The Most Famous

CELEBRITIES from United Kingdom

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This page contains a list of the greatest British Celebrities. The pantheon dataset contains 265 Celebrities, 9 of which were born in United Kingdom. This makes United Kingdom the birth place of the 3rd most number of Celebrities behind United States, and France.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary British Celebrities of all time. This list of famous British Celebrities is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of British Celebrities.

Photo of Millvina Dean

1. Millvina Dean (1912 - 2009)

With an HPI of 70.30, Millvina Dean is the most famous British Celebrity.  Her biography has been translated into 44 different languages on wikipedia.

Eliza Gladys Dean (2 February 1912 – 31 May 2009), known as Millvina Dean, was a British civil servant, cartographer, and the last living survivor of the sinking of the RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912. At two months old, she was also the youngest passenger aboard. Dean was born at Culverwell House in Branscombe, on the south coast of Devon, England, on 2 February 1912, to Bertram Frank Dean (1886–1912) and Georgette Eva Light (1879–1975). She had an older brother, Bertram Vere Dean, born 21 May 1910. She never married and had no children. Her father died on the Titanic; her mother died on 16 September 1975, aged 96; and her brother died on 14 April 1992, age 81, the 80th anniversary of the iceberg collision. Millvina Dean's father, Bertram Dean, was born and grew up in Branscombe. He moved to London as an adult, where he married Millvina's mother, Ettie. The couple owned and ran a public house in London for several years. In 1912, the Deans decided to leave the United Kingdom and emigrate to the United States; they were planning to relocate to Wichita, Kansas, where Bertram had relatives, and he planned to become a stakeholder in a tobacconist's shop that his cousin owned. Bertram sold the pub and purchased a third class ticket for his family, costing £20 11s 6d, equivalent to £2,573.69 in 2023. Before leaving the United Kingdom, the Deans paid a visit to Branscombe to say goodbye to their family, and while there, Ettie Dean gave birth to Millvina. The Deans were not originally supposed to be on board the Titanic, but due to a coal strike, they, along with many other passengers, were transferred onto the Titanic and boarded as third-class passengers at Southampton, England. Dean was nine weeks old when she boarded the ship. Her father felt its collision with the iceberg on the night of 14 April 1912 and, after investigating, returned to his cabin, telling his wife to dress the children and go up onto the deck. Dean, her mother, and her brother were placed in Lifeboat 10. Her father did not survive, and his body, if recovered, was never identified. As was the case with many of Titanic's immigrant widows, Ettie Dean surrendered any notion of remaining in the United States once it was clear her husband had not been saved. In the 2000 PBS documentary Lost Liners, in giving her account of the disaster, Millvina described the state her mother was in during the aftermath of the disaster: [W]e stayed in a hospital for two or three weeks for my mother to recover a little bit, and then we came back to England; because we had nothing, we had no clothes, we had no money and of course she was so broken-hearted, she just wanted to get home. The White Star Line offered Ettie and her children passage back to England aboard RMS Adriatic. While aboard the ship, Dean attracted considerable attention. An article in the Daily Mirror dated 12 May 1912 described the ordeal: [She] was the pet of the liner during the voyage, and so keen was the rivalry between women to nurse this lovable mite of humanity that one of the officers decreed that first and second class passengers might hold her in turn for no more than ten minutes. Dean attended the Gregg School in Southampton. In her younger years she did not know that she was on the Titanic, and only found out when she was eight when her mother became engaged. Dean worked for the British government during World War II by drawing maps, and later served in the purchasing department of a Southampton engineering firm. She worked there as a secretary until her retirement in 1972. It was not until Dean was in her seventies that she became involved in Titanic-related events. Over the years, she participated in numerous conventions, exhibitions, documentaries, radio and television interviews, and