UK | Albert Pierrepoint, the pub landlord whose part-time job saw him kill 400 people

Albert Pierrepoint had a calling for the profession from a young age, and went on to become Britain's chief executioner who delivered some of the most controversial hangings in British history

A pub landlord had a part-time job that meant he took the lives of more than 400 prisoners.

Photographs show Albert Pierrepoint, who was born in 1905 in Bradford, can be seen smiling and laughing as he stands behind the bar in his pub, the Help the Poor Struggler.

But Albert had another job, one that was part-time and that he hid from his wife until after they were married - he was Britain's most famous (or infamous) executioner.

Within a 25-year period, it estimated that he had taken the lives of 435-600 people, Yorkshire Live reports.

His father had also been a hangman, and from a young age he had felt a desire to follow in his footsteps.

“I have come to the conclusion that executions solve nothing, and are only an antiquated relic of a primitive desire for revenge which takes the easy way and hands over the responsibility for revenge to other people.” — Albert Pierrepoint

At a schoolboy, he had once written in class: "When I leave school I should like to be public executioner like my dad is, because it needs a steady man with good hands like my dad and my Uncle Tom and I shall be the same."

His dad had recommended the job to him, as there were perks such as being able to travel internationally.

Pierrepoint's uncle Tom had also been an executioner, and Albert had grown up reading his diary.

It was with his uncle that he took part in his first execution as an assistant executioner in 1932 when he was 27-years-old, hanging a young Irish farmer who had murdered his brother.

The execution took place in Mountjoy prison in Dublin, and it was Albert's job to take the man onto the scaffold, tie his legs together and stand back while his uncle sprung the mechanism that dropped the prisoner through the trap door.

And this is became his part-time job in the 1930s, spending the rest of his time working in the grocery business.

“Hanging must run in the blood,” Pierrepoint said in his retirement.

“It requires a natural flair. The judgment and timing of a first-rate hangman cannot be acquired.”

In 1941, Albert was promoted to lead executioner.

He had killed an estimated 450-600 people, with the most amount of executions he carried out in one day being 17.

He prided himself on delivering as quick, dignified and as humane a death as possible, paying meticulous attention to the height, weight and build of the condemned, to ensure the fatal drop was as efficient and as painless as possible.

After quitting his job at the grocer, he became the pub landlord to the Help The Poor Struggler alehouse at 303 Manchester Road, Oldham.

It is said that he was a small, cheerful man, known to be smartly-dressed with a cigar in hand and had a passion for boxing.

Soon he had become Britain's chief executioner, which had made him somewhat of a celebrity since he was the third person in his family to hold this title.

“Capital punishment in my view achieved nothing except revenge.” — Albert Pierrepoint

Groups of sightseers would visit his pub, asking to hear stories and meet the man himself.

In the years following the end of the Second World War, Albert became widely seen as a populist avenger of Nazi crimes after it was revealed he visited Germany to execute 200 war criminals found guilty at Nuremberg.

Among his 'clients' then was Josef Kramer 'The Beast of Belsen' and - hanging women individually and men in pairs - he once notched a personal record of 17 executions in a single day.

Another port of call was Gibraltar, where he executed spies, and Albert even carried out the last-ever execution in the Republic of Ireland, taking Michael Manning's life in 1954.

Visitors to his Oldham pub hoping for anecdotes and stories were to be disappointed, however, by a painfully discrete man who didn't even tell his wife, Anne, about his part-time job until after they were married.

In all, between 1932 and 1956, Albert's part-time position saw him end the lives of an estimated 433 men and 17 women.

Those who met their ends in his noose included necrophiliac Halifax-born multiple murderer John Christie and the acid bath murderer John George Haigh, who grew up in Outwood, Wakefield.

Albert was also involved in controversial cases such as that of Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in Britain, and Derek Bentley, executed for his part in the murder of PC Sidney Miles despite having a mental age of 11, just as the public mood turned against capital punishment in the Fifties.

According to a film about his life, it was one remarkably personal case that may have changed the mind of the hangman himself.

On November 28, 1950, Albert visited Strangeways prison, Manchester, to carry out the grim task of hanging James Corbitt. The man had murdered his girlfriend in a fit of jealous rage, strangling her and daubing the word 'whore' across her forehead in indelible ink.

It was just another crime and just another name to Pierrepoint until - looking through the observation window beforehand - he was stunned to recognise Corbitt as a regular and friend from his Struggler's pub.

The two men, who affectionately nicknamed each other Tish and Tosh, had even sung their regular Saturday night duet of 'Danny Boy' in the pub on the night of the murder.

Pierrepoint proceeded with the execution but is thought to have been haunted by the experience. Most shocking of all to him was the realisation that a man so personally aware of the punishment and the hangman himself had not found the death penalty to be a deterrent.

“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.” — Albert Pierrepoint

With his conscience now deeply troubled, he spurned begging letters from the government and resigned in 1956 citing a row with the Home Office over fees. He had been paid £4 instead of the usual £15 when a client received a late reprieve.

Within eight years the death penalty was abolished in the UK and Albert's subsequent autobiography 'Executioner: Pierrepoint', revealed his conversion in 1974.

He wrote: "I have come to the conclusion that executions solve nothing, and are only an antiquated relic of a primitive desire for revenge which takes the easy way and hands over responsibility for revenge to other people.

"The trouble with the death penalty has always been that nobody wanted it for everybody but everybody differed about who should get off."

Albert left the Struggler's in 1954 and the pub served its final pint 18 years later before demolition under a road-widening scheme in the Nineties.

Albert died aged 87 in 1992 at the Southport nursing home where he had spent his final years.

Staff are reported to have said he had died "with a clear conscience".

Source: mirror.co.uk, Shiler MahmoudiAndrew Robinson, September 20, 2021

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde