At 8:00 a.m. on August 13, 1964, Peter Allen was hanged at Walton Prison in Liverpool. Simultaneously, 30 miles away, Gwynne Evans died on the gallows at Strangeways Prison in Manchester. They had been convicted of murdering a laundry van driver, John Alan West, during a robbery in Workington seven months earlier. The executioner at Strangeways was Harry Allen, one of Britain's last official hangmen. The two executions were synchronized to prevent one condemned man from knowing the other was already dead.
This procedural detail underscores the bureaucratic efficiency maintained around a practice entering its terminal phase. The death penalty for murder had been suspended for a five-year trial period under the 1957 Homicide Act, which limited its use. Public opinion was shifting. The executions of Allen and Evans, who were not figures of notable sympathy, provided no dramatic final argument. They were simply the last to pass through a system that was quietly being retired.
The hangings mattered as a full stop. They concluded a practice that had been a cornerstone of English common law for centuries. The abolitionist movement, fueled by cases like the potentially innocent Timothy Evans, hanged in 1950, had gradually chipped away at its legitimacy. These final executions were carried out without ceremony or widespread public attention, almost as an afterthought to a concluded debate.
The lasting impact was the closure of a specific form of state power. Capital punishment for murder was fully abolished in 1969. The synchronized drops in Liverpool and Manchester became a historical bookmark. They marked the end of a era where the British judiciary could, as a routine matter, schedule the breaking of a neck at a precise hour.