by Phil Clarke
Billington married his beloved Alice in 1872 but the union was plagued with sadness. Not ony did the couple lose three children in infancy, but Alice died prematurely in 1890 at the age of forty, shortly after her husband had realised his dream of becoming an executioner. Determined to make something of his life, James Billington applied for the post that had been held by the somewhat celebrity executioner, William Marwood. His application was turned down, however, he managed to secure the position as the hangman for Yorkshire.
Billington’s very first execution took place at Armley Gaol in Leeds on 26 August 1884, when he hanged a Sheffield hawker, Joseph Laycock, for the murder of his wife and four children. Just before Billington placed the noose around his neck, Laycock pleaded, ‘You will not hurt me?’ to which James replied, ‘No, thaal nivver feel it, for thaal be out of existence i’ two minutes’. Billington mastered the art of swift execution and soon gained himself a reputation for a ‘clean, quick finish’.
In July 1891, Billington married for the second time to Alice Fletcher, who bore him two more children. He had three surviving sons from his first marriage, Thomas born in 1873, William born in 1875 and John in 1880. The year after his marriage, in 1892, he succeeded James Berry as the main executioner for London and the Home Office.
Billington went on to complete 147 executions, the last one taking place on 3 December 1901 with the hanging of Patrick McKenna at Strangeways Prison in Manchester. Ironically, McKenna was a friend of the Billington family, and they had once lived on the same street in Bolton. On this occasion, Billington’s assistant Henry Pierrepoint assisted in the execution, and the night before they carried out the hanging Billington admitted that he would rather not have to carry out the deed on someone he was so familiar with, despite the fact that McKenna had murdered his wife.
Perhaps Billington’s most interesting hanging was that of the poisoner Dr Thomas Neil Cream on 15 November 1892 at Newgate Prison. Just seconds before the trap door opened, Cream could be heard to say, ‘I am Jack the . . .’ but he never managed to complete the sentence. Although the authorities felt it was highly unlikely that the doctor was indeed the infamous Jack the Ripper, it certainly caused quite a stir at the time.
During his career, Billington developed a hatred for the media who seemed to hang around his barber’s shop when he wasn’t carrying out any executions. They would sit in the barber’s chair and while having their hair cut try and coax Billington to give them some gruesome stories. He hated the intrusion and if he got wind of the fact that his customer was a newspaper reporter, he thought nothing of downing his tools and leaving the man half way through a shave or a haircut.
Bit by bit, Billington turned into a melancholy character and returned to drinking. He gave up his barber’s shop and became the licensee of a public house in Bolton called the Derby Arms. He was once heard to say to one of his customers that being a hangman was like ‘living in a bloody cage’, and that it wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be.
Billington died ten days after his very last execution on 13 December 1901. He had suffered a severe bout of bronchitis and at just fifty-four years of age he left a wife and five children.
Thomas Billington
Thomas Billington was James’s eldest son and loved nothing more than to assist his father in his executions. His role, however, was short-lived as he died of pneumonia in 1902 when he was just twenty-nine years old.
William Billington
At the time of his father’s death, William was living with his stepmother in the Derby Arms. William Billington took over where his father left off not only in the barber shop but as an executioner as well, often assisted by his younger brother, John. He assisted his father in fourteen executions and went on to carry out another fifty-eight on his own. He carried out the very last execution at Newgate Prison, that of George Woolfe on 2 May 1902 and also the first at Pentonville Prison on 30 September the same year. He was also responsible for the first executions at Holloway Prison, which was an establishment set up for women prisoners. William hanged two women Annie Walters and Amelia Sach on 3 February 1903 for the crime of ‘baby farming’. This crime was one of the more distasteful aspects of Victorian England and was the practice of taking in unwanted babies in return for a commercial fee and either overcrowding or killing them.
