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Gallows Hill
The Anglo Saxons are credited with introducing hanging as a form of capital punishment to the UK from around the 5th century. Crowds would gather to watch condemned prisoners being led to the gallows and to witness their final moments.
However, it looks like he made a mistake on his map reading. Checking the tithe map of 1839, Gallows Hill is given the plot number 533.
Scouring the map confirms the entry from Nicholls is correct, as it shows 532 and 533 located close to the St Margaret's entrance to Heaton Park.
Britain’s joint-last hangman, Harry Allen, ran The Junction pub in Whitefield, and performed 29 executions, assisting in 53 others carried out by the legendary Albert Pierrepoint, between 1938 and 1964. Albert's Father Henry, and uncle Thomas had also been executioners between 1901 and 1946.
The Norman conquest changed all that, with offenders being castrated or blinded instead, until Henry I (1068 – 1 December 1135) decided to reintroduce hanging - though boiling, burning or beheading were still an option during the medieval period.
Ref: Wiki]
In 1789 and 1790 there had been a spate of highway and house robberies. Gangs of armed men had entered houses in the middle of the night and taken away all they could carry. Armed patrols were placed around the neighbourhood to little effect until, at last, a man named James McNamara was arrested with three others for burglary at the Dog and Partridge Inn on Stretford Road. McNamara was tried at Lancaster Assizes and sentenced to be hanged on Kersal Moor as a warning to other criminals.
A large number of people came to watch the execution but, as Joseph Aston said in his Metrical Records of Manchester "no one could suppose that the example had any use ... as several persons had their pockets picked within sight of the gallows and the following night a house was broken into and robbed in Manchester"
Wilson's History of Prestwich (1980) refers to a gallows hill in Prestwich:
Watch a video showing the present day location of Gallows Hill in Heaton Park.
It wasn't until the 18th century that the movement to abolish the death sentence was started.
Albert was Britain’s most prolific hangman – carrying out 450 hangings, and retired to be a landlord in Hollinwood and later in Preston. It would fall to Harry Allen to close the chapter on hangings in Britain.
Harry's most controversial hanging was that of James Hanratty, who was hanged for the notorious A6 murder case, and also assisted in the 1953 execution of Derek Bentley, who received a partial posthumous pardon. Wit the Homicide Act 1957 reducing the number of condemned criminals from about 15 a year to 4 or 5. He performed the last hanging in Northern Ireland in 1961, and the last hanging in Scotland in 1963.
His last job as Britain’s chief executioner was the hanging of murderer Gwynne Owen Evans at Strangeways, Manchester, at 8am on August 13, 1964, with another hanging carried out simultaneously in Liverpool. A list of Harry's execution can be found at Wiki
On 9 November 1965 the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act suspended the death penalty for murder for five years in the United Kingdom and, on 16 December 1969, the House of Commons voted by a majority of 158 that capital punishment for murder should be abolished.
