As regular readers are aware, I cover true crime here a fair bit and the death penalty is a regular feature. So, today, it’s with some small satisfaction that we’re going to look at Britain’s last executions.
On August 13, 1964 Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen took their unwilling place in British penal history as the last-ever inmates to suffer the ‘dread sentence’, to be taken to one of Her Majesty’s Prisons and keep their date with the hangman. Well, hangmen, actually. Evans met his death at HMP Strangeways at the hands of Harry Allen (grandfather of British comedienne Fiona Allen) assisted by Harry Robinson. Allen met his at HMP Walton at the hands of Robert Leslie Stewart (known as ‘Jock’, being from Edinburgh) assisted by Royston Rickard.
Their crime was unremarkable (not that any murder is a trivial matter) and their executions were equally standard affairs except for the fact that they were the last in British penal history. Judges would continue to don the dreaded ‘Black Cap’ and pass the ‘dread sentence’ until 1969, when the death penalty was retained for several crimes other than murder. The death penalty would finally be repealed in 1998 under the Human Rights Act. By then the noose and scaffold had already been consigned to history and the occasional prison museum. Never again would the prison bell toll or the black flag be hoisted just after eight or nine in the morning. No longer would crowds gather outside a prison’s gates in protest at what was happening inside.. No more would a prison warder have to brave an angry crowd to post the official announcement on a prison gate. After centuries of State-sanctioned killing ranging from the deliberately-barbaric to the scientifically-precise, ‘Jack Ketch’ had finally put away his noose and passed into history.
Clik here to view.
Hangmen of Britain.
Not that this was any consolation whatsoever to Evans and Allen. As far as they were concerned it made no difference at all and nor did it to anyone else. They still had to sit in their Condemned Cells at Walton and Strangeways, guarded 24 hours a day by prison warders and hoping every day for a reprieve that never came. Prison staff and the hangmen still had to report for duty as instructed and ensure that everything was prepared properly down to the finest detail. The Appeal Court judges and Home Secretary still had to discuss, debate and ponder their decision, knowing all the time that if they refused clemency then these two deaths would be as much their responsibility as that of the executioners themselves.
Their crime was brutal and their guilt undeniable. Given the evidence against them there was almost no chance of their being acquitted. To manage that would require lawyers possessed of both boundless talent and equal optimism. If they did ever stand a chance of avoiding the gallows then it was far more likely to be through a reprieve than an acquittal. Barring a reprieve or a legal blunder serious enough to impress the Court of Criminal Appeal, their race was run and they probably knew it.
Clik here to view.
Evens and Allen, the last two convicts to be executed in Britain.
Evans and Allen were both your typical condemned inmates. Under-educated, lower IQs than usual, failed to hold down any job for very long and had a string of petty criminal convictions between them. Fraud, theft, deception, the usual type of relatively low-level crimes that see a person in and out of trouble on a semi-regular basis and nothing to suggest that either was capable of a brutal and old-blooded murder. Then again, a great many brutal, cold-blooded murderers have been described as not being ‘the type’ even though there is no ‘type’ to watch out for. It would make honest people’s lives so much easier if there were.
Aside from not seeming the type, Allen and Evans weren’t exactly criminal masterminds either. After beating and stabbing to death Alan West in his home during a bungled robbery on July 7, 1964, Evans in particular left a trail of evidence that Hansel and Gretal would have been proud of. He left a medallion at the crime scene with his name inscribed on it. When he was dumping the stolen car they’d used to visit West’s home, he dumped it at a builder’s yard and made himself so conspicuous (and, to a neighbour, highly suspicious) that it wasn’t long before he found himself in custody. Being found in possession of the victim’s gold watch probably didn’t help his case much either.
Once under questioning Evans excelled himself even further. Initially he denied being involved. On realising he’d left a smoking gun with his name on it at the scene he decided to bury Peter Allen and save himself from a charge of capital murder by putting all the blame on his accomplice. He denied having a knife on him during the robbery and clearly blamed Allen for stabbing West to death, which might have worked a great deal better but for one small problem. At the time Evans was loudly denying his having had or used a knife to murder Alan West, police pointed out to him that they hadn’t actually mentioned a knife, nor had they released that information to the press. Oops.
