Discalimer off the top! This article contains the mention of legal execution, hanging, war crimes and related subjects, it is purely historical fact and is not the personal opinion of the author.
July 10th marks the anniversary of the death of the UK’s most prolific - and absolutely legal - executioner, Albert Pierrepoint. He passed away at age 87 in 1992 after a long career as Official Executioner for His Majesty’s Prison Service from 1932 - 1956 and during his tenure hanged at least 435 people including notorious murderers, serial killers and Nazi war criminals as well as many controversial cases which put into question the use of capital punishment in the UK which we will get onto in due course.
He was born in Clayton, Yorkshire on March 30th 1905, the third of five children and the eldest son of parents, Mary and Henry Pierrepoint. The family were no strangers to the job title ‘Official Executioner’ as Henry and his brother Thomas both held the role, Henry from 1901 - 1910, and Thomas from 1906 - 1946 when Albert took over after serving as his uncle’s apprentice. It seems Albert always wanted to go into the family business, noting in an essay at the young age of 11 that he should like to be Official Executioner like his father and uncle. When Henry died in 1922, Albert inherited his notes, journals and execution diaries with details of every hanging he had conducted.
It was a trying time for young Albert, following many applications to the Prison Service where there were simply no vacancies, he had to take delivery jobs, work at Marlborough Mills, grocery and sales to cover the years until a position became available in his chosen profession. Eventually in 1932 he was able to take the role of Assistant Executioner following the previous assistant’s resignation and he began his career attending a hanging in Dublin carried out by his Uncle Thomas, it was scheduled for 8am and took less than a minute to perform. His role was to follow the prisoner up to the platform, bind his legs then step backwards off the trapdoor at which point the official executioner would trip the mechanism. Not a job just anyone could stomach, regardless of the crime.
In the years that followed, Albert carried on with his normal jobs, assisting on executions with his Uncle as they came about, carrying out his first official hanging in 1941, that of Antonio Mancini, a gangster and murderer in London. As he would for the rest of his career, he followed the guidelines put in place by the Home Office, arriving the day before the execution, viewing the prisoner, establishing their height and weight, then testing the hanging equipment with a weighted sack, and calculating the length of rope needed for a quick, efficient death. The following year, in June 1942 Pierrepoint executed Gordon Cummins, a vicious serial murderer known as the ‘Blackout Ripper’ due to his method of killing and mutilating his female victims during the wartime blackout restrictions. He was convicted of murdering four women and attempting to murder two more during a six day period earlier that year. As he was taken to the hanging platform, a German air raid was taking place over London, He is the only criminal known to have been put to death during an air raid.
After the war, Albert Pierrepoint found himself to be in high demand both at home and abroad. During World War Two he had executed many German spies and and some US soldiers found guilty of committing capital offences in England, but between 1945 and 1949, following the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp he was employed in Germany and Austria to execute many war criminals, many of which were Nazis who committed atrocities during the war.
Two of those condemned to death for their part in such unimaginable crimes were Josef Kramer - ‘ The Beast of Belsen’ who had also been Commandant of Auschwitz, and Irma Grese - ‘The Hyena of Auschwitz’ seen above awaiting trial.
After this incredibly dark period of history, Executioner Pierrepoint became something of a hero for his part in serving legal justice on some of the most heinous crimes against humanity there have ever been. Around this time Pierrepoint took on the lease of a pub called Help the Poor Struggler in Oldham, and then The Rose and Crown on Preston. There was a period in 1948 when there were no hangings to carry out as the Criminal Justice Bill raised the issue of whether the death penalty should continue, during this time he worked in his pub which was very busy as people crowded there to be served a drink by such a famous figure, but the bill failed in the House of Lords and executions resumed. Pierrepoint carried out several more sentences including those deemed to be ‘of the most notorious murderers of the period’ including the ‘Acid Bath Killer’ John Haigh in 1949.
Things began to turn for Albert in 1950 when he had to carry out a hanging on someone he knew well, a friend and customer at his own pub named James Corbitt who had been convicted of brutally murdering his mistress. Called ‘Tish’ by Pierrepoint, he had reportedly been at the pub that night and even sang a duet with Albert before leaving to commit his crime. Having to be the one to execute Corbitt, it is reportedly one of the few times Pierrepoint regretted doing his job.
If he did have doubts about his chosen profession, he continued to be Official Executioner for a further five years, and during this period the controversial nature of the cases began to raise issues with the death penalty in Britain. Timothy Evans was killed by the noose in March 1950, a man with a low IQ and mental age, he was arrested for the murder of his wife and child at 10, Rillington Place where they were tenants of the notorious John Christie. Despite constantly claiming his innocence, he was put to death, then three years later it was proved that Christie was responsible for the murder of Evans’ wife but he denied the killing of the child. Pierrepoint hanged Christie in 1953, the conviction and hanging of Evans was deemed a miscarriage of justice.
Two more cases of wrongful conviction and death occurred around this time, firstly that of 19 year old Derek Bentley, a man of ‘low intelligence’ who was the accomplice of 16 year old Christopher Craig who shot and killed a policeman, then the hanging of Ruth Ellis in 1955. She was a model and hostess at a nightclub who shot her abusive boyfriend while in a state of clear distress and panic. Before her execution the case attracted a huge amount of interest from both the public and the press and a petition of over 50,000 signatures asking for a reprieve was handed to the Home Secretary Gwilym Lloyd George but he refused to grant one. She was the last woman to be hanged in Britain.
Albert Pierrepoint resigned in January 1956 apparently following a dispute over pay and with that the career of the UK’s most prolific executioner ended. His last hanging was that of Norman Green who had confessed to killing two boys in the Wigan area. When asked in later years his view on capital punishment he said it
‘... is said to be a deterrent. I cannot agree. There have been murders since the beginning of time, and we shall go on looking for deterrents until the end of time. If death were a deterrent, I might be expected to know. It is I who have faced them last, young lads and girls, working men, grandmothers. I have been amazed to see the courage with which they take that walk into the unknown. It did not deter them then, and it had not deterred them when they committed what they were convicted for. All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment convince me that in what I have done I have not prevented a single murder. ‘
Following Pierrepoint’s resignation, two of his assistants we promoted - Henry Allen and Jock Stewart, they carried out the final 34 executions in the UK over the next seven years. On the 13th August 1964 Allen hanged Gwynne Evans at Strangeways Prison in Manchester for the murder of John Alan West, and at the same time Stewart hanged his accomplice Peter Allen at Walton Gaol in Liverpool. They were the last hangings in British legal history and the following year the death penalty was temporarily abolished with the decision being made permanent on 18th December 1969.