James Hawker (baptised 29 August 1836 7 August 1921) was an English poacher.[1]

Biography

He was born in Daventry, Northamptonshire and began poaching as a teenager to gain extra income whilst working as an apprentice bootmaker.[1] He joined the militia to acquire a gun and reached the rank of corporal, although he left Daventry after falling out with the head gamekeeper at Badby.[1]

In 1893 he was elected to the Oadby school-board (sitting next to the "Leading Gentlemen" on whose lands he poached)[2] and in 1894 was a member of the Oadby parish council. Hawker kept photographs of William Ewart Gladstone, Charles Bradlaugh, Augustine Birrell, Thomas Sayers, and Gladys Cooper in his diary.[3] In 1921 he died of a heart attack at Stoughton Road, Oadby, and was buried in Oadby cemetery.[1] Descendants of James Hawker are also buried there.

In 1961 the Oxford University Press published his journal, written in 19041905, a "mixture of autobiography, poacher's handbook, and radical philosophy".[1] A play of Hawker's life, The Poacher, was produced by the Emma Theatre Company in 1980 and written by Andrew Marley and Lloyd Johnston. After the first performance of the play, a collection was raised which paid for a headstone at Hawker's grave, bearing the motto: "I will Poach till I die".[1]

In 1982 David Sneath and Barry Lount published a book on James Hawker titled The Life of a Victorian Poacher. David Sneath is a direct descendant of James Hawker who has also lived on Stoughton Road and was part of the Oadby Historical Society.

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Robin P. Jenkins,‘"Hawker, James (1836–1921)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 18 April 2010.
  2. E. F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform. Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 18601880 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 217.
  3. Biagini, p. 403, n. 191.

Further reading

  • Garth Christian (ed.), James Hawker's Journal: A Victorian Poacher (Oxford University Press, 1961, 1979).
  • David Sneath and Barry Lount, The Life of a Victorian Poacher: James Hawker (1982).
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