Robert ‘Nosey Bob’ Howard

Robert Rice Howard

[media]Robert Rice Howard was a successful Sydney cab driver in the mid-nineteenth century. When he lost his nose in an accident, the disfigured cabbie also lost much of his business, and the man who came to be known as ‘Nosey Bob’ took on the role of hangman for New South Wales.

Marriage and children

Robert Rice Howard was born in early 1832 in Norfolk, England, to Henry Howard and Mary Ann Howard, née Rice.[1] In 1858, the 26-year-old Howard, who was working as a coachman like his father, married Jane Townsend, the daughter of a stonemason, at Saint Luke’s Church in Charlton, now a suburb in south east London.[2] Robert and Jane Howard welcomed their first three children in England: Mary Ann, Emily Jane and Edward Charles.[3] In the 1860s the Howards decided to emigrate to Australia, arriving in Moreton Bay in early 1866.[4] After the birth of Fanny, in Brisbane, the growing family moved again, leaving Queensland for New South Wales where they were soon joined by sons Sydney and William George.[5]

A successful career, ruined by an accident

Howard was apparently a tall and good-looking man, who ‘passed for an Adonis amongst the horsey crowd’[6] and was allegedly the preferred coachman for Government House.[7] Some newspaper articles even claimed Howard was called upon to drive for His Royal Highness, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, during his visits to Sydney, but this has never been substantiated.[8]

Almost every published account of Howard’s life includes a statement that he lost his nose when he suffered a horse’s kick to the head, with his terrible disfigurement instant and irreparable. There are several different versions of this story, but there are no specifics offered. Even when Howard recounts his own transition from cab driver to executioner, there are few details:

I used to drive a cab. I was always amongst horses from a boy, but although I had a good turn-out and was always well dressed, I found that the public, ladies particularly, objected to engage me owing to this disfigurement, which I had suffered through an accident with a horse. The post of assistant-executioner became vacant and I applied for it and got it. I had no idea then of becoming the principal, but that fell to me in due course.[9]

With a wife and six children to support, a disfigured and desperate Howard may have felt he had few options. A permanent position with the colony’s Department of Justice may have brought with it the infamy of being the executioner, but it also offered financial security for himself and his family.

Howard’s debut as a hangman

Some histories start Howard's career as a hangman in 1875[10] yet when George Pitt was executed on 21 June 1876 in Mudgee, the state's principal hangman, William Tucker (or Tuckett), was followed out by his new assistant. Reports noted that Tucker’s offsider, presumably Howard, ‘was recognised as having once been in good circumstances in Sydney’.[11] Just days later Michael Connolly was hanged on 28 June 1876 in Tamworth.[12] When Daniel Boon was hanged on 19 July 1876 in Wagga Wagga, the assistant executioner was mentioned in newspaper reports as a man ‘whose naturally repulsive appearance was heightened by the absence of any nose’.[13] Thomas Newman was the next man executed in New South Wales, mounting the scaffold in Dubbo ‘with a hangman on either side’, on 29 May 1877.[14]

When Peter Murdick was hanged in Wagga Wagga on 18 December 1877, there was no mention of an assistant accompanying the senior hangman who arrived from Sydney. This senior man was very likely to have been Robert Howard.[15] Only one person was hanged in New South Wales the following year, In Chee on 28 May 1878 in Goulburn.[16] When Alfred, an Aboriginal man, was hanged on 10 June 1879 in Mudgee, it was clear that Howard held the position of senior executioner for the colony of New South Wales.[17]

Such was the stigma attached to the role of hangman however, that his employment was not published in the NSW Government Gazette until 1896 and the Public Service List until 1897, creating some confusion around the dates of his first work on a scaffold.[18] When Howard was first publicly listed as a civil servant, he had actually been the principal hangman for around two decades.

A happy family, but a horrible job

Howard once told JF Archibald, co-founder of The Bulletin, that he took the job and was ‘not ashamed of it’. He explained that he was a comfortable man who could support his children – they were all clean, well read and well mannered – and that he had ‘as good a garden as there is anywhere’.[19] Despite a happy home life, the task of the executioner took a toll.

Howard, like many of his predecessors in the role, was known to drink, though he never appeared drunk on the job. His drinking was reported as early as the late 1870s and by the mid-1880s his problems with alcohol were widely acknowledged. It had ‘to be admitted, Robert usually gives way to drink, and may often then be seen, clad in the strictest black, helplessly clasping a lamp-post’.[20]

Howard was at this time battling public revulsion and private loneliness. His wife of almost 20 years died at home aged 42 on 22 August 1878. It was suggested that Jane died of shame, that being married to a hangman who was constantly insulted and taunted was more than she could bear.[21] Her death certificate states the cause of death less fancifully as ‘Disease of Lungs (4 months)’ and ‘Pleuritic Effusion’.[22]

It has also been suggested that his ‘three beautiful daughters were condemned to lives of lonely spinsterhood because, as the story goes, no suitor was willing to suffer the ignominy of having a hangman as father-in-law’.[23] Yet, Mary Ann married Edward Hawkins, at a registry office on 20 May 1879 and Fanny married Harry Bullenthorpe at St Peter’s Anglican Church in Darlinghurst on 4 April 1885.[24] Emily Jane died from heart disease, on 20 December 1880, when she was just 18 years old.[25] At least two of Howard’s three sons also married.[26]

