They made an unlikely pair, the hangman and the sister of the woman he executed. But here they were on their way to view together the final resting place of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged for murder in the United Kingdom.
Two prison officers completed this unusual group. What made it even more bizarre, giving the entire scene a veneer of pathos, was an atmosphere that was more akin to a charabanc outing than a sombre excursion to a churchyard. For on the journey – and later on the way back – the group were singing.
Things became yet more surreal when they arrived at their destination and were greeted by the sound of groaning noises, apparently coming from Ellis’s grave. This, it turned out, was a mumbling drunk hidden behind tombstones and lying out of sight.
The story of this extraordinary encounter between Ruth Ellis’s sister Muriel and Albert Pierrepoint, once Britain’s most celebrated hangman, emerged after a tape of a long-lost radio interview was recently unearthed.
In it Pierrepoint, a wiry, neatly-dressed Yorkshireman who prided himself on the speed with which he carried out his grim task, describes the meticulous detail that went into every hanging with macabre satisfaction.
He was certainly the most prolific public executioner. In the 25 years before his retirement in 1956, he claimed to have dispatched 550 people – 530 men and 20 women.
They included John Haigh, the infamous acid bath murderer, Rillington Place serial killer John Christie, the wartime traitor William Joyce – better known as Lord Haw-Haw – and dozens of convicted Nazi war criminals who were so numerous he devised a way to execute them in pairs.
But of all those he stood with on the gallows as they took their last breaths before placing a hood over their head and a noose around their neck, the name of Ruth Ellis has echoed the loudest down the years.
Ruth Ellis (pictured), a Welsh nightclub owner, was the last woman to be hanged for murder in the United Kingdom
The ITV drama A Cruel Love, starring Lucy Boynton and screened this month, suggested Ellis was as much a victim of the prevailing icy snobbery over class and sex that existed then
The story of this extraordinary encounter between Ruth Ellis’s sister Muriel and Albert Pierrepoint (pictured), once Britain’s most celebrated hangman, emerged after a tape of a long-lost radio interview was recently unearthed
Was she the cold-hearted femme fatale portrayed at her Old Bailey trial who shot her violent, public school-educated lover David Blakely in a fit of jealously – or was she a victim herself?
The ITV drama A Cruel Love, starring Lucy Boynton and screened this month, suggested Ellis was as much a victim of the prevailing icy snobbery over class and sex that existed then. And that the post-traumatic stress she suffered at Blakely’s brutal hands – a condition not recognised in 1950s Britain – meant she should never have been hanged.
Now the discovery of Pierrepoint’s own words as we near the 70th anniversary of Ellis’s execution in July seems especially poignant. It was one of the last hangings he supervised before suddenly quitting his post the following year.
Many wondered if his conscience had been so troubled by executing the young woman, he could no longer stomach his job. Certainly, her conviction and sentence triggered a huge public reaction. Many believed it was an affront to justice to execute her despite the admission of her guilt and her refusal to lodge an appeal.
When Pierrepoint arrived at Holloway Prison in north London to prepare for his grim task he described fighting through crowds, many of whom had their heads bowed in prayer. But there was also anger among the mob and, at first, police refused to allow even the hangman admission.
By the following morning, July 13, 1955, the crowd was hushed, and as the 9am execution approached, the only sound was of a lone violinist playing in a side street Bach’s Be Thou With Me.
So, was Pierrepoint troubled? Even though he later disavowed capital punishment, there is no suggestion in the tape recording that he felt different about hanging Ellis than he did any of the other psychopaths and murderers he put to death.
If anything, he seemed impervious to the outcry when Ellis went to the gallows and which lead eventually to the abolition of capital punishment – apart from one moment of soul-searching. ‘It’s a bit dicey,’ he reflected of hanging Ellis. ‘You don’t like doing it to a little woman because they’re supposed to be the weaker [sex]…but you have to, you’ve got to do it.’
Ellis was hanged in July 1955 after being found guilty of murder
Ellis is played by Lucy Boynton in ITV production A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story
Ellis was the victim of a ‘severe miscarriage of justice’, her grandson claimed after the release of A Cruel Love
In his chilling, matter- of-fact way, Pierrepoint recalled her final moments. ‘She was no trouble really,’ he said.
‘She wobbled a bit like, naturally, any woman can do that. Nothing went wrong with her. She was good as bloody gold she was.’
It is talking about Ellis that triggered another, unexpected memory. According to the interview – first aired on a now defunct local radio station in 1987, five years before his death – Pierrepoint made his startling claim about meeting Ellis’s sister. ‘I’ve never told anybody this,’ he says at one point. ‘I went out one afternoon and had a meal with her.’
He said he had been accompanied by two prison officers who had made the arrangements and they’d met in London. Afterwards, he said: ‘And on my God’s honour, you won’t believe it, we [were] all singing as if we were going on a bloody trip.’
What happened next was even more astonishing. ‘We went to see where she was buried,’ he said, describing the position of her grave as being at the end of a row near a wall.
Out of respect, he said: ‘I took my hat off.’ It was then that he heard ‘some bugger groaning’ and added: ‘I thought she was coming up from the grave!’ Instead, it was ‘some bloody clot’ whom the party couldn’t see at first, ‘this drunken fellow who’d been boozing right behind the grave’.
From there, he said, they returned to the sister’s home, adding: ‘We were singing all the bloody way to this house where she lived.’
As he speaks there seems little doubt in his memory, but his recollection does pose questions. He offers no other details of where and when these events took place.
Ellis standing next to her lover David Blakeley, who she shot dead in 1955
Ellis had been condemned to death for shooting her violent racing driver boyfriend David Blakely following a trial that lasted under two days
What is known is that Ellis, whose family are now seeking a pardon for her, was buried in the unconsecrated grounds inside Holloway’s walls. It was only in 1971 that her body was quietly exhumed and reburied by her son Andy in the churchyard of
St Mary the Virgin in Amersham, Bucks. By coincidence the spot is five miles from the village of Penn where her murdered lover Blakely, a hard-drinking racing driver, was laid to rest.
Her grave is at the end of a row and close to a boundary wall, as Pierrepoint describes in the interview, but he does not say when his visit took place. He had been retired for 15 years by the time Ellis’s remains were removed from Holloway and he made no mention of it in his 1974 memoir, Executioner: Pierrepoint.
But in that book he did make a shocking assertion. While defending the ‘humane’ and ‘dignified’ method of implementing state-sanctioned killing, he observed: ‘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.’
That clearly didn’t stop him taking satisfaction in his handiwork, however. As he says in the radio interview: ‘I’ve enjoyed every bloody minute of it.’
