Hangings in Glasgow

For more than three hundred years Glasgow put people to death by hanging. Executions moved from the old gallows on the edge of the burgh to the Tolbooth at the Cross, then to Jail Square facing Glasgow Green, where vast crowds gathered to watch. After 1868 the gallows moved behind prison walls, first at Duke Street and then at Barlinnie, where the last execution in Glasgow took place in 1960. This page traces that history, and the men who carried out the sentences.

Many of those hanged had committed terrible crimes, and their victims deserve to be remembered first. Others were hanged for offences such as robbery or forgery that no modern court would punish with death, and some, like the radical weavers of 1820, for their politics.

The early gallows

The street name Gallowgate is a clue to where the burgh’s early gallows stood, on the road leading east out of the town. Later executions were carried out around the cathedral and the Tolbooth at Glasgow Cross, where the jail and courts stood. According to the city archivists at the Mitchell Library, 132 executions took place in Glasgow between 1615 and 1897.

The city hangman

Glasgow often struggled to find a hangman. In 1605 a man named John McClelland was banished from the burgh for theft, on the understanding that he would be hanged if he returned. He came back, was caught stealing again, and found that the town had no executioner. Instead of hanging him, the council gave him the job, on condition that he would be hanged himself if he ever gave it up. The council also fined anyone who abused him in word or deed.

Two centuries later, in 1815, Thomas Young agreed to serve as the city’s "common executioner" for the rest of his life. Besides hanging, his duties included whipping offenders and putting them in the pillory or the stocks, and between times he worked as a labourer for the city. He was paid £50 a year, a guinea for each execution and a new pair of shoes twice a year, and was required to live "quietly, soberly and regularly". Drink was a recurring problem with hangmen: as late as 1889 the Secretary for Scotland advised councils to strictly limit the executioner’s alcohol.

Jail Square

In 1814 new courts and a jail were opened at the foot of the Saltmarket, facing Glasgow Green. The open space in front, which became known as Jail Square, was the city’s place of public execution for the next half century. There were 52 public hangings there between 1814 and 1865. The building still houses the High Court in Glasgow, described in our page on the city’s courts.

Executions were great public events. Tens of thousands came to watch, and the crowd could be festive or angry. In 1820 the radical weaver James Wilson of Strathaven was hanged and beheaded there for treason after the Radical War. The body snatchers who haunted the city’s graveyards were connected to the scaffold too, since the bodies of some hanged murderers were handed over for dissection.

The last public hanging in Glasgow was that of Dr Edward Pritchard, the poisoner, on 28 July 1865, watched by a crowd estimated at around 100,000. Three years later Parliament ended public executions throughout Britain.

Behind prison walls: Duke Street

From 1868 executions were carried out in private, inside prisons. In the twentieth century Glasgow’s gallows stood in Duke Street Prison in the East End, where twelve people convicted of murder were hanged between 1902 and 1928. Among them was Susan Newell, hanged on 10 October 1923, the last woman executed in Scotland.

The hanging shed at Barlinnie

When executions ended at Duke Street, the gallows moved to Barlinnie. Ten men, all convicted of murder, were hanged there between 1946 and 1960, at eight in the morning, in a gallows built into D Hall. They were buried in unmarked graves inside the prison walls. The most notorious was the serial killer Peter Manuel, hanged on 11 July 1958.

The last execution in Glasgow

The last man hanged in Glasgow was Anthony Miller, aged nineteen, an apprentice cabinet-maker from Crosshill on the South Side. With a sixteen-year-old accomplice, James Denovan, he had robbed men in Queen’s Park Recreation Ground, and on 6 April 1960 they attacked and killed John Cremin there. Under the Homicide Act of 1957, murder in the course of theft was a capital crime. Miller was sentenced to death by Lord Wheatley; Denovan, too young to hang, was ordered to be detained. A petition for a reprieve gathered some 30,000 signatures but was refused, and Miller was hanged at Barlinnie at 8.02am on 22 December 1960. He was the last teenager executed in Scotland. A play about his last days, Please, Mister, was staged in 2010.

The last execution in Scotland took place in Aberdeen in 1963. Hanging for murder was suspended in Britain in 1965 and abolished permanently in 1969. When D Hall at Barlinnie was renovated in 1997 the execution cell was demolished, and the remains of the executed men were exhumed and reburied elsewhere.

Timeline