page_title: Albert Pierrepoint
section_title: Post-war executions
hierarchical_section_title: Albert Pierrepoint / Biography / As lead executioner, 1940–1956 / Post-war executions
caption_attribution_description: English: Bullet holes in the wall of the Magdala Tavern. On Easter Sunday 1955, Ruth Ellis, a hostess in a Soho nightclub, shot and killed her lover, racing car driver David Blakely, outside the Magdala Tavern: 1057153 and 1057156. Some of the bullet holes are shown in the photo. Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be executed in the UK - she was hanged at Holloway Prison on 13th July 1955. See http://www.stephen-stratford.co.uk/ruth_ellis.htm
context_page_description: Albert Pierrepoint was an English hangman who executed between 435 and 600 people in a 25-year career that ended in 1956. His father, Henry, and uncle Thomas were official hangmen before him.
  Pierrepoint was born in Clayton in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His family struggled financially because of his father's intermittent employment and heavy drinking. Pierrepoint knew from an early age that he wanted to become a hangman, and was taken on as an assistant executioner in September 1932, aged 27. His first execution was in December that year, alongside his uncle Tom. In October 1941 he undertook his first hanging as lead executioner.
  During his tenure he hanged 200 people who had been convicted of war crimes in Germany and Austria, as well as several high-profile murderers—including Gordon Cummins, John Haigh and John Christie. He undertook several contentious executions, including Timothy Evans, Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis and executions for high treason—William Joyce and John Amery—and treachery, with the hanging of Theodore Schurch.
  In 1956 Pierrepoint was involved in a dispute with a sheriff over payment, leading to his retirement from hanging.
context_section_description: After the war, Pierrepoint left the delivery business, and took over the lease of a pub, the Help the Poor Struggler on Manchester Road, in the Hollinwood area of Oldham. In the 1950s he left the pub and took a lease of the larger Rose and Crown at Much Hoole near Preston, Lancashire. He later said that he changed his main occupation because:
  I wanted to run my own business so that I should be under no obligation when I took time off. ... I could take a three o'clock plane from Dublin after conducting an execution there and be opening my bar without comment at half past five.
  In 1948 Parliament debated a new Criminal Justice Bill, which raised the question of whether to continue with the death penalty or not. While the debates were proceeding, no executions took place, and Pierrepoint worked solely in his pub. When the bill failed in the House of Lords, hangings resumed after a nine-month gap. The following year, the Home Secretary, Chuter Ede, set up a Royal Commission to look into capital punishment in the UK. Pierrepoint gave evidence in November 1950 and included a mock hanging at Wandsworth prison for the commission members. The commission's report was published in 1953 and resulted in the Homicide Act 1957 which reduced the grounds for execution by differentiating between capital and non-capital charges for homicide.
  From the late 1940s and into the 1950s Pierrepoint, Britain's most experienced executioner, carried out several more hangings, including those of prisoners described by his biographer, Brian Bailey, as "the most notorious murderers of the period ... [and] three of the most controversial executions in the latter years of the death penalty." In August 1949 he hanged John Haigh, nicknamed "the Acid Bath Murderer", as he had dissolved the bodies of his victims in sulphuric acid; Haigh admitted to nine murders, and tried to avoid hanging by saying he drank the blood of his victims and claiming insanity. The following year Pierrepoint hanged James Corbitt, one of the regular customers at Pierrepoint's pub; the two had sung duets together and while Pierrepoint called Corbitt "Tish", Corbitt returned the nickname "Tosh". In his autobiography, Pierrepoint considered the matter:
  As I polished the glasses, I thought if any man had a deterrent to murder poised before him, it was this troubadour whom I called Tish, coming to terms with his obsessions in the singing room of Help The Poor Struggler. He was not only aware of the rope, he had the man who handled it beside him, singing a duet. ... The deterrent did not work. He killed the thing he loved.
  In March 1950 Pierrepoint hanged Timothy Evans, a 25-year-old man who had the vocabulary of a 14-year-old and the mental age of a ten-year-old. Evans was arrested for the murder of his wife and daughter at their home, the top floor flat of 10 Rillington Place, London. His statements to the police were contradictory, telling them that he killed her, and also that he was innocent. He was tried and convicted for the murder of his daughter. Three years later Evans's landlord, John Christie, was arrested for the murder of several women, whose bodies he hid in the house. He subsequently admitted to the murder of Evans's wife, but not the daughter. Pierrepoint hanged him in July 1953 in Pentonville Prison, but the case showed Evans's conviction and hanging had been a miscarriage of justice. The matter led to further questions on the use of the death penalty in Britain.
  In the months before he hanged Christie, Pierrepoint undertook another controversial execution, that of Derek Bentley, a 19-year-old man who had been an accomplice of Christopher Craig, a 16-year-old boy who shot and killed a policeman. Bentley was described in his trial as:
  a youth of low intelligence, shown by testing to be just above the level of a feeble-minded person, illiterate, unable to read or write, and when tested in a way which did not involve scholastic knowledge shown to have a mental age between 11 and 12 years.
  At the time the policeman was shot, Bentley had been under arrest for 15 minutes, and 
caption: The outside of the pub where Ruth Ellis shot her lover: the bullet holes are visible in the wall
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