IT WAS the run-up to Christmas 1913, but instead of the crowds spilling on to the streets to spread festive cheer they were baying for blood.

Many were the worse for drink and smashed the windows of Oldham Town Hall. Soon a huge crowd was marching on Werneth Police Station, creating havoc and destruction. Mounted police tried to control the mob and they too were attacked.

The irate crowd, now rumoured to be 50,000-strong, decided to march on Strangeways Prison and a stand-off took place over night until, at 8am the following day – December 17 – the hangman pulled the lever on the trap door and the prisoner Ernest Kelly was killed.

It was an incredible situation – not least as the guilt of ‘Ernie’ was not in question.

The remarkable story of ‘the cowboy murder’ is retold in a fascinating new book called ‘Lancashire Tales of Mystery and Murder’ by Steve Fielding.

In brief, Ernie and his 17-year-old pal Edward Hilton had been found guilty of murdering local businessman Daniel Bardsley.

Mr Bardsley ran a highly successful bookselling and stationery business in Yorkshire Street and had employed Edward Hilton, who had recently returned to his hometown after a stint in Canada.

Hilton was an errand boy and he wasn’t making the grade, so Mr Bardsley told the teenager that he would be letting him go.



That same night the shop owner was attacked and bludgeoned to death and a number of items of jewellery stolen. He had been beaten with a metal dumb-bell and Indian club and his blood was all over the walls.

Suspicion immediately fell on Hilton, who initially denied anything to do with it. However, he rapidly claimed that it was a robbery that had gone wrong and that his pal Ernie Kelly had actually killed Mr Bardsley.

Ernie, a 20-year-old piecer at the Platt Brothers cotton mill in Oldham, was then pulled in by the police and he claimed that it was Hilton who had come up with the idea of the robbery and struck the fatal blows.

The judge decided that it didn’t matter who had done what, as they had both agreed to the crime and been present when the fatal violence was used. He said they were both “equally guilty” and sentenced the pair to death at the gallows.

However, because Hilton had only been 17 at the time of the murder – and the legal age for hanging was 18 – his sentence was reduced to life imprisonment.

The people of Oldham were outraged that Ernie would now be the one to face the gallows alone. MPs and even Queen Mary were lobbied with claims that he had been the less guilty of the two and had a mental age of just 14. They even produced a photocard taken a few days before the murder (right) which showed the pair posing childlike as cowboys, with claims that they were so immature they had been influenced by stories of the wild west.

It was all to no avail, and the Home Secretary confirmed, on the eve of the hanging, that Ernie must pay the ultimate price. It was the dashing of this chance of an 11th-hour repreive that sparked the near-riot that followed.

Apparently, Ernie went bravely to his death.