Clodagh Finn: It’s important to recall Ireland’s female executioner

Lady Betty is portrayed by Sally Dexter in Declan Donnellan’s 1989 play. Picture: courtesy of Cheek by Jowl and Simon Annan

It might not be the job description you’d like to see recorded for posterity, but Kerry-born Elizabeth Sugrue will always be known as Ireland’s female ‘hangwoman’, or Lady Betty for short.

The so-called “queen of the long drop in Roscommon Gaol” is back in the news again as her life, sketchy and morbid though the details are, is among the 39 new entries recently added to the Dictionary of Irish Biography.

In the same way that I’m an avid reader of obituaries — to me, they are about life, not death — I’m a keen admirer of the Royal Irish Academy’s biographical dictionary. It’s an expansive ‘who’s who’ of the people who passed this way before us.

But, more than that, it surprises. Prepare to be challenged, entertained, shocked, and, best of all, shaken from that limiting but reflexive urge to force people into neat pigeonholes.

For instance, did you even know that an 18th-century woman, the widow of a tenant farmer, officiated at what was thought to be the highest gallows in Ireland? The story of how she became an executioner — possibly the first and only Irish woman to do so — has been embellished over time, but it goes something like this:

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When Elizabeth Sugrue’s son returned home, flush with earnings after working abroad, he disguised himself and sought bed and board at his mother’s lodging house. He wanted to see if she had changed her harsh ways before revealing himself the following day.

During the night, however, Elizabeth murdered the man she believed to be a stranger and stole his money, her harsh ways clearly still intact. Though, when she realised what she had done, she ran screaming onto the street where she was promptly arrested and later sentenced to death by hanging.

Lady Betty was Ireland’s only hangwoman in The Old Gaol, Roscommon.

On the day she was due to be put to death, no hangman could be found. Elizabeth Sugrue saved herself from the gallows by agreeing to step in and perform the gory task on her fellow condemned. And in the words of William Wilde, eye surgeon, writer, and father of the famous Oscar, “under the name of Lady Betty, [she] officiated, unmasked and undisguised, as hangwoman for a great number of years”.

Violent temper

His account claims that this “middle-aged, stout-made, dark-eyed, swarthy-complexioned, but by no means forbidding-looking woman” was born in Kerry around 1750. She was, he wrote, “a person of violent temper, though in manners rather above the common, and possessing some education”.

He was writing in 1852, almost five decades after her death in 1807. By then, she had already been mythologised into a kind of bogeywoman. Her name was invoked by people in Roscommon — “here’s Lady Betty” — to frighten the wits out of misbehaving children.

Charlotte O’Conor Eccles, a 19th-century journalist and writer, also recounts Lady Betty’s story, but with a few more flourishes.

She puts words in Sugrue’s mouth, spoken at the gallows she would later claim as her own: “Spare me life, yer honour, spare me life an’ I’ll hang thim [sic] all,” O’Conor Eccles wrote in 1884.

Both accounts are placed side by side in the considered entry written by Liz Evers in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. She explains that O’Conor Eccles, known for including social commentary in her journalism, attributes the hangwoman’s seeming callousness to her own difficult circumstances.

According to O’Connor Eccles, Elizabeth Sugrue left Kerry on foot after her husband died, making her way to Roscommon in search of a better life. The journalist, a native of Roscommon herself, takes the view that the wretched soon-to-be hangwoman was “crushed by bitter, hopeless poverty [which] seemed to act like frost on her soul, chilling and freezing the fount of kindness that springs in every woman’s heart.”

Unfeminine role

Scratch the surface of history, though, and you’ll find that a “fount of kindness” does not spring in every woman’s heart. Lady Betty might be remembered because she worked in a singularly ‘unfeminine’ role, but she is more than an empty ‘bad-woman’ stereotype; she reminds us that Irish history is far more diverse and intriguing than we imagine.

Too often, there is a tendency to look back through a political or ideological prism. 

How easy it is to reclaim ‘heroes’ and ‘heroines’ and shape them into a rosy version of our own ideals. Projecting modern ideas backward is always fraught.

Having said that, it’s worth taking one modern buzzword — ‘diversity’ — and using it to inform our view of the people who inhabited the island of Ireland before us.

When Declan Donnellan of Cheek by Jowl theatre company first staged Lady Betty, a play inspired by the true story, in London in 1989, Time Out said it was “challenging and exhilarating, this is powerful stuff”.

We might say the same of our own history. While we love to carve up the population and label them according to their political beliefs, religion, or birthplace, it is heartening to see that real people burst out of the ready-made categories our restricting shoehorn tries to force on them.

That fact is evident in the recent selection of dictionary entries. To start, while not equal, there is a better balance between men and women; 24 men to 15 women.

Among the women, you’ll find the boxing promoter Clara Copley who, in the 1930s, earned the nickname ‘Ma’ because she encouraged so many from poor backgrounds in Belfast to enter the ring.

It’s good to see the lives of five early modern women fleshed out too, among them Dorothy Moore (c1612-1664), a woman of letters who advocated for women’s education. Unusually for a woman at the time, she could read Latin, Hebrew, and Greek.

The male entries span centuries, from 17th-century military officer John James Devenish to more recent people of note, such as broadcaster Derek Davis, Catholic bishop Edward Daly, and former Ulster Unionist party leader James Molyneaux.

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The entry on Finbarr Flood (1938-2016) will inspire as it shows that someone can start as a messenger boy at Guinness brewery and go on to become its managing director. He also defies classification as he had careers as a soccer player, chairman of the Labour Court, and as a quotable wit.

As Niav Gallagher recounts, he once told “a snoozing colleague never to jerk awake if your boss entered the room as that was tantamount to an admission of guilt: ‘The thing to do … is to very slowly open your eyes with a comment on the lines of “you know, I was just thinking about that suggestion you made earlier …”’

Excellent advice. For more inspiration and tales of the unexpected, see the free-to-access www.dib.ie