Clouds billowed low like cigarette smoke over “The Crum”, a 150 year old jail located on Crumlin Road in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Shutter Island feel remains too, even after being restored with guided tours fit for the public. Among the locals, if someone went for a stay at the Crumlin Road Gaol, they were “up the Crum”.

Its life spanned two world wars, its own very uncivil war quaintly called “the troubles”, and seismic social change. During this period it housed miscreants and ne’erdowells, major and minor criminals, men, women and children alike, as well as those who committed of the most gruesome of crimes. For the latter, this facility not only held them, but punctuated their term with the ultimate sentence itself.

Bear in mind that this is no light topic, and this prison operated under standards much different than those of today. If you are disturbed by this history, best to stop reading now.

Capital Punishment Up The Crum

Down the long hall of cells, there were displays showing the execution kits. In a gruesomely neat and tidy assemblage, the ropes, shackles and sandbags gave testament to the precise choreography of the event.

Each person had their height and weight measured (see the pic). This was in order to calculate the mass of the individual to determine the required length of the fall, to make sure there was enough force to instantly snap the neck. Public executions in Northern Ireland were stopped in the early 1900’s, but death by hanging continued up the Crum until 1961.

Those who received this sentence were put into a special room containing a desk, a bed, a large wooden bookshelf, and a guard posted with them 24/7. Part of the sentence was that they were to be buried in an unmarked, unconsecrated grave just inside the walls of the prison.

Even in death, they could never leave.

They were never told the day of the hanging, but when that day did come, the prisoners were allowed to meet with a priest and have their last meal. They were then told that they would be able to walk out into the cell row, one last time, to say good bye to their mates.

It was a lie.

The moment the cuffs were on behind the prisoner’s back, that wooden bookshelf at the end of the cell was slammed back to reveal a secret door to the room of the noose and drop. The guard rushed the shocked prisoner into the room, noose on, lever pulled, deed done.

In fact, the quickest recorded time from opening the bookshelf door to the drop was seven seconds.

In the telling of our guide, this was done for both safety and humanitarian purposes. By surprising the person, by rushing them immediately to the noose, they minimize the time of fear for the prisoner, as well as reducing the time for them to physically resist.

Almost humane … for a hanging.

But true humanity was not absent these walls, and presented itself in the most unexpected ways. The guards charged with carrying out the orders — “to be buried in an unmarked, unconsecrated grave” — could not comply. Those who interred the bodies just inside the prison walls saw fit to etch in stone the initials of the person over their grave (see the pics). For this the guard would have been fired, or worse.

Maybe they figured that the man had paid his price in full. Maybe they had gotten to know him. Or maybe they felt that to consign them as nothing more than dirt into the dirt beneath, lowered us all.

The Worst of All Prisoners

Prisoners of all stripes inhabited these cells, from hardly hardened to heinous, but our guide let us know that one kind were apparently the worst of the worst. They were so difficult to manage that guards and wardens alike devised new rules just to be able to get rid of them.

These were the suffragettes. Members of women's organisations in the early 20th century who fought for the right for women to vote in public elections, known as women's suffrage.

They were excellent at being awful prisoners.

You could not make them stand down, settle down, or quiet down. If all that weren't enough, they'd take their chamber pots, do their business, and slop that mess out into walkway outside their cell as the guards went past. The warden and guards were at the end of their rope with these women, even though they were housed in their own wing of the prison.

But these ladies were not done without one final act of defiance. Hunger strikes.

A Particularly Irish Solution

For those running the prison, they couldn’t have these ladies sick and dying, and god knows they were never going to convince them to comply … with anything. Ever. So they arrived at a solution of a particularly Irish kind. They agreed to allow the ladies on hunger strike to leave the jail to recuperate, with their families, in their own homes.

Yes. They were actually sent home to get better. And the rule was that after the women themselves decided that they were all better, they were asked to voluntarily re-admit themselves back into the prison. Yeah.

Shockingly, it seems that this recuperation method must not have been very effective, because no one readmitted themselves. Crazy right?

In fact, once the women got home, some left the country but many others stayed without hiding, living in the same town, right up the road from the Crum itself.

But the prison officials somehow never noticed, as they were distracted by the lack of muck and ruckus about, and were totally happy with the extended length of their recuperation.

The Escape

One and only one person ever successfully escaped the Crum without being caught. Donal Donnelly with his accomplice John Kelly, a few bedsheets, and a hacksaw managed to get into the courtyard where Donal planned to scale the wall first with the rope and then help John over after him.

But, according to Donal, “John lay flat on the wall holding the rope but it broke, sending me down to the tarmac outside with an almighty thud.” John fell backward into the prison yard, losing his opportunity to escape and ending up with an extended sentence for his effort.

The almighty thud broke Donal’s ankle and yet he somehow managed to make it to a known Ireland Safe House within Belfast. The woman who opened the door and saw Donal immediately whisked him inside, burned his prison uniform, and stashed him safely there until he could be transferred out of the country. Meanwhile 12,000 troops were dispatched to apprehend the 18 year old young man, never to track him down.

In his life, Donal went on to have a successful sales career at Unilever where he had but one condition for his employer, that he never have to travel back to Northern Ireland, no questions asked. Then late in his 70s, Margaret Thatcher eventually extended a full pardon to Donal, finally allowing him to come back home. During a recent trip, he actually returned to The Crum after it was converted to an attraction. He visited his old cell, saw the wall he scaled, and the towers he escaped, and even stayed to tell his tale to the visiting tourists.

So in the end, Donnelly left The Crum for free, but had to pay to get back in.

For us, the Crumlin Road Gaol tour revealed the chilling standards of prison care even as recently as the 1990s. The unease of standing in the room where men’s lives were taken by the state was palpable, and put us face to face with the worst of our own human rationalization about capital punishment. Balancing this was the humanity of anonymous guards, who were compelled to mark covertly the passing of a lowly prisoner by etching their name in stone. In the end, it is this subtle rebellion, this mark of human kindness that we will never forget.