'Pierrepoint' discussed

Jeff Pope explains how writing the story of Britain's last hangman was a life-changing experience.

Apr  7 2006

From as early as I can remember I have had a horror of judicial execution. The idea of a condemned prisoner possessing the certain knowledge of his doom, to know where, how and, more importantly, precisely when it was going to happen has always made me shudder. I once cornered a rat in a garage and at the moment it knew there was no escape it let out the most hideous shriek. It was how I always imagined I'd feel if ever I was forced to face the noose. Not for me a quiet, dignified exit.

But in spite of my horror of being on the receiving end of a death sentence, I always possessed an equally strong belief that the death penalty was necessary and totally justified - at least for certain types of crime and especially for child killers. Brady and Hindley? No problem. Sutcliffe? Let them all swing, and let it be televised for all I cared - so we'd know they really had been put to death for what they had done.

I was always aware of the capacity for error - perhaps tragedy is a better word - and had studied intimately the chain of events that led to the wrongful execution of Timothy Evans. But somehow, of course illogically, I just couldn't relate it to the abolitionist's argument. How much worse off would the world be if Roy Whiting, callous taker of Sarah Payne's life, had been put to death? As recently as the Soham murder case, I believed if my hand had been on the trap lever I would have been able to yank it back and send Ian Huntley to his doom, so much did my blood boil at the thought of what he had done to those two young girls.

Funny that. The executioner actually pushes the lever forward to open the trap doors, not pulls it back as I'd always imagined. That simple misconception, uncovered very early on, stuck with me throughout the researching and writing process of 'Pierrepoint', a movie about the life of Albert Pierrepoint, this country's - and perhaps the world's - most famous and prolific executioner. It became a metaphor for the extraordinary journey of personal discovery I went on.

I was always aware of Pierrepoint, without ever really knowing too much about him. I was told a story as a teenager, of how he drank at a working men's club in West London, alone at the bar, watched over by a huge minder. Although I now know the story could not have been true, the image fascinated me. Did he choose to be alone, or were others scared to approach him? The thought of a man whose job was ending lives fascinated me and I felt, when the opportunity came, that I was somehow fated to write Albert's story.

Pierrepoint was the most important element of my pro capital punishment thinking. The idea that, whenever called upon, this phlegmatic, undemonstrative Yorkshireman stepped up to the plate with skill and precision on behalf of us all, comforted me. Like I am comforted by the SAS or submarine captains. And the fact that Albert showed no emotion, was able to do the job and then melt back in contented anonymity, was equally important to me.

Albert was a product of his environment, but above all of his time. He started training to be an executioner, following on from his father and uncle before him, in 1933, at the age of just 27. He was, on one level, following in what you might call the family business. He was a Georgian Englishman, born to serve and secure of his place in society. When men like Albert were told to do something they did it, without question, and to the best of their ability. Albert's contract with the state as an executioner bonded him to the King, and I believe this was something he took extremely seriously.

To begin with, Albert was driven by the simple desire to do well in his chosen profession. By day a grocery delivery driver, he kept his other 'job' a strict secret from all bar his mother and uncle. I was surprised to learn that Albert's father, Henry, had died relatively young, his health ruined by drink and desperation at what he had done. It appears he turned up for an execution smelling of booze and had his name summarily struck off the Home Office list. I am sure that Albert's drive to succeed, to become the country's 'Number One' executioner, was in large part fuelled by the desire to restore the good name of Pierrepoint.

Further research revealed that old Henry Pierrepoint was by no means alone in being broken by the job. Two of his immediate predecessors also died young, haunted by what they had done - one of them committing suicide.

But there was Albert, rising up the list, doing more and more jobs and getting faster and faster in his work. By the late 1930s his average time for an execution, defined as from the moment the prisoner entered the execution chamber to the moment his neck snapped on the end of the rope, was an astonshing twelve seconds, (his career record was seven and a half seconds - about the time it takes to read this sentence). And afterwards? He would enjoy the train journeys and the travel to different parts of the country, a rarity in those days, then a nice pint or two and back to his cosy home in Failsworth and his cosy wife Ann, who never asked him any questions about what he did.

Albert wrote an autobiography in the mid-1970s, entitled 'Executioner Pierrepoint'. I suspect the title was foisted on him, for he was possessed of a bottomless (and largely false) modesty.

