James Hawker


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

This article is about the English poacher. For the explorer of South Australia, see James Collins Hawker.

He was born 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]

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]

Notes
  1. 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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