James Berry death location (8th February 1852 to 21st October 1913)

 

Thursday 13th August 1964 saw the last person in the UK to be officially executed by hanging (two men were hanged at the same time but died after the other.) The likelihood of hanging returning is almost nil but it was prevalent for two hundred years. From 1735 to 1964 there were 10,935 executions  of which 557 were women. Here I am outside the former home where an executioner lived and died. I was on my way home after a long day of grave hunting around West Yorkshire and thought I’d have a quick look his home where he breathed his last breath.

 

James was an executioner for seven years from 1884 but he was in his thirties before he started this unusual career. As a young man he served eight years with Bradford Police Force before moving to being a boot salesman. After keeping his family slightly above poverty he applied for the job as a hangman after executioner William Marwood died in 1883. Many hangmen at that time could not read or write but James could. He was 32 when he started executing people. He became adroit at perfecting the science behind the “long drop” - a method developed by the previous hangman William Marwood. He made small but subtle improvements to the gallows to minimise mental and physical suffering and they remained in place until the abolition of capital punishment.

 

James’s name pops up when you research John Babbacombe Lee who had knifed his employer to death. He came known as "The Man They Couldn't Hang". James hadn’t been in the job long when he was sent to hang Lee. Three times the trap door failed to open and Lee was saved from death (he served the rest of his sentence in prison.) It’s thought the trap was secretly blocked by a wooden wedge that was inserted by a prisoner working on the scaffold.

 

James also had another failure when he went to hang Robert Goodale in Norwich prison. Somehow he’s miscalculated to the drop which was based on the man’s weight. The rope was too long and Goodale dropped too far resulting in the rope cutting off his head. This miscalculation meant the end of James’s career. He was sent to hang John Conway at Kirkdale Prison and the drop was - again - slightly too long. The condemned man was almost decapitated. In March 1892 James resigned not knowing that the Home Office was going to sack him anyway.

 

In his seven years he executed 126 men and five women. He hanged William Bury who was suspected by some of being Jack the Ripper believing - as detailed in his memoirs - that Bury and "Jack the Ripper" were the same person.

 

In his forties he converted to Christianity and toured the country as an evangelist, giving lectures on phrenology (where the shape of a person’s skull determines their mental characteristics and abilities - no longer studied.) Oddly he became a prominent campaigner for the abolition of the death penalty. He died aged 61 here at his home Walnut Tree Farm.

 

He's buried with his wife just over two miles away at Scholemoor Cemetery (which I’d visited to find two graves of Yorkshire Ripper victims.) The edging stones bear his name but there's little to see. I did a salute and left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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