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.