Some pretty macabre memorabilia is up for auction in the United Kingdom as the belongings of “celebrity executioner” Albert Pierrepoint are on the block.
Several Items Belonging to the UK’s “Celebrity Executioner” Albert Pierrepoint Are Up for Auction
Pierrepoint is notable for his transition from working a store to pursuing the family business of public execution via hanging. As a child, he reportedly said that he wanted to be the Official Executioner after he finished school.
His father, Henry Pierrepoint transitioned from a butcher’s assistant to the hangman profession. The elder Pierrepoint started as an assistant to the Billington family of executioners. The Billington name should be familiar to our wrestling readers as former WWE stars Dynamite Kid, Davey Boy Smith, and Smith’s son Harry Smith are members of that family which first came to prominence as Crown executioners.
Henry’s run as an executioner ended in 1910 after he was considered too drunk to perform an execution by his assistant then fought with him. His brother and son had lengthier careers with Thomas being active for 39 years before he basically aged out of the profession in 1946 in his 70s having officiated almost 300 executions.
Starting in 1932 at 27-years-old, Albert Pierrepoint retired after 25 years having executed somewhere between 435 and 600 people. Among them were a who’s who of infamy including serial killers the Blackout Ripper and the Acid Bath Murderer, Nazi war criminals who were over the Auschwitz concentration camp, gangsters, and some pretty questionable executions where people were sentenced to death but were actually innocent or the public was mixed on the sentence.
His final high-profile execution occurred in 1955 and saw him execute Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in the UK. It was also the execution that pushed the anti-capital punishment movement and eventually resulted in the practice being abolished in 1964.
Items auctioned in the past include one of his last cigars and notebooks where he documented the condemned’s height, weight, and build as well as how much rope would be needed for an effective hanging. His death mask, a mould of the deceased’s face, was also auctioned.
CHECK IT OUT: Get The Overtimer’s Hottest Stories, Breaking News and Special Features in your email, CLICK HERE!