personal correspondence. In 1997, Dean sailed to New York, along with several members of the Titanic Historical Society, aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 (QE2). After a few days in New York, she travelled to Kansas City, and visited the house that her uncle owned, and to where her family was going to settle. Several of her uncle's descendants met her for the first time. In 1998, she travelled to the United States to participate in a Titanic convention in Springfield, Massachusetts, and another in 1999 in Montreal, Quebec. She had also been scheduled to appear at a commemoration of the 94th anniversary of the sinking in 2006, but a broken hip prevented her appearance. She also appeared in the History special Titanic's Final Moments: Missing Pieces. Her brother Bertram, who had been a carpenter, also became active in Titanic-related commemorations until his death at the age of 81 on the 80th anniversary of the disaster in 1992. Dean staunchly refused to see James Cameron's film Titanic (1997). She recalled having nightmares after seeing A Night to Remember (1958), the film based on Walter Lords book with the same title, and did not wish to imagine her father as one of the people in the crowd of passengers stranded on the sinking liner. She declined invitations to the premieres of Titanic and Ghosts of the Abyss (2003). In December 2007, she criticised the BBC and its television programme Doctor Who for including an episode with a starship "cruise liner" called the Titanic which was similar in appearance to the historical liner. Speaking from her nursing home, she said: "The Titanic was a tragedy which tore so many families apart. I lost my father and he lies on that wreck. I think it is disrespectful to make entertainment of such a tragedy." A spokeswoman for the show said: "No offence was intended. 'Voyage of the Damned' is set on a spaceship called The Titanic and not a boat." In April 2008, Dean had accepted an invitation to speak in Southampton at an event commemorating the 96th anniversary of the sinking, but ill health resulting from a respiratory infection forced her to cancel. In December 2008, at age 96, Dean was forced to sell several of her family's possessions to pay for her private medical care following a broken hip. These included a letter sent to her mother from the Titanic Relief Fund, and a suitcase given to her and her mother in New York following the sinking. Their sale raised approximately £32,000. In February 2009, she announced that she would be selling several more items to pay for her increasing nursing home costs which she said exceeded £3,000 a month. In response to the escalating cost of Dean's care, The Millvina Fund was set up in April 2009 by the Belfast, British, and International Titanic Societies with the exclusive aim of taking care of her nursing home bills. It was given a boost by the Irish author and campaigning journalist Don Mullan at the opening of his worldwide Nokia photographic exhibition, A Thousand Reasons for Living (featuring a portrait of Dean), in Dublin on 22 April 2009. Mullan introduced an additional portrait of Dean's hands, as she signed a card for a Titanic autograph collector, which he produced as a limited edition of 100 copies. He made the edition available at €500 each and then challenged the director and stars of the film Titanic (1997) – James Cameron, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kate Winslet – singer Celine Dion, and the corporations Sony Music, 20th Century Fox, and Paramount Pictures to match him euro-for-euro to support her with her bills. DiCaprio and Winslet led the way with a joint contribution of US$20,000. Cameron and Dion donated US$10,000 each. Dean died of pneumonia on the morning of 31 May 2009, aged 97 and seven weeks after the Titanic sailed, at a care home in Ashurst, Hampshire. She was cremated, and on 24 October 2009, her ashes were scattered from a launch at the docks in Southampton where the Titanic set sail. Since October 2007, Dean had been the last Titanic survivor, following the death of Barbara West Dainton, who died aged 96 in England. Grace Hanagan, last survivor of the Empress of Ireland disaster Audrey Pearl, last survivor of the Lusitania sinking Adella Wotherspoon, last survivor of the General Slocum disaster Catherine Uhlmyer, longest-lived survivor of the General Slocum disaster Miss Elizabeth Gladys 'Millvina' Dean – Encyclopedia Titanica biography Millvina Dean – Daily Telegraph obituary Titanic Survivor gets Mayoral Tribute Southern Daily Echo, 7 May 2007

