Albert Pierrepoint: The Hangman Who Decided the Rope Deterred No One

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Albert Pierrepoint was born in 1905 into a struggling Yorkshire family and learned at age 11, from a newspaper serializing his father's memoirs, that both his father Henry and his uncle Tom had been state hangmen. Henry had been struck from the Home Office list in 1910 for arriving at a prison drunk. Albert set out to redeem the family name through sobriety and precision. He first assisted his uncle in Dublin in 1932, and by the 1940s he had turned execution into a 12 second procedure, built on the official table of drops, a look at the prisoner through the cell door, and a sandbag left hanging overnight to stretch the rope.

This episode traces how that efficiency made him the most prolific British executioner of the 20th century, working from 1931 to 1956. He hanged 15 German spies during the war and more than 200 Nazi war criminals at Hamelin, including Bergen-Belsen commandant Josef Kramer and guard Irma Grese. Between jobs he ran a pub and kept the two lives apart, until the day in 1950 when he had to hang one of his own regulars. His 1974 autobiography ended with a verdict few expected from him: capital punishment was not a deterrent.

• His uncle Tom gave him the rule he lived by: if you can't do it without whiskey, don't do it at all.
• German spy Karl Richter fought so hard in 1941 that he burst the leather strap on his wrists. Pierrepoint kept the broken strap and later used it for executions he considered significant.
• James Corbett, a pub regular who sang duets with him, greeted him in the condemned cell with the words hello, Tosh. Pierrepoint answered hello, Tish, and carried out the sentence.
• He hanged Timothy Evans, Derek Bentley, and Ruth Ellis, cases that provoked public outrage, and later hanged John Christie, the serial killer who had framed Evans.
• He resigned in January 1956 after a reprieved execution in Manchester, when a sheriff offered 4 pounds instead of his full 15 pound fee.