All that neck-stretching in Iraq lately, especially Saddam’s half-brother getting stretched a bit too far and his head popping off, got me thinking about a couple of photos I had in the morgue, pardon the pun, of beheadings in Olde Siam.

At the same time I was reading an article about Albert Pierrepoint (1905-1992), Britain’s “last” hangman, whose technique had evidently been studied by the Iraqi executioners. They clearly didn’t take notes.

Damned if I can find anything on the Net about Siamese beheadings, but there’s certainly a lot about Pierrepoint, the sort of chap movies are made about, most notably the recent “The Last Hangman” (he wasn’t Britain’s last at all, though).

Pierrepoint, a Yorkshireman, died 15 years ago at age 87, quite a while after he quit the post over a paycheque fumble. Britain hasn’t turned to capital punishment since 1964, and membership in the European Union requires its banishment.

Inheriting the part-time job from his father and an uncle, the off-duty Albert ran a pub in Lancashire called Help the Poor Struggler. There must have been plenty of temptation to tell customers about some or all of the 433 men and 17 women (including six US soldiers) he’d hanged. He strung up the notorious Neville Heath, the “acid-bath murderer” John George Haigh, the traitor “Lord Haw-Haw” and James Corbitt, too, but he was sworn to an oath of discretion and stood by it.

Corbitt, amusingly for some, had been a regular in Pierrepoint’s pub. After sharing a sing-along with Albert one night, he showed up in the next day’s papers accused of murdering his date of the previous evening. “This particular night he left reasonably early,” Pierrepoint recalled. “I realised later why — he went to Ashton-under-Lyne and murdered this girl.”

Albert also gave the noose to Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England, in 1955. She’d shot her roving lover after a miscarriage, and many said she didn’t deserve to die. Few disagreed with Pierrepoint doing to deed for German spies and about 200 Nazi war criminals, though.

He was swift and efficient with all of his customers regardless, in fact he held the speed record: seven seconds from prison cell to the underside of the scaffold, complete with arms tied and a hood in place.

It was only in the 19th century that hangmen got relatively humane, the properly positioned noose and a sharp drop bringing swift death with a broken neck. Before then they just dropped ‘em and watched what happened. In Shakespeare’s day they were going to have their hearts cut out and handed to them anyway before they breathed their last.

I’ve just finished reading yet another astonishing novel by Anthony Burgess, 1993’s “A Dead Man in Deptford”, which offers a twist to the tale of playwright Christopher Marlowe and his strange demise in a Thameside pub. There’s a description of an execution at Tyburn that’s well and truly graphic (synchronicity! — let’s get them all over with at once, God seems to be saying).

The convicted man, not Kit Marlowe, not yet, “smiled sadly, shaking his head, then was hauled up, firmly noosed, then kicked from the ladder. Here was skill shown. The single garment ripped down, the prick and ballocks exposed then sliced away, the first blood healthily flowing, then the cross-cut along the belly so that the bowels gushed out and, here was the skill of it, the victim saw before his eyes turned up.

“Then was the whole body cut down and chopped by the hangman and his two [assistants] (never eat flesh no more, vomited a girl that pushed her away from it), the hacking most vigorous so that the sweat showed on the bare chests of the hackers. The quarters were left up at Smithfield and thrown into the boiling tub, there would be a fair stew soon, it lacked but carrots and onions and the coils of entrails pulled by the two lads as to unwind a rope for the hangman’s skipping.”

It goes on lustily for a spell more, the dense thicket of spectators swooning with nausea or bawling in bloodthirst, then withdrawing to debate the relative talents of the executioners.

Today in thickly concreted London, the traffic and tourists swirl around Marble Arch where Oxford Street and Park Lane meet, few aware or caring that these busy thoroughfares used to be Tyburn Road and Tyburn Lane, respectively. This is where the “Tyburn Tree” stood. Westminster long ago swallowed the village of Tyburn, named in the Domesday Book and in mediaeval times marked by a monument known as Oswulf’s Stone, long since lost. The greater fame came with the gallows, when Tyburn served as London’s principal location for public executions, specifically at what is now 49 Connaught Square.

The first execution recorded at Tyburn took place in 1196, 400 years before the Tyburn Tree was erected, three beams in a horizontal triangle on three legs, enough room to simultaneously dangle as many as 24 people, as happened once in 1649. Oliver Cromwell was hanged there, though he was already dead — he was exhumed and strung up as posthumous revenge for having the king’s father beheaded.

Thousands came to watch the executions of Tyburn, and one time hundreds of spectators inadvertently joined the accused in the afterlife when specially erected viewing stands collapsed beneath them.

And then there were the rehearsals. These photos, which my dad brought back from China before World War II, are not executions per se, but Japanese soldiers having a little bayonet and sword practice with Chinese corpses. Part of the fun in Nanjing, I believe, though the Japanese government still seems shy about the topic.

The first person Albert Pierrepoint hanged was a gangster named Mancini who accepted his necktie with a gay “Cheerio!” before the trapdoor was sprung. It’s unlikely that the poor sods who were long ago put to the sword in Siam were so fatalistic.

Someone was selling this dandy postcard online for $100, noting that “Chinese execution cards are not uncommon, but from Thailand they are unusual and seldom seen”.

Unless I’m missing something on the Thai-language Web, any mention of ritual executions in Siam is seldom seen, make that “never”. What you do find are sidebars, such as the entry in inexhaustible Once, a long time ago, Siam and other Southeast Asian countries put criminals to death by having elephants step on them, and perhaps pull off a few limbs. This choice method came from India, this illustration from Ceylon. Later on a measure of “mercy” was introduced by the kings of Siam, who trained their elephants to roll the victim around on the ground — just rough them up a bit. One still feels pity for the elephants, though, as much as the condemned.