Photo of Joseph Merrick

2. Joseph Merrick (1862 - 1890)

With an HPI of 66.75, Joseph Merrick is the 2nd most famous British Celebrity.  His biography has been translated into 41 different languages.

Joseph Carey Merrick (5 August 1862 – 11 April 1890), often erroneously called John Merrick, was an English artist known for his severe physical deformities. He was first exhibited at a freak show under the stage name "the Elephant Man", and then went to live at the London Hospital, in Whitechapel, after meeting Sir Frederick Treves, subsequently becoming well known in London society. Merrick was born in Leicester and began to develop abnormally before the age of five. His mother died when he was eleven, and his father soon remarried. Rejected by his father and stepmother, he left home and went to live with his uncle, Charles Merrick. In 1879, 17-year-old Merrick entered the Leicester Union Workhouse. In 1884, he contacted a showman named Sam Torr and proposed that he might be exhibited. Torr arranged for a group of men to manage Merrick, whom they named "the Elephant Man". After touring the East Midlands, Merrick travelled to London to be exhibited in a penny gaff shop rented by showman Tom Norman. The shop was visited by surgeon Frederick Treves, who invited Merrick to be physically examined. Merrick was displayed by Treves at a meeting of the Pathological Society of London in 1884, after which Norman's shop was closed by the police. Merrick then joined Sam Roper's circus and was toured in Europe. In Belgium, Merrick was robbed by his road manager and abandoned in Brussels. He eventually made his way back to the London Hospital, where he was allowed to stay for the rest of his life. Treves visited him daily, and the pair developed a close friendship. Merrick also received visits from some of the wealthy ladies and gentlemen of London society, including Alexandra, Princess of Wales. Although the official cause of his death was asphyxia, Treves, who performed the postmortem, concluded that Merrick had died of a dislocated neck. The exact cause of Merrick's deformities is unclear, but in 1986 it was conjectured that he had Proteus syndrome. In a 2003 study, DNA tests on his hair and bones were inconclusive because his skeleton had been bleached numerous times before going on display at the Royal London Hospital. Merrick's life was depicted in a 1977 play by Bernard Pomerance and in a 1980 film by David Lynch, both titled The Elephant Man.

Photo of Albert Pierrepoint

3. Albert Pierrepoint (1905 - 1992)

With an HPI of 59.90, Albert Pierrepoint is the 3rd most famous British Celebrity.  His biography has been translated into 22 different languages.

