Making History – The Execution Of Ellen Thomson

Ellen Thomson was only woman ever to be executed in Queensland. Convicted of murder in 1887, the case still inspires considerable passion among those familiar with the facts, including her descendants, some of whom feel there was a miscarriage of justice. Whether or not she was guilty, and how a court might view her case today, are issues author Vashti Farrer has explored in Ellen Thompson – Beyond Reasonable Doubt – along with the background to the case and the society that existed in far north Queensland in 1887. Vashti Farrer addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 6 August, 2014.

MAKING HISTORY – THE EXECUTION OF ELLEN THOMSON

VASHTI FARRER

At 8 am on Monday 13 June, 1887, a small official party left a disused hospital block in the grounds of Her Majesty’s Gaol, Brisbane. The party included the Principal Gaoler, Captain John Jekyll, male and female warders, a priest, Father Fouhy, and two Sisters of Mercy. In the centre was a prisoner, Ellen Thomson, a tiny woman only 4 feet nine inches in height, or less than 145 cms. She was dressed in mourning black with a matching bonnet and she appeared pale and older than her official age of 41.

The month before she had been convicted of the murder of her husband, William Thomson, a 66 year old farmer, on his selection on the Mossman River. The actual murderer was a labourer, John Harrison, aged 27, but Ellen was convicted as his accomplice. Thomson was 22 years older than his wife, who was 17 years older than Harrison. The press had no problem with the age difference between husband and wife, but were quick to highlight the discrepancy between Ellen and Harrison, suggesting that Harrison may have been under her control, perhaps even a bit “simple,” to have done her bidding. This shifted emphasis from her being an accomplice to the main perpetrator, thereby increasing animosity towards her.

William Thomson was portrayed in the press and in court as vulnerable and helpless at the hands of the accused, but there was evidence to suggest he was paranoid, an alcoholic, at times violent and that he’d been the cause of her children having left home. He also held strong racist views and openly admitted to hating the Chinese, yet he had Chinese tenants on his land. He seemed to think they were out to destroy him, by producing crops on land where he had failed.

As for Ellen, in nineteenth century Australia, a woman who broke the mould of docile and obedient, whether as a wife, mother, daughter or sister, was considered abnormal.A woman accused of murder was therefore deemed far worse than her male counterpart, so it was hardly surprising that the press turned against her and were keen to portray her as a scarlet woman, even – as some kind of monster. When Louisa Collins, the last woman executed in New South Wales, was hanged in 1889, the press said she was “accused of a crime that flew in the face of convention – poisoning to death her two husbands.” So it was unacceptable for women to break the rules!

Ellen Thomson’s case is interesting, not for any legal precedent, but because the evidence does not appear to support guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. There were enough inconsistencies one would have thought, to leave a jury uncertain as to its verdict. Legally speaking, she probably was guilty, as an accessory, even of second degree murder, but she was uneducated, unable to read nor write and simply could not understand, not having pulled the trigger herself, how she could possibly be guilty of murder.

It could be argued why shouldn’t a woman found guilty of murder receive the same penalty as a man and yet in Ellen’s case, despite widespread feeling against her, there were still some sections of the public that struggled with the notion of executing a woman and even the hangman thought she would be reprieved at the eleventh hour. Male hangings at the time were not uncommon, but Ellen would be the first woman and, as it turned out, the only woman ever executed in Queensland, so the authorities were keen for everything to go smoothly, that she would give them no trouble.

Did she have a fair trial? By today’s standards, no and even in 1887, with a biased judge, a clever Crown Counsel and 197 depositions on one side and no witnesses and an inexperienced country solicitor on the other, it was easy to see which way the scales would fall. At that time, the law did not permit accused persons to mount a defence, or call witnesses on their behalf during a trial. Nor were they allowed to take the stand, and could only cross-examine Crown witnesses at preliminary hearings. It would be another twelve years before the law was changed to allow the accused to mount a fairer defence.

The case was heard before Mr Justice Cooper, described as “grand, pompous and arrogant” whowas noted for his severity in criminal cases. He instructed the jury saying, “In every case of murder, the law assumes that murder has been committed until the contrary is proven.” The following day newspapers asked, not surprisingly, what had happened to “innocent until proved guilty”?His Honour also appears to have been biased from the start against Ellen in particular. The notes he made during the trial he later reworked into his official report. They state, despite evidence to the contrary, that Ellen had lived a happy life with her husband until a younger man appeared on the scene, after which all loyalty to her husband evaporated with his attentions. Given these were his opening remarks, it would seem he had already made up his mind.

His notes also included the sentence, “They were tried before Justice Cooper, the evidence left no room for doubt as to their guilt,” but for some strange reason the words were crossed out, suggesting perhaps that they may have been written a little too early, before the jury had even retired to consider its verdict.

Further examples of his prejudice were when he allowed the evidence of an ex-prisoner who had left prison before Harrison was admitted and he accepted the evidence of Chinese witnesses claiming that, “They are an observant race” when there was good reason to suspect they had been coached by someone keen to secure a conviction. Ellen in her official prison statement said, “Before I left Port Douglas, a policeman told me that Inspector Morrisett would never let me out of it, if he had to pay a Chinaman to swear he saw one of us do it.”

To understand the background to this, Chinese diggers who had struggled to extract gold from claims others had abandoned, had by this time become tenants and market gardeners on land owned by white settlers. The Chinese numbered two thirds the white population but the resentment of the latter towards them and towards South Sea Islanders, or Kanakas, who had been brought over to work in the cane fields, gradually built. This led eventually to the establishment of the White Australia Policy in 1901. So it was a racist time and a racist area and one cannot help but wonder if the Chinese witnesses who gave evidence did so hoping to improve their standing in the community.

