End of the 8 O'Clock Walk

Last November 21-year-old Walter John Cross, a hard-up truck driver, strangled a crippled London watchmaker and snatched his wallet. Three months later Cross was hanged on the gallows of Pentonville Penitentiary. He may have been the last man who will ever be executed in Britain for murder.

Unripe Time? Last week the House of Commons abolished the death penalty for murder for a trial period of five years. Halfheartedly, the Labor government opposed the change. Kindly Home Secretary Chuter Ede, who ten years ago was speaking out for abolition of the death sentence, now apologetically opposed it. "The time is not ripe," he said, "for the undertaking of this particular reform." He was thinking of Britain's soaring postwar wave of armed robberies and assaults, and of his shriveled police force, 14,000 men under authorized strength. Murders had increased from 97 in 1938 to 138 in 1946, crimes of felonious and malicious wounding from 1,990 to 3,009.

But most M.P.s thought the death penalty had little influence on the murder rate. Some recalled that objections like Ede's were raised more than a century ago to oppose the reform of Britain's brutal criminal laws. In George III's reign, more than 200 crimes were punishable by death. Among them: felling a tree, picking a pocket, associating with gypsies for a month. In 1810, to a proposal to abolish 'the death penalty for shoplifting of articles worth five shillings or more, Lord Ellenborough had solemnly objected: "I trust your lordships will pause before you assent to an experiment pregnant with danger to the security of property . . . Repeal this law and see the contrast--no man can trust himself for an hour out of doors without the most alarming apprehensions that on his return every vestige of his property will be swept off by the hardened robber."

But, without the dire consequences predicted by Ellenborough, gibbet and gallows were prescribed for fewer & fewer crimes. When murder was crossed off the list last week, only three capital crimes remained: high treason in time of war, piracy with violence, arson in dockyards.

Unheeded Plea. Mrs. Ayrton Gould, a Labor M.P., had her own objections to the death sentence. She said it demoralized prison personnel and made prison jobs repulsive to able people. She recalled the case of Edith Thompson, hanged 25 years ago for helping her lover dispose of her husband. Mrs. Thompson had fainted before her execution. Her limp body was dragged to the gallows. Said Mrs. Gould: "That execution was so horrible that after it, the hangman committed suicide,* one of the wardresses who was present went mad, and the chaplain had a very bad nervous breakdown; and every single person who was present left the service within a very short time."

To decide the question, the Labor government permitted a rare "free vote." Laborites could vote as they chose without regard to the official party stand. Only 75 Labor M.P.s heeded House Leader Herbert Morrison's plea to keep the death penalty. As the teller reported that 245 had voted to abolish the penalty, 222 to keep it, M.P.s cheered, shouted, wept and threw papers into the air.

One man in England was sure to join the cheering. James Camb, 31-year-old steward, waiting in the death cell at Winchester Prison to hang for the shipboard killing of Gay Gibson (TIME, April 5), will now escape the "8 o'clock walk" to the gallows.

* Actually he tried, but failed.

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