Capital Punishment in The United Kingdom - Notable Executions in The United Kingdom

Notable Executions in The United Kingdom

Note: This list does not include the beheadings of nobility.

• 1724, 16 November: Jack Sheppard, housebreaker, was hanged at Tyburn for burglary after four successful escape attempts from jail. His partner-in-crime, highwayman Joseph "Blueskin" Blake, was executed for the same burglary five days earlier.
• 1725, 24 May: Jonathan Wild, criminal overlord and fraudulent "Thief Taker General", was hanged at Tyburn (over six months after Jack Sheppard's and Blueskin's executions) for receiving stolen goods and thus aiding criminals.
• 1739: Dick Turpin, famous highwayman, was hanged.
• 1746, 30 July: nine Catholic members of the Manchester Regiment, Jacobites, were hanged, drawn and quartered for treason at Kennington Common (now Kennington Park).
• 1750: James MacLaine, 'The Gentleman Highwayman', was hanged at Tyburn, London
• 1757: John Byng became the only British admiral executed, by firing squad by the Royal Navy. His crime was to have failed to "do his utmost" at the Battle of Minorca during the Seven Years War.
• 1760, 5 May: Laurence Shirley, 4th Earl Ferrers was executed at Tyburn for the murder of a servant. He was the last peer to be hanged (reputedly by a silken rope) and is the only peer to have been hanged for murder.
• 1789: Catherine Murphy, a counterfeiter, was the last woman executed under a sentence of burning at the stake in England (though Murphy was in fact strangled before the fire was lit, and thus not literally burned to death). The penalty of burning at the stake, which applied to women and not to men, was abolished the next year.
• 1812, 18 May: John Bellingham was hanged for the murder of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval.
• 1820: Andrew Hardie and John Baird were hanged and beheaded at Stirling after being tried for their part in the Radical War in Scotland.
• 1828, 11 August: William Corder was hanged at Bury St Edmunds for the murder of Maria Marten at the Red Barn a year before.
• 1856, 9 August: Elizabeth Martha Brown was the last woman to be hanged in public in the English county of Dorset; her hanging is notable in part because it influenced Thomas Hardy, an eyewitness, in his portrayal of the execution of the fictional heroine of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
• 1861, 27 August: Martin Doyle was the last person to be hanged for attempted murder, at Chester.
• 1868, 2 April: Frances Kidder was the last woman to be hanged in public in Britain.
• 1868, 26 May: Michael Barrett was executed at Newgate Prison for the Fenian bombing at Clerkenwell, the last public hanging in the UK.
• 1899, 19 July: Mary Ansell was hanged at St Albans, for poisoning her sister. At 22 she was the youngest woman to be hanged in the post-1868 'modern era' (non-public, and by the 'long drop' method).
• 1910, 23 November: Hawley Harvey Crippen was hanged in London's Pentonville Prison for the poisoning murder of his wife.
• 1914, 8 September: Private Thomas Highgate was executed by firing squad, the first British soldier to be executed for desertion during World War I.
• 1915, 13 August: George Joseph Smith was hanged in Maidstone Prison for the pattern of serial killings known as the "Brides in the Bath Murders".
• 1916, 3 August: Roger Casement was hanged at Pentonville for treason, based on his attempt to smuggle German weapons into Ireland in support of the unsuccessful Irish Easter Rising.
• 1920, 2 November: Private James Daly of the Connaught Rangers was shot for mutiny in India, the last member of the British Armed Forces to be executed for mutiny.
• 1923, 9 January: Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, in London's Holloway and Pentonville Prisons respectively, for the murder of Thompson's husband. The case was controversial because, although the two lovers had discussed the possible elimination of her husband in advance, Thompson did not directly participate in the murder for which she was hanged.
• 1931, 3 January: Victor Betts for murder committed during the course of a robbery. The case had established that a person need not be present when a crime is committed to be regarded as an accessory after the fact.
• 1940, 31 July: Udham Singh, an Indian independence activist, at Pentonville Prison. He had assassinated the Indian administrator Sir Michael O'Dwyer.
• 1941, 15 August: Josef Jakobs, a German spy, was executed by firing squad, the last execution in the Tower of London.
