by Bar de Ness

Created on: May 24, 2009

It was cold. It always was on the slake. The wind would whistle across the barren mud, where the earth melded into sludge towards the river. The river, the giver and taker of life, the source of existence. The artery that carried the ships between the damp, dingy docks and the wide, frightening sea.

The ships. Since her earliest memory there were ships. Ships and coal. Black, dirty coal and black, dirty, browbeaten men who mined it.

That morning was the same as every other. In the ramshackle home, she struggled out of bed, shivered and wrapped herself in a flimsy gown, and glanced at the empty hearth. She knew she needed coal. She found her mother at the window, staring out to the river, transfixed across the slake. Something different was there today, something sinister, something hideous.

She followed her mother's gaze and recoiled. The black tarred body, bound and caged, suspended on an oak timber staff, was dead. Unrecognizable it swung with every gust of wind, it creaked on every hinge, it swayed with every breeze.The man was dead of that there was no doubt. For the next three weeks she would confront the same grim spectacle.

Later she would learn that the dead man had been hanged. Later she would learn that he was soaked with pitch and encased in a metal frame. Later she would learn that it was called a gibbet. Finally she would learn that the poor creature within it was her own dear father. For more than 21 days she, her two siblings, and mother, would awake every morning and see him swinging outside their window.

It could not be removed. A permanent guard of artillery would surround it.

The family had no where to go. No work, no income, only charity from neighbours. As the child grew older, and the years took their toll, she would eventually see her mother committed to the workhouse, so distressed and withered, that no recollection would ever exist in her mind of the events of that fateful time.

But this was not ancient Rome, nor medieval Japan, not Stalinist Russia, nor Nazi Germany. It was the country which repealed the Slave Trade Act twenty-five years earlier. It was the country which would abolish slavery throughout it's empire in 1833. It was the most powerful and civilised nation on Earth. This was Great Britain in 1832.

What transpired on that day of August 21st is infamous in its cruelty and injustice. The man hanging in the cage was the last man to be gibbeted in England. Prior on June 11th, William Jobling, an uneducated and simple Jarrow

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