The puzzling afterlife of Britain’s last executioner
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On an overcast May morning last year, I caught the train from London to Newbury racecourse in Berkshire. The walk to the Special Auction Services building took about 10 minutes through a half-deserted scrub of industrial land, pockmarked by tool wholesalers, carpet emporiums and a few despondent empty units for rent. On arrival at the auction house, I made my way to the main hall, a harshly lit confusion of thin glass cabinets and loose items for sale, to wait for the day’s bidding to start. The scene was quiet enough save for a few conspiratorial middle-aged men in heavy wax jackets, though the chief auctioneer assured the room that there were several others closely following proceedings online.
A few lots — a gleaming early 20th-century police belt buckle from Dublin, a Royal Navy Ensign that had perhaps flown from a 1910s Dreadnought battleship — sold for a few hundred pounds each. These were not the relics that I, or anyone else, had come for. Lot 569 was different, an “assortment of signed and annotated photographs of the Pierrepoint family” put up for sale by Albert Pierrepoint’s anonymous goddaughter. The gavel banged twice and the items were dispatched to an online bidder, unseen to the rest of us in the room. The main prize was still to come: Pierrepoint’s handwritten “execution diary”, bearing the names and weights of the condemned, as well as the date of death. The gavel banged once, twice. Sold, to the same anonymous bidder, for £12,400.
From his school days in early-20th-century Huddersfield, Yorkshire, Pierrepoint — the most prolific hangman in modern British history, whose effects were being sold off before my eyes — had already developed a crystalline vision of his own destiny. Nothing, he recalled many years later, would match becoming an “Official Executioner . . . and somehow it didn’t seem so impossible”. If others imagined following their fathers into the local wool mill or gasworks, the young Pierrepoint was aware of a darker path open to those with the necessary temperament or connections. Both his father, the garrulous, often-drunken Henry, and his uncle Thomas were executioners for the British state. During the summer holidays, the 11-year-old Albert had devoured his father’s “confident, easy and very authentic” memoirs, serialised in the Thomson’s Weekly News. The tales of wicked murderers, dramatic reprieves and avenging justice made an indelible impression. “In my [youthful] imagination,” he wrote, “Death was an adventure . . . and Execution was romance.”
Albert Pierrepoint’s extraordinary life and career birthed an international celebrity that has veered between adulation and discomfort for almost 80 years. It has often been repeated that no one knows precisely how many people he hanged between 1931 and his resignation from official duties in 1956. The Guinness Book of Records once had it down as 550, though the consensus today is a hundred or so fewer. The persistent confusion over Pierrepoint’s cultural legacy has never been about blunt numerical supremacy alone. Neither can it easily be explained in the notoriety of many of those he put to death. And they were notorious. From British serial murderers to Nazi war criminals, through to some of the bitterest miscarriages of justice that helped gradually shift the debate on capital punishment before its suspension and eventual abolition in the 1960s, Albert Pierrepoint, the self-avowedly humble, God-fearing instrument of British justice, was responsible for executing them all.
When his much-anticipated memoir Executioner: Pierrepoint was published in 1974, the reaction ran far beyond the expected pangs of morbid curiosity. The book carried a shocking admission. “The fruit of my experience has this bitter aftertaste: that I do not now believe that any of the hundreds of executions I carried out has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder. Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge.”
These brief lines were to birth a legend that endures to this day, long after his peaceful death in a Merseyside nursing home in July 1992. Albert Pierrepoint, the repentant hangman and reluctant media stalwart, a figure of bottomless dignity and regret, whose example might serve as both warning and corrective to the bloodthirsty follies of the recent past. A figure with the depth to sustain a cottage industry of academic study, popular biography and even the occasional big-screen adaptation. “All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment convince me that . . . I have not prevented a single murder,” Pierrepoint once wrote.
