Talk:Harry Allen (executioner)

"Simultaneous final executions" : Does this mean that these were the last executions that took place in the UK?

Yes. -- Arwel 10:16, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Peter Griffiths - 30 seconds to die?

Where the text says it took Peter Griffiths 30 seconds to die we find a footnote number pointing to a newspaper article about the sale of Harry Allen's diaries. The article is accompanied by a photo showing a page from Allen's diary; it is about the execution of Griffiths. However, there is just the note "time 30 seconds". It does not say time for WHAT. Since several hangmen's biographies that I have read often report the time between (a) the hangmen's entering of the condemned cell and (b) the opening of the trapdoor but are at the same time very vague about the time it took the victim do die (more about that later), I believe the 30 seconds refer to the time between entrance of the hangmen into the condemned cell and the trapdoor opening.

A. Pierrepoint, John Ellis and Syd Dernley never give a precise number for the time it took a hanged person to die. They often say that the person was hanging "dead on the rope" immediately after the opening of the trapdoor, but they seem to mix up "motionless" and "dead". At the same time they report over and over again how they went into the pit below the gallows, put a small ladder next to the hanging body, mounted it, ripped open the shirt for the doctor's stethoscope, went down, how the doctor THEN mounted the ladder, listened to the heartbeat and only after some time pronounced the person dead. This would place the average timespan closer to some minutes than to some seconds. AND Pierrepoint left out in his autobiography, where he tells the tale of the Hameln executions, what came to light only after the National Archives released the documents: In the case of some executions there, the British Army timed the dieing process with the help of electrocardiographs (instead of a simple stethoscope) closer to half an hour than to any other timespan. In order to shorten the time between executions, it was then decided to inject the hanging prisoners with chloroform. Injection into the heart, performed by a medical officer, proved to be most effective: Stop of heartbeat within seconds after injection. In all these instances, the executed persons were hanging motionless on the rope. With Pierrepoint officiating, it was almost sure their neck was broken and the spinal cord torn so that they were unable to move anyway. It may be hoped that they were unconscious. But DEAD they were not - yet. Without the "help" of the doctor's syringe (which was used on war criminals only, as far as I know, so the ordinary British wrongdoer did not experience it), death would come from asphyxia while hanging unconscious for about 30 minutes.--Kauko56 (talk) 22:14, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

Harry's son an Assistant?

I marked the relevant passage in the article today as needing citation, but I don't believe there will be any.

Reasons: (a) Stewart McLaughlin's biography of H.B.Allen explicitly denies that Allen's son ever assisted. (b) Stephen Fielding, The Executioner's Bible has an appendix where executioner's and assistant's names are given for every hanging since the turn of the 20th century, and Brian A. is nowhere mentioned.

If after three months there is no citation given, I'll change the wording.--Kauko56 (talk) 10:09, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Chief Executioner

This article repeatedly refers to the post of "Chief Executioner", but the article on Albert Pierrepoint is clear that there was no such post. This inconsistency needs sorted. 217.42.202.71 (talk) 22:02, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

This is right. Once you were on the Home Office list, you could be called upon either as hangman or as assistant. In practice most of them were only offered a job as assistant, because once you had acted as no.1 you were likely to be called on again, rather than someone who had never done the main job before. . — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C4:5602:2301:D41F:B3E3:2193:D6B1 (talk) 19:40, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Cyprus

According to truecrimelibrary, Mr. Allen also executed (along with John Underwood) three prisoners at Nicosia Central Jail in 1962. Does anyone have further sources on this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.183.97.253 (talk) 14:56, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

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Always wore a bow tie

I understood he wore a bow tie to help not being identified. He hoped he might be mistaken for the prisoner's solicitor. Given the decline in the reputation of the legal profession since then, it's possible that nowadays the solicitor would try to look like the hangman, if there still were one.