Albert Pierrepoint was an English hangman who executed between 435 and 600 people in a 25-year career that ended in 1956. During his tenure he hanged 200 people who had been convicted of war crimes in Germany and Austria. He wrote his memoirs in 1974 in which he concluded that capital punishment was not a deterrent, although he may have changed his position after that. His life has been included in several works of fiction, such as the 2005 film Pierrepoint, inwhich he was portrayed by Timothy Spall.
About Albert Pierrepoint in brief
Albert Pierrepoint was an English hangman who executed between 435 and 600 people in a 25-year career that ended in 1956. His father, Henry, and uncle Thomas were official hangmen before him. During his tenure he hanged 200 people who had been convicted of war crimes in Germany and Austria, as well as several high-profile murderers. He wrote his memoirs in 1974 in which he concluded that capital punishment was not a deterrent, although he may have changed his position after that. His life has been included in several works of fiction, such as the 2005 film Pierrepoint, inwhich he was portrayed by Timothy Spall.Pierrepoint was born on 30 March 1905 in Clayton in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He was the third of five children and eldest son of Henry Pierrepoint and his wife Mary. Henry had a series of jobs, including butcher’s apprentice, clog maker and a carrier in a local mill, but employment was mostly short-term. Henry was removed from the list of executioners in July 1910 after arriving drunk at a prison the day before an execution and excessively berating his assistant. Henry died in 1922 and Pierrepoint received two blue exercise books—in which his father had written his story as a hangman—and Henry’s execution diary, which listed details of each hanging. In the 1920s Pierrepoint left the mill and became a drayman for a wholesale grocer, delivering goods ordered through a travelling salesman.
By 1930 he had learned to drive a car and a lorry to make his deliveries; he later became manager of the business. In October 1941 he undertook his first hanging as lead executioner. He ran a pub in Lancashire from the mid-1940s until the 1960s. In 1956 he was involved in a dispute with a sheriff over payment, leading to his retirement from hanging. He said that the execution was ‘sacred to me’ and that he approached his task with gravity and said that it was his ‘duty’ to carry out the executions. He died in 2007 at the age of 87. He is survived by his wife, Mary, and their three children, all of whom are now in their 80s and 90s, and his son, David, who is in his mid-40s. Pierrepoint is buried in Failsworth, near Oldham, Lancs, in a plot of land he inherited from his father, who was a mill worker in the 19th century. He also has a brother, Thomas, who became an official executioner in 1906. In September 1932, aged 27, he was taken on as an assistant executioner, alongside his uncle Tom. He spent four days training at Pentonville Prison, London, where a dummy was used for his first execution. At the end of that time he received his formal acceptance letter. At that time, the assistant’s fee per execution was £1-11-6d, with two weeks later if his behaviour were satisfactory.
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