In the sangfroid of his final seconds, the fascist collaborator was expressing an enduring public fascination with Albert Pierrepoint, a British publican and, for 24 years, the chief executioner of the United Kingdom and, occasionally, Ireland's hangman too.

By the end of his career, Pierrepoint had established a reputation as a most respected and prolific executioner . . . the last in a dynasty of state-sanctioned killers begun by his father and uncle. With an authority that only a man of his experience could wield, he also became an eloquent opponent of the ultimate sanction he dispensed with such proficiency.

Amery, the son of a senior civil servant who was sentenced to death for his proNazi propaganda broadcasts, was Pierrepoint's 102nd executee, six days before Christmas in 1945. By the time Pierrepoint resigned in 1956, he had dispatched a further 333 souls, making a total of 435 executions, which included 16 women and 200 Nazi war criminals.

It is the largest number of executions carried out by a Briton and a record which continues to play on the popular imagination, all the more so since it was Pierrepoint who pulled the noose over the heads of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in Britain, Lord Haw-Haw and John George Haigh, the so-called acid bath murderer, to name but three.

Pierrepoint, a British film about the dutiful hangman, played by Timothy Spall, opened in Britain last week.

The film adds to the list of documentaries and books that attest to the extraordinary life led by a man who ran an Oldham pub . . . called, famously, Help the Poor Struggler . . . and held singalong sessions with his regulars when his services were not required by the Home Office.

But with an average frequency of one missive a month, a grey envelope bearing the letterhead of the prisons commission would arrive at Pierrepoint's home. Inside would be a letter asking as to his availability to carry out a hanging, naming the jail and the date where the execution was to be conducted.

It was a task which the tall, dapper Pierrepoint, always dressed in a double-breasted suit and his short-back-andsides hairstyle carefully slicked into place, performed with professional pride and something akin to a priestly duty of care to people whose last sight would be his hands pulling the cotton hood over their faces.

In his autobiography, Executioner: Pierrepoint, published in 1974, the hangman wrote: "A condemned prisoner is entrusted to me, after decisions have been made which I cannot alter. He is a man, she is a woman who, the church says, still merits some mercy."

When he appeared before a Royal Commission on capital punishment in 1949, Pierrepoint said he refused to speak publicly about his duties, describing it as something "sacred" to him. By all accounts, here was a man who took no pleasure from his role or confessed to a frisson of power as he pulled the trapdoor lever.

For each hanging, Pierrepoint received £15, equivalent to about 570 today. The payment was not enough for him to give up his "day job" . . .

first as a grocery deliveryman and then as a landlord with his beloved wife, Anne.

He therefore led an ordinary existence punctuated by the extraordinary task of bringing death . . . initially in an anonymity so complete that he did not discuss his job even with Anne . . . and later with a measure of celebrity that at first appalled him and then turned him into a minor tourist attraction.

True to his character, Pierrepoint never commented on whether he personally believed the death sentence had been merited by any of his "subjects", including James Corbitt, a regular in his pub with whom he had sung a rendition of 'Danny Boy' on the night Corbitt murdered his girlfriend.

Speculation persists as to whether it was this execution that finally persuaded the executioner that his work had done nothing to improve humanity. But that was precisely the conclusion he eventually reached.

Pierrepoint wrote in his autobiography: "All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment convince me that in what I have done I have not prevented a single murder. And if death does not work to deter one person, it should not be held to deter any. . .

Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge."

They were words written long after Pierrepoint's resignation as UK chief executioner in 1956 and the abolition of capital punishment in Britain in 1964. Here was a philosopher executioner who only professed his own verdict long after it no longer mattered.