Northern Ireland

Judge in Public Flogging Call – On This Day in 1924

Man ordered to have 20 strokes of the ‘cat’ for living on immoral earnings of a woman

A rope whip with nine knotted lashes for flogging sailors, soldiers or criminals aboard the convict ship HMS 'Success'
A rope whip with nine knotted lashes for flogging sailors, soldiers or criminals aboard the convict ship HMS 'Success' (Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
June 13 1924

The first sentence involving the lash passed in Glasgow under the Amended Act was pronounced yesterday on a young man convicted for the second time of living on the immoral earnings of a woman. He was ordered twenty strokes of the cat in addition to nine months’ hard labour.

Sheriff Fyfe, in passing sentence, declared that in his opinion use of the cat was the only effective way of putting down this particularly heinous form of offence, and he was sorry they had squeamishly introduced the word “privately” into the Act.

In the old days when flogging was quite commonly reported to, the criminal was publicly flogged through the streets, and had he the power he would not have hesitated in imposing that sentence on the accused. It would have been an object lesson to onlookers, of whom not a few he was afraid were accustomed to resort to this occupation, which was perhaps the meanest conceivable form of crime for any man calling himself a man to commit.

While the punishment of flogging was banned in Great Britain in 1948, judicial corporal punishment was only abolished in Northern Ireland in 1968.
Morse Murder

George Morse (27), a New Zealand carpenter, has, says the “Daily Mail”, been found guilty there of the murder of Mrs Hilda Emily Hunter, and sentenced to death. At the conclusion of the [First World] war Morse joined the “Black and Tans”.

After finishing up with the Auxiliaries in 1922, Morse travelled to Adelaide in Australia with Coleraine-born Hilda Emily Hunter, where he killed her and then injured himself trying to kill himself.
Union Jack in Free State

Major-General Edward Langford Dillon JP, a Crimean veteran, who died at Hodson Bay, near Athlone, was buried yesterday afternoon in Kiltoom Protestant cemetery with full military honours.

The Western Command of the National Army (Major-General Sean McKeon) supplied the guard of honour and firing party. The coffin, which was draped with the Union Jack, was borne to the gun-carriage by six stalwart Free State Army officers.

As well as facilitating annual Armistice Day commemorations, Free State Army members also provided guards of honour and firing parties for funerals of some British Army veterans.