William’s career reached its pinnacle in April 1903 when he executed George Chapman at Wandsworth Prison, assisted by Henry Pierrepoint. Shortly after this William appears to have gone off the rails and took to drinking, resigning from his job as executioner and relinquishing his interest in the barber’s shop as well. On 20 July 1905, he was charged with failing to maintain his wife and two children after they were forced to go and live in the Bolton Union workhouse. He was in and out of court and failed to keep his promises of financial support for his family. William died on 2 March 1952 in his early sixties.
John Billington
Like his father and older brother, John was a barber by trade. He assisted his father in executions and in December 1903 carried out one himself at Liverpool, hanging Henry Starr for the murder of his wife at Blackpool. Unlike William, however, John was on the Home Office list of approved executioners and assisted in twenty-four executions and another fifteen as principal hangman. He died suddenly at the age of twenty-five, leaving behind a wife and one child.
The Pierrepoint Family
Henry Albert Pierrepoint
Much like the Billingtons before them, the Pierrepoints were a dynasty of executioners. They took up the mantle from where the Billingtons left off and went on to dominate the role of the hangman during the first half of the twentieth century.
Henry Albert Pierrepoint was the first of the family to enter this ignoble and notorious profession. He had grown up reading stories about the executioners of the past, taking great inspiration from educated and literate hangman James Berry. Pierrepoint read his autobiographical work My Experiences As An Executioner and longed for the same. He dreamed of travelling outside his hometown of Huddersfield and saw the role of hangman-for-hire as a means to tour the country and the world. The ambitious young man persistently bombarded the Home Office with letters of application, expressing his desire to follow in the footsteps of Berry, Ketch and Calcraft.
He eventually received a positive response from the Home Office and, in time, he was invited to train at Newgate Prison. His first role, as assistant executioner to James Billington, came at the age of twenty-five. His first victim was twenty-three-year-old Marcel Fougeron on 19 November 1901 for the murder of Hermann Francis Jung. His involvement was deemed a success and it signified the beginning of a nine-year term of office as a judicial killer. During his career, he performed a total of 108 executions, acting as lead executioner for sixty-eight of them.
Very little information can be found regarding the majority of people who died by the hands of Henry Pierrepoint, but it is safe to say that his victims were an eclectic mix. There was Richard Wigley, who was hanged in Shrewsbury for the murder of his girlfriend, and the Indian student-cum-martyr, Madar dal Dhingra, who shot dead Sir William Curzon Wyllie – a colonial administrator in the foyer of the Imperial Institute. Pierrepoint also saw to the deaths of three baby farmers during his career. Baby farming was a Victorian phenomenon which involved taking in unwanted infants in return for payment. While the majority of these pseudo-adoption agencies used the money to care for the children, there were some despicable people who simply murdered the children in order to keep the money for themselves. Amelia Sach and Annie Walters – known as the Finchley baby farmers – perished at the hands of Henry Pierrepoint in what became the only double hanging of women in modern times. Pierrepoint also oversaw the final baby farmer death sentence in Britain on 14 August 1907 in Cardiff, when Rhoda Willis was hanged by the neck on her forty-fourth birthday.
The day before Rhoda’s execution Henry was busy at work in Wandsworth Prison, London, overseeing another death sentence – there was clearly no rest for tho
se who dispatched of the wicked! The condemned was one Richard Brinkley, who had attempted to swindle seventy-seven-year-old Johanna Blume out of her worldly belongings. The ingenious con involved tricking the old woman into believing that a folded piece of paper was a list of those keen to travel to the coast. She eagerly signed the register which unbeknown to her was, in fact, her last will and testament in which she made Mr Brinkley the sole beneficiary of all that she owned! His perfect scam began to flounder on the death of Johanna, when her grand-daughter contested the will. Realising that the witnesses, whom had been swindled in the same fashion, would be questioned, Brinkley decided he had no option but to kill them. He contacted the first witness, Reginald Parker, pretending to be interested in buying their dog. During the visit, he gave Parker a bottle of stout which was contaminated with prussic acid. This proved more than adequate, though Parker was not the victim. While Brinkley and Parker were inspecting the dog, his landlords, Mr and Mrs Beck entered the house and, on finding the poisoned chalice, sampled its contents and promptly died!
