Pierrepoint (16 page)

Over in England, at the same moment Cushnan walked firmly to his death, Sydney Fox, the notorious Margate matricide murderer, was being dragged kicking and screaming to the gallows, where he was hanged by Robert Baxter.

There were just two further executions in 1930 – at Wandsworth and Winchester – both carried out by Tom; another six dates in the diary came to nothing while the parliamentary debate raged on. At Winchester he hanged William Podmore, convicted on circumstantial evidence of the murder of a Southampton garage owner. He declared his innocence throughout and moves were made to secure a reprieve right up to the last moment.

Baxter was on duty for a rare execution in Gibraltar in early 1931. In March, Tom travelled down to Bedford to hang Alfred Arthur Rouse, a bigamist who had committed a brutal murder and then left the body in a burning car in the hope of starting a new life. Known as the Blazing Car Murderer, Rouse was a travelling salesman, convicted of the murder of an unknown man whose body was found inside the burnt-out car at Hardingstone, Northamptonshire. On 5 November 1930, two young men spoke to a man as he passed them walking away from a blaze, which they assumed was a bonfire. As they approached, they discovered that it was a burning car. Fire officers were called and when the blaze was extinguished they found the charred remains of a man on the front seat. Despite the car being a charred shell, the number plate was hardly damaged and the car was quickly traced to Rouse, who lived in north London.

He had already left London and travelled to Wales to be with a girlfriend when police named him in the newspapers and, under pressure from her parents, he returned home to answer questions. Rouse said that he was giving a hitchhiker a lift to Leicester when they had run out of fuel. He asked the passenger to fill the tank from a spare can of fuel in the boot while he went to relieve himself in the bushes. This he did while smoking a cigar Rouse had given him. Rouse said as he had walked a little way down the road he saw the car suddenly explode into flames. He panicked and fled, but not before realising that this accident had given him a chance to lose his identity and free himself of his many debts and tangled love life. He then fled to his mistress in South Wales.

He maintained throughout his trial that the fire was an accident, but on 31 January he was convicted after evidence emerged that suggested the car had been tampered with. His wife stood by him throughout the trial, believing his pleas of innocence. It was known, but not revealed in court, that Mrs Rouse knew of the plan to commit murder so they could both benefit from a £1,000 insurance policy. Rouse was the third of eight men Tom executed that year.

On 16 April, Tom carried out an execution at Manchester. Three days later, without his knowledge, his nephew came home from work and sat down to pen a letter to the Home Secretary.

Within days he received a reply. Tearing open the slim brown envelope he read that the sender was directed to inform him there were no vacancies at the moment.

Albert was the middle child of Harry and Mary Pierrepoint. Born on 30 March 1905 at Clayton, Bradford, he attended Beaumont Street School at Huddersfield after the family moved from Bradford when Harry ended his career as an executioner in 1910. During a lesson in his class, the children were asked what they wanted to do upon leaving school. The 11-year-old Albert wrote: ‘When I leave school I should like to be the Official Executioner…’

Throughout his early years he spent his summer holidays with his Uncle Tom and Aunt Lizzie at Clayton, and their closeness increased when Albert’s father passed away. Although Tom was unwilling to discuss his role as an executioner in front of the family, Aunt Lizzie was far more talkative and when her husband was away on an execution she invited Albert to read through the diary that he kept in the lounge. In the winter of 1917 the family moved to
Failsworth, Manchester, where Albert attended the Holy Trinity School. In those days it was possible for children at the age of 12 ½ to work half-time at the local cotton mills. On 30 September, Albert reached the required age and was able to start work at the nearby Marlborough Mills, where a week’s shift from six in the morning until fifteen minutes to noon brought home the princely sum of six shillings a week. He handed the money to his mother, who returned to him the going rate of one penny in the shilling.

Following the death of his father, Albert, as the eldest son, took possession of his papers and diary, which he studied at length over the next few years. He continued working in the mills until a change of career at the end of the 1920s, when using his experience and love of horses he gained a position at a wholesale grocer’s. Working as a horse drayman he delivered the goods that the travelling salesman had taken orders for. By 1930 he was trained to drive a car and a lorry and was earning a weekly wage of two pounds five shillings.

While Albert waited to learn his fate following the interview, Tom arrived at Strangeways to carry out what would be his last engagement of 1931, intending to hang two high-profile convicted murderers.

He knew that behind the high, sombre brick walls, waiting in two condemned cells, were local men Solomon Stein and Peter McVay whose crimes had been thoroughly reported in the local press and whose court appearances had made the headlines across the country when both, incredibly, chose to plead guilty as charged. Sentenced to death by Mr Justice Finlay, the men were scheduled to hang a week apart and were the next appointments in Uncle Tom’s diary.

Solomon Stein had booked into a local hotel room to celebrate his 21st birthday with a girl he had recently met. She enraged Stein by stealing money from him as he dozed on
the bed, then telling him she had to leave as she had made another date for later that night. Stein strangled her with a tie and gave himself up to the police on the following morning. Nothing untoward happened at the execution and it was noted it took just five seconds from the time Stein was pinioned to the drop falling. In what appears to be an arbitrary show of mercy, McVay was reprieved three days after Stein’s execution.

The first execution of 1932 took place at Crumlin Road, Belfast, when Edward Cullens, a 28-year-old fairground entrepreneur, was hanged for what the press dubbed a ‘mafia-style’ gun murder of a business rival. On the morning of Monday, 13 January, Tom and assistant Robert Wilson arrived in Belfast off the Liverpool night boat and carried out the execution without a hitch at 8 a.m. on the following morning.