In the days and weeks following the auction, I found the weirdness of the spectacle difficult to shake, from the auctioneer’s self-delighted performance to the unknown buyer, mute inside the computer. On the journey back to London, my imagination ran to Marvin Lundy, the obsessive collector in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, whose New York basement in a house “steeped in aquarium dimness” contains a lifetime of carefully hoarded baseball memorabilia. I wondered if Pierrepoint’s diaries had found their British equivalent, destined to be entombed in some subterranean vault in Cheshire or Morecambe, rather than Manhattan. The auction had a precedent. In 2019, a tranche of similar effects had raised nearly £20,000, while a major 1992 auction at Christie’s had commanded only a couple of hundred pounds less. The symbolism of these sporadic events was stark. As if the present were perpetually trying to neatly itemise and value the untidy, unendingly contentious legacy of state-sanctioned murder in Britain.
But the story of capital punishment in the UK is often recalled as a lengthy, if eventually straightforward, march to liberal enlightenment, culminating in the 1965 Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act. The early 1950s had witnessed the controversial executions of 25-year-old Timothy Evans, followed by 19-year-old Derek Bentley, a teenager with a mental age of 11 who had been present at the fatal shooting of a police officer during a bungled robbery in Croydon. (Bentley’s conviction was posthumously overturned in 1998 after decades of campaigning by his family.) Then, in April 1955, a glamorous 28-year-old model and nightclub hostess named Ruth Ellis caught a taxi to Hampstead and shot her abusive lover to death. Despite an outpouring of public sympathy, she was sentenced to death after a day-long trial. Albert Pierrepoint was the executioner for all three.
The history of abolition isn’t as neat as might be suggested at first glance. In late 1945, the National Council for the Abolition of the Death Penalty wrote to its members that the postwar Labour government would bring “success to our efforts . . . within the next few years”. Despite the well-publicised miscarriages of justice, public support for capital punishment remained high, as it does today. Last February, the reliably bellicose politician Lee Anderson, then deputy chair of the Conservative party, told The Spectator that he’d bring back the death penalty without hesitation. “Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed. You know that, don’t you? 100 per cent success rate,” he said.
His comments, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak scrambled to clarify, were decidedly unrepresentative of Conservative policy. Still, Anderson’s beliefs are shared by a vocal segment of British society. The most recent YouGov poll shows that 56 per cent of the country would support the death penalty for terrorists, 55 per cent for child killers, while 46 per cent support it in the case of all murders. Petitions to reinstate capital punishment are frequent enough and typically garner a few thousand signatures. Support mostly skews older and Tory, though not entirely. Comments underneath the Instagram posts of innumerable UK crime news outlets testify to broader agreement. When the “killer nurse” Lucy Letby was handed down a life sentence last August, social media had no shortage of “bring back hanging” sentiment from a more youthful crowd.
Polling only tells us so much. Lizzie Seal is professor of criminology at the University of Sussex and author of a book-length study on the history of capital punishment in 20th-century Britain. Anderson’s comments were “genuinely worrying [as] he’s clearly been given the space to say these ridiculous things, as they think these culture-war talking points have some benefit”, she explained. “More widely, it’s a warning sign of authoritarianism . . . It’s a small step, but it makes [these views] acceptable in ‘the discourse’.” For now at least, there is no real danger of such rhetoric becoming legislative reality. Fifty-five countries still have the death penalty, from China to the US and Saudi Arabia, a number that has shrunk significantly since the 1990s. Britain won’t be one of them, for as long as it is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights.
Albert Pierrepoint was born in March 1905, the middle child of Mary and Henry Pierrepoint. His early life was unremarkably Edwardian working class: a few years of mandatory schooling, followed by part-time work from the age of 12 at a cotton mill near Manchester, where the family had moved to from Yorkshire for Henry’s day job. The older Pierrepoint had taken on the part-time role of executioner in 1901, after a lengthy application process to the Home Office, despite his initial unease. “I am 24 years of age, height 5ft 8½ inches,” he wrote. “Should you require particulars of my character I shall be very glad to give you all the information you require.” The freelance role — £10 per execution — supplemented his wages and offered some relatively glamorous benefits, including trips to London. After training at Newgate Prison, he was added to the official list of state executioners.
