Pierrepoint (19 page)

On 2 January 1939, the body of 17-year-old Peggy Irene Pentecost was found in a Lambeth hotel room. She had been strangled and a bed quilt had been forced into her mouth. She had checked into the hotel on New Year’s Eve with a man who had signed the register Mr and Mrs Armstrong of Seaford.

Armstrong was traced and found to be a parlour-man of Seaford, with a number of previous convictions, including attempted murder. He admitted that he had become engaged to Peggy shortly after Christmas, and at his two-day trial before Mr Justice Humphries at the Old Bailey, in March, it was alleged he had killed her after he had discovered she was also seeing another man. Armstrong’s execution was the first of five that took place at Wandsworth that year. Four days later Tom Pierrepoint, with Phillips as his assistant, carried out the execution of William Butler, who had stabbed a shopkeeper to death during a robbery. The final three executions all took place in October, a month after war had broken out in Europe. In two days at the end of October Tom hanged two soldiers from the North Staffordshire Regiment on consecutive days for the rape and murder of a hotel worker close to where they were stationed in Surrey.

In February 1940, the Pierrepoints, along with Phillips and Cross, were in action at Birmingham when they carried out the double execution of two members of the IRA who had been convicted of a bomb outrage in Coventry. In the summer of 1939, the IRA formulated the ‘S’ Plan, a bombing campaign
on the British mainland aimed at focusing attention on the requests for the withdrawal of British troops from Ulster. In July that year, James Richards travelled to the mainland and lodged with an Irish family on Clara Street, Coventry. The house quickly became a terrorist HQ, and explosives were stored and prepared there. On 21 August, Peter Barnes also travelled to Clara Street, and over the next few days a woman who was also staying at the house purchased a suitcase while Richards and another man obtained a bicycle from Halfords in Coventry. On 24 August, Richards made a bomb in the front room of the house and on the following day the bicycle was left on the busy Broadgate at Coventry, where it exploded in the early afternoon killing five people, among them 21-year-old Elsie Ansell, who was due to be married in a few days’ time. The serial number found on the bicycle led police to Richards and arrests in London later that night led to Barnes. In total five people were arrested and charged with murder.

At Birmingham Assizes in December, three defendants were acquitted of the charges but Barnes and Richards were convicted of the murder of Elsie Ansell. Although there was no direct evidence that Barnes had planted the bomb, there was enough incriminating evidence against him to prove he had participated in the outrage. Richards claimed it was against the orders of the IRA to kill people and that therefore the explosion was accidental. ‘My Lord,’ he said as the black cap was draped on Mr Justice Singleton, ‘before you pass sentence, I have something to say… I wish to thank sincerely the gentlemen who have defended me during the trial and I wish to state that the part I took in these explosions since I came to England I have done for a just cause… God bless Ireland and God bless the men who have fought and died for her. Thank you, my lord.’ On the morning of 7 February 1940, Phillips and Cross led Richards onto the drop. He walked bravely. By
contrast, his fellow countryman was assisted to the drop by Tom and Albert in a state of partial collapse.

William Appleby and Vincent Ostler were two petty crooks who in the early hours of Friday, 1 March, were spotted breaking in to a Co-op store at Coxhoe, County Durham. Police Constable William Ralph Shiell was called to the premises with several colleagues and as two men made their getaway, PC Shiell gave pursuit. He was closing in when one announced: ‘All right, let him have it!’ A shot rang out and the constable fell, fatally wounded. He was able to give his colleagues a vague description of his killers before he died. Left near the scene was a stolen Vauxhall motorcar, and a newspaper appeal resulted in reports that a similar car had been seen in the possession of two local criminals. Appleby, a 27-year-old joiner, was questioned first and confessed that he had taken part in the robbery, though he insisted that he had been unaware that his accomplice, whom he named as Ostler, a 24-year-old ice-cream salesman, was carrying a gun.

