author

James Berry

1852–1913

Best known as a Victorian-era executioner, he later wrote a stark, unusual memoir shaped by years on the scaffold. His account offers a rare firsthand look at punishment, reform, and the uneasy conscience behind a grim public role.

1 Audiobook

My Experiences as an Executioner

My Experiences as an Executioner

by James Berry

About the author

Born in Yorkshire in 1852, James Berry became one of England’s best-known public executioners, serving in the 1880s and early 1890s. Sources agree that he is chiefly remembered for refining the "long drop" method of hanging, with the stated aim of reducing suffering.

Berry later wrote My Experiences as an Executioner (1892), a memoir that stands out for its firsthand view of a profession most writers only described from the outside. The book helped fix his place in popular history, not simply as an official hangman, but as someone who tried to explain and justify the work in his own words.

He died in 1913. Reliable results found for this name and lifespan identify him as James Berry the English executioner and memoirist; I did not find a clearly usable portrait image from the page I checked, so no profile image is included.