Albert Pierrepoint ( PEER-point; 30 March 1905 – 10 July 1992) was an English hangman who executed between 435 and 600 people in a 25-year career that ended in 1956. His father Henry and uncle Thomas were official hangmen before him. Pierrepoint was born in Clayton in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His family struggled financially because of his father's intermittent employment and heavy drinking. Pierrepoint knew from an early age that he wanted to become a hangman, and was taken on as an assistant executioner in September 1932, aged 27. His first execution was in December that year, alongside his uncle Tom. In October 1941 he undertook his first hanging as lead executioner. During his tenure he hanged 200 people who had been convicted of war crimes in Germany and Austria, as well as several high-profile murderers—including Gordon Cummins (the Blackout Ripper), John Haigh (the Acid Bath Murderer) and John Christie (the Rillington Place Strangler). He undertook several contentious executions, including Timothy Evans, Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis and executions for high treason—William Joyce (also known as Lord Haw-Haw) and John Amery—and treachery, with the hanging of Theodore Schurch. In 1956 Pierrepoint was involved in a dispute with a sheriff over payment, leading to his retirement from hanging. He ran a pub in Lancashire from the mid-1940s until the 1960s. He wrote his memoirs in 1974 in which he concluded that capital punishment was not a deterrent, although he may have changed his position subsequently. He approached his task with gravitas and said that the execution was "sacred to me". His life has been included in several works of fiction, such as the 2005 film Pierrepoint, in which he was portrayed by Timothy Spall. Albert Pierrepoint was born on 30 March 1905 in Clayton in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He was the third of five children and eldest son of Henry Pierrepoint and his wife Mary (née Buxton). Henry had a series of jobs, including a butcher's apprentice, clog maker and a carrier in a local mill, but employment was mostly short-term. With intermittent employment, the family often had financial problems, worsened by Henry's heavy drinking. From 1901 Henry had been on the list of official executioners. The role was part-time, with payment made only for individual hangings, rather than an annual stipend or salary, and there was no pension included with the position. Henry was removed from the list of executioners in July 1910 after arriving drunk at a prison the day before an execution and excessively berating his assistant. Henry's brother Thomas became an official executioner in 1906. Pierrepoint did not find out about his father's former job until 1916, when Henry's memoirs were published in a newspaper. Influenced by his father and uncle, when asked at school to write about what job he would like when older, Pierrepoint said that "When I leave school I should like to be public executioner like my dad is, because it needs a steady man with good hands like my dad and my Uncle Tom and I shall be the same". In 1917 the Pierrepoint family left Huddersfield, West Riding of Yorkshire, and moved to Failsworth, near Oldham, Lancashire. Henry's health declined and he was unable to undertake physical work; as a result, Pierrepoint left school and began work at the local Marlborough Mills. Henry died in 1922 and Pierrepoint received two blue exercise books—in which his father had written his story as a hangman—and Henry's execution diary, which listed details of each hanging in which he had participated. In the 1920s Pierrepoint left the mill and became a drayman for a wholesale grocer, delivering goods ordered through a travelling salesman. By 1930 he had learned to drive a car and a lorry to make his deliveries; he later became manager of the business. On 19 April 1931 Pierrepoint wrote to the Prison Commissioners and applied to be an assistant executioner. He was turned down; there were no vacancies. He received an invitation for an interview six months later. He was accepted and spent four days training at Pentonville Prison, London, where a dummy was used for practice. He received his formal acceptance letter as an assistant executioner at the end of September 1932. At that time, the assistant's fee was £1 11s 6d per execution, with another £1 11s 6d paid two weeks later if his conduct and behaviour were satisfactory. The executioner was chosen by the county high sheriff—or more commonly delegated to the undersheriff, who selected both the hangman and the assistant. Executioners and their assistants were required to be discreet and the rules for those roles included the clause: He should clearly understand that his conduct and general behaviour should be respectable, not only at the place and time of the execution, but before and subsequently, that he should avoid attracting public attention in going to or from the prison, and he is prohibited from giving to any person particulars on the subject of his duty for publication. In late December 1932 Pierrepoint undertook his first execution. His uncle Tom had been contracted by the government of the Irish Free State for the hanging of Patrick McDermott, a young Irish farmer who had murdered his brother; Tom was free to select his own assistant as it was outside Britain, and took Pierrepoint with him. They travelled to the Mountjoy Prison, Dublin for the hanging. It was scheduled for 8:00 am, and took less than a minute to perform. Pierrepoint's job as assistant was to follow the prisoner onto the scaffold, bind the prisoner's legs together, then step back off the trapdoor before the lead executioner sprang the mechanism. For the remainder of the 1930s Pierrepoint worked in the grocery business and as an assistant executioner. Most of his commissions were with his uncle Tom, from whom Pierrepoint learned much. He was particularly impressed with his uncle's approach and demeanour, which were dignified and discreet; he also followed Tom's advice "if you can't do it without whisky, don't do it at all." In July 1940 Pierrepoint was the assistant at the execution of Udham Singh, an Indian revolutionary who had been convicted of shooting the colonial administrator Sir Michael O'Dwyer. The day before the execution, Stanley Cross, the newly promoted lead executioner, became confused with his calculations of the drop length, and Pierrepoint stepped in to advise on the correct measurements; Pierrepoint was added to the list of head executioners soon after. In October 1941 Pierrepoint undertook his first execution as lead executioner when he hanged the gangland killer Antonio "Babe" Mancini. He followed the routine as established by Home Office guidelines, and as followed by his predecessors. He and his assistant arrived the day before the execution, where he was told the height and weight of the prisoner; he viewed the condemned man through the "Judas hole" in the door to judge his build. Pierrepoint then went to the execution room—normally next to the condemned cell—where he tested the equipment using a sack that weighed about the same as the prisoner; he calculated the length of the drop using the Home Office Table of Drops, making allowances for the man's physique, if necessary. He left the weighted sack hanging on the rope to ensure the rope was stretched and it would be re-adjusted in the morning if necessary. On the day of the execution, the practice was for Pierrepoint, his assistant and two prison officers to enter the condemned man's cell at 8:00 am. Pierrepoint secured the man's arms behind his back with a leather strap, and all five walked through a second door, which led to the execution chamber. The prisoner was walked to a marked spot on the trapdoor whereupon Pierrepoint placed a white hood over the prisoner's head and a noose around his neck. The metal eye through which the rope was looped was placed under the left jawbone which, when the prisoner dropped, forced the head back and broke the spine. Pierrepoint pushed a large lever, releasing the trapdoor. From entering the condemned man's cell to opening the trapdoor took him a maximum of 12 seconds. The neck was broken in almost exactly the same position in each hanging—the hangman's fracture. During the Second World War Pierrepoint hanged 15 German spies, as well as US servicemen found guilty by courts martial of committing capital crimes in England. In December 1941, he executed the German spy Karel Richter at Wandsworth prison. When Pierrepoint entered the condemned man's cell for the hanging, Richter stood up, threw aside one of the guards and charged headfirst at the stone wall. