Executioner Pierrepoint: An Autobiography

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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.

Notebook of executioner who hanged Nazi war criminals and Notebook of executioner who hanged Nazi war criminals and

One night Tish - whose real name was James Corbitt - left the pub, at Hollinwood, Oldham, and did something which he had been brooding on for a year.

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.”

A Very English Hangman: The Life and Times of Albert Pierrepoint

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. 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. Hallo Tosh”, Corbitt said, looking up at the man who had been sent to execute him. “Hallo Tish, how are you?” replied the executioner.verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ 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.” 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

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Michael Manning, who raped and murdered a 65-year-old nurse and in 1954 became the last man to be hanged in Ireland. Pierrepoint reputedly said afterwards: “I love hanging Irishmen – they always go quietly and without trouble. They’re Christian men and they believe they’re going to a better place.” Read More Related ArticlesAfter 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’. 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. 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.” 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. John ‘Reg’ Christie, who murdered at least eight women, including his wife, at his flat in Notting Hill. The victims also included the wife and daughter of Timothy Evans, who also lived at the property. Before Christie was revealed to be a serial killer, Evans was convicted for killing his wife and daughter after making a false confession. Evans was sentenced to hang, and was executed by Pierrepoint in March 1950. Three years later Pierrepoint hanged Christie as well. ‘I hanged John Reginald Christie, the Monster of Rillington Place,’ he wrote, ‘in less time than it took the ash to fall off a cigar I had left half-smoked in my room at Pentonville.’