Haunted Hull by Mark Riley

Author:Mark Riley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752481753
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

Hull Prison.

On the day of the hanging a large crowd gathered outside the prison, looking at the clock above the entrance and waiting for someone to come out with the news that a reprieve was given, but it never was.

The first prisoner to be hanged at Hull was Arthur Richardson in 1902, and, over a thirty-two-year period, ten more people were hanged at the prison; Ethel being one of them. She was the only woman ever hanged at Hull and she was the last person to be hanged at the prison; her hangman was the infamous Tom Pierrepoint and his assistant – his nephew Albert Pierrepoint, who would eventually become more famous than him. Ethel was lucky enough to have been hanged within the prison walls unlike some others, such as Frances Kidder, who was the last woman to be hanged in public on 2 April 1868; the same year the passing of the Capital Punishment Act ruled that all hangings had to take place within the prison walls from then on. History shows us that between 1868 and 1955 a total of forty-one women were hanged inside the walls of prisons in Britain. Then followed the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act of 1965; passed on 8 November that year, which replaced the penalty of death with a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment, as many now felt that hanging was an inhumane act itself, and not the deterrent everyone once believed it was.

The Pierrepoint family became the most notorious hangmen in the UK and it all began with Tom’s younger brother, Henry. Henry was the first to become a hangman in 1901; a career that lasted just ten years. It was rumoured he had problems dealing with the psychological side of things, causing him to drink heavily, and he was eventually sacked. After turning up at a prison in Essex drunk, his apprentice had to perform the deed after a fight broke out between the two and the next day the apprentice wrote to the Home Office and informed them about Henry’s behaviour, resulting in his dismissal. Henry’s son, Albert, was to become Britain’s most well-known and prolific hangmen, in a career that lasted from 1932 to 1956. Albert is believed to have hanged 435 people in that time, including seventeen women, as well as the infamous John George Haigh, who was dubbed ‘The Acid Bath Murderer’ in the 1940s; John Reginald Halliday Christie, a serial killer who was active during the 1940s and '50s; Derek Bentley, aged nineteen, was hanged for murder in what is still one of the country’s most controversial cases in British legal history. He also hanged Ruth Ellis who, on 13 July 1955, at the age of twenty-eight, was the last woman ever hanged in the UK at London’s Holloway Prison.

Going back to our story, however, it was Albert’s uncle Tom who had the responsibility for hanging Ethel. Tom, Henry’s older brother, had been convinced to apply to become a hangman’s apprentice in 1906,

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