Famous Last Words

“I did not get my Spaghetti-O’s, I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this.”

You would have thought that convicted murderer Thomas Grasso had more important things on his mind than spaghetti. He was after all about to be executed by lethal injection. It is entirely possible that he was about to say something else, perhaps go on to give an eloquent explanation about how he was using the spaghetti incident as a metaphore in a wider statement concerning the general treatment of deathrow prisoners, but unfortunately at that point he snuffed it. His concluding remark therefore leaves us with the impression of a man who, given the full and undivided attention of the world’s media, chose to moan about his dinner.

Only your parents will remember your first faltering words, unless of course you happen to be a gorilla taking part in a groundbreaking scientific research programme, in which case your epochal request for ‘more nanas pease’ will probably be international news. The rest of us usually have to rely on the memory of a parent, which given the number of times my own mother inexplicably leaves her spectacles in the fridge, may not be all that reliable. However, potentially at least, the rest of eternity may recall the last thing you ever say. With that in mind it is probably worth preparing a little something in advance, something short and snappy and easily recalled in a moment of duress. A moment of duress being those final seconds before you expire, naturally. Or even unnaturally, as was the fate of Benjamin Dodd, a lifelong petty thief and eventual forger who was hanged in 1712. On the gallows he gamely invited anyone in the crowd to, “Swap places for the gold coin sewn inside my waistcoat.” Unsurprisingly not a single member of the assembled mob took him up on the offer, and Dodd was swiftly hanged. And robbed.

All the same, it shows that Dodd was thinking on his feet well before being hoisted off his them. He found something to say, something he felt was important, if a trifle ambitious. In fact condemned criminals – along with withering poets – are the masters of the melodramatic adieu. When mother and daughter Elizabeth and Mary Branch were brought to the gallows for the murder of a servant girl in 1740, they each made an address of such tedious verbosity that many in the rowdy mob of assembled raggamuffins stretched out and asked to be woke for the finale.

Meanwhile Harry Harbord Morant, an Australian poet, bushman, hero, and occasional murderer, is remembered for urging his firing squad from the Cameron Highlanders regiment to, “Shoot straight, you bastards – don’t make a mess of it!” and thoughtful to a man, they obliged. So it wasn’t exactly poetry (but then again, Morant was an apauling poet. The opening verse of his final ditty, penned from his cell in South Africa, should possibly have earned him a place in front of a second firing squad: In prison cell I sadly sit/ A dammed crestfallen chappie/ And own to you I feel a bit/ A little bit unhappy), but it does demonstrate a commitment to the cause, that being to be immortalised in any number of magazine articles and circulating e-mails.

Providing office workers with light relief was probably the furthest thing from the mind of Gunpowder Plot co-conspiritor Everard Digby as his heart was cut out of his still-living body and displayed before a baying crowd. Well it would be wouldn’t it? However, when the executioner called out, “Behold – the heart of a traitor!” Digby sent giggles rippling through countless Human Resources departments centuries in the future by indignantly responding, “Oooh, thou liest!“

Indeed condemnded criminals can often be relied upon to bring a much-needed chuckle to an otherwise solemn occasion. Unlike Everard Digby, poisoner William Palmer probably had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he stepped onto the trapdoor of the gallows and queried of the hangman, “Are you sure this is safe?” and James Rodgers, who was asked whether he had a last request before facing a line of rifles, was not seriously hopeful when he replied: “Why yes – a bulletproof vest!“

The irksome thing about death is that it so often occurs in the middle of a sentence, as Major General John Sedgwick disovered at the battle of Spotsylvania in 1864, moments before he was felled by a sniper: “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist-“

Therein lies another problem. If you don’t go out with a bang, a whimper, a song or a wisecrack – or even if your timing is just memorably unfortunate: “I am still alive!” the emporer Caligula reported triumphantly, as he was being stabbed to death by his own guards – you run the risk of having something attributed post mortem. The truth is that Sedgewick was killed hours after scoffing at the acuracy of his enemy’s snipers. For all we know his very final words may have been something completely ordinary, but how many people would have heard of Sedgwick had his last words been faithfully recorded as: “Simon, is there any more tea in that pot?” Forget that he was the most senior officer killed in the American civil war – mere facts don’t bring a man the level of immortality that a piece of humourous trivia can. If French grammarian Dominic Bouhours really did take a last shuddering breath and whisper: “I am about to – or I am going to – die; either expression is correct.” I will eat a Pot Noodle.

Let me quickly add one final note of warning, least my roof suddenly collapse and I be remembered as the man whose last words were ‘Pot Noodle’. Never tempt fate – it bites, as Canadian tourist John Murdoch, who excitedly urged his wife to, “Get a picture of me with the bear,” found out to his great cost. There is little more the Hand of Fate can do after a line such as that other than give you a fatal mauling. That is just the way of these things. Or as the legendary Aussie outlaw Ned Kelly concluded: “Such is life.”