Who Killed Oswald Grey?: Race, the law and the last Black man hanged in Britain.

By Jon Berry

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.

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.

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Sep 28, 2025
• ISBN: 9781836289951

Jon Berry

JON BERRY lives with his partner Victoria in an ancient Wiltshire cottage, 20 yards from a pub and within casting distance of the River Avon. When not teaching in a large secondary school, he is an irregular contributor to Waterlog magazine and caughtbytheriver.net.

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Contents

Foreword

Introduction

People and Places

Timeline

1.Felix

2.Felix

3.Mover

4.Felix

5.Thomas

6.Mover

7.Gerald Baumber

8.Felix

9.Gerald Baumber

10.Mover

11.Felix

12.Graham Swanwick

13.Regina v Oswald Augustus Grey, Birmingham Assizes

14.Felix

15.Thomas Bates

16.Phyllis

17.Gerald Baumber

18.Henry Brooke

19.Tony Mountford

20.No protest, no fuss

21.Felix

22.Bog Walk and Spanish Town

23.Miscarriage of Justice?

24.Memory and Records

25.Thomas

26.Oswald

27.Who killed Oswald Grey?

28.Why this story?

Sources

Acknowledgements

About the author

By the same author

Foreword

Matt Foot

In 1971, my father, the author and campaigning journalist Paul Foot, wrote Who Killed Hanratty? He had been enraged by the careless actions of a legal system that was quick to make up its mind that a working-class young man with a chequered past must have been guilty of the murder of Michael Gregsten and the rape of Valerie Storie ten years earlier.

I remember as a young boy accompanying Paul on walks with Hanratty’s mother, Mary, round Gladstone Park. Peter Alphon, an initial suspect for the murder, would ring our house repeatedly. He had frequently confessed to the murder. Paul’s tireless investigations and his refusal to be deterred by officialdom, uncovered flaws in the process and numerous witnesses in Rhyl who supported Hanratty’s alibi, placing him away from the scene of the murder. He was part of a high-profile campaign, supported by John Lennon, that ensured that even after Hanratty’s execution in April 1962, the case continued to be revisited for decades afterwards.

Later DNA evidence cast doubt on Hanratty’s innocence. Paul didn’t trust the science. Whatever the true position, the fact the state had executed Hanratty meant the DNA evidence could not be put to Hanratty himself – a compelling reason in itself to end the death penalty, especially given we know there are many miscarriage of justice victims who are incontrovertibly innocent. That point was put to a previous Home Secretary, Priti Patel, in 2011 by Ian Hislop on BBC’s Question Time. She was humiliated by her own stubborn insistence that killing innocent people would act as a deterrent to murder.

Seven months after the execution of Hanratty in Bedford jail, Oswald Augustus Grey was hanged in Winson Green Prison in Birmingham. By grim coincidence, both cases had been prosecuted by Graham Swanwick and both executions carried out by Harry Allen. But while my father’s efforts had ensured that the world took notice of Hanratty’s case – both at the time and thereafter – Oswald Grey, a bewildered twenty-year-old from Jamaica who had barely been in the country for two years, merited no such attention.

Grey went to the gallows without his case ever making headline news, even in his adopted city. His trail had lasted less than a working week. His appeal less than an hour. His plea for clemency from the Home Office was dismissed with unseemly haste. On the day of his execution, a mere four students constituted the protest outside the prison gates. He became a forgotten man. Even among the Jamaican diaspora in Birmingham, there are few who are familiar with his story.

Jon Berry’s book attempts to put that record straight. His use of contemporary documentation and spoken accounts from people alive at the time, give us a genuine sense of the time and place of these shocking events. Along with photographs, illustrations and vividly imagined episodes, we are made fully aware of how the dice were loaded against Grey. His work does not forget other victims. Newsagent Thomas Bates shot dead in his shop in Lee Bank Road and his grieving family are invoked with proper respect.

My father always felt that the case of James Hanratty was a miscarriage of justice. Jon Berry makes a compelling case that Oswald Grey also went to his death without the law looking into every corner of the accusations against him. I am very pleased he has borrowed and amended the title of my father’s important work to continue this tradition of exposing historic injustice concerning the death penalty.

Matt Foot

Solicitor and author

2025

Introduction

At 8.00a.m on the morning of 20 November 1962, twenty-year-old Oswald Augustus Grey was taken from his cell in Winson Green Prison in Birmingham and hanged. It was the last execution in that place. Five more men were executed in England until the abolition of the death penalty took effect in 1965.

Grey had arrived in the country in 1960. In a commonly repeated pattern, his father, Felix, had left Jamaica some years earlier and then arranged for his children to join him when money and circumstance allowed. Oswald was the first to arrive.

On 2 June 1962, Thomas Bates was shot dead in what appeared to be a bungled robbery in the newsagent shop which was part of the house where he lived with his mother on Lee Bank Road.

