Oswald Augustus Grey was a Jamaican immigrant. He was 20 years old when he was executed and 19 when the crime for which he was convicted took place. To talk to people who lived in the city at the time, or to scour the nostalgia forums that proliferate online, is to discover an episode that has almost entirely disappeared in terms of public remembrance. This book unearths something of a place and a society that allowed a young life to become expendable and forgotten. The Birmingham in which this happened is both alien yet familiar.
| Foreword |
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xiii | |
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| Preface |
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xiv | |
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Chapter 1 The evening paper and the return of the blood-stained man |
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1 | (5) |
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Chapter 2 Oswald Grey. Forgotten, unreported and nobody's cause celebre |
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6 | (11) |
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Chapter 3 Saturday evening, 2 June
1962. The fatal consequence of no cricket and no pub |
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17 | (11) |
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Chapter 4 Hard graft and grey weather; blues parties and church |
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28 | (24) |
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Chapter 5 The official details - still firmly locked in the vault |
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52 | (6) |
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Chapter 6 Arrest, trial and conviction. Why a bewildered Oswald never stood a chance |
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58 | (11) |
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Chapter 7 Not like us. Other people with their guns, drugs and sex |
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69 | (20) |
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Chapter 8 November
1962. Castro and Marilyn hit the headlines. A Birmingham execution goes unnoticed |
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89 | (9) |
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Chapter 9 Records lost in transit. The creation of non-people |
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98 | (9) |
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Chapter 10 Vile jokes in high places. How a nerdy schoolboy set the standard for British racism |
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107 | (20) |
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Chapter 11 Sixty years on: Black boy dies in Lee Bank. Of course he does |
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127 | (19) |
| Postscript after a year of lockdown. How Covid was allowed to discriminate and why our rulers remained deaf to systemic racism |
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146 | (8) |
| Acknowledgements and resources |
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154 | |
Retired teacher and political campaigner, Jon Berry has written about teaching, testing, football, and now about the execution of the last man hanged in Birmingham. His work always places incidents and events in the context of the wider world and usually challenges orthodoxies and unchallenged 'truths'. He lives in St. Albans, UK.
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