Thomas Pierrepoint
English executioner (1870–1954)
Thomas William Pierrepoint (6 October 1870 – 11 February 1954) was an English executioner from 1906 until 1946. He was the brother of Henry Pierrepoint and uncle of Albert Pierrepoint.
Personal life
Pierrepoint was born in Sutton Bonington, Nottinghamshire, in 1870, the second child and eldest son of Thomas Pierrepoint, a plate layer on the railway, and Ann Pierrepoint, formerly Marriott. The Pierrepoint family were still living in Sutton Bonington at the time of the 1881 census, but by the 1891 census they had moved to Clayton, near Bradford, Yorkshire, where Thomas and his father were employed as stone quarrymen. He was married to Elizabeth Binns on 5 December 1891.
By 1914, Pierrepoint had taken on a number of "sidelines", including a carrier service founded by his brother, a small farm, and an illegal bookmaking business.
Career
Thomas Pierrepoint began working as a hangman in 1906 under the influence of his brother, Henry. His career spanned 39 years, and ended in 1946, by which time he was in his mid-seventies. During this time, he is thought to have carried out 294 hangings, 203 of which were civilians executed in England and Wales; the remainder were executions carried out abroad or upon military personnel. Among those he executed was the poisoner Frederick Seddon in 1912 and double murderer Dr Buck Ruxton in 1936.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Pierrepoint” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.