After four years as an assistant, diligently dispatching armed robbers and wife killers, Henry Pierrepoint graduated to principal executioner. In 1906, his elder brother Thomas joined him on “the list”. Such dynastic manoeuvres were common in the profession, with its tight-knit world of competing families. Henry Pierrepoint’s career came to a sudden end in July 1910, when he turned up visibly drunk to an execution at Chelmsford Prison and engaged in a fist fight with his assistant.
In his autobiography, Albert Pierrepoint skirts over the circumstances of his father’s retirement and quick decline before his death a few years later. In as far as the two were similar, it was for having a shared wanderlust. “Travel! Different towns! Both my dad and I want the same things. We are globetrotters really.” More is made of his uncle Tom, a comparatively reserved, fastidious man responsible for almost 300 executions during a 39-year career. Was hanging a woman any different, the young Albert asked his mentor after becoming an assistant executioner in 1932. His uncle had smiled. “Why lad, you’re not afraid, are you?”
By the 1940s, the young Pierrepoint had established himself as one of the pre-eminent executioners in the country. The work was varied. Poisoners and revolutionaries, Irish republicans and child killers, jealous lovers and fascist spies. Pierrepoint was adamant he could, given the proper preparation, hang a man in eight seconds flat. There was pride in it, just as there had been for his uncle and father. National celebrity arrived after the second world war, when Pierrepoint was sent to Hamelin, Germany, to hang the officials in charge of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, along with more than 200 other convicted war criminals. The press seized on Pierrepoint as an avenging angel, though he later claimed to have found the attention dismaying. “I had more reporters camped on my doorstep than a heavily suspected murderer . . . I was chased to the airport by a pack of newspapermen who were as unwelcome to me as a lynch mob.” In any case, the guidelines issued by the Home Office, the government department responsible for crime and punishment, were strict: “[He] should avoid attracting public attention. He should clearly understand that his conduct and general behaviour must be respectable and discreet.”
On returning home, Pierrepoint opened Help The Poor Struggler, a pub in Oldham, near Manchester, along with his wife Anne. Pierrepoint was adamant that the two never spoke of his “other work” during the course of their half-century marriage. But his double lives often blurred into one, as busloads of awe-inspired visitors arrived from across the country for an autograph and audience with the dapper Yorkshireman who had made “short work” of the “Beasts of Belsen”.
In one self-documented incident, Pierrepoint was surprised to recognise one condemned man, a wife killer, as a regular from the pub. “Hello, Tosh,” the man had greeted him. “Hello, Tish,” Pierrepoint replied before leading him to the gallows. By the 1950s, the uncritical adulation had begun to wane, particularly after the executions of Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis. In 1956, Pierrepoint resigned his commission, though not, as is commonly supposed, in moral protest. Instead, after a quarter of a century, he apparently resigned over a minor pay dispute.
My fascination with Albert Pierrepoint developed at the start of last year, shortly after a visit to Executions, an exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands, nestled among the gleaming absurdities of Canary Wharf. It charted the history of public executions in the capital between the first recorded hanging at Tyburn in 1196 to 1868, when they were moved behind closed doors, away from an increasingly appalled Victorian public. The curators managed to sustain a note of sobriety, rather than fully sanitising the subject matter. The range of artefacts on offer was impressive: the writings of early capital-punishment abolitionists, as well as the mostly futile last-minute petitions of the condemned. There were the executioners’ “trade signs” of dubious provenance competing for attention with a fine silk shirt that Charles I possibly wore to the scaffold. Trinkets that told a centuries-long story of violence and squalid public spectacle.
