The Executioners Bible

Download or read book The Executioners Bible written by Steve Fielding and published by Kings Road Publishing. This book was released on 2008-11-12 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been just over 40 years since a gallows was last used in Great Britain, and the secrets behind the men who pulled the lever and dropped the condemned to their deaths are still shrouded in mystery. This account tells the story of the working-class men who carried out this profession until its abolition in the late 1960s. The hangman's rope was part of an exact science, and in their day, the men who undertook the job assumed the profiles of infamous celebrities, their reputations often rivaling the notorious criminals they were charged with dispatching. From the bungling hangmen sacked for incompetence and those driven to guilt-ridden suicide to the last to pull the lever at the height of the swinging sixties, the secrets of this form of capital punishment are finally revealed. They were the last of their kind, the hangmen of the 20th century; and this is their fascinating, sometimes repugnant, always enthralling story.