagher, who managed affairs on the Seaforde Estate for owner Colonel William Forde. Earlier that day, July 29, Colonel Forde’s agent had entrusted Gallagher with the £44 wages for the estate workers, a practice that had been going on every Friday morning since anyone could remember.

Most people knew that it was Gallagher’s habit to put the money in his inside coat pocket. To reassure himself that it was still there, he spent most of his Fridays tapping his jacket pocket until late afternoon, when he began driving around the sprawling, 21,000-acre estate to hand out the wages.

The last half-dozen men to be paid habitually gathered in late evening outside Gallagher’s house at the entrance to the estate, and it was these men on this Friday evening who sorrowfully went home empty-handed.

They were not the only ones who were worried. Gallagher had a family and as darkness enveloped the estate they raised the alarm. All that night they searched the woods and fields, but there was no sign of their kinsman. Then, as the sun rose the following day, a labourer found his body.

The remains of John Gallagher were lying under a tree about 60 yards off the road that led out of the estate to the nearest village. The body was lying on its right side, and as the Seaforde Estate workers came running to view it they noticed a curious wound on the back of the head. It was a huge wound, and blood had flowed from it over his left ear and down his chest. They soon noticed something else that for them was almost equally alarming. The familiar linen purse was missing from his inside jacket pocket. None of the week’s wages was anywhere on the body.

One of the men on the scene was the gatekeeper John Gregory. “He’s been shot,” Gregory announced to those gathered around, after surveying the body. “The injury is too wide to be caused by shot. That sort of wound is caused by a bolt.” Gregory should know, the others reasoned. He was an old soldier who’d served in the Crimea. The men standing around the body eyed each other coldly. Who among them, they wondered, could have done this?

A post-mortem proved that John Gregory was right — the steward had a heavy bolt lodged in his brain. An inquest was convened. Gallagher had been murdered, it was decided, and the motive was obvious — robbery.

A deep sense of shock hung over the community for, unusual as though it may seem in modern times, a century and a half ago murder and robbery were virtually unheard of in County Down.

As the events of that Friday were reconstructed, the focus quickly fell on the gatekeeper John Gregory. He was under a month’s notice for his poor work performance. That could have given him a motive, and it was subsequently shown that he was harbouring feelings of resentment.

A fortnight before the murder he had bought a pistol from a local man, claiming he wanted it to shoot rabbits. Then he asked one of the estate residents, James Cairns, to buy him some gunpowder caps.

Curiously, it seemed, when the gatehouse was searched, police could find no shot. But there was a carpenter’s shop on the estate with a number of small bolts lying about. Gregory had been seen in the carpenter’s shop — and the bolt found in John Gallagher’s brain was identified as one coming from the shop.

There was an old ruined house opposite the gatehouse, almost hidden by embedded laurels. A police search of the ruin revealed John Gallagher’s linen purse. Part of Friday’s wages were still in it and so, too, were some of the percussion caps which were bought for Gregory.

Gregory’s movements in the hours before John Gallagher’s disappearance were put under scrutiny. During the afternoon he went to Gallagher’s house and the steward’s daughter heard him say to her father, “Will you come soon?” The conversation indicated to her that her father had agreed to meet Gregory at some particular place that evening.

A couple of gardeners trimming hedges remembered seeing Gallagher walking towards Gregory’s gatehouse at 6 pm. Half an hour later a local man heard a shot in the woods near the gate.

Gregory re-entered his house around 6.30 p.m. He sat down by the fire alongside his wife and a friend of hers, Mrs. Margaret Morrison, a local woman who was visiting. Mrs. Gregory asked him, “John, why have you got blood on your hand?” Gregory looked down, surprised. “Oh,” he replied. “I hid a bottle of whisky in the bushes and must have ripped my hand.” He got up and went into the kitchen to wash.

