Execution Dock

Execution Dock - where pirates met their maker

Wapping was home to 'Execution Dock' which for approximately 400 years until 1830 was the host of executions relating to maritime crimes. Some pages on the web quote the location as being either uncertain, or in a variety of different locations, however having studied numerous maps (see an early post on maps of the area) that 'execution dock' was clearly on the river between what is now the Town of Ramsgate and the Overground section and this is further supported by the perspective of the church in Rotherhithe in this 18th century engraving. I'll do another post on this later, as this post looks at the frequency of executions.

Over the period for which I have data (1735-1830) there were 84 executions which took place on 50 different dates. These executions took place over 95 years, or just under 35,000 days, meaning that there was only one execution every 700 days, which I found surprising, I assumed that it might have been more active - I may need to compare to Tyburn to get a better sense.

Breaking the data down by decade shows a reasonable level of variation, with the number of executions ranging from 1 to 18 in a given decade.

	Number of executions
1730s	7
1740s	3
1750s	7
1760s	12
1770s	3
1780s	13
1790s	13
1800s	5
1810s	18
1820s	1
1830s	2

The data suggests executions were quite sporadic - I note above that there were only 50 occasions when hangings took place, and these took place in only 34 of the 95 years. I plotted the number of executions in each decade to see if there was any indication of a trend in the number of executions overtime.

The blue bars in the chart show each decade's executions, whilst the red line shows the cumulative number of executions (totalling 84 over the period). I plotted a linear trend line for the cumulative number of executions (essentially the gradient relates to 84 executions spead evenly over 10 decades). Despite the significant variation in the number of executions, we can see that the cumulative trend stays close to the trend line, indicating that there is no significant change in the number of executions over the period.

I'll post a breakdown of the nature of the crimes in a subsequent post and I will have a read of the Old Bailey cases and see if any of the cases are of interest.