Most men facing the gallows tried to put on a brave face to friends and relatives; 32-year-old George Alfred Rice, convicted of the dreadful rape and murder of nine-year-old Constance Inman in a Manchester park, was no exception. His counsel’s plea that the girl was suffocated accidentally during the sex act, and that Rice was only guilty of manslaughter, was rejected. It was reportedly a harrowing trial, with Rice collapsing in tears on hearing the guilty verdict. Mr Justice Finlay, distressed by the evidence heard in his court, was also in tears as he passed sentence of death.

Despite the revulsion felt around the city, Rice was still visited regularly by friends and family, and on his last visit he told his friends he was prepared to meet his end bravely. It was to be an idle boast. At 8 a.m., Rice sat in the cell listening intently to the words of the priest and as the door opened he went to pieces, shrieking and crying, begging for mercy. As the assistant Robert Wilson helped Tom strap his wrists, Rice
collapsed in a heap and had to be carried shrieking and moaning across the corridor and supported on the trap.

Twenty-two-year-old George Pople was the next name in Tom’s diary. He was paying the penalty for the murder and robbery of a woman on a road outside Oxford. Tom carried out two executions in two days at the end of April, the first at Hull when black sailor and bigamist George Michael stabbed to death his Danish-born wife on New Year’s Eve in full view of a policeman. On the following day, Tom carried out a double execution at Leeds, when Thomas Riley and John Roberts were hanged side by side for two separate murders linked only in that in each case they had battered their victims to death with a hammer.

Twelve months after he had received the rejection to his application as assistant hangman, another letter was sent to Albert at the house on Mill Street.

There were always at least six names retained on the short list of approved executioners from which the governors and under-sheriffs selected hangmen and assistants.

In the spring of 1932 a vacancy arose when Lionel Mann, an assistant of five years and the veteran of a dozen executions, offered his resignation. His full-time employers had told Mann that his work on the scaffold was holding back any chance of promotion. At the end of June, Albert came home from a long day delivering groceries to find an official letter waiting on the mantelshelf. Having seen scores of these same long, OHMS-stamped, buff envelopes during her husband’s tenure as chief executioner, Mary Pierrepoint realised what she had always suspected yet hoped against. Mary confronted Albert when he sat down to read the letter. She was concerned that Albert wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps. For a dozen years she had watched her eldest study his father’s papers and, as he was the nephew of the country’s
chief executioner, it was no surprise to her. But still, it was something she wasn’t happy to accept.

At 3 p.m. on the first Saturday in July 1932, Albert approached the main entrance, the smaller wicket gate opened and out stumbled a middle-aged man, neatly dressed but appearing to be the worse for drink. Presenting the letter to the warder at the gate Albert was shocked to find he was one of a dozen applicants to be interviewed that afternoon. During the stern interview, geared up to weed out anyone whose motives for applying were morbid or ghoulish, Albert was asked if he didn’t think he was too young to apply. When the governor queried the response that his father had been a chief executioner at 24 years of age, Albert reaffirmed that his father had indeed been that age and asked him to check his father’s record to confirm this. Although it’s clear that the reasons for Harry Pierrepoint’s dismissal were well known to prison governors, the calm, assured way the young Pierrepoint conducted himself was enough to see him safely over the first hurdle.

A few weeks after Tom travelled to Manchester, to dispatch Darwen-based child-killer 18-year-old Charles Cowle, Albert had received word that his interview had been successful and he was invited to attend Pentonville Prison for a medical examination and a week’s instruction and training in the apparatus and methods used for execution.

For this first trip to London, the young Pierrepoint had to first make arrangements with his bosses at work to take a week’s unpaid leave and he then confided in a friend the nature of his ‘business trip’. Catching the midnight train from Manchester’s London Road station, he arrived at Euston at 6 a.m., recalling how the magical place names he had heard a
hundred times in the musical halls filled him with excitement as he set out on his new adventure. After a breakfast-time tour of the city he finally asked a policeman for help in finding Pentonville Prison. Given directions to ‘The Ville’, at a few minutes to 9 a.m. he presented himself at the main gate. Also on the training course was 39-year-old Stanley William Cross, a Londoner living in Fulham.

Albert had imagined himself making this journey so many times as he read and re-read his father’s papers and accounts. Two things took him by surprise: firstly the spotlessly clean and highly polished execution suite, and secondly the sight of a noose hanging shackled to the chain that hung down from the giant beams. The engineer gave both trainees a step-by-step guide to the equipment and procedure, only briefly looking down at his hand-written prompts, leading Albert to assume that assistants must leave the list pretty frequently. Interestingly, prior to Lionel Mann’s departure the list had carried the same names for the previous seven years, an unusual longevity of assistants, with the last addition being in the autumn of 1928.

Given rooms in the prison and the freedom to spend a few hours outside after the days’ sessions ended, Cross and Albert spent several evenings seeing various sights and drinking in public houses, but on the penultimate night of the course Albert stayed in his quarters and wrote to his uncle explaining he was on the training course and hoped he would pass and soon be assisting at executions.The four-day training course ended with both trainees carrying out a dummy execution in front of the governor, then sitting a written exam in which they calculated a variety of drops and explained the execution procedure from start to finish. Both left the prison uncertain whether they had passed or failed. John Ellis, who had just finished a stint on seaside fairgrounds in which he carried out
dummy executions and explained the procedures of carrying out executions, committed suicide at the second attempt on Tuesday, 20 September. A week later, notification that the name of Albert Pierrepoint had been added to the official list was received.