Ostler, a father of four, and the son of a serving policeman, was interviewed, unaware that his friend had confessed. He denied any knowledge of the murder, but was arrested and charged with wilful murder. Tried before Mr Justice Hilbery at Leeds Assizes, Appleby denied PC Shiell’s deathbed claim that he had shouted ‘Let him have it!’, instead insisting he told Ostler to ‘Give him a clout!’ After a four-day trial, both were sentenced to death, with the jury giving Appleby a strong recommendation for mercy. Both men were of similar height and weight, Appleby just under 5 feet 8 inches and 156 pounds; Ostler was an inch taller and a pound heavier. Appleby was given a drop of 7 feet 2 inches, his companion a drop of half an inch less. Tom was assisted by his nephew, along with Stanley Cross and new assistant Alexander Riley from Manchester.

When Albert received his next letter of engagement it was to assist at the execution of Udham Singh, a 37-year-old Sikh assassin who, on 13 March, attended a meeting at London’s Caxton Hall and shot dead Sir Michael Francis O’Dwyer. In 1919 O’Dwyer had been the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, where, under the command of General Dyer, scores of Indians were killed as riots were brutally suppressed. As the meeting ended, Singh, also known as Singh Azad, pulled out a revolver and fired six shots at the platform. Sir Michael was killed instantly; others received gunshot wounds, but were not seriously injured. From a diary taken from his room, it seemed the killer had mistaken his victim for General Dyer.

Stanley Cross was nominated to carry out the execution, his first engagement as chief executioner. Tom Phillips had had his short career as a chief executioner terminated following an execution in March, when his conduct was brought into question. Tom Pierrepoint was unavailable, as he had accepted an execution to hang a woman at Liverpool scheduled for the same day. With travel being somewhat erratic, as wartime bomb damage was causing interminable delays on all modes of transport at the time, Cross was offered the engagement, possibly as the journey from his home in Fulham was a fraction of that of any other man on the list, and also because he was now the most senior assistant, if only in age and not in experience.

Arriving at the gaol, Cross found that he had a large number of official witnesses as he and Albert were taken to the execution chamber to rig the drop. They were given the condemned man’s details: age 37 years, height 5 feet 8 inches; weight 158 pounds. At exercise they saw that he was of a proportionate build but with a slim neck. Singh had been on a 42-day hunger strike prior to his trial, but had begun to take food again following his conviction. Albert claimed that
the chief executioner had made no plans for the drop, and was at a loss as to what the drop should be.

As the governor noticed things were not running as smoothly as expected, Albert took over and with a quick glance at the official table of drops, worked out a drop of 7 feet 1 inch. Confident in the role of assistant executioner, Cross allowed Albert to take the lead. Together they measured off the drop, adjusted the chain, weighed and fixed the sandbag at the same weight as the condemned man. In the presence of the governor and official witnesses that included the under-sheriff, they tested the scaffold and dropped the sandbag to take out the stretch in the rope. The official witnesses departed without a word.

In
Executioner: Pierrepoint
, his 1974 biography, Albert claims Cross thanked him for his help in working out the drop, admitting he got flummoxed in front of such an impressive audience. Later that evening Albert studied the condemned man’s details and adjusted the drop to a finer degree, and when the governor asked for a record of the official drop, Cross said it was 7 feet 1 inch. On the following morning, prisoner 6828 Udham Singh was hanged at 8 a.m. As the hangmen left the prison Albert claimed that Cross offered him a sum of money, equal to half of his fee. ‘You’ve got to take it. You got me out of that scrape, you should have the lot really,’ Cross is alleged to have said.

Records of the measured details on the official LP C4 sheet, however, showed that all was not well for the new hangman. The second column on the official record sheet, which is filled in and added to a large leather-bound volume that is known to officials as the ‘execution book’, is headed ‘Particulars of the Execution’. The first entry is the drop as determined before an execution and is recorded as the official drop given to the governor after the drop had been calculated and
measured. It is recorded as 7 feet 1 inch. The second entry is the length of drop as measured after the execution, from the level of the floor of the scaffold to the heels of the suspended culprit. As the drop causes the spinal column to break, ideally at the second and third vertebrae, this second measurement is usually an inch or two longer than the first measurement, and is usually made up from the stretch of the condemned person’s neck. In this case the second measurement is 6 feet 6½ inches! Evidently someone had miscalculated, and the blame was put firmly at the feet of the chief executioner. Asked on the official form if they felt the hangman and assistant had performed his duty satisfactorily, Governor Ball and Dr Murdoch stated that in the case of Pierrepoint he had performed his duties satisfactorily, but in the case of Cross they found that he did not, adding: ‘He is not a suitable person on account of mental incapacity viz particulars of length of the drop.’