When asked if they had anything to say before sentencing, His Honour noted that Ellen “launched forth into an impassioned oration which for a time stupified the people in the court room”. It lasted nearly an hour and he had no choice but to hear her out. She started by describing her early life and later that as William’s wife. She tried to exonerate herself by suggesting a number of possible causes for his death, tying herself in knots in the process, which only made her appear more guilty. Justice Cooper referred to this confusion in his notes.

Then immediately before sentencing, an odd thing happened. A lone juror stood and asked permission to address the Bench. He claimed to be speaking only for himself and said he believed them to be guilty, but he wished to plead for clemency on behalf of the female prisoner who, he said, “had had a very difficult life and had struggled hard to support herself and her children”. His Honour said he would pass the juror’s comments on to the relevant authorities then promptly sentenced both prisoners to death at which Ellen replied meekly, “Thank you,” which suggest she may not have fully understood the implication.

During her weeks in gaol, she went through a range of emotions from anger, defiance, depression and finally, desperation as the date of her execution grew nearer. She twice petitioned the Governor pleading for mercy, saying that different witnesses had told lies about her. Presumably for legal reasons, their names were later blacked out.

In the week leading up to the hanging, a group of prominent Brisbane businessmen unsuccessfully petitioned the Governor to have her sentence commuted to life imprisonment. At the same time, Mr J.W. Knight, the Harbour Master and Customs Official at Port Douglas wrote two open letters to the press hoping to gain public sympathy for her. He said he’d known her in Cooktown and described her as hard-working and kind and he appealed to the women of Queensland to get behind her and show support in not seeing one of their own sex executed. The editor printed the letters with the terse footnote that in his opinion she deserved to hang. The women of Queensland remained silent, but in all fairness, as wives, mothers, daughters and sisters themselves, they may have been reluctant to go against the wishes of the male heads of their households. It was not a time for women to make bold stands.

Ellen had believed she would inherit the property and she admitted before she died that she thought she and Harrison could have managed it between them. As for the so-called affair, each claimed not to love the other, so it appears to have been more a case of proximity and convenience, than anything deeper.

As Ellen crossed the prison yard that morning, she stumbled slightly but managed to regain her balance and climb the steps to the scaffold unaided. Like Louisa Collins she did not require a chair and remained standing throughout. Before the hood was placed over her head, the Principal Gaoler asked if she had anything to say and she answered, “I want to say good-bye everybody. I forgive everyone from the bottom of my heart for any wrong they may have done me in this world. I never shot my husband, and am dying like an injured angel. Soon I will be in a world where they will tell no lies about me.”

The authorities had been worried that she would prove defiant and difficult, but she behaved with dignity. However, at 4 feet 9 inches, she was too small to fit on the scale used to calculate hangings and the execution went horribly wrong.

His Honour would not have been present that morning, but he must have read subsequent newspaper reports, because he described the event and I quote, “The next moment she was gone. Her body dangled lifeless, and a crimson stream poured over her dress onto the floor. In her hands she still clutched the little crucifix, by this time steeped in blood.” Words that are not only ghoulish, but not what one would expect from an impartial judge.

After she had been cut down, she had to suffer the further indignity of having her skull examined by a Professor of Phrenology keen to prove avarice in the case of Harrison, and an over-developed sexual appetite on the part of Ellen, thus perpetuating the image of “scarlet woman.” Yet despite this, her official prison conduct card reads:

Strenuously denied her guilt upon the gallows and insisted that her innocence would be established. She was a very talkative woman, of a cheerful temperament. Had led a rough hard life in the northern part of Queensland and had probably learned to attach little value to life. Not a bad dispositioned woman, very temperate in her habits. Capable and industrious. Died instantaneously.

Ellen was hard-working, gregarious, perhaps flirtatious, but at the same time a devoted mother with a strong sense of justice. She felt her lack of education keenly and could only mark official documents with her X. Later, in prison, someone must have taught her to write her name because it started to appear on statements. The signature began boldly with a flourish to the E of Ellen, but as the execution date drew near, the letters deteriorated until her signature resembled little more than a shaky scrawl.

For many years the women in her family were not told about her. Her name was never mentioned and only the men were allowed to know what had happened. Now that has changed and many of her descendants and supporters are keen to find out more about her and to speak out on her behalf. Some have even gone so far as to seek, not a posthumous pardon, since they acknowledge her likely guilt, but a retrospective forgiveness on the basis that the trial was patently unfair. One supporter has even written to the Queen who replied that as a constitutional monarch she could not interfere, and the former Governor-General referred the matter to the Governor of Queensland, who refused to do anything – on legal advice.

William’s brother, Thomas Thomson, who inherited the property along with William’s debts, paid for an ornate headstone to be erected in his memory. It reads:

Sacred To The Memory of My Generous and Beloved Brother William Thomson – Who Met His Death By Cruel and Treacherous Murder on the 22^nd Day of October 1886 Aged 66 Years. This Stone is Erected by His Much Esteemed and Beloved Brother, Thomas Thomson

GOD WANTED HIM IN HEAVEN IN COMPANY WITH THE BLESSED.

HIS ABODE IS NOW WITH ANGELS WHERE THE WEARY ARE AT REST.

OUR FATHER IN HEAVEN THY WILL BE DONE.

THY WAYS ARE INSCRUTABLE

One wonders what Ellen would have made of it? Ellen Thomson lies in unmarked grave in a south Brisbane cemetery.