It is April 1903. A cramped, dark and dirty hall, which seems bespattered with spittle however much it is cleaned, is gloomy despite the fine day.

This is the Old Bailey, the famous chamber of the London criminal court that before 1905 had been located next to Newgate Prison, in which several hundred people were executed. Once upon a time, on the night before an execution, a great mob of vagabonds, prostitutes, thieves and the blasé rich would assemble before the prison gates where a gallows was being erected. They would drink deep, sing, dance and brawl until dawn, while from the belfry opposite the prison the death knell tolled for the man who was still, at that moment, alive. When the wicket in the debtor's gate was opened and the condemned man appeared, tied hand and foot, the drunken mob would greet him with shouts, catcalls and obscene curses that mingled with the sounds of the death knell. Sometimes the condemned man would faint. The crowd would then not only whistle but pelt him with dirt. Sometimes, he proved to be a courageous man with nerves of steel. In that case, he would toss the mob a grim joke or an obscene curse as he ascended the scaffold. Then the mob would applaud and shout ‘hooray’. Smollett (Roderick Random), Fielding (Jonathan Wild), and then in the nineteenth century Dickens (Oliver Twist) have all given us dreadful portraits of the mob awaiting an execution. In the early sixties, a brilliant French political writer and historian wrote: ‘An immense multitude, excited to an extraordinary degree, and, if I may say so, famished with curiosity, inundates, several hours before the time of the looked-for performance, all the approaches to the spot devoted to executions.