Back home, I reached for Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, published at the turn of the millennium. His chapter on capital punishment races through the incalculable “burnings and stonings, hangings and crucifixions practised in the Roman and Saxon times”, to the terrible spectre of Newgate Prison and the fascination of the great Victorian writers who charted the final years of open-air executions. (Thackeray wrote of his “extraordinary feeling of terror and shame” in an essay occasioned by the hanging of a notorious forger; Dickens excitedly watched the spectacle from the top floor of a nearby house.) Pierrepoint figures briefly in Ackroyd’s account, as the “most recent and celebrated successor” to the celebrity executioners of the more transparently barbarous past, though his ministries were, he concedes, at least “performed in silence and secrecy”.
Certainly, these were two of the virtues the man himself approved of. Though perhaps not as much as “dignity” and “mercy”, both of which are invoked repeatedly across his autobiography and the subsequent press coverage. The role of hangman, Pierrepoint wrote, was “sacred to me. That sanctity must be most apparent at the hour of death.” The condemned prisoner, he continued tenderly, “is entrusted to me, after decisions have been made which I cannot alter . . . The supreme mercy I can extend to them is to give them and sustain in them their dignity in dying and death. The gentleness must remain.” This was not simply a question of professional pride. Pierrepoint was devout and often thought of his long career in religious terms, as a direct calling from God himself.
It isn’t surprising to see how his story has lent itself to creative adaptation over the decades. In early September, I spoke with Jeff Pope, the screenwriter of 2005’s Pierrepoint, a well-crafted biopic starring a winningly morose Timothy Spall in the title role. “I came to [Pierrepoint] through his autobiography. It gripped me, the very idea that another human being could be tasked with killing another in a totally unemotional way,” Pope told me. Naturally, the film’s success relies on the gradual collapse of this premise. Spall’s Pierrepoint is slowly ruined by regret, one hanging at a time, from his erstwhile pub crony Tish to the slick production line of executions in postwar Germany. Then, as now, Pope had little doubt over the guilt that must have consumed Pierrepoint. “In life there are certain things you do that you end up dismissing. You think they’re gone, but they’re not. They never go. They come back to you. I think that’s what happened to him.”
Despite granular research, the film makes no claims to be literal historical transcription, both Pope and its director, Adrian Shergold, explained to me. “It was a strange but rather wonderful experience making [it],” said the latter. “When it screened at the Toronto Film Festival, we ran the names of the people he’d executed, instead of credits.” Their vision of a morally exhausted Pierrepoint certainly makes for an effective anti-capital punishment fable.
Look, the film demands, at the terrible cost that violence extracts, state-sanctioned or otherwise. Look at how it warps and degrades even its most famous practitioners. It’s a shame, then, that there’s no evidence the real Pierrepoint ever experienced anything like this tortured regret. In his autobiography, the Tish hanging is related with brisk efficiency: an anecdote that dissolves into self-satisfaction at how humanely he’d treated his old acquaintance at the last. Neither does he express particular interest or concern for the fates of Timothy Evans, Derek Bentley or Ruth Ellis. Pierrepoint was particularly adamant when it came to Ellis. No, her execution hadn’t played any part in his 1956 resignation. “No untoward incident happened which appalled me or anyone else. Nor did I leave the list . . . because I was about to reveal [her] last words. She never spoke.”
Despite the shock that followed the famous repudiation of his craft, fewer have remembered what came next. The success of his memoir revitalised Pierrepoint’s flagging celebrity. In January 1977, he appeared on a BBC chat show presented by Melvyn Bragg, along with guests who included the footballer Rodney Marsh. When the boyish Marsh pressed for details on the Timothy Evans execution, Pierrepoint refused to comment. He then announced that he was having second thoughts on his rejection of capital punishment. Rising crime rates and the news that a policeman friend had been shot dead in Blackpool left him unsure of what to believe. In the mid-1980s, he made an appearance on Robert Kilroy-Silk’s Day to Day programme, to speak during a debate on the merits of the death penalty for child murderers. Wearing a black glove to cover the scars from a recent operation, a wary 81-year-old Pierrepoint spoke only briefly. Responding to an audience question, he was adamant that he’d never hanged anyone he hadn’t thought to be guilty. And, yes, he had always slept soundly at night.
