Executioner Pierrepoint: An Autobiography

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Derek Bentley, hanged in 1954 after Christopher Craig, his teenage accomplice in a burglary in Croydon shot a police officer. The shooting came after the officer had asked Craig for his gun, and Bentley had replied ‘let him have it’ - a phrase open to two different interpretations in the circumstances. Bentley, who had learning difficulties. was posthumously pardoned in the nineties. The Struggler, supplied by defunct Salford brewery Groves & Whitnall, was on Manchester Road in Hollinwood - on the old tram route to the city - but was pulled down in the nineties to make way for the M60. 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. In a hotel room in Ashton-under-Lyne, Corbitt strangled Eliza Wood, his some-time girlfriend, to death. 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’.

Pierrepoint: The Preston pub owner who was one of the most Pierrepoint: The Preston pub owner who was one of the most

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.’A group of horses caused traffic chaos after getting loose and going for a gallop on a busy part of the M60 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. 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.”

British hangman who sent the Beasts of Belsen to hell British hangman who sent the Beasts of Belsen to hell

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.

Executing Nazis And Beyond

He was 26 by the time he went into the job, after stints as a drayman and an interview at Strangeways. 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. 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. 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.

Albert Pierrepoint, The British Executioner Who Killed More Albert Pierrepoint, The British Executioner Who Killed More

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!’ 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 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.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.” 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.