Three years later, Henry Pierrepoint’s yearned-for career came to an abrupt end when, in 1910, he was involved in a drunken brawl with his assistant, John Ellis. Ellis accused Henry of being drunk on the job, whereupon a tirade of abuse flowed forth from Henry and, according to Chief Warder Nash, resulted in Henry knocking his aide off his chair. The incident was promptly reported to the Home Office which decided to remove him from the list of approved executioners. Henry did not go without a fight. Losing this post would have meant losing not only his considerable fee of £10 per hanging but also his much strived-for all expenses paid travelling about the country. He appealed directly to the home secretary stating that Ellis was in fact trying to undermine him, desiring for himself the position of chief executioner. This was to no avail and Henry never held the post again. Banished from his dream job, he kept the memories alive by writing about his experiences which were later chronicled in The Thomson’s Weekly News. Henry Pierrepoint died in 1922, ten years before his son, Albert, was to follow in his footsteps.
Thomas Pierrepoint
Born in 1870, Thomas William Pierrepoint was the elder brother of Henry. Unlike Henry, Thomas did not aspire to be a hangman for his country. In fact, one could say he was roped into it by his younger brother! Despite not wanting a career in capital punishment, he clearly had a knack for the noose. He was only required to complete one of the compulsory two weeks of training at Pentonville, before being judged ready for service. This was surely due, in part, to some considerable personal training he had received from brother Henry inside a stable situated at the rear of his cottage.
Like his brother, widespread demand for his skills would see him spend considerable time in Ireland, although he went one step further in being named the official executioner for Eire after its independence was granted in 1923. During his time there, he carried out twenty-four executions at Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison. He obtained a further feather in his cap across the border in Belfast, where he achieved the record for the most executions performed by one man. His victims included William Smiley – considered an exemplary prisoner – who was sentenced to death for the double murders of Maggie and Sarah McCauley. Samuel Cushnan was dispatched on 8 April 1930 for the murder of postman James McCann, and similarly Thomas Dornan was found guilty of the murders of Bella and Maggie Aiken, falling foul of the rope on 21 May 1931.
Back in Blighty, Thomas continued to add to his tally of victims with some noteworthy individuals. On 19 December 1934, he hanged Ethel Lillie Major at Hull Prison for the murder of her husband, Arthur. She had poisoned his food with strychnine causing convulsions which were initially identified as epilepsy. Nearly two years later, Thomas executed another female poisoner, one raven-haired Charlotte Bryant, this time in Exeter. Bryant had been having an affair with a lodger and had decided to do away with husband, Frederick, using arsenic. The unfortunate husband’s suffering was, yet again, misdiagnosed – this time as gastroenteritis – however, the post mortem examination revealed grains of the poison still inside Frederick’s system. During her incarceration, waiting for the dreaded day of her demise, a remarkable change occurred; Bryant’s jet-black hair had turned completely white. On Thursday 15 July 1936, her wait was over and she was promptly dispatched by Thomas Pierrepoint.
In 1940, Thomas reached the grand old age of seventy yet the frequency of his executions had far from diminished. However, questions were beginning to be asked regarding his ability to do the job by the governing authorities. Along with his age, there were concerns over his eyesight which was considered poor enough to render him potentially unfit for the position. After keeping a close yet discreet eye on Thomas, the Prison Commission decided against relieving him of his duties. There seems to have been sufficient positive feedback from other prisons to counteract the negative reports and this assisted in their decision. Also, the world as at war and, therefore, there existed an exceptional shortage of manpower. This played no small part in Thomas retaining his post.
