Hopes ran high in abolitionist circles when the first Labour government with a parliamentary majority was elected in 1945. Anticipating the end of the death sentence for murder, abolitionists had, in the event, to settle for a Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (1945-53), whose terms of reference restricted it to the possible means of limiting the operation of the death penalty, as distinct from its abolition. I have already examined why the post-war Labour government failed to get rid of the death penalty, and I shall begin my paper with a brief summary of this work, since it raises themes that recur in the rest of the paper.

The paper will then move into the 1950s and 1960s, to assess why it was that a penalty which led to the execution of fewer than a dozen people each year, and which was foreign to the rehabilitative thrust of general penal policy, was so ardently clung to for so long by the judiciary, the police, and a sizeable section of both the political elite and the general public. Why did post-war penal debate continue to be so consumed by the agitation over whether to retain or dismantle the gallows? The paper will attempt to uncover and explain the enduring symbolic role of the capital penalty, the social and political background of the retentionist ranks, the main arguments that were used by retentionists (and how they changed over time), and the factors that eventually led to the abolition of the last remaining human sacrifice in 1965.