John Gregory was born in 1816, the year after the Battle of Waterloo. His father, who lived in Downpatrick, was a tailor, and John Gregory served his time in tailoring. As a young man he decided upon an army life and enlisted as a foot soldier. He fought through most of the Crimean campaign, serving for 20 years, receiving a good conduct medal and praise for his bravery in battle, and was demobilised with a pension.

He had been the gatehouse keeper at Seaforde for six years when he was given a month’s notice. A week before the murder he was using his tailoring skills to mend a coat for the head gardener, George Willis, when Willis asked him if he had found a new job. Gregory replied: “No, I haven’t, but I’ll tell you something. I’ll create a big stir in Seaforde before I leave.”

No one saw Gregory kill the steward, and all the evidence against him was circumstantial, but he was nonetheless brought to trial at Downpatrick Assizes in March 1871. He showed not the slightest anxiety and seemed to observers to be totally indifferent to his fate.

It was assumed, probably correctly, that he had panicked after the murder, and in his anxiety hidden the money in the abandoned house in the woods before going quickly back home, not realising that he still had his victim’s blood on him.

After a two-day trial followed by a two-hour retirement, the jury found him guilty, with a recommendation to mercy on account of his age — 55 was then considered to be old.

Passing the death sentence, Mr. Justice Fitzgerald said: “John Gregory, after a most patient trial, in which you had the benefit of a defence unrivalled in ability, the jury have found you guilty — I won’t say of the crime of murder, but of horrible and barbarous murder.” The judge then cautioned him not to take heart from the jury’s recommendation. “I disagree with it,” he said. “The hours of your life are numbered, and I shall presently announce to you the period when you must pass into another world.

“I implore and entrust you to pass that time in endeavouring to obtain pardon of the Almighty by a sincere repentance.”

John Gregory would be executed,

the judge added, on Wednesday, April 12, 1871, at Downpatrick Prison. The prison was on the site currently occupied by Down High School, although the gate lodge is the only part of the old gaol which still survives.

Catholic and Protestant clergy combined in their efforts to get a reprieve. Petitions arrived from every direction on the desk of the lord lieutenant, Earl Spencer, but he was unmoved. A scaffold was built and it was clearly intended to be a permanent one, although Gregory turned out to be the last man hanged at Downpatrick.

The scaffold stood at the farthest end of the prison from the gatehouse in a purpose-built room. Large black beams supporting it were built into the wall of what had formerly been a mill.

A pit six feet deep was dug under the and the height from the drop to the ground was 11 feet. This made the entire fall 17 feet — more than enough for the new “humane” hanging method advocated by the Royal College of Surgeons.

Languishing in the death cell, John Gregory seemed totally reconciled to his fate. He merely shrugged when told of the efforts being made for a reprieve. He slept soundly on his last night and drank wine with his breakfast on the execution morning.

The walk to the gallows was a long one but the condemned man strode forward resolutely. On the scaffold he was completely without emotion. As he started to say, “Lord Jesus, receive my soul…” the bolt was drawn. Death was apparently almost instantaneous. That pleased officialdom; the apparatus and the new method had performed well.

Some mystery surrounds the hangman. He was known to have performed the previous execution at Downpatrick — that of John Logue, in 1866. He was called the “Irish Calcraft” and he possibly came from County Wexford. When acting in public he always wore a mask, but he was unmasked for Gregory’s execution. He was described as “about 60 years old, and a man who takes credit to himself for the workmanlike manner in which he puts the extreme sentence of the law into effect.”

After executing Gregory he sat down and smoked his pipe until the time came to cut down the body, which was placed on a stretcher in the prison. With that meticulous eye for detail, much beloved by the Victorians in such cases, a reporter noted that, “the face wore a singularly tranquil appearance. The eyes were closed and the chin slightly contracted. There was no indication of him having suffered any pain.”

Gregory was married but had no family. His wife left Ireland after the murder and never returned.

The prison remained in permanent use until 1891 when it was closed. It was largely demolished in the 1930s before Down High opened in 1933.