THE WORST AND TERRIBLE EXECUTION OF JAMES BERRY OF HECKMONDWIKE YORKSHIRE .......

 James Berry of Heckmondwike Yorkshire (1852-1913).

Period on Home Office List - 1884-1891.

James Berry was born on the 8th of February 1852.  He carried out a total of 130 hangings, including those of five women and that of John Lee (see below).

 He was the first British executioner to write his memoirs, "My Experiences as an Executioner" which is still available in libraries and also on line.

He was, like Marwood, proud of his calling and both had their own waxworks in Madame Tussauds. 

Berry had previously been a policeman in Bradford and had met Marwood and became acquainted with his methods.  He worked in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, but strangely not in his native Yorkshire, where James Billington always got the job.  

His seven years in office were not without event.

His first commission was the double hanging of William Innes and Robert Vickers at Edinburgh’s Calton prison on the 31st of March 1884. Innes and Vickers were two poachers who had shot and killed two gamekeepers. 

Mary Lefley was to be his first English execution, on the 26th of May at Lincoln County gaol. Lefley, aged 44, poisoned her husband with arsenic and had to be dragged to the gallows screaming "Murder, Murder" and struggling with the warders. In both of these executions Berry was assisted by “Richard Chester”, not his real name which he kept concealed. 

He assisted Berry on a few other occasions when required, although Berry normally worked alone.

One of his most famous (non) jobs was the strange case of John Lee - "The man they could not hang" on the 23rd of February 1885 at Exeter prison. Twenty year old John Lee was convicted of the murder of his elderly employer Emma Keyse, for whom he worked as a footman. 

 All the normal preparations were made on the gallows, set up in the coach house at Exeter prison, but when Berry operated the lever, nothing happened. Berry stomped on the trap but to no avail, and Lee was then taken back to his cell whilst the trap release mechanism was tested. It worked perfectly. 

 The process was now repeated but with the same result and yet again the trap worked perfectly after Lee was removed. After the third unsuccessful attempt, the governor stayed the hanging whilst he obtained directions from the Home Office. Lee was later reprieved.

Various theories abounded as to why the trap would not open with Lee on it, ranging from divine intervention through the wood swelling in the damp weather to the more unbelievable one of the prisoners who had helped to erect it placing a wedge between the leaves of the trap which he removed again as soon as Lee was taken off and reinserted at each new attempt.  The reality was much more prosaic. 

 When the trap had been erected in the coach house at Exeter, having been previously used at a different location for the hanging of Annie Tooke in 1879, the metal work was not installed correctly and one of the long hinges fouled on the side of the pit when there was weight on the trapdoors but not when there wasn’t.

On the 7th of October 1885, the Chairman Prison Commission wrote advising them that the hangman should be required to lodge within the prison on the night before an execution to avoid their getting drunk and entertaining the locals in hotels and pubs with stories of their executions.

  This was advisory rather than mandatory as the Home Office recognised that it was the sheriff who appointed the hangman and oversaw the execution.  In Berry’s case drunkenness was not an issue at this time as he was a teetotaller.

An unfortunate experience concerned the execution of Robert Goodale at Norwich Castle on the 30th of November 1885.

 Goodale who weighed 15 stone (95 Kg.) but was in poor physical condition, was decapitated by the force of the drop, the only recorded instance of this in Britain, although two other of Berry's clients, Moses Shrimpton at Worcester and John Conway at Kirkdale were nearly decapitated by the drop. Berry blamed the prison doctor, Dr. Barr, for interfering with his calculations in the Conway case.

The opposite problem occurred in at least three of Berry's other hangings when the condemned clearly strangled to death due to the length of drop being insufficient. These were David Roberts, hanged at Cardiff on the 2nd of March 1886, Henry Delvin, executed on the 23rd of September 1890 in Glasgow’s Duke Street prison for murdering his wife, and Edward Hewitt who was executed at Gloucester on the 15th of June of 1886.

The government were concerned about these incidents, as they resulted in bad publicity and were raising questions over the continuing use of hanging as the form of capital punishment. 

So in 1886, the Conservative Home Secretary, Sir Richard Assheton Cross, commissioned a former Liberal Home Secretary, Lord Aberdare, to chair a committee with a brief to inquire into and report to the Home Secretary upon “the existing practice as to carrying out the sentence of death and the causes which in several recent cases

 have led either to the failure or to unseemly occurrences and to consider and report what arrangements may be adopted (without altering the existing law) to ensure that all executions may be carried out in a becoming manner without risk of failure or miscarriage in any respect”.  

The Committee issued its report in June 1888, none of its recommendations required any legislation to allow them to be implemented.

