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!’

Albert Pierrepoint - Wikipedia

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.’ 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. 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.” 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.

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ 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. He was 26 by the time he went into the job, after stints as a drayman and an interview at Strangeways. 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. 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 Articles

Great dynasties of the world: The Pierrepoints | Family | The Great dynasties of the world: The Pierrepoints | Family | The

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. 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 In a hotel room in Ashton-under-Lyne, Corbitt strangled Eliza Wood, his some-time girlfriend, to death. 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.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.” 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’. A group of horses caused traffic chaos after getting loose and going for a gallop on a busy part of the M60 If death were a deterrent,” he wrote in his 1974 autobiography Executioner Pierrepoint, “I might be expected to know. It is I who have faced them at the last, young lads and girls, working men, grandmothers. I have been amazed to see the courage with which they take that walk into the unknown.

ALBERT PIERREPOINT books and biography | Waterstones

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.

Executing Nazis And Beyond

After 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’.