During my conversation with Professor Seal, she’d offered a theory. The idea of the repentant hangman was a potent tool, though not, as might be expected, for the comically blood-and-thunder rhetoric of Lee Anderson or his ilk. “I think it connects with a very 21st-century notion of trauma. That portrayal resonates with a contemporary audience . . . It confirms the belief that it’s a terrible form of punishment.” Pierrepoint, even with his ambivalence and repeated caveats, would simply never be a blunt enough symbol for the revenge fantasies of the far right. Yet there is a feeling that the old mythology’s power has begun to wane. “Pierrepoint liked killing a little too much,” runs the headline to a hectoring April 2023 piece by popular historian and Times columnist, Ben Macintyre. The “callous, self-important brute . . . was one of Britain’s worst serial killers”. Not only that, Macintyre writes, but “Pierrepoint did it because, like many natural born killers, he enjoyed killing”.
In the weeks after the Berkshire auction of Pierrepoint’s effects, it didn’t take much for the mystery surrounding the diary’s new home to crumble. In fact, as the auction house representative wrote to me over email, its new owner would be only too happy to talk. In late June, I dialled the mobile number for 72-year-old Adrian Forman, a distinguished, if now semi-retired, antiquarian who splits his time between rural Devon and the sunshine of Gran Canaria, from where he’d logged on to the Berkshire auction. The diaries were no impulse buy, he told me. Forman’s late father, Michael, was a prolific, single-minded collector, who spent decades amassing the single largest private store of Pierrepoint’s effects before his death in 2008. “[My] father was quite eccentric really. He was fascinated by the man. Well, Pierrepoint does fascinate people, [doesn’t] he?”
From his childhood in Birmingham, the younger Forman was always a reader. “History, always history” was his passion, Napoleon an early hero. At a loss over what to buy his father for Christmas in 1976, he’d alighted on Pierrepoint’s autobiography. The book proved a source of instant obsession. “He wrote to the publishers with a letter to forward to Mr Pierrepoint. They ended up corresponding. My father asked to interview him on film. Pierrepoint agreed [and] they got on very well. That’s how my father began his collection, [which] he paid a lot of money for.” Its macabre treasures included the briefcase the hangman had taken on his postwar trips to Germany. “The rope he used is still inside, with the special ankle straps. And the handkerchief which he used as a hood [for] the condemned,” Forman outlined with proprietorial relish.
By the late 1970s, Forman’s father was a sporadic, if always warmly received, visitor at Albert and Anne Pierrepoint’s Southport bungalow. Each trip would result in a fresh round of additions to the burgeoning Pierrepoint archive; official correspondence and documents, some relating back to Henry Pierrepoint and before. Most telling, in Adrian Forman’s view, were the papers that didn’t return with his father. “The one for Ruth Ellis wasn’t there. Neither was Timothy Evans. Albert probably destroyed them. I actually met him a couple of times.” What, I greedily wanted to know, were his abiding impressions? “A small, very dapper Yorkshireman. All smiles and strong handshakes. Not anything like what you’d imagine an executioner to be.” It was, Forman added after a beat of deliberation, “a terrible thing to have to do, I don’t see how you could. But he believed he had a calling from God. He mentions that in the book.”
When his parents died within months of each other in 2008, the collection passed to Forman. At first, he had no idea of what to do with the tranche of macabre oddities. Yet, in the years since, there have been times when he’s been unable to think of little else. The eventual plan was to publish a new edition of Executioner: Pierrepoint by the end of the year, as his father had held the copyright. “I’ve no idea if anyone will want it. I might do it myself. That world is so difficult these days.” Either way, his abiding ambition, Forman told me when we spoke over the phone, was to claw back some of the small fortune both he and his father had spent on the executioner over the years. “The rest of my family aren’t interested in any of it, and I’ll look to [recoup] what I can eventually,” he sighed. “But it’s part of our history, isn’t it?” In early November, true to his word, Forman emailed me a photo of the cover for the glossy new edition, foregrounded with a photo of a half-smiling, elderly Pierrepoint looming into the camera, noose in hand.
