It was a bitterly cold November day, and they were two old men, penniless paupers, huddled over a fire in the workhouse in Devizes. “Move over a bit,” Charles Gerrish, 70, told Steven Coleman, 77. “It’s my turn to get a bit warmer.”

Coleman refused to budge, and they began to argue. Exasperated, Gerrish pulled a red-hot poker from the fire and thrust it into Coleman’s neck, killing him instantly.

At Gerrish’s trial at Wiltshire Assizes he was said to be “addicted to fits of passion.” He was hanged on Monday, January 30th, 1882, at Devizes Prison.