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 1904–1905, 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, 1860–1880 (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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