If we are to take his writing and manifold television appearances at face value, accuracy was always more important to Pierrepoint than remorse. The lucrative memoirs were simply an honest attempt to set the record straight. No, he hadn’t shaken hands with Derek Bentley on the way to the scaffold or made any notes about him. Nor had the condemned man cried. Pierrepoint wasn’t in the habit of identifying himself to strangers as “the executioner” and had never attempted anything as vulgar as cashing in on his celebrity (an odd claim to make in a mass-market autobiography). He hadn’t opened a restaurant called The Long Drop, or displayed a “no hanging around the bar” sign at his Oldham pub. The impression is of annoyance and distress at the “imaginative . . . propaganda versions of various controversial cases”.
Reality isn’t kind to this image of reluctant celebrity. As writer Steve Fielding notes in his 2006 biography of the Pierrepoint dynasty, Albert had begun secret negotiations with the editor of the Empire News and Sunday Chronicle in the weeks before his 1956 resignation. The series was to be titled “The Hangman’s Own Story” and would detail the final moments of several of the most infamous criminals he’d executed. On being informed, the Home Office had asked for the pieces to be submitted for preapproval, a request Pierrepoint apparently ignored. On March 18, the first article appeared under the headline “Pierrepoint Speaks”, with a beaming Pierrepoint captured pouring pints and indulging in various pub games with his customers. Later editions promised to reveal how he had dispatched the “coward” John Christie, serial killer of 10 Rillington Place, west London, as well as Ruth Ellis and the Beasts of Belsen. The series was discontinued after two sensational editions, following the threat of legal action from an increasingly furious Home Office.
When Timothy Evans was posthumously pardoned in 1966 (after years of campaigning, a High Court judge-led inquiry had concluded that Evans wasn’t responsible for the death of his daughter, the offence he’d been convicted of), his story was adapted into a film starring John Hurt, with Pierrepoint engaged as an uncredited technical adviser. Hurt was later to recall that Pierrepoint had no compunction in making off-colour jokes about his former trade on set, while the actress Diana Dors wrote in her memoirs that she had later been invited back to Help The Poor Struggler during production of another film. She remembered an attention-grasping man who boasted freely of the people he’d executed. In his biography, Steve Fielding points to multiple witnesses who confirmed that, whatever the ex-hangman claimed, the “no hanging around” sign was a fixture at the various pubs he’d run.
As Fielding and others have noted, Pierrepoint’s memoir contains several inconsistencies and distortions (he repeatedly changed the year of his initial interview for “the job”, while a former assistant was mystified to read that he’d been dismissed after making a crude joke following an execution). Most damning is the testimony of Ruth Ellis’s sister, Muriel Jakubait. In 1974, she’d written to Pierrepoint in an attempt to correct the claim that Ellis had gone silently to her death, as well as challenge him on a radio interview in which he’d claimed to have taken a picnic with Jakubait shortly after the execution, as well as later taking them both on a jovial drive to visit Ellis’s grave.
According to Jakubait, these anecdotes were a creepy fabrication. Pierrepoint had indeed written to her many times requesting a meeting — letters often penned under his wife’s maiden name — though she had always refused his offers. Their one and only meeting in London was, Jakubait claimed, an elaborate sting operation by a newspaper, which brought her face to face with her sister’s executioner.
On a warm Saturday morning in late September, I cycled across south London for an appointment with Stewart McLaughlin, ex-prison officer and faithful custodian of Wandsworth Prison Museum, housed in a converted garage a few yards from the main prison gate. On arrival, my vision was immediately drawn to the back wall, where a replica noose — the same one used in the Pierrepoint biopic, McLaughlin explained — hung from a tiny makeshift gallows, along with photos of the hangman at the peak of his fame, as well as his white plaster “death mask” mounted beside them.
