John Weachurch: Life and Fate

At 10am on 6^th December 1875, John Weachurch, alias John Hallam or John Taylor met his end on the gallows at the Old Melbourne Gaol. His story is one of crime, punishment, and the harsh realities of life in colonial Australia’s prison system. But who was John Weachurch, and what led him to this final, fatal moment? Pentridge Prison Tours Guide, Damien Beard, delves into the life of Weachurch, exploring the circumstances that shaped him and the decisions that sealed his fate.

Born in Nottinghamshire in 1829 or 1830, John Weachurch started his young adult life as an apprentice bootmaker, and, to quote The Age, ‘received but little education’, yet was in possession of a ‘great shrewdness and intelligence’. Weachurch soon fell into a life of crime, and in 1850 was sentenced to seven years penal servitude in Tasmania for an unknown, arriving on the ship Blenheim before the year was out.

In 1851, as Weachurch was getting used to the terms of his imprisonment on that cold and hostile island, things to the north were starting to get interesting. On 1 July 1851, the separate and independent colony of Victoria was established. Mere weeks later, large deposits of gold were discovered around Ballarat.  This prompted the now infamous ‘gold rush’.

Washing up on the shores of Port Phillip sometime between 1857 and 1860, like many other hopefuls in search of gold, was John Weachurch. However, he found no luck at the increasingly mined out diggings and soon ran afoul of the law for various minor offences. He found himself within the walls of the Collingwood stockade after being convicted of ‘being illegally on premises’ in 1862. After serving a six-month sentence, he made his way to Ballarat, where a ‘daring burglary’ in 1866 resulted in a further conviction and 6 years hard labour in Pentridge.

Weachurch was rebellious in prison. Being, as The Age (1875) described it:

Of an excitable and ungovernable temper, [he] frequently committed breaches of the prison regulations, for which he received various sentences of more or less severity.

It was these sentences that was to form the basis for future problems and lead to his eventual end on the gallows.

At the time, prisoners were not kept informed with any sort of accuracy about extensions to their sentences. So, when his six years was up, Weachurch was surprised to find out he was not in fact free to leave. The extra time he had received for misbehaviour inside had piled up and ensured he would be caught behind Pentridge’s towering bluestone walls for a ’considerably longer period’.

He took this about as well as you could imagine. Between 1871 and 1873 he is alleged to have made three attempts to escape, no doubt resulting in further extensions of his time and physical punishments. Indeed, his admission records to the gaol at the time of his execution note the presence of extensive flogging scars on his back. Over time, Weachurch began to view his imprisonment as unlawful, and himself as personally victimised by the law and colonial society at large.

And honestly, legality of the sentence aside, it’s not hard to feel like he kind of had a point. Especially when newspaper articles at the time noted that he was “essentially a member of the criminal class, boasting of having been for 30 years a professional thief”, or that his “prominent forehead” spoke of a “physiognomy that caused him to be singled out as capable of any crime”.

This was of course, the era in which the pseudoscience of Phrenology, which believed that an individual’s personality and behavioural traits, particularly a propensity towards violence and criminal behaviour, could be determined by the shape of their skulls. In this way many who fell afoul of the justice system were dehumanised, viewed by respectable society as something more animal than man.

This time spent – in his mind, unlawfully – within Pentridge was marked by increasing violence from Weachurch. He began with smashing furniture in his cell and attacking warders. In 1871 he even managed to get out of his cell block and set fire to the new inspector general’s residence that was then under construction. While awaiting execution, he claimed this was an attempt to draw attention to his plight. Newspapers and authorities at the time were less sympathetic to this idea, seeing it more as a result of his ‘natural’, physiological, criminal tendencies.

In 1872 Weachurch requested an audience with Mr. G.O. Duncan, Superintendent of Penal Establishments. When Duncan entered his cell, Weachurch produced a knife and stabbed him in the groin. The Inspector General was wearing a heavy overcoat at the time, and it was believed that this saved his life. Weachurch was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to death for this attack, but this sentence was commuted to life in prison on the personal intervention of Duncan himself.

