A Walk from London to Fulham

by Thomas Crofton Croker

Alas! the hand which on May morning had penned this introduction to an appeal in the cause of literary benevolence,—that hand was cold; and the lips by which, on the following day, the words that had flowed warmly from the

heart were to have been uttered,—those lips were mute in death within a week.

On the 16th of April, 1765, Mr. James House Knight, of Walham Green, returning home from London, was robbed and murdered on the highroad in the vicinity of Little Chelsea; the record of his burial in the parish register of Kensington is, “Shot in Fulham Road, near Brompton.” For the discovery of the murderers a reward of fifty pounds was offered; and, on the 7th of July following, two Chelsea pensioners were committed to prison, charged with this murder, on the testimony of their accomplice, another Chelsea pensioner, whom they had threatened to kill upon some quarrel taking place between them. The accused were tried, found guilty, hanged, and gibbeted; one nearly opposite Walnut-tree Walk, close by the two-mile stone, the other at Bull Lane, a passage about a quarter of a mile farther on, which connects the main Fulham Road with the King’s Road, by the side of the Kensington Canal. In these positions, for some years, the bodies of the murderers hung in chains, to the terror of benighted travellers and of market-gardeners, who

“Wended their way,
In morning’s grey,”

towards Covent Garden, until a drunken frolic caused the removal of a painful and useless exhibition. A very interesting paper upon London life in the last century occurs in the second volume of Knight’s ‘London;’ in which it is observed that “a gibbet’s tassel” was one of the first sights which met the eye of a stranger approaching London from the sea.

“About the middle of the last century, similar objects met the gaze of the traveller by whatever route he entered the metropolis. ‘All the gibbets in the Edgware Road,’ says an extract from the newspapers of the day in the ‘Annual Register’ for 1763, ‘on which many malefactors were being hung in chains, were cut down by persons unknown.’ The all and the many of this cool matter-of-fact announcement conjure up the image of a long avenue planted with ‘gallows-trees,’ instead of elms and poplars,—an assemblage of pendent criminals, not exactly ‘thick as leaves that strew the brook in Valombrosa,’ but frequent as those whose feet tickling Sancho’s nose, when he essayed to sleep in the cork forest, drove him from tree to tree in search of an empty bough.

“Frequent mention is made in the books, magazines, and newspapers of that period, of the bodies of malefactors conveyed after execution to Blackheath, Finchley, and Kennington Commons, or Hounslow Heath, for the purpose of being there permanently suspended. In those days the approach to London on all sides seems to have lain through serried files of gibbets, growing closer and more thronged as the distance from the city diminished, till they and their occupants arranged themselves in rows of ghastly and grinning sentinels along both sides of the principal avenues.”

This picture is not over-coloured; and it is to the following occurrence in the main Fulham Road that the removal of these offensive exhibitions is to be attributed. Two or three fashionable parsons, who had sacrificed superabundantly to the jolly god at Fulham, returning to London, where they desired to arrive quickly, had intellect enough to discover that the driver of their post-chaise did not make his horses proceed at a pace equal to their wishes, and, after in vain urging him to more speed, one of them declared that, if he did not use his whip with better effect, he should be made an example of for the public benefit, and hanged up at the first gibbet. The correctness of the old saying, that “when the head is hot the

hand is ready,” was soon verified by the postboy being desired to stop at the gibbet opposite Walnut-tree Walk, which order, unluckily for himself, he obeyed, instead of proceeding at a quicker pace. Out sprung the inmates of his chaise; they seized him, bound him hand and foot, and throwing a rope, which they had fastened round his body, over the gibbet, he soon found himself, in spite of his cries and entreaties, elevated in air beside the tarred remains of the Chelsea pensioner.

The reverend perpetrators of the deed drove off, leaving the luckless postboy to protest, loudly and vainly, to “the dull, cold ear of death,” against the loathsome companionship. When the first market-gardener’s cart passed by, most lustily did he call for help; but every effort to get free only tended to prolong his suspense. What could the carters and other early travellers imagine upon hearing shouts proceeding from the gibbet, but that the identical murderer of Mr. Knight had by some miracle come to life, and now called out, “Stop! stop!” with the intention of robbing and murdering them also? And they, feeling that supernatural odds were against them, ran forwards or backwards, not daring to look behind, as fast as their feet could carry alarmed and bewildered heads, leaving the fate of their carts to the sagacity of the horses. Finding that the louder he called for help the more alarm he excited, the suspended postboy determined philosophically to endure the misery of his situation in dignified silence. But there he was suffered to hang unnoticed; or, if remarked, it was only concluded that another criminal had been added to the gibbet, as its second tassel. The

circumstance, however, of a second body having been placed there speedily came to the knowledge of a magistrate in the neighbourhood, who had taken an active part in the apprehension of Mr. Knight’s murderers; and he proceeded, without delay, to the spot, that he might satisfy himself as to the correctness of the report. Judge, however, his astonishment on hearing himself addressed by name from the gibbet, and implored, in the most piteous manner, to deliver from bondage a poor postboy, whose only offence was that he would not goad on two overworked horses to humour a pair of drunken gentlemen. These “drunken gentlemen” are said to have been men of rank and influence: their names have never transpired, but the outrage with which they were charged led to the immediate removal from the Fulham Road of the last pair of gibbets which disgraced it.