“I’m fed up with life,” 21-year-old James Fletcher told the police when he was arrested for murder. Which wasn’t altogether surprising, because he was already serving a seven-year sentence at Chatham Prison, where he had been set to work breaking rocks.

The work made him so depressed that he lifted his hammer and smashed it into the head of prison officer James Boyle, who died a few hours later in terrible agony.

Fletcher’s trial lasted for just three hours. He was publicly hanged on Tuesday, January 10th, 1867, outside Maidstone Prison, alongside Ann Lawrence, 29, who killed her four-year-old son at Tunbridge Wells.