The Christmas Execution No One Tried to Stop | True Crime 1898
News of the Times | Episode 591 | 1898
In today’s episode, we travel to Bugsworth, Derbyshire, where the brutal murder of Hannah Cotton shocked Victorian reporters… but what stunned them even more was this:
When her husband John Cotton was sentenced to hang — just four days before Christmas — no one asked for clemency.

No neighbours.
No friends.
No anti-capital-punishment campaigners.
Not even the canal community who had known him for decades.

Victorian newspapers called him “friendless,” a man whose violence had driven away every human tie long before the gallows claimed him. Tonight, we examine how a life shaped by hardship, jealousy, and cruelty ended with an execution that the public accepted without hesitation.

Along the way, we uncover:
• the shadowy world of Victorian canal-boat life
• allegations surrounding two previous wives
• the testimony of three schoolgirls who saw the murder
• why even at Christmastime, no voice rose to save him
• shifting attitudes toward capital punishment in 1890s Britain

And in a lighter Further Particulars: a wedding at St John’s, Hammersmith, collapses spectacularly when someone stands mid-ceremony to announce, “Stop! That man has a wife already!”

👤 Narrated by Robin Coles 

📅 New episodes: Monday, Wednesday & Friday 
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📚 Related cases from the archive: 
1843 - 1898: Favourite Victorian Cases 2024 |  EP428
https://youtu.be/K-6i26HYCgI
1898: The Case of the St Neots Murder |  EP448
https://youtu.be/4qvv0FZ36g8
1898: The Nolagh House of Horror: Ireland’s 1898 Family Massacre |  EP556
https://youtu.be/jLFY8LtgtZk

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