The last face more than 200 men and women would see before they died was that of a Rochdale barber.
Fleet Street’s evil barber sounds like the premise of Sweeney Todd.
The fictional Todd murdered his victims by throwing them through a revolving door while sitting in a barber’s chair. Then he would cut his throat with a razor and polish them.
John Ellis was not a work of fiction, and his reason for killing people was very different. Born in 1874 in Broad Lane, Buersil, Rochdale, he was a hairdresser in the street and, between 1901 and 1924, the town’s last ever executioner.
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It is perhaps unusual to think of a hairdresser moonlighting as an executioner, but many notorious executioners, including Albert Pierrepoint and Harry Allen, had regular jobs outside of this role. They were both bar owners.
During his career, Ellis hanged more than 200 people and became the best executioner in the country.
Before becoming an executioner, he worked in a cotton mill. According to a story in the Rochdale Observer in 1932, an earlier accident at the factory left him unable to continue working as a manual labourer, so he followed his own father and bought his hairdressing scissors from a shop in Oldham Road. He also opened a newsstand, which he ran with his wife and children.
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John Ellis’ descriptions describe him as slender, with a slight build and pale skin. It was even said that he couldn’t bear to break the necks of the chickens on his family’s small farm. So it was said that it surprised everyone when he signed up as an executioner.
In a posthumous interview published in the Rochdale Observer on 21 September 1932, Ellis explained how he decided to become a public executioner.
He told a reporter: “I was working in a textile workshop in those days. When the execution happened, I remember saying: ‘I wouldn’t mind doing this job.’ Other people laughed at me and said: ‘What, you’re going to hang anyone!’
“I applied for the job and was lucky enough to get it. It wasn’t a clout thing. I guess I was lucky or unlucky.”
Following a meeting with the Governor of Strangeways Prison in Manchester, he spent a week training in the hangman’s art in London, with the result that his name was included in the list of public executioners and assistants.
All potential executioners were required to undergo a week of training, which included practicing on a real gallows set with a dummy and learning to calculate the required fall, taking into account the person’s weight and height.
Having assisted in his first execution in May 1901, Ellis would work as an executioner for the next 23 years, assisting in and eventually directing more than 200 executions. Some of the famous criminals he dispatched during his tenure include the infamous Dr. Crippen; ‘Brides in the bath’ murderer George Smith; and Sir Roger Casement, who was hanged as a spy.
But perhaps his most famous execution, and the one that some believe affected him enough to contribute to his own death, was that of Edith Thompson. Edith was convicted of murdering her husband and was the first woman Ellis hanged.
Convicted mostly on circumstantial evidence, 29-year-old Edith was convicted, along with her lover Frederick Bywaters, of murdering her husband. Details of the salacious trial appeared in newspapers weeks before the pair were sentenced.
On the day of her execution, January 9, 1923, Edith was dragged to the scaffold, almost completely devastated. Heavily drugged and semi-conscious, she was still hysterical and bound at her ankles and wrists, and had to be carried to the gallows by four prison guards.
Ellis later admitted that he was deeply affected by the execution of Edith, who barely retained consciousness, and handed in his notice as executioner 12 months later in March 1924. own life.
He was found in his home with a broken jaw, thought to have been caused by trying to shoot himself with a gun. He was brought to trial on charges of attempted suicide and was released on an undertaking not to repeat the crime (suicide was a crime in Britain until 1961).
In another strange development, in 1927 Ellis appeared in Gravesend, playing the role of an executioner in a theater production about the life of thief and murderer Charles Peace.
The demonstration received widespread condemnation. Monte Bayley, secretary of the Federation of Variety Artists, said at the time: “We think this is a most deplorable piece of bad taste. No purpose can be achieved by submitting to such a pathological state of the audience.”
“The public is partly responsible for patronizing such a demonstration. Probably all they wanted to see was an execution.”
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Eventually pressure from critics forced the show to close, leaving Ellis facing significant financial losses. He continued to work as a barber, but in later years he also toured fairgrounds with a series of gallows and staged grisly mock executions.
But he could no longer live with his demons; On September 20, 1932, the former executioner was found dead by his son in his Kitchen Street home. He was 57 years old.
A decision to commit suicide was recorded while he was mentally unstable. Ellis’ wife, Annie, said he had been in poor health for about 18 months, suffering from neuritis, nerve disease and heart problems.
Annie said he had been drinking on the evening of his death before running into the kitchen while taking off his collar and tie. She said that he took a razor from the shelf and threatened her with a knife, so she ran away to her son’s house with her daughter.
Many people still believe that Ellis’s long bouts of depression in his later years, when he tried to relieve himself with alcohol, were the result of being haunted by his former profession. John Ellis, a cold-blooded and efficient executioner who reportedly made many improvements to his job that caused him incredible distress, was buried in Rochdale Cemetery, where his headstone remains.
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