The last face that more than 200 men and women would ever see before they died was that of a hairdresser from Rochdale.
It sounds like the premise of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street.
The fictional Todd killed his victims by dropping them through a rotating trapdoor while they sat in his barber chair. He then brushed them off with a cut to the throat with his razor.
John Ellis was not a work of fiction, and his reason for killing people was very different. Born in Broad Lane in Buersil, Rochdale, in 1874, he was a high street hairdresser and the town’s last executioner between 1901 and 1924.
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It may be unusual to think of a barber as an executioner, but many infamous executioners, including Albert Pierrepoint and Harry Allen, had regular jobs outside of this role. They were both cafe owners.
During his career, Ellis hanged more than 200 people and became the country’s top executioner.
Before he became an executioner, he worked in a cotton mill. According to a 1932 story in the Rochdale Observer, an earlier accident at the factory left him unable to continue working as a manual laborer, so he followed his own father and picked up the hairdressing scissors from a shop on Oldham Road. He also opened a newsagents, which he ran together with his wife and children.
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Reports of John Ellis describe him as delicate, with a light build and pale complexion. It has even been reported that he couldn’t bear to wring the necks of chickens in his family’s small business. So when he signed up to be an executioner, it would have surprised everyone.
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 company at the time. And when there was an execution, I remember saying, ‘I wouldn’t mind doing that job.’ Other people laughed at me and said, ‘What, hang someone!’
“I applied for the job and was lucky enough to get it. It wasn’t a matter of influence. I guess I was lucky or unlucky.”
After an interview with the governor of Strangeways Prison in Manchester, he was given a week’s training in the art of the executioner in London, which led to his name being placed on the list of public executioners and assistants.
All future executioners had to undergo a week of instruction, during which they practiced with a dummy on a real gallows and had to calculate the required fall, taking into account the person’s weight and stature.
Ellis assisted in his first execution in May 1901 and would work as an executioner for the next 23 years, assisting in and eventually carrying out more than 200 executions. Some of the famous criminals he dispatched during his tenure included the infamous Dr. Crippen, who was convicted of poisoning and dismembering his wife; George Smith, the “brides in the bath” killer; and Sir Roger Casement, who was hanged for being a spy.
But perhaps his most famous hanging, and one that some believed affected him so much that it contributed to his own death, was that of Edith Thompson. Edith had been convicted of her husband’s murder and was the first woman Ellis had hanged.
Convicted mainly on circumstantial evidence, 29-year-old Edith was found guilty of her husband’s murder along with her lover, Frederick Bywaters. Details of the salacious trial made headlines for weeks before the pair were convicted.
On the day of her execution on January 9, 1923, Edith was dragged to the scaffold in a state of almost total collapse. She was heavily sedated and semi-conscious, but still hysterical and tied at the 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 the barely conscious Edith and twelve months later he resigned as executioner in March 1924. He had started drinking heavily and just five months later he attempted his death. own life.
He was found at his home with a broken jaw, probably caused by an attempt to shoot himself with a revolver. He was taken to court on charges of attempted suicide, and on a promise not to repeat the crime (suicide was a criminal offense in Britain until 1961) he was discharged.
In another strange twist, Ellis appeared in a theater production in Gravesend in 1927, which was about the life of burglar and murderer Charles Peace, who played the role of the executioner.
The show received a lot of criticism. Monte Bayley, secretary of the Variety Artists Federation, said at the time: “We think it is a most deplorable example of bad taste. No advantage can be gained by indulging such morbidity on the part of the public.
“The public is partly responsible for patronizing such a show. Presumably they just wanted to see the hanging.”
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Ultimately, pressure from critics forced the show to close, causing Ellis to suffer significant financial losses. He continued to work as a barber, but in his later years he also toured fairs with a gallows and performed gruesome mock executions.
However, he could no longer live with his demons; on September 20, 1932, the former executioner was found dead at home in Kitchen Street by his son. He was 57 years old.
A verdict of suicide while mentally ill was recorded. Ellis’s wife, Annie, said he had been in poor health for 18 months, suffering from neuritis, a nerve disease and heart problems.
On the night of his death, Annie said he had been drinking before storming into the kitchen pulling off his collar and tie. She said he grabbed a razor from a shelf and threatened her with a knife, so she fled with her daughter to her son’s home.
Many still believe that the long bouts of depression Ellis suffered in his later years, during which he sought relief in alcohol, were the result of being haunted by his former profession. John Ellis, a cool and efficient executioner who was said to have made many improvements to his work that caused him an incredible amount of trouble, was buried in Rochdale cemetery, where his gravestone still remains.
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