James Berry (executioner)
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James Berry (executioner)
James Berry (8 February 1852 – 21 October 1913) was an English executioner from 1884 until 1891. Berry was born in Heckmondwike in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where his father worked as a wool-stapler. His most important contribution to the science of hanging was his refinement of the long drop method developed by William Marwood, whom Berry knew quite well. His improvements were intended to diminish mental and physical suffering and some of them remained standard practice until the abolition of capital punishment for murder. An insight into Berry's behaviour and methods can be read in the book ''My Experiences as an Executioner'', in which he describes his methods and recalls the final moments of some of the people he executed. Early life He served eight years with the Bradford Police Force, then tried himself as a boot salesman. Since he did not earn enough for the upkeep of his family, he applied for the post of executioner after William Marwood died in 1883 but was uns ...
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Executioner
An executioner, also known as a hangman or headsman, is an official who executes a sentence of capital punishment on a legally condemned person. Scope and job The executioner was usually presented with a warrant authorising or ordering him to ''execute'' the sentence. The warrant protects the executioner from the charge of murder. Common terms for executioners derived from forms of capital punishment—though they often also performed other physical punishments—include hangman (hanging) and headsman (beheading). In the military, the role of executioner was performed by a soldier, such as the ''provost''. A common stereotype of an executioner is a hooded medieval or absolutist executioner. Symbolic or real, executioners were rarely hooded, and not robed in all black; hoods were only used if an executioner's identity and anonymity were to be preserved from the public. As Hilary Mantel noted in her 2018 Reith Lectures, "Why would an executioner wear a mask? Everybody k ...
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Jack The Ripper
Jack the Ripper was an unidentified serial killer active in and around the impoverished Whitechapel district of London, England, in the autumn of 1888. In both criminal case files and the contemporaneous journalistic accounts, the killer was called the Whitechapel Murderer and Leather Apron. Attacks ascribed to Jack the Ripper typically involved female prostitutes who lived and worked in the slums of the East End of London. Their throats were cut prior to abdominal mutilations. The removal of internal organs from at least three of the victims led to speculation that their killer had some anatomical or surgical knowledge. Rumours that the murders were connected intensified in September and October 1888, and numerous letters were received by media outlets and Scotland Yard from individuals purporting to be the murderer. The name "Jack the Ripper" originated in the "Dear Boss letter" written by an individual claiming to be the murderer, which was disseminated in the press. ...
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People From Heckmondwike
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, or legal responsibility. The defining features of personhood and, consequently, what makes a person count as a person, differ widely among cultures and contexts. In addition to the question of personhood, of what makes a being count as a person to begin with, there are further questions about personal identity and self: both about what makes any particular person that particular person instead of another, and about what makes a person at one time the same person as they were or will be at another time despite any intervening changes. The plural form "people" is often used to refer to an entire nation or ethnic group (as in "a people"), and this was the original meaning of the word; it subsequently acquired its use as a plural form of per ...
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1913 Deaths
Events January * January 5 – First Balkan War: Battle of Lemnos – Greek admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis forces the Turkish fleet to retreat to its base within the Dardanelles, from which it will not venture for the rest of the war. * January 13 – Edward Carson founds the (first) Ulster Volunteer Force, by unifying several existing loyalist militias to resist home rule for Ireland. * January 23 – 1913 Ottoman coup d'état: Ismail Enver comes to power. * January – Stalin (whose first article using this name is published this month) travels to Vienna to carry out research. Until he leaves on February 16 the city is home simultaneously to him, Hitler, Trotsky and Tito alongside Berg, Freud and Jung and Ludwig and Paul Wittgenstein. February * February 1 – New York City's Grand Central Terminal, having been rebuilt, reopens as the world's largest railroad station. * February 3 – The 16th Amendment to the United States Cons ...
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1852 Births
Year 185 ( CLXXXV) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Lascivius and Atilius (or, less frequently, year 938 '' Ab urbe condita''). The denomination 185 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. Events By place Roman Empire * Nobles of Britain demand that Emperor Commodus rescind all power given to Tigidius Perennis, who is eventually executed. * Publius Helvius Pertinax is made governor of Britain and quells a mutiny of the British Roman legions who wanted him to become emperor. The disgruntled usurpers go on to attempt to assassinate the governor. * Tigidius Perennis, his family and many others are executed for conspiring against Commodus. * Commodus drains Rome's treasury to put on gladiatorial spectacles and confiscates property to su ...
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Horace Bleackley
Horace William Bleackley (1868 – 30 July 1931) was an English writer of fiction and works of history and literary research. He sometimes used the pseudonym "Tivoli". Bleackley was born in Prestwich, Lancashire, and educated at Cheltenham College, Repton School, and University College, Oxford."Author: Horace William Bleackley (1868–1931) Alternate Name(s): Tivoli (pseudonym)"
victorianresearch.org, accessed 28 July 2022
His early work was mostly fiction, but as the years went by he turned his hand increasingly to history. Bleackley married Ruth Mary Gabriel, a daughter of Edmund Gabriel, and they had four children, Edward Overall Bleackley (1898–1976); Sheelah Bleackley (born 1904), Aline Ruth Gabrielle Bleackley (1 ...