Allen was now also in custody and being questioned. Both killers were under lock and key within 48 hours of committing their crime, a pretty fast resolution to a murder investigation. By modern American standards, their road from trial to execution would certainly seem faster still. One of the principle complaints of America’s pro-execution lobby is that the appeals process takes far too long. There are too many levels of court, too many technicalities, too many bleeding-heart pro-bono lawyers, too many soft judges and State Governors who refuse to allow what a judge and jury have already decided to hand down. Not so in Britain. A condemned inmate was granted a minimum of only 3 Sundays between sentencing and execution. That didn’t mean an execution always happened 3 weeks after a sentence due to appeals, finding new evidence, court schedules, sanity hearings and so on, but 3 Sundays was all you could expect as of right.
Your avenues for appeal were both smaller in number and moved a great deal faster than their American counterparts as well. After sentencing your first stop was the Court of Criminal Appeal where your appeal against conviction and sentencing would be heard by a panel of 3 judges, often including the Lord Chief Justice himself if he hadn’t presided at your trial. If they turned you down, you moved up the Home Secretary (nowadays the Minister of Justice). If the Home Secretary turned you down you could still appeal to the King or Queen, but this was effectively pointless. By one of the many unwritten rules so beloved of British officialdom, the Monarch didn’t grant an appeal except on the private advice of the Home Secretary. A Home Secretary (an elected official) might want to respond to (or defy) public opinion by granting a reprieve while risking their job if they were seen to do so. The Monarch, on the other hand, not having to consider their approval rating, could grant an appeal thereby saving a prisoner without causing problems for the elected officials concerned. But, regardless of whether a prisoner appealed directly to a Monarch, without a Home Secretary’s advice there would be no reprieve. Nobody involved felt merciful towards Evans and Allen.
Clik here to view.
The black cap traditionally worn by British judges when sentencing a defendant to death.
Their trial began at Manchester Assizes on June 23, 1964 with Mr. Justice Ashworth presiding. Leading for the prosecution was was Joseph Cantley, QC (Queen’s Counsel, a senior lawyer) while Allen was defended by lawyers F.J. Nance and R.G. Hamilton. Evans was represented by Griffith Guthrie-Jones, QC. It didn’t take very long. With Evans’s many and varied blunders and Allen’s wife as the star prosecution witness, testifying that she’d seen Evans dispose of the knife and that Allen had made incriminating remarks in her presence, even the best of defenders couldn’t have won a verdict of not guilty. Justice Ashworth then took his own place in British penal history, becoming the last British judge in a British courtroom to don the dreaded ‘Black Cap’ (a square of black silk placed atop a judge’s wig as a gesture of mourning for the newly-condemned and recite the modified death sentence.
Previously, the judge would have recited a long, drawn-out set script which usually did little to help a prisoner keep their composure. It was this:
“Prisoner at the Bar, you have been convicted of the crime of willful murder. The sentence of this Court is that you be taken from this place to a lawful prison, and thence to a place of execution where you shall be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And that your body be afterwards cut down and buried within the precincts of the prison in which you were last confined before execution. And may the Lord have mercy upon your soul. Remove the prisoner…”
Ashworth’s version was edited for brevity and out of compassion for the prisoners hearing it:
‘”Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans, you have been convicted of murder and shall suffer the sentence prescribed by law.”
Clik here to view.
The hanging room
Shorter, certainly. But not tasting any more sweet. Their one mandatory appeal was heard by Lord Chief Justice Parker, Justice Winn and Justice Widgery on July 20, 1964. It was denied the next day. The executioners were engaged and a date set. Evans and Allen would die at HMP Strangeways and HMP Walton respectively. Harry Allen and Harry Robinson would execute Evans, Robert Leslie Stewart and Royston Rickard would execute Allen. Both men dying at the same time meant that no one hangman could ever claim to Britain’s last executioner.