They all met their fate at the end of Pierrepoint’s rope...
British fascist William Joyce, who was hanged for treason in 1946. Nicknamed ‘Lord Haw Haw’ for his exaggerated upper class accent, Joyce, who was born in Shaw in Oldham, was the voice of the ‘Germany Calling’ Nazi propaganda broadcasts during World War II.
Josef Kramer, the Beast of Belsen. The commandant of Auschwitz as well as Belsen, Kramer sent thousands to their deaths in the gas chambers. Kramer, executed in 1945, was one of hundreds of war criminals Pierrepoint hanged in Germany. On one December day, Pierrepoint hanged 13 people before lunch. For years afterwards Pierrepoint was anonymously sent £5 in an envelope at Christmas, along with a note with one word on it - Belsen.
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.
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.
Margaret Allen, a bus conductor from Rawtenstall who beat her neighbour to death with a hammer after she asked to borrow a cup of sugar. Allen identified as a man, and would have been known as trans had she been alive today. She was hanged at Strangeways in 1949.
Glamorous nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis, the daughter of a Manchester cellist, who shot dead her lover outside a north London pub. She was the last woman to hang in England, and her 1955 execution paved the way for the abolition of the death penalty in this country.
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.’
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: “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.”