James Hawker (poacher)

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

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.^{[citation needed]}

Notes[edit]

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Robin P. Jenkins,‘"Hawker, James (1836–1921)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 18 April 2010.
^ E. F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform. Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 217.
^ Biagini, p. 403, n. 191.

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