At the end of August 1940, four men attended the hangman’s training school at Pentonville. Unusually, all four graduated onto the list, and when Tom and Albert arrived in Bedford for the execution of William Cooper at the end of November, they found that two of the new assistants were in attendance as trainee observers, doing the very role Harry Pierrepoint had been prevented from taking 40 years before.

On 5 July, farmer John Joseph Harrison was found seriously wounded on his farm on the Isle of Ely. He had been battered about the head with a bottle. William Cooper was a former horse keeper at the farm who had been dismissed in April. He was arrested on a charge of assault and when the old man died on 21 July the charge was changed to one of wilful murder. Tried at Cambridge Assizes in October, Cooper claimed he had called at the farm to ask Harrison why he had dismissed him, and that the victim had attacked him first with a hammer.
Cooper claimed that he had merely picked up the bottle in self-defence. The prosecution suggested Cooper had beaten the old man in revenge for his dismissal before stealing a sum of money; the jury believed them.

Cooper was calm in the lead up to the execution and when the hangman and his assistant observed him at exercise there was nothing to suggest he would cause any trouble on the following morning. He even played dominoes with the warders until he retired for the night. With Harry Allen and Steve Wade in attendance, Tom and Albert stood outside the prison door on the stroke of 8 a.m. Receiving the signal to enter, they found that Cooper’s whole demeanour had changed during the night. Now clearly terrified, he fainted through sheer terror as the hangmen entered the cell and he had to be carried by warders down the corridor to the execution shed.

The miscalculation of the drop at his first senior execution had evidently not caused Stanley Cross’s name to be removed from the official list, for when the first enemy agents were sentenced to death at the end of November, he was engaged to carry out the executions. In September, four enemy agents, travelling in two pairs, landed in Kent. Karl Meir and Jose Waldberg, both German-born, had both had been drinking prior to landing, and to quench their thirst they called into a pub at Lydd where, ignorant of the British licensing laws, they tried to purchase a glass of cider. The suspicious licensee, warned to be on the look out for spies, called the police and they were arrested later that afternoon. Like all subsequent spies caught during the war, they were tried under the 1940 Treason Act; their trials were held ‘in camera’ so that the enemy would be unaware of their capture. Evidence was heard in court that the two men had sent back radio messages prior to their arrest.

Cross, assisted by Albert Pierrepoint and two other new
assistants, Henry Critchell and Harry Kirk, carried out the executions at Pentonville. Again, the official report commented unfavourably on his capacity to carry out the work, and although a week later Cross hanged a third spy, Charles Van Der Keiboom, this turned out to be his last execution as number one.

Tom Pierrepoint was kept busy in the first part of 1941. With his nephew he made another trip over to Dublin in early January to hang David Doherty for the murder of his cousin Hannah Doherty. The two had been clandestine lovers and when Hannah fell pregnant Doherty was asked to procure medicines to induce an abortion. When he turned up at the rendezvous without them they quarrelled, and, fearful that her shouting would attract attention, he strangled his cousin and then battered her about the head with a boulder. They were no protests outside the gaol and Tom and Albert were able to slip in and out without any problems. Although tall and powerfully built, Doherty submitted meekly and died without a struggle.

By the time he had invited Albert to accompany him on another visit to Dublin in April, Tom had carried out executions in Manchester, Durham and Liverpool. Henry Gleeson was hanged at Mountjoy, protesting his innocence after being convicted of the murder of Mary McCarthy. It was later alleged that she worked as a prostitute and had been executed by the IRA for antisocial activities. Gleeson was framed for the murder; witnesses who could have testified to his innocence were intimidated and warned against giving evidence. The real killer was suggested to be George Plant, a member of the IRA who was later executed by firing squad in March 1942.

On 9 July, Tom went down to Wandsworth to hang George
Armstrong, a Newcastle-born spy who was the first Englishman to be executed for treachery during the war. While Armstrong was awaiting his fate in the condemned cell, a few miles across the city events were taking place that were to have an major impact on the career of the young Pierrepoint.