Long shot question here

Such people will be very old now, so it's unlikely. But you never know.

Your local library, if it keeps either hard or microfiche copies of the local evening papers of the day, should be a source for news reports, because then local newspapers were real newspapers, not, as mine has become, a weekly sustained on a diet of cats in trees and Cub Scout litterpicks. Some simply took the AP or Reuters feeds, some were big enough to send reporters to London.

I'm interested in the Christie-Evans affair for this reason...

In 1953 (when I was six) the realisation that an innocent man had been hung was shocking. It shocked my mother, hitherto a fairly ordinary housewife, into becoming an active opponent of the death penalty, and she usually helped with petitions and joined protests outside prisons. It wasn't a particularly popular pastime, as you might imagine.

Anyway, I do dimly remember the noise and bustle and the pain of a broken wrist outside Winson Green gaol on the morning they hung Frederick Cross, which was in 1955. I don't think Mum could find anybody to look after me that day. I went with her again in 1963, when Oswald Gray was hung at Winson Green (I think I was 16). I recall that as a bitterly cold morning, with a nagging wind.

It wasn't that Mum or I were woolly liberals, you should understand. We believed that life should mean life for premeditated murder, and that not being hung would at least give the innocent a chance.

That kind of thinking was soon challenged by the Moors Murders, and after that by the police killings at Shepherd's Bush in 1966. Everybody forgot about Evans.

There were, of course a slew of convictions in the 70s and 80s which met the criteria of the 1957 Homicide Act, some of which were later overturned. Think of Stefan Kiszko's tragedy, and the Birmingham Six.

I should imagine a fair number of us have come closer to murder in one way or another than is comfortable. A quiet man I knew from going about various Coventry pubs was murdered in the late 80s, his body left in a garden opposite my house, his head bashed in. His killer was true low life scum, but got off with manslaughter and a 6 year sentence. On release he resumed his normal activities.

In November 1974 I was passing from New Union Street to Little Park Street in Coventry, on my way to a nightshift. I went past the telephone exchange. Just as I got by the Council House I heard a terrific shriek followed by a crumpling sound, and very quickly Little Park Street was filled with policemen spilling out of their HQ. Naturally, everybody in the area, including me, was questioned, though I had nothing of any worth to tell. What had happened was that IRA man James McDade, intending to blow up the telephone exchange and all the women in it, instead blew himself up.

In all my days, I never saw such anger across the city as this attempt at murdering innocent women provoked. A week later the Birmingham Pub Bombings happened, of course. There were marches, factory workers took to the streets, and a lot of Irish people sensibly kept a low profile. But I'm getting off the point.

The men arrested for the pub bombings were on their way to Belfast for the funeral of James McDade. They had nothing to do with the bombings, of course, though it's always stuck in my craw that they were going to pay their respects to a man who fully intended to blow mothers, sisters, daughters to smithereens. A sneaking, murderous coward to me then, and now.

The fact is, though, that the Birmingham Six could not be put to death, and all but one of them lived to be exonerated.

That is justice - delayed to be sure, but justice. Something the death penalty would have swept away.

Thanks very much for that. It was very informative.