I think you will find he wasn't this country's last hangman, also I think you'll find he said "hanging is not a deterrent".
Although IMO it should be a punishment.
You are correct, he wasn't. Yes, I think that was the level of his comments. He has, as you point out, been misinterpreted, I think. People are saying that that comment of his means that he was anti-death penalty in his later years which I simply do not believe. Passing comment that it is not a deterrent is simply stating the bleeding obvious, to be honest.
The story of Mr Pierrepoint, and most of the the hangmen and their assistants of the 20th Century is a fascinating one. When you read into these people it's fairly clear that lots of them were probably psychotic and were only a few steps away from being serial murderers themselves. Albert Pierrepoint hanged literally hundreds of people all over the world and had a career spanning decades. He had family who did the same and the notion that he was some sort of repentant type at the end of his life really doesn't hold water. One of his assistants, Sid Dernley wrote a book about his experiences a good few years ago. One of the accounts he gave was of working for the Americans with Pierrepoint in about 1944 at Shepton Mallet. The US military had a glut of their soldiers who had been sentenced to death for things like murder, rape, etc. They'd flown them in from all over the world, apparently. He and Pierrepoint hanged, I think nineteen Americans that day and apparently left with their pockets "stuffed to overflowing with money". It was the biggest mass execution on British soil in hundreds of years, I believe. These people were unhinged, quite frankly.
He was right, though. It's not a deterrent. When I first started being interested in this sort of thing I was quite shocked as to how many people we actually managed to put to death in the first half of the last century. It was something like two every month. So literally hundreds! You kind of get the idea that hanging people was a rarity but it really wasn't. Also when you consider that more than 50% of those sentenced to death had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, it's pretty clear that all those people were certainly not deterred in any way by the thought of a meeting with Mr Pierrepoint and his length of hemp.
