The pub landlord who killed over 400 people

By night he was a jovial pub landlord serving pints, but off the clock he took the lives of over 400 men as a clinical state executioner.

Drinkers would have found it difficult to reconcile the two disparate worlds in which the smiling man serving across the bar, Albert Pierrepoint, existed. Born in West Yorkshire, Albert moved to Oldham as a youngster with his mother.

Aged 12, Albert's first job was as a piecer at a textile mill in Failsworth. But he always knew a very different life awaited him.

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As a schoolboy, when asked to write what he wanted to be when he grew up, he answered: "When I leave school I should like to be the Official Executioner." This perhaps should not come as such a surprise, as Albert later said: "Hanging must run in the blood."

As reported in the Manchester Evening News back in 2019, Albert's Yorkshire-raised father, Henry, had also been an executioner before him. Soon after Henry married a Manchester woman, Mary Buxton, at Newton Heath, the former butcher was added to the Home Office's approved list of hangmen, having written to them repeatedly to volunteer his services.

In time, Henry encouraged his younger brother, Thomas Pierrepoint, to follow him into the trade. The siblings were prolific hangmen in the early twentieth century, but both were eventually removed from the list amid concerns over their fitness for the role - in each case following allegations they had turned up for work after a drink.

The young Albert had grown up reading his uncle Tom’s diaries of the job, while his dad had recommended it as a side-line with opportunities for continental travel. But unlike his father and uncle