• 1946, 3 January: William Joyce, better known as "Lord Haw-Haw", for treason in London's Wandsworth Prison. He was an American citizen, but was convicted of treason because, as the holder of a British passport (albeit fraudulently obtained), he was held to have owed allegiance to the British sovereign. Theodore Schurch, hanged for treachery the next day, was the last person to be executed for an offence other than murder; he was executed at Pentonville. As a member of the armed forces he had been tried by court-martial.
• 1947, 27 February: Walter Rowland in Manchester for the murder of Olive Balchin despite maintaining his innocence. While he had been awaiting execution, another man confessed to the crime. A Home Office report dismissed the latter's confession as a fake, but in 1951 he attacked another woman and was found guilty but insane.
• 1949, 12 January: Margaret Allen, aged 43, for killing a 70-year-old woman in the course of a robbery, the first woman to be hanged in Britain for 12 years.
• 1949, 10 August: John George Haigh, the "acid-bath murderer", at Wandsworth.
• 1950, 9 March: Timothy Evans at Pentonville for the murder of his baby daughter Geraldine at 10 Rillington Place, North West London. He initially claimed to have killed his wife, but later withdrew the claim. A fellow inhabitant at the same address, John Christie, later found to be a sexual serial killer, gave key evidence against Evans. Christie was executed in 1953 for the murder of his own wife. Evans received a posthumous pardon in 1966. In 2004 the Court of Appeal refused to consider overturning the conviction due to the costs and resources that would be involved. See John Christie (murderer).
• 1950, 28 March: George Kelly at Liverpool for murder, but had his conviction quashed posthumously by the Court of Appeal in June 2003.
• 1952, 25 April: Edward Devlin and Alfred Burns, for killing a woman during a robbery in Liverpool. They claimed that they had been doing a different burglary in Manchester, and others involved in the crime supported this. A Home Office report rejected this evidence. Huge crowds gathered outside Liverpool's Walton Prison as they were executed.
• 1952, 3 September: Mahmood Hussein Mattan, a Somali seaman, in Cardiff for murder. The Court of Appeal quashed his conviction posthumously in 1998 after hearing that crucial evidence implicating another Somali was withheld at his trial.
• 1953, 28 January: Derek Bentley at Wandsworth Prison as an accomplice to the murder of a police officer by his 16-year-old friend Christopher Craig. Craig, a minor, was not executed and instead served 10 years. Bentley was granted a posthumous pardon on 29 July 1993, and the Court of Appeal overturned his conviction on 30 July 1998.
• 1953, 15 July: John Reginald Halliday Christie at Pentonville for the murder of his wife Ethel. Christie was a serial killer and had murdered at least six other women (see also entry on Timothy Evans above).
• 1954, 13 December: Styllou Christofi, aged 53, penultimate woman executed in Britain.
• 1955, 12 July: Ruth Ellis, aged 28, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. She was the 15th and youngest woman hanged in the 20th century.
• 1958, 6 May: Vivian Teed, 24, in Swansea, the last person to be executed in Wales.
• 1958, 11 July: Peter Manuel, aged 31, second to last person to be hanged in HM Prison Barlinnie and the third to last to be hanged in Scotland.
• 1959, 9 October: Francis Joseph Huchet, 31, in St Helier, Jersey, the last person to be executed in the Channel Islands.
• 1959, 5 November: Guenther Podola, the last person to be hanged for the murder of a policeman.
• 1960, 10 November: Francis Forsyth, the last 18-year-old to be executed in Britain.
• 1960, 22 December: Anthony Miller, 19, in Glasgow's Barlinnie Prison, the last teenager to be executed in Britain.
• 1961, 20 December: Robert McGladdery, 25, in Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast, the last person to be executed in Northern Ireland, for the murder of Pearl Gamble in Newry.
• 1962, 4 April: James Hanratty at Bedford after a controversial rape-murder trial. In 2002 Hanratty's body was exhumed and the Court of Appeal upheld his conviction after Hanratty's DNA was linked to crime scene samples.
• 1963, 15 August: Henry Burnett, aged 21, at Craiginches Prison in Aberdeen for the murder of seaman Thomas Guyan, the last hanging in Scotland.
• 1964, 13 August: Peter Anthony Allen, at Walton Prison in Liverpool, and Gwynne Owen Evans, at Strangeways Prison in Manchester for the murder of John Alan West, the last people executed in Britain.