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Official Table Of Drops
The ''Official Table of Drops'', formerly issued by the British Home Office, is a manual which is used to calculate the appropriate length of rope for long drop hangings. Following a series of failed hangings, including those of John Babbacombe Lee, a committee chaired by Henry Bruce, 1st Baron Aberdare was formed in 1886 to discover and report on the most effective manner of hanging. The committee's report was printed in 1888 and recommended a drop energy of . In April 1892, the Home Office revised this based on an energy of . In practice, however, the hangmen ignored this table and awarded considerably longer drops, and a significantly revised edition of the Table of Drops was published in October 1913, allowing of drop energy – and then from 1939 executioners routinely added nine more inches () to the drop in the 1913 Table. The Table continued to be used in the United Kingdom until the country suspended capital punishment in 1965, and the UK abolished the death penalty al ...
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List Of Executioners
This is a list of people who have acted as official executioners. Algeria Alger Monsieur d'Alger: The Executioners of the French Republic In 1870 the Republic of France abolished all local executioners and named the executioner of Algiers, Antoine Rasseneux, Éxécuteur des Arrêts Criminels en Algérie, which became France's official description of the executioner of Algeria's occupation. From then on there would be one only executioner to carry out death sentences for all of Algeria. Since the colony's executioner was required to live in Algiers, people soon started to refer to him as ''"Le Monsieur d'Alger"'' ("The Man From Algiers"). Upon his nomination, Rasseneux was permitted to choose four among France's and Algeria's former local executioners to be his aides. Australia Austria Hall in Tirol Meran Salzburg Steyr Vienna Belgium Brazil After 1808, during the Portuguese-Brazilian Kingdom (1808–1822) and the Empire (1822–1889), when Braz ...
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West Yorkshire
West Yorkshire is a metropolitan and ceremonial county in the Yorkshire and Humber Region of England. It is an inland and upland county having eastward-draining valleys while taking in the moors of the Pennines. West Yorkshire came into existence as a metropolitan county in 1974 after the reorganisation of the Local Government Act 1972 which saw it formed from a large part of the West Riding of Yorkshire. The county had a recorded population of 2.3 million in the 2011 Census making it the fourth-largest by population in England. The largest towns are Huddersfield, Castleford, Batley, Bingley, Pontefract, Halifax, Brighouse, Keighley, Pudsey, Morley and Dewsbury. The three cities of West Yorkshire are Bradford, Leeds and Wakefield. West Yorkshire consists of five metropolitan boroughs (City of Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees, City of Leeds and City of Wakefield); it is bordered by the counties of Derbyshire to the south, Greater Manchester to the south-west, Lancash ...
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Smith Wigglesworth
Smith Wigglesworth (10 June 1859 – 12 March 1947) was a British evangelist who was influential in the early history of Pentecostalism. Early life Smith Wigglesworth was born on 10 June 1859 in Menston, Yorkshire, England, to an impoverished family. As a small child, he worked in the fields pulling turnips alongside his mother; he also worked in factories to help provide for his family. He was illiterate as a child, being unschooled because of his labours. Nominally a Methodist, he became a born again Christian at the age of eight. His grandmother was a devout Methodist; his parents, John and Martha, took young Smith to Methodist and Anglican churches on regular occasions. He was confirmed by a Bishop in the Church of England, baptized by immersion in a Baptist church and had grounding in Bible teaching in the Plymouth Brethren while learning the plumbing trade as an apprentice from a man in the Brethren movement. Wigglesworth married Mary Jane "Polly" Featherstone on 4 Dece ...
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Phrenology
Phrenology () is a pseudoscience which involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits.Wihe, J. V. (2002). "Science and Pseudoscience: A Primer in Critical Thinking." In ''Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience'', pp. 195–203. California: Skeptics Society.Hines, T. (2002). ''Pseudoscience and the Paranormal''. New York: Prometheus Books. p. 200 It is based on the concept that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that certain brain areas have localized, specific functions or modules. It was said that the brain was composed of different muscles, so those that were used more often were bigger, resulting in the different skull shapes. This led to the reasoning behind why everyone had bumps on the skull in different locations. The brain "muscles" not being used as frequently remained small and were therefore not present on the exterior of the skull. Although both of those ideas have a basis in reality, phrenology generalized beyond empirical knowledge in a way that ...
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Suspect
In law enforcement jargon, a suspect is a known person accused or suspected of committing a crime. Police and reporters in the United States often use the word suspect as a jargon when referring to the perpetrator of the offense (perp in dated US slang). However, in official definition, the perpetrator is the robber, assailant, counterfeiter, etc.—the person who committed the crime. The distinction between suspect and perpetrator recognizes that the suspect is not ''known'' to have committed the offense, while the perpetrator—who may not yet have been suspected of the crime, and is thus not necessarily a suspect—is the one who did. The suspect may be a different person from the perpetrator, or there may have been no actual crime, which would mean there is no perpetrator. A common error in police reports is a witness description of the suspect (as a witness generally describes a perpetrator, while a mug shot is of a suspect). Frequently it is stated that police are looking ...
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