Albert Pierrepoint; Britain’s Chief Executioner

Albert Pierrepoint, who hanged hundreds of people as Britain’s chief executioner but late in his life said capital punishment was nothing more than revenge, died Saturday night in a nursing home in this city in northwest England. He was 87.

Pierrepoint came from a family of executioners. He succeeded his uncle and father as public executioner in 1946 and kept the post until 1956.

His first hanging was of British traitor William Joyce, who broadcast from Germany during World War II and was dubbed “Lord Haw-Haw” because of his aristocratic, sneering voice.

Pierrepoint once hanged 27 people in less than 24 hours for Nazi war crimes. In all, he executed 433 men and 17 women.

Pierrepoint told the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment in the 1950s that hanging was humane, quick and certain.

But in 1974 he wrote in his memoirs: “The fruit of my experience has this bitter aftertaste--that I do not now believe that any one of those 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.”

Capital punishment was abolished in Britain in 1969, and Pierrepoint campaigned vigorously against its return.

After the public outcry surrounding the hanging of murderer Ruth Ellis in 1955, Pierrepoint gave up his hangman’s job in 1956. She was the last woman to be hanged in Britain.

With his wife, Anne, a former nurse, Pierrepoint ran the Rose and Crown pub in Much Hoole, about 15 miles northeast of Southport.