'I don't know why anybody would want to read about me,' I can hear him say. 'But if you're daft enough to pay me all that for my thoughts then I'll set them down for you.'

The book is interesting mostly for what it doesn't say. The ghost writer has caught his faux pomposity perfectly, and he begins with a solemn rap across the reader's knuckles, along the lines of 'if you want to read this for any salacious detail about what went on when I hung all those famous people, then you're out of luck'.

He mentions, just about, his most notorious 'jobs', such as Ruth Ellis, Haigh the acid bath murderer, Nazis Irma Grese and Josef Kramer, Timothy Evans and John Reginald Christie, the man who framed Evans for his wife's and daughter's murder, and poor Derek Bentley. I'll be honest, I had been hoping for a bit more detail, but the book is largely filled with homespun philosophy about making good and the importance of absolute discretion at all times. Albert loves a nice pork chop and a glass of beer and unwinding with a sing song with the customers in his pub. And he absolutely never, ever had a sign in the bar saying 'no hanging around'.

But in the preface was a statement which made my fellow writer Bob Mills and I sit bolt upright. Albert wrote: '...the fruit of my experience leaves this bitter aftertaste... It is my belief that capital punishment has achieved nothing, except revenge.'

To begin with I was sure that the publisher had somehow put this to Albert as a great way of selling the book, for the book certainly did that. During the research phase, I noted that Albert had made it onto the telly, and watched grainy footage of him chatting with Melvyn Bragg about his book circa 1976. But on that extraordinary statement he seemed defensive, seeming to not want to say outright, as the statement suggests, that he was now for the abolition of capital punishment. I put it down to Albert never really believing in the sentiment in the first place. But the thought that, for whatever reason, he had either himself written it, or allowed it to be written in his name, would not leave me.

Albert retired in February 1956 shortly after the execution of Ruth Ellis. There has always been intense speculation that having to hang Ellis who, judged by today's standards, would serve six years for manslaughter at most, finished him off. In his book he suggests that his retirement was simply down to an argument over expenses not paid for a job where the prisoner was given a last minute reprieve, an ever more common occurence towards the end of Albert's career. And that was it. He settled into his seaside retirement bungalow in Southport and became the life and soul of every pensioner party until slipping away peacefully in a nursing home in 1992, at the grand old age of 87. Was my image complete? Had Albert managed to live a full and happy life, completely untroubled by what he had done - so important to me as I clung to my view that capital punishment was good and necessary. Had he managed to 'breathe underwater', as producer Christine Langan and I speculated?

The unearthing of a private, genteel, elderly couple living in Bromsgrove, near Birmingham, was to prove crucial to the genesis of our story of Albert's life, and to my own personal voyage of discovery.

Michael and Doreen Forman first met Albert in the early 1970s, after he had retired and when they ran an antiques business from a central London premises. Michael was - and is - an inveterate collector of the macabre. He once owned Kaiser Wilhelm's medals, and among other items has a large collection of the personal effects of William Joyce, better known as 'Lord Haw Haw'. And so it was only natural that when Albert decided he wanted to dispose of his personal effects, Michael would get to hear about it and step into the breech. Albert was interested in selling his cigar holder, fob watch, gloves, executioner's wrist strap and his hangman's noose. Michael quickly and discreetly found a buyer who offered top prices, and a friendship based on mututal trust and respect was born. He and Doreen remained friends with Albert and Ann right to the end.

The most interesting aspect of this first meeting was why Albert wanted to sell? He was not a rich man in retirement, but he was certainly not short of a bob or two. But it was when I put the story together with another from Tommy Mann, a charming friend of Albert's from his Southport days, that something clicked. Tommy told of a night when Albert arrived to pick up Ann from his house, where she'd been visiting Tommy's wife.

'Here, have a look at these,' Albert had said. And he then pulled out of his pockets two handfuls of gold Krugerrands. Tommy was astonished, but when he asked Albert what they were for, Albert simply shrugged and said he 'liked to have them about his person'.

A picture was emerging of a man who wanted to be able to put his hands on his money, to be able to feel it close to him. It was as if he was trying to say - not least to himself - 'look, it's all been worth it, look what it's got me'.

