Harry Allen (executioner)

[3] In October 1955 Allen was appointed as Chief Executioner alongside Pierrepoint, although he did not execute anyone in this role until 10 May 1956, when he hanged two EOKA members in Cyprus.

Born in Denaby Main, near Conisbrough in the West Riding of Yorkshire on 5 November 1911,[2] Allen was brought up in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire,[4] and was educated at St Anne's Roman Catholic School in Burlington Street, Ashton.

[7] As a preliminary step, he witnessed his first execution at the age of 29 – that of William Cooper – on 26 November 1940 at Bedford Prison, describing it as a "very good, clean job, not as gruesome as I expected".

They staged a mock trial, kicking the victim to death and dragging him by the neck to the toilet where they hung his lifeless body on a waste pipe.

Contrary to some accounts, Allen was not present at the execution of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the UK, in 1955: the assistant to Albert Pierrepoint on that occasion was Royston Rickard.

[citation needed] Following the resignation of Albert Pierrepoint and the death of Stephen Wade in 1956, Allen and Robert Leslie Stewart jointly became Chief Executioners.

As Chief Executioner, on 11 July 1958 Allen hanged American-born Scottish serial killer Peter Manuel at Barlinnie prison, Glasgow.

Allen performed the last execution in Northern Ireland in December 1961, when he hanged Robert McGladdery at Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast.

He also performed one of the two final executions in the UK, when at 8.00 am on 13 August 1964 Gwynne Owen Evans was hanged at Strangeways Prison in Manchester for the murder of John Alan West.

This occurred simultaneously with the execution of Evans's accomplice Peter Anthony Allen, who was hanged at Walton Gaol in Liverpool by Robert Leslie Stewart.

Their names are: Following the Independence of Cyprus in 1960, Allen performed the final three executions at the Central Jail of Nicosia for the new Cypriot government, assisted by John Underhill.

In his diaries he revealed that the execution of one prisoner, Peter Griffiths, who was convicted at Lancaster assizes of murdering a three-year-old child, June Anne Devaney, in the grounds of Queens Park Hospital in Blackburn on 15 May 1948,[21][22] took 30 seconds, which would have been the time from Allen's entering the condemned cell to the moment of the drop.

Although the death penalty remained for other crimes such as treason and piracy with violence, no further executions took place in the UK, although a working gallows was kept in service and regularly tested at Wandsworth Prison until 1998.