Coming in 2025 - marking 60 years since the abolition of capital punishment in the UK
This update on Brutish Necessity includes new research from Jamaica and various archives, including confidential Home Office papers, which point to a miscarriage of justice for a young man barely out of his teens.
In November 1962, 20-year-old Oswald Augustus Grey, an immigrant from Jamaica who had been in the UK for less than two years, became the last man to be hanged in Birmingham’s Winson Green prison. There were only five further executions in the UK before capital punishment ended in 1965.
Grey was found guilty of shooting newsagent Thomas Bates in his shop in Lee Bank Road in June that year. In a bungled robbery, a single shot from a stolen pistol killed the shopkeeper who died instantly.
His trial lasted fewer than five working days and his subsequent appeal less than an hour. There were 24 weeks between the crime and the execution.
Labelled a backward child, he had spent months in a reform school in Kingston before his father brought him to the ‘mother country’ to ‘straighten him out.’
That plan failed. Within months he was back in bad company and embarked on the life of petty crime that led him to the gallows.
The law failed Oswald Grey. He was treated as disposable and was the victim of careless advocacy and the unchallenged racism of his times. His story has been largely forgotten: this book puts that right.
