Winchester Death Masks

In the Early Life of Thomas Hardy (1928), there is a note dated 1888 about a builder and plasterer named Thomas Haviland Voss. Amongst his other labours, 'Voss used to take casts of heads of executed convicts ... Dan Pouncey held the heads while it was being done. Voss oiled the faces, and took them in halves, afterwards making casts from the masks. There was a groove where the rope went.' (This might refer to the rope of the gallows; or to the cord put under the plastercast to help extract it from the face.) The casts of executed murderers were valuable material to phrenologists, who studied the formation of the head in the belief that the shape of the skull gives valuable information on the character of its owner (a ceramic head for phrenological study is in the classroom opposite mine, and a daily object of envy).

William Palmer

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Winchester Prison apparently gave 28 death masks to the local museum. Where their provenance was before that remains a mystery, though the donation may have been an act of civic munificence on the part of Dr Henry Giles Lyford, prison surgeon and subscriber to the Winchester Museum Fund.

Whatever their origin, a selection of these masks are now on display in the City Space area of the Winchester Discovery Centre. Not all are of murderers. The first is of one 'Eustache', former slave in St Domingo who, in the slave uprising there (1791-1803) apparently saved some 400 white people from being killed. A life of loyal service to new masters followed, ending with a period in Paris in which Eustache was observed giving regularly and generously to the poor. What would psychologists call this behaviour pattern today? Extreme empathy? Phrenologists of the time labelled it 'Benevolence' and observed that the middle forehead, where our generous instincts allegedly have their physical manifestation, was appropriately large. Next to Eustache are a series of individuals seemingly untroubled by empathy,

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including William Palmer, 'Prince of Poisoners', who made a career of killing to cover his debts. His victims included his wife, brother, mother-in-law and four of his own children. The Inscription reads 'The first cast of William Palmer. Taken by William Bally phrenologist of Manchester the 14th June 1856 Stafford'. Next to Palmer is the murderer Courvoisier and next to him James Blomfield Rush, responsible for a notorious nineteenth-century outrage, the 'Murder at Stanfield Hall'. An excerpt is given of the exhuastive documentation and analysis of his head, which must have accompanied other details of his execution. Far from his worldly triumphs, the half-mask of Napoleon Bonaparte lies in a case nearby. The exhibition is completed by two anonymous casts: one looks like an execution victim: I saw, or imagined perhaps, a groove round the neck and the expression is set in a grimace. The other is small and ungrooved; perhaps something about its shape excited the curiosity of  surgeon who had a cast taken. Or perhaps the life had been remarkable in some way that we will never know.

Phrenology is now as dead as its models, but it is impossible not to look for the mind's construction in the face, and even without the accompanying information one might surmise that William Palmer was not of a kindly avuncular persuasion. Drs Lyford and Bally and their colleagues must have gone over these items painstakingly with compasses, noting down measurements with the same solemnity as a psychologist would write up data today. The results would then be tabulated and compared. Though what practical proposals could ensue from the knowledge gained? Perhaps some kind of eugenics system was hatching in advanced minds, whereby those endowed with ominously unbenevolent heads could be quietly terminated or isolated in some way. At the practical end of things, I imagine being Mr Pouncy holding the head of a Dorchester deceased convict and feeling Mr Voss's plaster or wax fall around my hands. What did a cast cost, though, and who paid for it? Was it simply a regular part of hospital procedure (casts of hands, too, were made, we are told). Did the bereaved (or in Palmer's case, any surviving family members) have any entitlement to object to their wretched kinsfolk being given a death beyond death?  And was it Voss or Pouncy, I wonder, who closed the victim's eyes?