Bad bungles and famous felons

Nosey Bob, during his tenure as an executioner, witnessed some scientific developments designed to improve the process of hanging. An official ‘Table of Drops’ was created in 1888 and updated in 1892. These tables, an improvement on the standard long drop of 8 feet that had been determined in 1880, took some of the guesswork out of hanging by listing how far a felon had to fall, based on their weight in pounds, to facilitate a dislocated neck as swiftly and cleanly as possible.[27] Basically, the heavier the criminal, the shorter the drop. Unfortunately mistakes were still made. At one extreme, the condemned could be strangled. When Henry Tester was hanged on 7 December 1882 in Deniliquin, it was thirty-five minutes after the bolt was drawn before he was declared dead.[28] At the other extreme, prisoners could lose their heads. When William Liddiard was hanged on 8 June 1886 in Grafton, it was declared that ‘death must have been instantaneous, for the head was almost severed from the body by the rope’.[29] When Howard set ropes for Charles Montgomery and Thomas Williams on 31 May 1894 in Darlinghurst Gaol, Montgomery’s death was instant, but Williams suffocated[30] after the men were put before ‘the wrong ropes, Montgomery being the tallest man was given a drop of 10 feet and Williams only 8 feet’.[31]

Howard claimed that he ‘had very few bungles’[32] but the newspapers disagreed, and ‘Nosey Bob’, as the press labelled him, was the subject of dozens of damning articles. When he botched the hangings of Montgomery and Williams, newspaper headlines such as ‘Our Hangman’s Horrible Blunder’, ‘A Horrible Bungle’, ‘Horrible Bungle on the Scaffold’ and ‘Another Bungle’ appeared across the country.[33]

Howard hanged felons across New South Wales, but almost half of his work was completed at the imposing Darlinghurst Gaol where he hanged some of the most famous criminals of colonial Sydney. When 11 men were tried for the rape of Mary Jane Hicks in 1886, nine were found guilty. Five had their sentences commuted but four – George Duffy, Joseph Martin, William Boyce and Robert Read – met Nosey Bob on 7 January 1887.[34] Howard also hanged Louisa Collins, accused murderer and the last woman executed in New South Wales, on 8 January 1889,  and notorious baby farmer John Makin on 15 August 1893.[35] He also 'turned off' Frank Butler, Australia’s first serial killer, on 16 July 1897, as well as the last bushrangers of New South Wales, Jacky Underwood at Dubbo on 14 January 1901, and Jimmy Governor at Darlinghurst on 18 January 1901.[36]

Retirement and death

Nosey Bob’s last job was a double hanging, Digby Grand and Henry Jones, who were convicted of murder, on 7 July 1903 in Darlinghurst Gaol (Grand was slowly strangled, Jones had his neck dislocated).[37] Then, after 28 years of continuous service, Howard finally retired in May 1904. He was on the same annual salary of £156 (roughly equivalent to $150,000 in 2019) that he had been on in 1876.[38]

Though his profession was reviled, many thought of Howard ‘as a quiet, inoffensive man, who is ever ready to give his mite towards the assistance of any case of distress or to do a good deed for any of his fellow creatures’.[39] It was, however, noted upon his retirement that ‘Robert Howard’s 'work' of late years has been fairly well performed, but at times there was a recklessness about it which caused extreme pain to the public and the hanged’.[40]

After his retirement Howard continued to live in his modest timber cottage at north Bondi on Brighton Boulevard, just off modern-day Campbell Parade, where he had moved in the 1880s.[41] He still liked a drink, and he famously trained a horse to carry a billy and make the return trip from his home to a local establishment. The billy carried a sixpence there and beer on the way back.[42] His short retirement was quiet. He spent time with his family, he looked after his animals and he tended his garden. Howard also spent time fishing, having developed a reputation for being very good at catching sharks.[43]

Robert Rice Howard died of endocarditis and senile decay on 3 February 1906 at the age of 74, less than two years after retiring.[44] All of his surviving children received blocks of land on his death.[45]

A popular character

Nosey Bob remained a firm feature of popular culture in New South Wales long after his passing. Like the famous English hangmen ‘Bull’ and ‘Jack Ketch’, ‘Nosey Bob’ became a byword for an executioner in Australian cultural references for many years.

Shortly before Howard died, one author quipped: ‘I’m that thirsty I’d drink with Nosey Bob’, a phrase that became an Australian colloquialism.[46] When it was rumoured that the judge William Charles Windeyer – a man who generated quite a bit of business for the executioner during his career – was writing a book of poetry, it was suggested that the volume should 'open with an apostrophe to the gallows, and to conclude with a sonnet to 'Nosey Bob', the N.S.W. hangman’.[47]

References

Beck, D, Hope in Hell: A History of the Darlinghurst Gaol and National Art School, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.

Family History, Sydney: Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages NSW, various years.

Haughton, S, ‘On hanging considered from a mechanical and physiological point of view’, London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, Vol.32, No.213, 1866, pp.23–34.

‘Howard, Robert [vertical file]: “Nosey Bob” the Hangman’, Waverley Library Local Studies Collection, Waverley, 1832–1902, call no. VF HOWA.

Public Service List, Sydney: New South Wales Government Printing Office, 1897 and 1903.

Report of the Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Existing Practice as to carrying out Sentences of Death [Aberdare Report], London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1888.

The Earl of Kimberley, Secretary of State for the Colonies (Downing Street, London), Circulars on Capital Punishment, Queensland State Archives, Brisbane, 27 June–28 December 1880, call no. ITM17282.

Sydney, Suburban and Country Commercial Directory, Sydney: John Sands Ltd, various years.

Ward, Ross, The Office of the Sheriff: A Millennium of Tradition, Sydney: Department of Courts Administration, 1992.

Notes