Despite the shrine-like exhibit, McLaughlin said he wasn’t interested in hagiography. “For one thing, the account of when Pierrepoint came here for [the] Bentley execution changed a few times.” But that couldn’t invalidate the hangman’s place in modern British history. Wandsworth was a fitting home for the collection. Not only had Pierrepoint once been a frequent professional visitor, but the prison’s gallows had only been dismantled in 1994 (certain strains of treason were hypothetically still capital crimes until 1998). Today, the space was used as a communal staff room, McLaughlin added cheerfully, before I thanked him and headed back into the autumn sunshine.
By the time Pierrepoint died in a Southport nursing home, aged 87, in the summer of 1992, his name had already begun to pass from memory into history, a black and white figure from the scarcely comprehensible early to mid-20th century. The obituaries were uniformly kind and deferential to his post-retirement persona. The Independent mourned a “brave, decent, honest man”, while The Guardian paid tribute to a “cheerful unassuming man . . . who refined his father’s craft to make it more merciful still”. The Washington Post took it further, unilaterally deciding it was the death of Ruth Ellis that had caused him to have “had enough” before his resignation.
Today, Pierrepoint’s legacy is less assured. The hangman appears as a different figure than he did to the obituary writers of the early 1990s and certainly to the adoring public of the postwar years. We are less convinced of the sincerity of his lukewarm repudiation of capital punishment; more concerned with the embellishments and yearning for celebrity, whatever Pierrepoint might have stressed to the contrary. If it was “no part of my ambition to become a showman”, then the decade-long media career is either inexplicable or the statement is untrue. For a man who often invoked a higher power as his guiding force, his trajectory — the bestselling autobiography, the secret tabloid deals and chat show appearances — often seems grubby and earthbound. Maybe we are too well trained in matters of celebrity and inauthenticity.
In the months after my interview with Adrian Forman, I’d become increasingly curious about the other half of the transaction: the goddaughter who had passed on the diary and pictures for sale. At the end of September, I called 39-year-old Helen Newbon. Her father had been adopted as a young child and spent almost his entire working life at Manchester’s Strangeways Prison, before his retirement in 2004. He had met Pierrepoint as a rookie prison officer and a strong bond had rapidly developed. “He was a father figure to my dad,” Newbon explained, “the son Albert and Anne never had. As they got older, my dad helped them out. They were very, very close.”
To her, Albert Pierrepoint had always been something more than a mere historical symbol. He had, and would always be, Uncle Albert. “He was such a kind man. My memories [of him] are very personal. I was only seven when he passed away, so we didn’t ever speak about ‘it’. He and Anne were a big part of my life.” The memories were still vivid. Christmases and birthdays in Southport, with the jovial, mild-mannered figure who rarely spoke above a whisper. There was always a framed picture of Albert and her father at home. “He only ever spoke about Albert with the highest regard. He wholeheartedly believed that he was put on this earth to do the job he did.”
After Pierrepoint’s death, her father inherited the estate. He put the items up for auction at Christie’s months later in 1992, though he’d decided to keep back the handwritten diaries. “It’s like he was keeping a bit of Albert back for himself,” Newbon told me. When her father died in 2019, they passed down to her. The decision to sell came after a chance conversation with her 13-year-old son. The weight of their history meant nothing to him. “I’ve got my memories, which are different from written records. None of it was doing any good to anyone sitting in my loft. I sold them to preserve that history. It wasn’t about the money.” Did she ever feel ambivalent about that history? “If he hadn’t done it, someone else would have. Nobody’s frightened of justice any more. Whether you agree with him or not, that was his life.”
Francisco Garcia is the author of “We All Go Into the Dark: the Hunt for Bible John”, published by Mudlark/HarperCollins
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