The real dates
Britain did not abolish the death penalty in 1967. Parliament passed the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act in 1965, which received Royal Assent in November of that year and suspended the death penalty for murder in Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland) for an initial period of five years. Permanent abolition came in December 1969, when both Houses of Parliament voted to make the change lasting. The last executions in Britain were carried out in August 1964. Although 1967 saw a wave of social reform in Britain, the abolition of hanging was settled on either side of that year.
The road to 1965
Until the 1950s, murder in Britain carried a mandatory death sentence. A series of cases weakened public confidence. Derek Bentley, who was hanged in 1953 after a police officer was killed by his teenage companion, and Ruth Ellis, hanged in 1955 and the last woman executed in Britain, became symbols of unease. In 1950, Timothy Evans was executed for a murder at Rillington Place in London, and it later emerged that another man living in the same house had killed several people. Evans received a posthumous pardon in 1966.
The Homicide Act 1957 limited the death penalty to certain kinds of murder, such as killing during theft or killing a police officer. But the new categories seemed arbitrary, and critics argued that the law produced odd results. The campaign for abolition drew support from members of both main parties, from churches and from many lawyers, though opinion polls typically showed that a majority of the public favoured keeping the penalty.
The 1964 executions and the new Parliament
On 13 August 1964, Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans were hanged for the murder of a man in Cumbria, in simultaneous executions at Walton in Liverpool and Strangeways in Manchester. They were the last people to be executed in Britain. Two months later, the Labour Party under Harold Wilson won the general election, and many of its new members were abolitionists.
Sydney Silverman, a long-time Labour campaigner, introduced a private member’s bill, and the government supported it by providing parliamentary time, while leaving MPs free to vote according to conscience. The bill passed the Commons after lengthy debate and then the Lords, with the Act reaching the statute book in November 1965.
What the debates covered
The arguments in Parliament were of long standing. Supporters of abolition stressed the risk of executing an innocent person, which could not be undone, and doubted that hanging deterred murder more than long imprisonment did. Opponents argued that it protected the public, and was a suitable response to the worst crimes, especially the killing of police officers. They also pointed to public opinion. Some MPs who disliked the principle of abolition accepted a trial period as a compromise.
The five-year suspension was a device to deal with this. It allowed the Act to be tested, and meant the matter would come back to Parliament. Under the Act, life imprisonment replaced the death sentence, with judges able to recommend minimum terms.
The 1969 vote
By 1969, the five-year trial period had run most of its course without persuading Parliament to reverse course, and the Labour government, with Roy Jenkins by then Chancellor of the Exchequer, did not change its view. In December 1969, the House of Commons and the House of Lords voted by resolution to make the abolition permanent. The Lords vote was seen as significant, because the upper house had rejected an earlier abolition bill in 1956. Later attempts to restore capital punishment, which came up periodically in the following decades, were rejected by the Commons.
Hanging remained available for a few other offences, such as treason and piracy with violence, for some time afterwards. These were removed in later legislation, with the last remnants of the death penalty in British law eliminated in 1998 and 2004 through human rights legislation.
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland’s criminal law was separate, and the 1965 Act applied only to Great Britain. The death penalty for murder there remained in law for several more years, although no executions took place after Robert McGladdery was hanged in December 1961. It was abolished in Northern Ireland in 1973. The Northern Ireland difference is one reason why careful writers use “Great Britain” in this context and not the United Kingdom.
Reform in a wider setting
The change belonged to a period of legal reform in the mid-1960s. In 1967 Parliament passed the Sexual Offences Act, the Abortion Act and a new law on breathalyser tests, all under a government that was willing to give time to measures backed by campaigners. These reforms were controversial, and often described as part of a move towards a more permissive society, but each had its own history and its own supporters. The end of hanging came first in time, and it was the least settled in public opinion: surveys in later years often showed substantial support for restoring the death penalty, even though Parliament refused to do so.