Executioner Pierrepoint: An Autobiography

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He was 26 by the time he went into the job, after stints as a drayman and an interview at Strangeways. Albert’s first job, at 12, was as a piecer at a textile mill in Failsworth, after he moved to the Manchester area with his mother. But he always knew the fate that awaited him. As a schoolboy, when asked to write what he wanted to be, he answered: “When I leave school I should like to be the Official Executioner.”

The smiling pub landlord from Oldham who killed 400 people. The smiling pub landlord from Oldham who killed 400 people.

John Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer. Hanged in 1949, Haigh murdered six people for their property and pensions before dissolving their bodies in acid. His victims included Dr Archibald Henderson and his wife Rosalie, whose brother was a hotelier from Withington’s Hartley Estate. Such was Pierrepoint’s esteem as a hangman - he could finish the job in eight seconds - the Home Office urged him to reconsider. But Pierrepoint was not to be persuaded to return to the task which had been his curious destiny. After leaving the Struggler in the fifties, Pierrepoint ran another pub, the Rose and Crown in Much Hoole, Lancashire. He died in Southport in 1992 at the age of 87 - having come to the view that executions ‘solve nothing’ and ‘are only an antiquated relic of a primitive desire for revenge’.

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Albert Pierrepoint’s Yorkshire-raised father, Henry, had been an executioner before him. Soon after he married a Manchester woman, Mary Buxton, at Newton Heath, the elder Pierrepoint was added to the Home Office’s approved list of hangmen, having written to them repeatedly to volunteer his services. The young Albert had grown up reading his uncle Tom’s diaries of the job, while his dad had recommended it as a sideline with opportunities for continental travel. And while Pierrepoint would not retire from his grim business for another six years, executing Corbitt, his friend from the pub, is said to have haunted him. The meeting marked the point at which Albert Pierrepoint’s two worlds - jovial Oldham publican by night, clinical state hangman in his spare time - collided. Later, in his memoirs, the executioner recalled the encounter, writing how the condemned man smiled and relaxed after he greeted him with ‘the casual warmth of my nightly greeting from behind the bar’.

The smiling Yorkshire pub landlord who killed over 400 people

The siblings were prolific hangmen in the early twentieth century, but both were eventually removed from the list amid concerns over their fitness for the role - in each case following allegations they had turned up for work after a drink. Hangman Albert Pierrepoint left seen here at Euston Station traveling home by train after the execution of Ruth Ellis. He is accompanied by Chief Inspector Robert Fabian He had a fine voice, and was usually joined in the singalong at the piano - a fixture in post-war pubs - by a man who called him ‘Tosh’, who he called ‘Tish’ in return. By the time Pierrepoint’s name went up above the door of The Struggler he was well-known for his work executing Nazi war criminals. Between 1932 and 1956, at least 433 men and 17 women died at the end of his rope. His personal record included 17 hangings in one day - of which he said, ‘was my arm stiff!’

Albert Pierrepoint’s Legacy And Craft

Hanging must run in the blood,” Albert Pierrepoint said after his retirement. “It requires a natural flair. The judgment and timing of a first-rate hangman cannot be acquired.”