HE admitted he had gone from bad to worse, his life frittered away on loose living.

Perhaps it would have been been different but for a harrowing tragedy.

William Atter had been born to highly respectable parents but sadly lost his father as a young boy.

His mother did her best for their three children, getting apprenticed to the village blacksmith.

But the irresponsible Atter happily fell in with dissolute people and crime.

Just 20, he was sentenced to seven years penal servitude for housebreaking but then appeared to have redeemed himself as a model prisoner and released halfway through the term for good behaviour, he enlisted in the army.

But Atter could not accept the discipline and deserted.

Destitute and desperate, he committed a vicious highway robbery. Within days, he was arrested, tried and sentenced to be hanged.

Remarkably it was commuted.

Instead it was a lifetime banishment to Botany Bay and it was thus aged 24 he came on board the York at Portsmouth where he constantly fell foul of the superintendent James O’Connor who twice had mercilessly had him flogged.

Pleas to the captain to move elsewhere on the ship were turned down and once more on June 10, 1848, Atter was in trouble, this time languishing in a solitary cell for refusing to obey O’Connor’s command.

“If the captain does not shift me, I shall do something for O’Connor,” he warned another convict.

And the ‘something’ happened’, Atter grabbing hold of a mallet which he twice smashed down on the turnkey.

Richard Smith, a rigger in the dockyard, witnessed part of the attack.

“I was at work in the upper part of the loft and I had to come to the lower end to fetch a pot, and while I was picking it up, I heard a blow struck,” he told the inquest two days later.

“I immediately looked in the direction from which the blow appeared to come and saw the deceased fall on to the floor.

“A convict was near him and had the mallet over his shoulder. Before I could render any assistance, the convict struck him a second blow on the face as he lay on the ground.

“The blow was a very violent one and the convict was swinging it over his shoulder with both hands, using all his force.”

The court then heard Atter approach from the rattling of his heavily laden chains, entering the room accompanied by two senior police officers.

Without betraying the slightest emotion or indication of the seriousness of his position, he stood in front of the rigger.

“That’s the man,” Smith confirmed.

“I with two others ran to the assistance of the deceased. There was a very severe bruise on his right temple from which blood was issuing.

“I did not speak to the deceased or the prisoner but the latter said: ‘I told him I would cook his goose and now I have done it.”

O’Connor was still alive when a doctor attended him, moaning ‘Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord.”

Another warder on the York, Thomas Pettit, reported he had overheard Atter confessing to another convict.

“I gave him a blow on the head and knocked him down. He then turned his eyes and I gave him another blow and knocked his nose flat on his face.

“I saw the devil stand round him as I killed him.”

Other prisoners carried the dying O’Connor to the adjacent Star Inn. He never regained consciousness, became delirious and fell into a deep coma the following afternoon. He died during the night.

Atter was committed for trial for murder took place at Hampshire Assizes on July 18. There was no hope of an acquittal, despite a letter he had written to the court.

It read: “I hope the jury will consider the treatment I have received on board the York and from James O’Connor. O’Connor was always driving me. My hands were full and blistered. I could never give him any satisfaction. I begged the captain to shift me to another gang as O’Connor would not let me go to the privy, and I was obliged to relieve myself on the works. I had a bowel complaint.

“The captain would not shift me. I was then treated worse than ever. I went to the captain again but he would not shift me and I refused to go to work with O’Connor any more and I was put into the black hole. At last I was driven to do from which I am heartily sorry and I beg the jury to have mercy.”

In his summing up, the judge directed the jury: “Whatever wrong, real or imaginary the prisoner might have received, by the laws of this country, by every law of nature, by every law of right or reason, it was nothing less than murder. If you believe the evidence, you must find him guilty.”

Without retiring, they returned the inevitable verdict and the court fell into a profound silence when the court clerk asked Atter if he had anything to say whether he should die according to the law.

He did not reply, and Mr Justice Williams donned the infamous black cap.

A massive crowd, many of them women, assembled outside the prison gates to watch him hang, but if they had expected him to deliver a final speech, they were in for a major disappointment as he did not attempt anything of the kind. He was remarkably resigned to this fate, frank and open with warders in the condemned cell that his fate was just and he did not fear it.

He wrote an affectionate letter to his mother, begging for a copy to be shown to his fellow convicts and friends, a request that was apparently granted.

Shortly before 9am, he left the cell, shaking hands with the warders before being led tom the scaffold, constantly praying as the hangman Calcraft made the final adjustments.

Following a short prayer and a plea to bystanders, he was launched into eternity.

The drama made a deep impression on the Hampshire Independent reporter, who commented in his report: “We trust for the credit of humanity, this will be the last to be ever seen in this county, and we may see the abolition of law that demands life for life.”

He would never see that in his lifetime.