The last man executed in Newcastle
HUSBAND HANGED IN 1919 FOR THE MURDER OF HIS ‘UNFAITHFUL’ WIFE
THE Chronicle recently recalled the story of the last man executed publicly in Newcastle.
He was George Vass, hanged at the town’s gaol in Carliol Square as a huge “bloodthirsty” crowd looked on in March 1863.
Vass had raped and murdered Margaret Docherty. At his trial, the jury took just 20 minutes to decide the 19-year-old was guilty.
But what of the very last execution of any kind to take place in Newcastle?
We step back to the dark days of 1919.
Tyneside, the nation, and indeed Europe at large were recovering from the industrialised mass slaughter of World War I and the attendant hardships at home.
On Wednesday, November 26 of that year, the gallows at Newcastle Gaol were prepared for the very last time.
The last victim would be 28-year-old Ambrose Quinn.
Quinn had served in the war as an aircraft mechanic.
Away fighting on the Western Front, he had suspected his wife Elizabeth had been unfaithful to him.
Returning home to Newcastle after the hostilities ceased in November 1918, Quinn’s suspicions continued.
After leaving the home he shared with his wife to live with his mother, he became enraged with jealousy after a drinking session with friends one night.
Spotting Elizabeth in the street a little later, Quinn cut his wife’s throat, killing her near the home of her father on Hawes Street, near the main thoroughfare of Scotswood Road.
Full of remorse, he gave himself up to the police immediately.
At his trial on November 6, he was found guilty. There were pleas for mercy, all of which fell on deaf ears.
Quinn met his maker at 9.15am on a grim Tyneside Wednesday morning nearly three weeks later. He was buried in a numbered grave inside the prison walls.
He would be the last of eight men to be hanged at the prison in the 20th century.
The others were: John Miller and his nephew John Robert Miller, 1901; Henry Perkins, 1905; John Alexander Dickman, 1910; John Vickers Amos, 1913; William James Cavanagh, 1917; and Ernest Bernard Scott, 1919.
On March 31, 1925, five years and four months after Quinn’s execution, HMP Newcastle was closed down and the prison moved to HMP Durham.
Thereafter, Durham took over the grim business of executions in the North East of England.