It occurred to me then that Albert had always had a ready-made reason for doing what he did. He started out wanting to restore the family name, then he was driven to be the fastest, to be 'Number One'. Providing financial security for his and Ann's old age - they died childless - was obviously a key factor in the latter part of his career.

But authoritative and knowledgeable though Michael Forman is about Albert's career on matters of fact and detail, it was his wife Doreen who was to prove the key to unlocking the real Albert Pierrepoint. Albert loved women. He seemed to love their company much more than that of men and as we dug deeper numerous dark - and unsubstantiated - rumours would surface about him enjoying a little more than just their company.

His relationship with Doreen was strictly above board, but he felt he could unburden some of his inner self to her, in a way he never could with Michael. Albert sang to her, down the phone. He loved to chat and to flirt and felt at ease showing his own softer, more feminine side to her.

It was Doreen who pointed us in the direction of 'Tish', the mysterious friend of Albert's who, in my opinion, was the key to Albert's story. Doreen said that in later life Albert would speak more and more of Tish, the nickname of a friend he would sing with in his pub. The story goes that one day, Albert arrived at Strangeways Prison for a 'job', and was stunned to learn that the condemned man was the very same Tish.

'Albert only knew him by his nickname, 'Tish'. He was Tish, and Albert was 'Tosh', and they never knew each other's real names. So when Albert was given the job, when he looked at Tish's real name on the slip of paper from the Home Office he had no idea who this man was,' Doreen told me.

'Albert told me he would never have done that job if he'd known it was Tish.'

Pierrepoint mentions Tish in his book, slightly obliquely, refusing to reveal his true identity. He passes the whole thing off as little more than a strange coincidence.

Determined work by my researcher Sarah Turner unearthed Tish's true identity, one James Henry Corbitt. Albert did indeed execute him, at Strangeways Prison on November 28th, 1950. Local papers of the day tell us Corbitt murdered his lover in a jealous rage. In the period leading up to the murder the two of them frequently used a local public house, which we discovered was none other than Albert's pub.

Doreen told us that for Albert, Corbitt's execution was a watershed. Albert's primary defence mechanism against the horrors of his 'job' was to tell himself that he, Albert Pierrepoint, never entered the condemned cell. It was the King's Chief Executioner, a tool of the state, and not he who carried out sentence of death. This appears to have been an effective way for him of going about his business, sustaining him through the arduous, draining mass executions of Nazi war criminals he carried out after the Nuremburg trials. Michael showed me interview tape of Albert in his retirement describing himself as having a 'sort of split personality'.

On the morning of Corbitt's execution, Corbitt had previously got a message to Albert asking him to 'acknowledge' him as he entered his cell. Corbitt was terrified of being blanked by his friend on this, of all days. Albert had every intention of retaining the same stony, non-communicative mask that he always adopted for the duration of each 'job'. But it appears common humanity won out, and as he stood face to face with Corbitt, Albert could not stop himself from uttering a few gentle words of comfort to his old pal.

The effect of this, in the long run, was devastating to Pierrepoint. As Doreen says, Albert had 'crossed the line'. He had taken himself into the condemned cell, and the barrier he had so carefully constructed between him and what he did was smashed irrevocably. Thirty years after the event it still dominated his thoughts to the point where he would wear Doreen out with long conversations, deep into the night, about that fateful day.

For me, everything fell into place on learning of the story of Corbitt's execution. Details emerged of Albert's emotional distress towards the end of his life. Although, admittedly, suffering from dementia, he would mutter endlessly about having 'done for many', clearly haunted - on whatever level - by what he had done.

Albert Pierrepoint killed between 550 and 608 people (estimates vary, Albert never disclosed the exact number). He killed them close up. His was the last face they saw, his hands the last to touch them. Not even Hitler or Stalin killed that number of people so personally.

And yet his story is, for me, a celebration of life. For it seems not even Albert Pierrepoint, perhaps the world's most efficient killing machine, could ultimately escape his conscience. His human spirit would not be held down. Thou shalt not kill.

With this realization came the end of my own personal journey, and my belief now that captial punishment is wrong and has no place in a civilized society. It is not that I don't still believe certain criminals deserve to face the ultimate punishment, but that for their sake, I don't believe we can ask one human being to put another to death in cold blood.

For Albert Pierrepoint, and for me, that is the crime above all crimes.

'Pierrepoint' opens today.

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