Oswald Grey was arrested on the following Wednesday and was then remanded in custody until his trial for murder on Monday 8 October 1962. He was found guilty and condemned to death four days later on Friday 12 October. His appeal against the sentence took place on Monday 29 October and was over in less than an hour.

There was an attempt to attain a reprieve from the Home Secretary, but this came to nothing and so, on that November morning, the execution took place. There were fewer than twenty-five weeks between the death of Thomas Bates and that of Oswald Grey.

The judicial system was careless and hasty in its disposal of Grey. He had no well-connected advocates and he lived in a time of deference toward the state and its self-preserving institutions. He was easily dispensable.

This all took place in a time when news did not travel fast and outrage had few public outlets. His story, even among Birmingham people of Jamaican heritage, is more than just forgotten – it is practically unknown.

What follows tells this story through real and imaginary eyes. It is an important one because, forgotten as it may be, it speaks to us about what we know of race and class more than sixty years on. And we will see that, as with so many Black boys in the following decades, Oswald Augustus Grey was not afforded true justice.

People and Places

From Jamaica

Felix Augustus Grey. Goes to England in 1955. Marries Beatrice Shields in 1973. Dies in 1988 in Jamaica.

Loleta Butler. Mother of Felix Grey’s seven children. Goes to England in 1956. Date of death unknown.

Oswald Augustus Grey. Son of Felix and Loleta. Goes to England in 1960.

Beatrice Shields. Goes to England in 1954. Marries Felix in 1973. Dies in Jamaica in 2008.

James Shields. Husband of Beatrice. Goes to England in 1954. Dies in 1968.

Phyllis Shields. Daughter of Beatrice and James. Goes to England in 1957. Alive and living in Birmingham in 2025.

Harris Charles Carniff. Known as Mover. Goes to England around 1950. Died in 2014.

In Birmingham

Louisa Bates. Owner of L. Bates and Son, newsagent, on Lee Bank Road.

Thomas Bates. Her son and co-owner of the business.

Cecilia Gibbs. Witness for the prosecution.

Police and judiciary

DCI Gerald Baumber. Chief investigator into the murder of Thomas Bates.

George Blackborow. Deputy Chief Constable. Birmingham Police.

Justice Gilbert Paull. Trial judge.

Graham Swanwick. Prosecuting the case against Oswald Grey.

Arthur James. Defence counsel.

Owen and Co. Solicitors acting for Grey.

At the Home Office

Henry Brooke. Home Secretary.

Sir Charles Cunningham. Under Secretary of State at the Home Office.

Francis Graham-Harrison. Senior civil servant.

Timeline

June–November 1962

Saturday 2 June – Thomas Bates is shot dead in his shop in Lee Bank Road.

Wednesday 6 June – Oswald Grey arrested in Cannon Hill Road and charged with stealing a pistol and being in possession of ammunition.

Thursday 7 June – Grey appears in court and pleads guilty to charges. Is remanded in custody.

Thursday 5 July – Grey appears in court charged with capital murder. Pleads not guilty. Remanded in custody.

Monday 8 October – Grey’s trial begins at Birmingham Assizes.

Friday 12 October – Trial concludes. Grey is sentenced to death.

Monday 29 October – Appeal begins and ends.

Monday 12 November – Meeting with police and civil servants at Home Office to consider the possibility of reprieve.

Monday 16 November – Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, confirms death sentence.

Tuesday 20 November – Grey is hanged at Winson Green Prison.

From 2 June–20 November – 171 days: 24 weeks and 3 days.

A black-and-white vintage map section showing streets and landmarks in Birmingham, UK, including Bristol Cinema, Synagogue, Calthorpe Park, Belgrave PH, Midland Arts Centre, and major roads like Bristol Road, Pershore Road, and Wellington Road.

Map of Birmingham in 1962, showing Lee Bank Road and Wrentham Street (leading into to Bristol Street) to the north. Cannon Hill Road and Edgbaston cricket ground to the south.

Birmingham 1962. North of Lee Bank Road. Lozells Road is shown to the north. Burbury Street abuts it to the south. Gordon Road and Finch Road, to the north of Lozells Road and to the south of Heathfield Road, are not labelled. Winson Green Prison is marked to the west.

Felix

Birmingham, 1960

Trouble and danger. Deep in his soul, Felix has known that the boy would always court them.

Pray and hope, then, that getting him to this England might have given him a chance. The others, the babies, they had to wait their turn. This firstborn boy, though, this wayward sprite – it was he who should cross first, have his chance of salvation.

But once here, soot and smog, drizzle and grime, they have suffocated hope. Once here, in the chill and the damp, the boy has swerved to bad company. Magnetised by villains, chancers and bullies, he has stumbled, stumbled again into the wasteland of stupid transgression.

