Mother of 8 Ann Woodman, condemned to death for uttering forged banknotes

“She seems afraid to love her baby.” Elizabeth Fry, Quaker, prison reformer and herself the mother of ten children, recognised the distress of Ann Woodman (alias Lawrence). It is not hard to understand why Woodman was “not in the state of mind we could wish for her.”¹ Her future was bleak in the extreme. She and four – now five – of her eight children were incarcerated in Newgate, she was under sentence of death for her part in a forgery operation, and her husband had already been executed. As Fry observed, “the very health which is being restored to her [Woodman] produces irritation of mind.” Every minute that passed as she recovered from the delivery of her child, moved her closer to death.

Woodman’s husband Thomas Cann or Cane was hanged on 5 March at Debtor’s Door, outside the Old Bailey, in an extraordinary scene. Seven people (six men and a woman) were executed together, an unusually large number even for this particularly bloody period. The event attracted huge crowds, some said even greater than those that assembled in 1807 to watch the hanging of Holloway and Haggerty, who had been convicted on the evidence of someone who was probably the true murderer, when 30 people died in the crush.

Cann and Woodman were not innocent. They, and two brothers Andrew and Benjamin Savage, had sold forged Bank of England one pound notes to John Charles, an agent of the Bank of England, who has avoided the gallows by setting up his former acquaintances. The Bank furnished him with money to purchase the forged notes, and then sent in officers to arrest the seller. Cann and Woodman were arrested in separate incidents on 15 September and confined in the Old Bailey, tried at the end of October and condemned.

In March Cann and the Savage brothers were reported for execution; Woodman was not, because she was pregnant. The news caused Cann to suffer a mental breakdown. Two days before Woodman’s husband Thomas Cann was due to be hanged, Elizabeth Fry wrote in her journal:

Besides this poor young woman [Elizabeth Fricker, who was convicted with her lover of burglary], there are also six men to be hanged, one of whom [Thomas Cann] has a wife very near her confinement [this was Woodman], also condemned, and seven young children. Since the awful report came down, he has become quite mad, from horror of mind. A strait waistcoat could not keep him within bounds – he had just bitten the turnkey, I saw the man come out with his hand bleeding, as I passed the cell.

On 5 March, execution day, the crowd waited, increasingly tense, waiting for the condemned to emerge into the street. Meanwhile, in the press yard² of the Old Bailey, there was confusion. The Observer reported:³

The execution did not take place until a full hour after the ordinary time, and it was generally believed that a reprieve for one or more of the the unhappy culprits was the cause of delay. The circumstance was easily accounted for: Cann, one of the culprits, was on Tuesday evening seized with delirium, which increased to such violence, that he was obliged to be restrained by means of a straight waistcoat, and he continued nearly in a state of insanity the whole night. Wednesday morning he was not perfectly recovered, and the utmost time was therefore allowed, in the hope of his mind being completely restored to a sense of his awful situation.

The authorities must have been relieved when Cann finally regained some composure. They were ready to begin.

Elizabeth Fricker was the first to climb the scaffold. As the hangman put the rope around her neck, she looking around in terror, begged him not to hurt her, wept, and asked to take leave of her co-defendant Kelly. They embraced and Kelly shouted, “She is innocent, innocent – murdered, murdered,” until silenced. At the end, all of the condemned, including Cann, went calmly to their deaths and, according to The Observer, died “apparently without much struggle.” Ann Woodman watched her husband die.

After that, Ann Woodman had little else to do except await the birth of her child and her own execution. She may have appealed for mercy to the Solicitor of the Bank of England. If she did, her letter of petition has not survived in the Bank’s archive. The governors of the Bank were used to receiving pleading letters from those convicted of fraud and uttering, many of them from women anticipating transportation. They were very often left completely without funds – in prison they had to pay for bed and board themselves and any of the children they had in their care. Occasionally, if they were not the primary defendants and if they expressed a suitable degree of contrition, they were granted small sums.

After Thomas Cann’s death, at a committee meeting of the Philanthropic Society, founded in 1788 to care for and reform children who were “the offspring of convicted felons” or who had “themselves been engaged in criminal practices,” a special guest Jeremiah Harman, the Governor of the Bank of England, announced that the Bank would be donating a thousand guineas to the Society. The Bank bore some responsibility for the forgery of their currency: it was ludicrously easy to copy the notes, and the numbers of prosecutions for forgery had reached epidemic proportions. Perhaps conscience had been pricked at the “Old Lady”.

The same meeting discussed the fate of Ann Woodman’s children. It was decided that two of the children, 13-year-old Hannah and 11-year-old Charlotte, would be accepted into the female school at St George’s Circus, Southwark, but the others were too young to be accepted. Their fate is unknown.⁴

Banknotes of small denomination, issued to free up the circulation of coins under the Bank Restriction Act of 1797,  were crudely designed and easy to counterfeit, and they offered temptation to forgers. Consequently there was a huge increase in prosecutions, and executions, for forgery, for which the Bank bore some responsibility. Perhaps conscience had been pricked at the “Old Lady”.

Ann Woodman did not die on the gallows. In July, three months after the birth of her baby, her sentence was respited.⁵

1. Memoir of the life of Elizabeth Fry, with extracts from her journal and letters, Elizabeth Gurney Fry, Katharine Fry, Rachel Elizabeth Cresswell. J. W. Moore, Philadelphia, 1847
2. So-called because this was where prisoners once suffered the ancient punishment peine forte et dure, that is being crushed with weights.
3. 9 March 1817.
4. Nipping Crime in the Bud: How the Philanthropic Quest was Put Into Law, Muriel Whitten. Waterside Press, 2011.
5. Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 20 July 1817.