Facing this sentence, Weachurch’s feelings of being wronged increased drastically, and he became even more determined to enact revenge on the prison system and/or draw attention to his case. He attempted to burn down the bootmaker’s shop at Pentridge, scalded a prison official with soup, and attacked a warder with a garden hoe in March 1874. For the latter he was tried by a jury and acquitted. However, it was decided to move him into a special cell constructed for purpose inside A Division.

This cell was located somewhere on the ground floor of the eastern wing of A Division. According to The Herald, iron bars were placed into the cell to form a cage, set back far enough that the door could be left open. The cell had no furniture, as the prisoner would destroy anything he got his hands on.

Currently, in the A Division building, there is a cell with bars in a setup like this. It is located in the part of the building that was walled off in 1958 to create H Division.  In fact, this is the same cell that Ronald Ryan later spent 13 months in before his 1967 execution. Whether this is the same cell is not certain, the bars are almost certainly newer than the 1870s. But it is the only cell in the building that appears to have those kinds of fittings, and I haven’t been able to find any others that look like they may have had the same in the past.

Weachurch was to spend his time in here permanently, always fitted with seven-pound irons. His only respite from confinement was a daily promenade through the A Division exercise yard. Or his occasional visits to the governor’s office for his still frequent breaches of regulations.

He was to spend 9 months in this cage. But around 5:30pm on 7^th October 1875, warder Patrick Moran entered into the cell intending to inspect the prisoner’s irons. As he leaned down, Weachurch attacked him with an iron handle wrenched off his bucket ‘issued to him for the purposes of hygiene’. The Avoca Mail (1875) described the attack thusly:

Before Moran could throw down his assailant and secure him he was struck a second blow on the head. The handle terminates in two sharp points like oyster knives, and these inflicted punctures which bled very freely [sic]. One was in dangerous proximity to Moran’s eye, and if it had entered that, it would probably have caused death by wounding the brain.

In November 1875 John Weachurch appeared before Mr. Justice Stephen, with the charge of attempted murder. After a three-day trial he was convicted and sentenced to death.

Some members of the public did actually sympathise with Weachurch. And there were calls in the editorials and letters pages of newspapers for an investigation into both his specific treatment, and the conditions in general at Pentridge. Many of these advocated for a stay of execution so that he might testify before any potential inquiry.

John Weachurch represented himself at his trial and tried to push his case that he had been unlawfully imprisoned in the first place. This belief was so strong that he fully expected a commutation of his sentence. When he was told there was to be no reprieve, he was allegedly so shocked he could not speak.

The Warders experience with Weachurch during his time at Old Melbourne Gaol was markedly different, as he had met with Gaol Governor John Buckley Castieau and promised he would behave. Shortly before his execution he met with many religious figures, including Wesleyan Chaplain Rev. Millard, Rev. Thompson from the Church of England, Rev. Hamilton from the Presbyterian Church, and a missionary named Coles.

Weachurch also asked for permission to preach to other inmates. Officially, this request was denied due to the regulations of the Gaol. But, given that the topic of the sermon was to be ‘thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour’, it’s fair to surmise that the Gaol authorities were perhaps worried about the sermon’s content and its effect on the other prisoners.

It was at this time, during the wait for his execution in the dark corridors of the Old Melbourne Gaol, that Weachurch began to declare to anyone who would listen that all his crimes were an attempt to draw attention to what he saw as an unlawful imprisonment.

On the evening of 5 December 1875, about 9 O’clock, Rev. Millard administered the sacraments to Weachurch in his cell. He ‘appeared to sleep soundly’ during the night. At 5am on the appointed day, he rose and engaged in prayer for some hours. At 7am, he took a light breakfast before being taken to the condemned cell. At 10 that morning he was marched out on to the gallows. Pinioned and with the rope placed about his neck by hangman Michael Gately, Weachurch addressed the 40 odd witnesses standing below:

Kind friends – I cannot call you enemies, for I must try to forgive my enemies – I am a poor criminal about to be launched into eternity to appear before my God upon a charge of intending to commit murder. So far as that charge is concerned, I am truly innocent before God. I had no intent to commit murder…Before God I stand here to-day, an innocent man. The law does not in its literal sense demand my body, but the law in its perverted sense does demand my body, and Christ I hope will demand my soul (Poultney, 2016).

