Albert Pierrepoint was the last great British executioner. He was so good at what he did that for the Nuremberg hangings he was commissioned into the British Army as a lieutenant-colonel and sent out to hang the Nazis - the ones that weren't any good to the Russians or the Yanks, anyway.
Uncle Sam's necktie artistes were so inept, with their cowboy nooses, that they were either strangling Hermann to death, with shit and eyballs everywhere, or ripping his fucking head off completely. The Limey hangman demonstrated to them the finer points of his trade, despatching the Hermanns neatly and swiftly, ripping-off not even one Kraut head
Pierrepoint came from a family of hangmen, his Da' and his uncle had been the official executioners for both England &Wales and Ireland, when we still owned her and Albert assisted them both, learning, forgive me, the ropes and when he inherited the official executioner post and the little case containing the notes and tables on hanging and the deadly little noose he made a steady living travelling the British Isles, killing people.
He was very adroit, Albert. He kind of boasted that he would enter the condemned cell as the clock began to strike eight and his client would be dead before the eighth peal of the bell. The condemned cell door would swing open, Morning, old chap, he'd say, grasping the prisoner's hand and quickly walking him to the trap-door in the adjacent cell, the Topping Shop, pinioning his arms as they walked; once on the trap-door Albert's assistant would strap the man's legs together whilst Albert pulled a hood over his head, the assistant would draw back the safety catch on the trap-door and Albert would step back pulling the lever as he went. The poor bastard never knew what was happening and in most cases died instantly, Albert having carefully calculated the length of his drop by means of reference to Home Office tables compiled over many decades and by means of his own hangman's eye. Having, the previous evening, surreptitiously viewed the man through the Judas hole in the cell door, Albert would minutely adjust the home office recommendations depending upon the idiosyncracies of each victim's musculature, if he was five feet eight with a thick neck and shoulders he would need a longer drop than a five feet eight man of slight build. In nearly all of Albert's executions the spinal cord was severed at exactly the right vertebrae to cause instantaneous death. Just the same, they'd leave him or her hanging there for an hour whilst Albert, the prison Governor and his guests all went and had a hearty breakfast; hungry work, hanging. Even so, if, before Abolition, you had been sentenced to death I am sure you would have paid good money to have Albert doing the business for you.
Those horrid, snarling little brown bastards in Indonesia, the ones with too many teeth in their mouths, those ugly little monsters could do with an Albert Pierrepoint, to help them execute people humaneley, well, less inhumanely. Gotta be more economical, too, one hangman, one fee, one breakast. I don't know if each of the eight executionees had their own firing squad, all to themselves but if they did that's ninety-six of the little brown bastards and nearly a hundred bullets. I was going to say that these shootings have put me in touch with my inner Farage, made me hate every last little angry brown bastard in Indonesia but I guess he'd applaud the Indonesians' death penalty as being a litle corner of a foreign field that is forever England.
I don't know what it was, today, why this particular obscenity shook me so but a huge, red rage overtook me. If there was an Indonesian charge d'affaires' gaff here, I'd have set fire to it and happily beaten the diplomats to death, calling them rotten little brown bastards as I did so, cursing their rotten little brown bastard parents and their rotten little brown bastard children. And don't start me about how the NHS would be fucked sideways to Christmas if it wasn't for Indonesian arse-wipers. I don't care, I don't want to be nursed or tended by nasty, angry little brown bastards, beardy women and angry, conceited men, fuck 'em.
I read a lot about Pierepoint when I was younger and was struck not by his humanity, that would be ridiculous, but by his efficiency; he did that dire duty as well as it could be done and that included sparing the condemned as much distress as was possible, given the circumstances, and sparing him a slow, painful and probably unimaginably humiliating death.
With these brown bastards, it is the savagery of the process as much as the cruelty of the fact - shooting someone for something he did a decade ago, when he was someone else - some poor smallfry, dragging him, screaming, to a post or a wall, taking aim, firing and then checking that a dozen rounds have done the trick, and all whilst government and lawnforcement cartels grow rich on the continued absurdity of the War on Drugs - the Indonesians are planning to shoot a British granny for handling three or four kilos of smack, I wonder how many kilos young parent, Sir Elton John consumed, when he was playing-up, Elt; of course, a rich junkie, was soireed in Downing Street, Granny a poor mule, will be shot to pieces.
Little Big Man
President Nasty Little Brown Bastard.
Hanging's too good for them, Indonesians. Another Boxing Day Tsunami, that's what they need,
the last one taught them nothing.
Little Big Man
Hanging's too good for them, Indonesians. Another Boxing Day Tsunami, that's what they need,
the last one taught them nothing.
