Next month, the movie The Last Hangman is due to be released starring Timothy Spall as Albert Pierrepoint, that jolly chap from Bradford who excelled at hanging convicted murderers efficiently and cleanly.

Hanging was not about choking to death; the purpose was to snap the spinal column at the nape of the neck, causing life to cease immediately. The job demanded a dutiful regard for accuracy; adjusting the length of the rope correctly according to the height and weight of the condemned.

Get it wrong and death would not be instantaneous; not only that, the swinging trapdoors might bash the dropping body before life was extinguished.

Between 1901 and 1955, three Pierrepoints despatched 839 felons including traitors and convicted war criminals; Steve Fielding lists them at the back of his book.

The first Pierrepoint, Henry, who applied to the Home Office for the job of hangman on February 11, 1901, hung 105 over nine years; Thomas 294 over 40 years; and Albert 435 over 23 years.

Albert's victims included Ruth Ellis in July, 1955, the last woman to be hanged in Britain; Timothy Evans in March 1950; Derek Bentley in January 1953; John Reginald Christie in July 1953; William "Lord Haw Haw" Joyce in January 1946; and Irma Grese, the Nazi death camp guard, in December 1945.

The Pierrepoint brothers Henry and Tom lived for a time at Town End, Clayton. Tom's son Albert stayed there during summer holidays.

After Albert became England's hangman, he had a good deal of business to conduct in post-war Germany; over three years, between December 1945 and October 1948, he hanged some 200 war criminals.

Of them all, Irma Grese, a compound commander at Belsen who learned her trade at Ravensbruck and later at Auschwitz-Birkenau, "was perhaps the most notorious of the female Nazi war criminals, " says Fielding.

"The Beautiful Beast, " they called her, who became an SS guard at Ravensbruck at the age of 19. During her short career she was said to have killed up to 30 prisoners a day, whipping and kicking them, shooting them, or setting her dogs on them.

She was also known to sexually abuse men and women.

"In her hut, following the camp liberation (Belsen), soldiers found a lampshade that had been made from the skins of a number of inmates, " Fielding adds.

These are among the Nazi death camp crimes that revisionist historian David Irving, currently in prison in Austria, regularly denies.

The night before Albert Pierrepoint sent Grese to her maker, she sat up with two others, laughing and singing Nazi songs. The following day, before execution, she told Pierrepoint: "Get it over with, quick."

Much of the book is taken up with a litany of the hangings carried out by Henry, Tom and Albert. Partly because Albert was the last of the Pierrepoints and partly because he had been involved in some famous hangings, he gained a kind of macabre celebrity which he enjoyed playing up to.

In 1986, at the age of 81, he appeared on Robert Kilroy-Silk's Day to Day television programme. The subject under discussion was the death penalty for child killers. Albert wanted to talk about Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley but was advised not to, in case of libel.

He contented himself with the observation that he had never hanged anyone whom he had not believed was guilty and deserved to be hanged.

Pierrepoint: A Family of Executioners, by Steve Fielding, is published by John Blake Publishing at £17.99.