‘Hanging requires a natural flair. It cannot be acquired’
BEFORE closing time at the Help the Poor Struggler, the landlord would sing Danny Boy.
He had a fine voice, and was usually joined in the singalong at the piano by a man who called him ‘Tosh,’ who he called ‘Tish’ in return. 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.
In a hotel room in Ashton-under-Lyne, Corbitt strangled Eliza Wood, his sometime girlfriend, to death.
Corbitt, then in his thirties, would be sentenced to hang for that murderous act of jealousy. In his cell at Strangeways, awaiting the walk to the gallows, he would be met by a familiar face.
“Hallo Tosh”, Corbitt said, looking up at the man who had been sent to execute him. “Hallo Tish, how are you?” replied the executioner.
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.’
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.
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.
It was at this time of year, back in 1956, that Pierrepoint was adjusting to finally giving up the lucrative, part-time role which he had held for a quarter-century; dispatching killers, gangsters, traitors, spies, terrorists and fascists for the state.
It was a row over fees which led him to hand in his notice, he was paid £1, instead of the usual £15, when Thomas Bancroft, a child-killer sentenced to swing in Liverpool, got an eleventh-hour reprieve.
Such was Pierrepoint’s esteem as a hangman - he could finish the job in eight seconds - the Home Office urged him to reconsider. But Pierrepoint was not to be persuaded to return to the task which had been his curious destiny. Albert Pierrepoint’s Yorkshire-raised father, Henry, had been an executioner before him.
Soon after he married a Manchester woman, Mary Buxton, at Newton Heath, the elder Pierrepoint was added to the Home Office’s approved list of hangmen, having written to them repeatedly to volunteer his services.
In time, Henry encouraged his younger brother, Thomas Pierrepoint, to follow him into the trade. 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.
Albert’s first job, at 12, was as a piecer at a textile mill in Failsworth, after he moved to the Manchester area with his mother. But he always knew the fate that awaited him. As a schoolboy, when asked to write what he wanted to be, he answered: “When I leave school I should like to be the Official Executioner.”
The young Albert had grown up reading his uncle Tom’s diaries of the job, while his dad had recommended it as a sideline with opportunities for continental travel.
“Hanging must run in the blood,” Albert Pierrepoint said after retiring. “It requires a natural flair. The judgment and timing of a first-rate hangman cannot be acquired.”
Unlike his father and uncle before him, Pierrepoint’s professionalism at the trapdoor was never questioned. He prided himself on delivering as quick, dignified and as humane a death as possible, paying meticulous attention to the height, weight and build of the condemned, to ensure the fatal drop was as efficient and as painless as possible. He was 26 by the time he went into the job, after stints as a drayman and an interview at Strangeways. And, by the time he was 35, he was the country’s principal hangman. 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!’
Diminutive, always immaculatelydressed and with a penchant for cigars, boxing and coin tricks, Pierrepoint became a publican in 1946. The irony of the Hollinwood hostelry’s name - ‘Help the Poor Struggler’ - can’t have been lost on him; some claimed a sign in the pub read ‘No Hanging Around the Bar,’ although he always denied that. 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. 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.
Tourists would visit the pub to see him, though until he left it, he was always discreet about ‘t’other job,’ which brought him into contact with some of the 20th century’s most notorious characters.
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.’
“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.
“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.”
Albert Pierrepoint wasn’t the only Greater Manchester publican to work the scaffold before capital punishment was outlawed in 1965. Bowtie-wearing Harry Allen, who ran the Woodsman pub in Middleton, as well as the Junction Hotel in Whitefield and the Rope and Anchor in Farnworth, became chief executioner after Pierrepoint’s retirement, alongside Robert Leslie Stewartknown as ‘Gentle Jock’- who lived in Chadderton.