Thomas went on to make a meaningful contribution during World War II. He was appointed as executioner by the US Armed Forces at Shepton Mallet Prison in Somerset. This was a jail exclusively for American servicemen who had flouted military law. Beginning with David Cobb on 12 March 1943 and ending with Aniceto Martinez on 15 June 1945, eighteen men were executed under the Visiting Forces Act, of which nine were convicted of murder, six of rape and three of both crimes. Of these convicts, sixteen were hanged within the purpose-built two-storey brick building containing the gallows and Thomas was in charge of thirteen of these.
Following this appointment, Thomas Pierrepoint left the post of his own volition, retiring in 1946 in his mid-seventies. With over forty years of service, Thomas had become the longest serving of all the Pierrepoints and had managed to notch up around 300 hangings throughout his career. While no verified statistics exist in full, it is known he carried out 235 hangings in England and Wales, of which thirty-four he assisted. Thomas died in 1954, ten years before the last hanging took place on British soil.
Albert Pierrepoint
The third and final member of the Pierrepoint family to attain the position of Chief Executioner was Albert Pierrepoint, the eldest son of Henry. He would go on to surpass both his father and his uncle Thomas to become the most renowned member of the dynasty.
It was almost inevitable that Albert would follow in his father’s footsteps. Even as an eleven-year-old schoolboy, he wrote that he wanted to be the Official Executioner when he grew up. He often stayed with his Uncle Thomas with whom he shared a close bond, and was permitted to read his execution diary whenever Thomas was away on business. It was not long before he would be recording one of his own. In 1922, Henry Pierrepoint, the first of the family executioners, died. A seventeen-year-old Albert took charge of his father’s papers and diaries, which he poured over whenever possible. It could not have been clearer which career path young Albert had chosen to take.
At the beginning of the 1930s, Albert was working for a wholesale grocer delivering wares by lorry, earning an honest £2 5s a week. The thought of carrying on his father’s legacy must have been at the forefront of his mind at this time for on 19 April 1931, he wrote to the Prison Commission offering his services much as Henry Pierrepoint had done some thirty years earlier. In the autumn of that year, after being told that no vacancies existed, he received an official letter inviting him to an interview at Strangeways Prison in Manchester.
After successfully completing a week’s training at Pentonville Prison, and much to his mother’s dismay, Albert Pierrepoint’s name was added to the list of assistant executioners on the 26 September 1932. However, at this time the execution business was quiet and Albert did not receive his first experience, or his first payment of £1 11s 6d until 29 December, when he accompanied his uncle to Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison to assist at the hanging of Patrick McDermott. He continued in this supporting role for a further nine years, learning the ropes c
hiefly from his uncle until 1941 when, on 17 October, Albert Pierrepoint stood at the gallows for the first time as chief executioner administering the death penalty to one Antonio ‘Babe’ Mancini. His nerves must have been tested on this momentous occasion. Legend has it that the condemned gangster and club owner had the gall to shout, ‘Cheerio!’ as the hood was placed over his head!
Double Life
Together with his career, there was also progress in Albert’s personal life. He had been courting a woman called Anne Fletcher who helped run a sweet shop only two doors down from his own workplace and on 29 August 1943, the couple married and quickly settled into their new home in Newton Heath, Manchester.
It was with this relationship that Albert’s attitude towards his chosen line of work was made abundantly clear. Albert believed that his role as death bringer to the condemned was a responsibility which bore no relation to his personal life. Just as he covered the heads of those he hanged, so did he place a figurative hood over his work when at home. This even included keeping his true profession a secret from his wife, Anne. The couple never discussed his other, darker career. However, with the many impromptu and unexplained trips he took, Anne was soon able to piece together the puzzle, yet he never confronted her husband.
Albert’s creation of this separate life was his way of coping with the distasteful nature of his work. He also had a unique attitude towards the victims of the noose. He was not interested in the crimes they had committed but remained utterly focused on the part he played within the criminal justice system. When the deed was done and the rope was made taut the price had been paid and, in Albert’s eyes, they were now innocent.