THE FLOGGING JUDGE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 420, 6 August 1908, Page 4

THE FLOGGING JUDGE.

Anecdotes of the Late Sir John Day. London, July 15Sir John Charles Day, the judge who earned the title of the “Hooligan’s Terror,” died on Saturday at Newbury, at the age of eighty-two. During the nineteen years Sir John was a judge of the High Court—from 1882 to 1901— he was noted for his gift of solemn humour and his drastic flogging sentences. In fourteen years he sentenced 137 criminals to 3766 strokes of the cat. He acted as chairman of the Belfast Riots Commission, and was the last survivor of the Parnell Commissioners. Many good stories are told of the late judge, who was one of the most striking personalities of his time. , Humorists were never tired ot playing upon his name. In Liverpool, where he passed some longremembered sentences which effectually stamped out an epidemic of hooliganism, he was known as Judgment Day. On the Western Circuit he was Day of Reckoning. When he was knighted the inevitable jest about Day being turned into knight was duly forthcoming. A variation of the theme was: “ When Day was made knight the cats came out.” While sentencing hooligans he was the personification of grimuess, and his awe-inspiring words made the most hardened criminal tremble.

Once he said to a gang of Liverpool ruffians; —

“I am not going to give you men long terms of imprisonment, but when you go in you get twenty lashes of the cat; when you have been in nine months you get twenty lashes of the cat; before you come out you get twenty lashes of the cat. And then you can show what you have got to your friends.” He was perhaps the only Judge who has ever done “ hard labour.” During a visit he paid to a northern prison he tried the treadmill, but when he asked to be set free the gaoler pretended not to hear his request. The Judge was perspiring freely by the time he was permitted to abandon his experiment. Sir John Day was the last Judge to go on circuit on horseback, like his predecessors of Tudor and Stuart times.