At or about 10am Gately shook Weachurch’s pinioned hand, drew the hood down over his head, and pulled the bolt. Weachurch was a small man, and the drop allowed for him was described as “generous”. Death was, apparently, instantaneous.

The execution remained controversial for some decades after. In 1909 a former warder wrote:

John Weachurch was not a murderer, in fact. But he was in law. As a murderer, he was hanged, although his crime was only an attempt which did not succeed. The final offence in his lurid career was the third time upon which he had committed murderous assaults upon prison officials. In addition, he had been guilty of numerous other enormities, which betokened rather the possession of a weak intellect than the workings of a sane and criminal brain.

We will never know if John Weachurch’s claims towards the end of his life that he had committed his crimes only to draw attention to his plight may be true, or were a retrospective justification from a man confronting what might be waiting for him after the gallows. But by the turn of the century his story became viewed more as one of a man broken by an unfair system, however condescendingly it may have treated the intellectual or moral faculties of its victim.

In 1895, writing under the pseudonym ‘Paul Mell’, a man claiming to be a child of the former Gaol Governor wrote an article for The Bulletin (1894) describing his encounters with condemned criminals. Claiming he was given free range of the Gaol, this author contended that he had met with some of the more infamous of the inhabitants of the cell beneath the gallows. As the Governor at this time was John Buckley Castieau, it’s quite possible this man was in fact Godfrey Cass, who later became a renowned actor, even playing Ned Kelly several times. His words perhaps best sum up the story of John Weachurch:

“This man was a deep scoundrel,” says Evening News Heaton of Weachurch in his diabolical “Dictionary of Dates.” If he was, then it was only the sort of scoundrel for which rotten prison systems are mainly responsible”.

Acknowledgements

100 years (It’s really more!) of diggings. (1951, September 11). The Argus, 2.

Anniversary of the Week. (1930, July 4). The Argus, 2.

Attempted Murder (1875, November 23). The Avoca Mail, 3.

Attempt to Murder (1875, November 22). The Age, 3.

Barrett, P. (2007). Her Majesty’s Collingwood Stockade: A Snapshot of Gold Rush Victoria. Provenance: The Journal of Public Records Office Victoria (6).

Coroner’s Court of Victoria. (1875, December 06). 1875/1137 Male John Weachurch: Inquest. Public Records Office Victoria. < https://prov.vic.gov.au/archive/6477ECDB-F1BB-11E9-AE98-A3571770482A?image=2>

Dower, A. (1953, September 12). Pentridge Caged Rebel Convict. The Herald, 13.

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Mall, P. (1894, March 13). Ghosts of a Gallows. The Bulletin, (14)737, 22.

Penal and Gaols Branch, (1865 – 67), Central Register for Male Prisoners 7360 – 8125 (1865 – 1867). P220. Public Records Office Victoria
<https://prov.vic.gov.au/archive/172983DD-F3A9-11E9-AE98-8BE3542C4690?image=220>

Penal and Gaols Branch, (1871 – 1960). Reg No. 7577 John Weachurch alias John Hallam alias John Taylor. Correspondence, Photographs and History Sheets of Certain Male Criminals. Public Records Office Victoria
<https://prov.vic.gov.au/archive/EB70C36C-F8DC-11E9-AE98-2926CEEED62E/about>

Pentridge Discipline: to the Editor of The Age (1857, December 4). The Age, 6.

Poultney, T. (2016). Victims of the Rope: Executions in Port Phillip & Victoria, 1842 – 1967. Printed by the Author.

Presland, G. (1997). The First Residents of Melbourne’s Western Region. Harriland Press.

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Spearim, Boe. (2023). The Frontier Wars. Common Ground.
<https://www.commonground.org.au/article/the-frontier-wars>

Warder X. (1909, January 10). Murderers I have Met. 1 – John Weachurch. The Story of his crimes. Truth (Brisbane), 9.