 The Capital Sentences Committee, to give it its full title, took evidence from James Berry in June 1887 which included a discussion of the elasticity of the ropes supplied by the Prison Commission, known as “government ropes”.  The elasticity issue was very important because if the rope stretched significantly the condemned got a greater drop and therefore an increased chance of decapitation. 

 There was also discussion of the correct position for the eyelet or thimble of the noose, Berry was of the view that it should be placed behind the left ear, the sub-aural position.

Up until now there had been no official table of drops, Marwood and Berry had devised their own.  A number of other recommendations were made by the Committee. 

 Executioners were no longer to be paid a salary as Calcraft had been, but rather hired by the individual county sheriffs on a by the job basis.  Properly trained assistants were to be used of who would be able to take over if the hangman became ill or fainted and would also be available to carry out an execution if the “No.1” was busy with one elsewhere. This particular recommendation did not totally take effect until after James Berry resigned in 1892.  

The sheriffs were then able to choose from a list of hangmen and assistants approved by the Prison Commissioners. The suggestion that the hangman and assistant should stay in the prison from 4 o’clock in the afternoon prior to an execution was endorsed by the Committee and became standard practice.

On the 8th of February 1886 Berry had an unusual assistant for a triple hanging at Carlisle.  

Sir Claude de Crespigny was a magistrate who was expecting to be the next Sheriff for the County of Essex and wanted to assist at a hanging in case he had to organise one.  He allegedly gave Berry £10 for being allowed to help hang James Baker, James Martin and Anthony Rudge. A question was asked in Parliament over the participation of a Knight of the Realm at an execution.

By a strange coincidence, Mr. Berry was called upon to hang Mrs. Berry who had poisoned her 11 year old daughter for £10 life insurance. The execution took place on the 14th of March 1887 at Walton prison Liverpool (the first in that prison).

 Not only did the executioner and the prisoner have the same surname, and although not related, they actually knew each other, having danced together at a police ball in Manchester some years previously. 

He was to hang Mary Ann Britland at Strangeways prison in Manchester on the 9th of August 1886 and Mary Eleanor Wheeler at Newgate prison on the 23rd of December 1890.

 His final execution was carried out at Greenock on the 11th of January 1892 when he hanged Frederick Storey. James Berry was not popular with the Home Office because of his holding “court” in local pubs after executions, which had led to questions being asked in Parliament, and his behaviour at the hanging of John Conway within Liverpool’s Kirkdale prison on the 20th of August 1891.

  Berry's last execution in England was Edward Fawcett at Winchester on August 25th, five days after Conway. In September 1891 the Chairman of the Prison Commission wrote a letter stating that Berry should not be selected again to carry out executions.  Subsequent English executions were carried out by James Billington. 

 Berry formally resigned on the 4th of March 1892, but had, in effect already been fired.  Berry's letter of resignation was a PR move, basically. He knew quite well that in the future he was not going to be called upon for an execution in England (which had been his main source of income). Consider this:

His last execution on English soil was on 25th August 1891. Between this date and the date of his "resignation", six executions were performed in the UK: one (Storey's) by Berry, one by Thomas Scott (in Ireland), and four by James Billington. 

Billington had been working in Yorkshire only up to then, but now he was performing executions in Somerset, in Durham, in Herefordshire. Of course, Berry read about that in the papers, and he wondered what was happening. 

On the 9th of November 1891 he wrote to the Home Secretary, asking whether he knew of any reason why he was being passed over. In December, he received a reply that refused to enter into a discussion on his being employed or not employed by the sheriffs. 

So, it is clear that Berry knew months before he wrote his "letter of resignation", that he was not going to be employed again, and that Billington was going to succeed him.

Behind the scenes, the following had happened: On 17th of January 1890, a commission selected, from seven applicants, three candidates whom they deemed suitable as future executioners: 

James Billington, Francis Gardner and Robert Wade. In the summer of 1891, Dr. Barr, the medical officer of Kirkdale Prison at Liverpool, trained these three. On the 26th of September, the Home Secretary wrote to the Prison Commissioners that Berry should no longer be recommended to the sheriffs. 

The Prison Commission sent out a circular to all prison governors on the 31st of October 1891, telling them about the Home Secretary's decision, adding a list with the names and addresses of the three newly selected "competent candidates for the office of executioner".

This was the situation when Berry wrote his "letter of resignation", dated 4th March. Three days later, the Evening Standard published the news (anyone in the dark where they got the letter from?). On the 18th of March, The Times wrote that on the following day Berry was beginning a tour of public speeches on his experiences with slides! And that he was about to speak against the death penalty.

James Berry died on the 21st of October 1913.

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