SearchMy accountHelpBasket0 items

I Am Pasha LiffeyThe Story of the Last Black African Hanged in Scotland

By David Alston

Pre-order
Format

£14.99

Pre-order

Published 30 April 2027

About this book

The story of the last black African hanged in Scotland: a life shaped by racism, empire and British colonialism

  • Reveals the startling detail of a life lived on the margins of society in Southern Africa and Britain
  • Provides a study of Black bodies on display in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, as servants and in shows, circuses and boxing booths
  • Gives an account of migration from the copper mines of Cornwall to the coal mines of Lanarkshire, foregrounding the lives of women in both communities
  • Uses the records of prisoners held in the condemned cell of Glasgow’s Duke Street prison to add to our understanding of capital punishment in Scotland 

'I Am Pasha Liffey' were the last recorded words of the young man from Lesotho in southern Africa, guilty of the brutal murder of 61-year-old Mary Jane Jose in Larkhall, Lanarkshire in August 1905. His crime, trial and punishment and the resulting publicity reveal what it was to be Black and poor, on display and on the move, in the years between his birth and his execution.

The narrative shows how of perceptions of race, white civilisation and ‘African savagery’ shaped Pasha’s life, in Africa and Britain, where he worked as a stable boy, house servant, groom, stage performer, milkman, muleteer, army scout, circus hand, barman and boxer. It is also an account of his victim – the Cornish pit-head worker, migrant and mother whose family struggled with poverty, dangerous and deadly working conditions, infant deaths, mental illness and alcohol in the mining communities of Lanarkshire.

Table of contents

Foreword
Some notes on language and terminology

Setting the scene
Chapter 1. What are we doing here?

Two Lives: Pasha Liffey and Mary Jane Jose
Chapter 2. Pasha Liffey: The boy in the blanket, c.1880 to 1891
Chapter 3. Mary Jane Jose: Bal Maiden, Mother and Migrant, 1844 to 1881
Chapter 4. Pasha Liffey: Stable Boy, Groom, House Servant, 1891 to 1898
Chapter 5. Mary Jane Jose: Carfin to the Dykehead Rows, Larkhall, 1882 to 1901
Chapter 6. Pasha Liffey: Savage South Africa and the ‘isolation of spectacle’, 1899
Chapter 7. Pasha Liffey: Love, heartbreak and a ‘tiger’, 1899 and 1900
Chapter 8. Pasha Liffey: War Service, 1900
Chapter 9. Mary Jane Jose: The Boer War begins, 1899 – 1900
Chapter 10. Mary Jane Jose and Pasha Liffey: An outing and a voyage, August and September 1900
Chapter 11. Pasha Liffey: Savage South Africa on Tour, 1900 & 1901
Chapter 12. Pasha Liffey: ’He had taken to a wandering life’, September 1901 to May 1905

Larkhall 1905: The Murder of Mary Jane Jose (Mrs Henry Welsh)
Chapter 13. Mary Jane Jose and Pasha Liffey: The Larkie Fair, 1905
Chapter 14. Larkhall: The Murder of Mary Jane Jose, 11 August 1905

Pasha Liffey: Arrest, imprisonment, trial and punishment
Chapter 15. Pasha Liffey: Arrest, imprisonment and trial, 12 August to 24 October
Chapter 16. Pasha Liffey: In the Condemned Cell, 24 October to 13 November 1905
Chapter 17. Execution: The theatre of the gallows, 14 November 1905

Commendatory prayer for a sick person at the point of departure (from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer)

Leobu (A Sotho Tale)

Acknowledgements
Index

About the author

David Alston

David Alston is a Historian and Independent Researcher. He is the author of Ross & Cromarty: A Historical Guide (1997) and My Little Town of Cromarty: The History of a Northern Scottish Town (2006). He was a Highland Councillor and from 1991–2003 was curator/manager of Cromarty Courthouse Museum. He has published articles on the Highlands and Slavery including 'Very Rapid and Splendid Fortunes: Highland Scots in Berbice (Guyana) in the early nineteenth century', in Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, (2007) and wrote a chapter in the T.D. Devine edited collection 'Recovering Scotland's Slavery Past' (EUP, 2015).