Just as he had back in Bog Walk. The sun may have shone and the boy may have run freer, but the thefts and the pranks, the dumb willingness to follow the sniggering leader, the sullen lippiness in the face of authority – all of these had captured him. Not for this boy the innocent childhood roundabout of stifling school and tedious chores, leavened by the gleeful release of hide and hope and the loafing of adolescence. He was marked at an early age: a scoundrel, one to be watched.

Days may have started off on the dusty road to the Tulloch schoolhouse, but his destination was elsewhere. Sloping away to the noise and cheery fug of the stalls, dives and lazy disorder of the shabby town. The illicit bookies’ runner, he dips deftly into the cash box while hawkers gossip. Cigarette packets slide into his pocket while punters leer at the bargirls or let the moonshine fog their minds. The useful idiot for bad company, he is an easy mark for indolent police. His roadway is being mapped out.

For him it was the path to the approved school at Stony Hill. There, with the cadet force of his fellow offenders, three of his precious teenage years crumbled to dust. Out of the way of trouble but learning how to be troublesome. His so-called education in this ‘industrial school’ is just a few steps up from the life of the child labourers of his heritage.

For the boy, words written on the page have never been more than so many tadpoles, scratches and whirling spools. All the spittle-flecked fury of the dragoness schoolteacher and all the sharp stings of switch on calf made not one jot of difference. Meaning evaded him. Books shone no light on his befuddled world. For this, his father has some sympathy. School learning had not been part of the strictness of his work-driven upbringing.

Now, Felix, upright Felix, sees that this has been a loss in his world. Maybe some sort of education would have helped him evade the bruising grip of poverty. Sutured into his own childhood, it had not eased its hold when he became a man. As every week passed, the ends would not meet; they would never meet. He needed no reminding of his duty to the mother and the babies. He knew the path that must be followed. Many had left Bog Walk and the townships around, mustering the £28 to come to this England. Their planning was clear-eyed. Five years of graft, self-denial and saving, then home to build a better life.

But five years on and Felix knew there was a truth that could not be avoided. There could now only be one direction of travel. Despite the life of the drafty, shared bedsits he had endured; for all the daily reminders of his second-class citizenship; for all the permanent need for the overcoat that had, at first, been so alien and encumbering, if there were journeys to be made, then they were to be made by his children. And the boy, the troubled boy, must be the first to join him. A new decade, these 1960s, might bring some renewed hope. There was work here – and soon, perhaps, the promise of proper housing, once the mess of Goering’s making had been cleaned up.

Just short of his nineteenth birthday, the boy joins his father. From Bog Walk down into Kingston and on to Nassau, The Bahamas, to London Heathrow, his airfare has cost Felix £85. He has taken a train to Birmingham New Street and although the countryside sweeps by green and soft, the pressing gloom of the lowly skies fills him with an unidentifiable dread. He cannot articulate it but feels menace under the grimy shroud. As the train approaches the city, the boy tries to make sense of chimneys, gantries, cranes, steel riggings, banks of dirty-bricked houses, several tundra of rubble and everywhere, everywhere, the pervasive hanging smoke. He knows already that his clothes are too thin.

If this has been a shock, there is more to come. Felix is waiting for him. With him stands a woman and with the woman, a girl, about the same age as himself. He can see that this girl is bearing a child. Neither the boy nor the man know how they should greet each other but settle on a handshake and a nod. Their eyes do not meet. The older woman, he hears, is Beatrice; her daughter is Phyllis. The boy may not read words well, but he can make a good guess at the status of the older woman. The older woman who is not his mother. The older woman who clearly plays a part in the life of Felix. Upright, dutiful, staid Felix.

They step outside the station and he feels the wetness in the very air. There is no birdsong, no music, no shouting and such children as he can see are not playing or laughing but, like him, waiting for a bus to arrive. They wear a version of the school uniform of the children who take the box car to the Catholic grammar school in Spanish Town, only in this paler and heavier version, the white shirts and striped ties hide beneath thick outer coats that he already begins to eye with envy. He boards the yellow-and-blue bus and, once inside, the gloomy vista of this Birmingham is hidden from view. Dust and dirt, spread and smeared by rain, render the windows opaque.

Felix eyes his boy with some sympathy. Has it been a lifetime or just six years since he, too, was so discomfited by this assault on his senses? Although the chill still pierces him, he has learnt how to swaddle and protect himself. And not just from the weather. He has grown the shield he has needed to deflect the grudging indifference and quiet hostility from so many he encounters in this new life. This life that dictates that he will stay because he can work and is now, at last, not so poor. His £85 has been saved and now spent to give the boy a chance to do the same. He tells himself that he has done a good thing. The boy will grow to understand Beatrice.

The house at Gordon Road squats, grimy and peeling, between two others