To die game

DUNGHILL. A coward: a cockpit phrase, all but game cocks being styled dunghills. To die dunghill; to repent, or show any signs of contrition, at the gallows.

GAME. ... To die game; to suffer at the gallows without shewing any signs of fear or repentance.

Francis Grose (1731–1791)

from A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785)


A concensus seems to have somehow developed that watching the videos of Saddam Hussein's execution was of itself a disreputable thing to do: a mark at best of unseemly curiosity, at worst of some kind of perverted thrill-seeking. Well, I watched them, and I have been thinking about it since.

I watched the videos with the same kind of sick feeling in my solar plexus that I lived with during the weeks that I wrote the chapters on early modern hangings in my book Outlaws and Highwaymen. I wrote those chapters because my subject required them; to leave them out would have been a serious falsification.

I watched the videos to inform myself, because I thought that was necessary – for me. I am certainly not saying I think they should be required viewing – far from it. But I have been interested to realise that I did in fact learn something important from watching them that I hadn’t been anticipating.

I grasped that a man facing imminent execution with a firm display of outward courage, even to the point of replying audibly and with calm contempt to insults from a hostile crowd, acquires what I can only describe as immense personal authority. This is a man who is supremely in control of himself.

I knew from my research that one of the things that was necessary for a robber to pass into legend was for him to ‘die game’, as they put it in eighteenth-century London. Before this, I hadn’t understood in my gut what a powerful and memorable spectacle that might be.

If there were any Blair sock-puppets hanging around this journal, they would be popping up to remind me that Saddam Hussein was a very evil man, who committed ‘crimes ... against his own people’. (I guess that formula has been contrived to make the monstrous crimes Bush and Blair have committed in Iraq seem less heinous by comparison – the Iraqis are not their people, after all.) I am not in danger of forgetting Saddam‘s crimes, nor those committed in the name of my own country. But I acknowledge that the blood-stained old tyrant faced execution with very great courage.

And now I understand, for instance, just a little more about how that lesser, but still unpleasant, criminal, Dick Turpin, who also ‘died game’, acquired a place in the long-term memory of the people. As to how it happened that he was eventually transformed into the representative romantic highwayman – there is still a certain amount of mystery in that.


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