ALBERT PIERREPOINT, the hangman immortalised this year in a biopic starring Timothy Spall, was already feeling the pressures of fame some 60 years ago.

Pierrepoint, Britain’s last official Chief Hangman, who is believed to have dispatched 333 men and women between 1932 and 1956, was being hounded by journalists as he became better known after the end of the Second World War.

Documents released by the National Archives yesterday show that in August 1946 he wrote to the Prisons Commission, complaining: “With the Nuremburg trials drawing to a close and the Government talking about the abolition of capital punishment, I have had a great number of press people round to see me.”

They had pestered his friends, visited his workplace, and a “war correspondent” from London had encouraged him to sell his story. Pierrepoint assured the commission that “any article which may appear in any paper will definitely not have come from me”.

Despite concerns that he had been discussing his work with “intimates”, the Prisons Commission decided to believe their star operator, perhaps reluctant to lose his services after the problems that they had had with his uncle.

Thomas Pierrepoint, who retired from the execution trade in 1946, aged 76, had been a worry for some time. By 1940 the medical officer at Wandsworth prison, a Dr Lander, felt that he was losing his sight and “getting past his job”, prompting a long-running investigation into his fitness as executioner.

The governor of Durham prison reported in December 1940 that during two executions Thomas had “smelled strongly of drink”, and two years later the governor of Wandsworth suggested that Thomas, who was then 72, had “passed his peak of efficiency and is becoming less tactful and more abrupt” in his duties.

In 1943 the governor of Liverpool prison offered a possible explanation for this apparent haste: “This zeal for speed may be related to a desire to show that his ability is unimpaired by advancing years.”

Nor was this the first time that Thomas had given the authorities cause for concern. In 1927 he was severely reprimanded by a senior Prisons Commission official after he and a rival hangman, Robert Baxter, were discovered “touting for business from under-sheriffs”.

Nevertheless, even in 1943 the commission was willing to let Thomas continue working with his nephew, Albert.

A commission official wrote to Wandsworth in July 1943 explaining that owing to “favourable reports from other prisons” and “wartime difficulties” in recruiting hangmen, the septuagenarian would be allowed to continue his duties.

Indeed, a recruitment drive in 1938 had met only limited success. Applicants included a Yorkshire butcher of “lax morals”, a Port of London police constable with a “somewhat morbid interest” in the work and an “awkward, clumsy, rather obese man” who was “stupid” enough to submit his father’s war record as his own.

And so the Pierrepoints continued their work, with Thomas retiring in 1946 to complain fruitlessly about his lack of pension. His younger brother, Henry, who had begun this dynasty of hangmen, had lost his own job after arriving for one execution at Chelmsford in 1910 “considerably the worse for drink” and then fighting with a rival hangman. Henry died in 1922.

Albert, his son, conversely, went on to gain a reputation as the most prolific and efficient executioner in 20th-century Britain before resigning after an argument about his fees in 1956, a decision that the authorities begged him to reconsider.

Perhaps he was the only one in the family to heed the advice of his uncle Tom: “If you can’t do it without whisky, don’t do it at all.”

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• UK regional accents thrive against the odds
• ‘Scarecrow’ wind farms put rare birds to flight
• What an anti-climax: G-spot is a myth