I think I see my father riding, riding many miles. *
Watching, as I have been accustomed to these past weeks, 'Hill Street Blues' (see last blog), I came across an American actor named Eric Pierpoint. This seemed oddly familiar to me but nonetheless strange; it was obviously a French name but the spelling was all wrong. I googled what I deemed to be the correct spelling and found that which was familiar; 'Albert Pierrepoint'. The Americans, as they usually do, I blame Webster's first dictionary which first proposed 'color' instead of 'colour', 'favor' instead of 'favour', a clarion call to 'American' English not (the hated) 'English' English, had simply gone by the pronunciation and discarded the extraneous letters. Pierrepoint in 'English' English is pronounced pier-point as opposed to the French who would pronounce it 'pee-air-pwoin'. I am sorry to all the linguists and phoneticists; I used to know all of that symbol stuff (as displayed on Wikipedia), most language students do, but it has been a long time, a very long time.
Albert Pierrepoint was the 'official' British executioner between 1941 and 1956 and was responsible for tying the noose around the necks of around 435 men and women, although he had been assisting for at least ten years prior to 1941; learning the trade, so to speak. It is increasingly difficult in this day and age to understand how someone would willingly kill, murder, another human being, state-sanctioned or otherwise, whatever their crimes, simply because they were paid to do so (Pierrepoint was paid £15 per execution in the 'forties, about a third of the weekly wage of a good NHS doctor); unless they were a psychopath. Should a psychopath be in charge of the mechanism of a state or national 'final retribution'? I use the term official in quotes because Britain had no official executioner; a man, Stephen Wade, was invariably used in preference to Pierrepoint in executions in the county of Durham, for example.
Pierrepoint likely acquired the moniker 'official' because he was first choice in the UK government eyes to officiate at the execution of over 200 Nazi 'war criminals'. ** It is easy to see that in the light of the atrocities committed in 'Occupied Europe' by the Germans during the war of conquest that Pierrepoint would come to be so regarded, although he had previously performed his duties as hangman for around a dozen or so American GIs stationed in the UK prior to the D-Day landings, some of them for the crime of rape, which was not a capital crime in the UK at the time.
I think that it would be difficult to accumulate evidence of possible psychopathic tendencies on the part of Pierrepoint; he was very likely just carrying on the family business as his father was a hangman and his uncle his assistant. Growing up, he was likely inured to the moral dilemmas inherent in state sanctioned killing; in his autobiography he seems to indicate that he wanted to follow in his father's footsteps from an early age. In a climate of the normality of the concept of capital crimes added to his desire to want to to emulate his father, it is unlikely that the morality only very occasionally crossed his mind.
From my earlier writing, it should be apparent that I oppose capital, and for that matter corporal, punishment in any circumstance. From a purely practical point of view, capital punishment rarely works as a deterrent to crime, most, if not all criminals believe they will not be caught and most murders are committed in the 'heat of the moment', only 'contract killings' would be exempt from that appraisal; from a moral or ethical standpoint, it is surely hypocritical in the extreme to punish murder with exactly the self-same retribution, we have, I think, moved beyond the simplicities of Old Testament wisdom and concepts of 'an eye for an eye' have had their day; human beings are fallible, even 12 of them together in one room. Would it ever be possible to justify just one mistake, a person incorrectly hanged or electrocuted or shot, to their parents, children, siblings with anything other than expediency. Karl Popper once wrote that a basis for an ethical approach to society's problems was not the adage 'the greatest good for the greatest number of people' but rather 'the greatest good for everyone'; capital punishment does not fall into the latter box.
After the carnage and the atrocities of the second world war, large sections of the western, democratic world undermined the basis for capital punishment and abolished it and that legacy continues to have an effect around the globe. What I find interesting is that in notionally the most free and most developed nation, some legislatures still cling to the outmoded notion of state execution.
* The title and the first line of this blog come from the Led Zeppelin version of a traditional English folk song, 'The maid saved from the gallows', although its roots perhaps go much deeper into Scandinavian and Eastern European folklore. The Zep version is truer to the original English folk song than its American counterpart, 'Gallis Pole', by Leadbelly (Huddle William Leadbetter) which omits any dialogue with the hangman. In the 'original' version the opening line is: 'Hangman, hangman, slack your rope a while, I think I see my father, ridin’ many a mile'. The hangman was not averse to a little bribery or corruption, especially if the hanging was of a woman, although some have questioned whether a fee (not a bribe) is implied.
** Pierrepoint was able to buy his first pub on the proceeds of the war criminal work.
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