Barber and hangman

HAIRDRESSER PUT MORE THAN 200 MEN AND WOMEN TO THEIR DEATHS

- LEE GRIMSDITCH

THE last face more than 200 men and women would ever see before they died was that of a Rochdale barber.

It sounds like the premise of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street.

The fictional Todd killed his victims by dropping them through a revolving trap door as they sat in his barber's chair.

He would then polish them off with a cut across the throat with his razor.

John Ellis wasn't a work of fiction, and his reason for killing people was very different. Born in Broad Lane in Buersil, Rochdale, in 1874, he was a high street hairdresser and the town's last-ever hangman between 1901 and 1924.

It's perhaps unusual to think of a hairdresser moonlighting as an executioner, but many infamous hangmen, including Albert Pierrepoint and Harry Allen, had regular jobs outside of this role.

They were both pub landlords.

During his career, Ellis hanged more than 200 people and became the country's top executioner.

Before he became a hangman, he worked in a cotton mill. According to a story in the Rochdale Observer in 1932, an earlier accident at the mill left him unable to continue to work as a manual labourer, so he followed his own father and picked up the hairdressing scissors with a shop on Oldham Road.

He also opened a newsagent, which he ran with his wife and children.

Accounts of Ellis describe him as delicate, with a slight build and pale complexion. It's even been reported that he couldn't bear to wring the necks of chickens in his family smallholding. So when he signed up as a hangman, it was said to have surprised everyone.

In a posthumous interview published in the Rochdale Observer on September 21, 1932, Ellis explained how he decided to become a public executioner.

He told a reporter: "I was working in a textile place in those days. And when there was an execution, I remember saying: 'I wouldn't mind doing that job.