EXECUTIONER PIERREPOINT - an Autobiography by Albert Pierrepoint

I don't suppose that these days the name Pierrepoint means anything to anyone under the age of 50. But for 56 years up to the abolition of capital punishment in 1964, Pierrepoint was the Hangman. The Executioner. The person who carried out judicial killings in our name. Such was the shadowy nature of the occupation that the name Pierrepoint was feared and reviled almost as much as the names of those who met their mortal termination at the end of his rope. The author of this book, Albert Pierrepoint, was the third consecutive official public executioner of the name Pierrepoint, he having been preceded by his father, Henry, and his uncle, Thomas. Obviously, it was something of a dynasty, and Albert explains how that came about. Suffice it to say that there were not many competing applicants for the role. The book is, in truth, not very well written, but the story he has to tell is jaw-droppingly astounding. Although there is an element of 'here's some wicked bastards wot I have hung' about parts of the story, I was fascinated by the bureaucracy associated with judicial execution. The senior civil servants charged with effecting the court's death penalty clearly wanted as little to do with the process as possible, and there is something peculiarly British/English about the prissy way in which the arrangements were made, as though it was some dirty, grubby little secret. Letters in brown envelopes offering the contract ("Dear Pierrepoint, would you accept a commission to act as executioner on 23rd inst. at Pentonville Prison") - further brown envelopes later passed over surreptitiously containing the fee in cash. There was limited co-operation from the authorities at every stage. The executioner would be admitted to the prison on the evening before the killing, and he would be allowed to look through the spy-hole in the condemned cell in order that he could estimate the height and weight of the prisoner - this so that he could figure out what length of rope to use. He had to estimate these critically important details because the authorities, turning a Nelsonian eye to the whole affair, would not provide the exact information. It was critically important because if the rope wasn't the correct length then it could lead to the prisoner being slowly strangled rather than swiftly having his neck broken. Or alternatively, on dropping through the released trap-door, the prisoner on the end of a rope which was too long might swing right across and collide with the door, breaking his nose, and making the whole process of his death quite unpleasant. Albert prided himself on making the condemned prisoner's death as quick and painless as possible, and much of the book is given over to his explanations of the technicalities of efficient execution. There are delightful illustrations of the tools of his grisly trade, including leather leg and wrist-straps, shackles, tape-measure, white cap (to be placed over the prisoner's head as soon as he arrived on the scaffold) etc etc. He recounts famous executions (eg Timothy Evans and John Christie (10 Rillington Place), Ruth Ellis (the last woman to be hanged), Derek Bentley (who was in handcuffs in police custody when his accomplice shot and killed a policeman(Bentley was hanged, the accomplice wasn't), Lord Haw-Haw (aka the wartime traitor William Joyce) and scores of Nazi war criminals ( he was proud of having been invited to Germany to assist in the final solution of the Nazi problem - he offed nearly 200 of them, including 27 in one particularly vigorous 24 hour stint.)). One specially awful episode features the execution of an acquaintance, a man whose nickname was 'Tish' and who referred to Albert as 'Tosh'. When Albert went in to the condemned cell the prisoner said, 'Hello Tosh' to which Pierrepoint replied, 'Come on Tish old chap' as he pinioned his arms and led him to the gallows. There is so much facinating detail herein that I can only scratch the surface. The horrible irony of this book strikes you before you even get to page 1, for in the Preface, Albert Pierrepoint says, "I do not now believe that any one of the hundreds of executions I carried out has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder. Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge". This book was published in 1974. The author died in 1992. Hopefully, we will never see his like again.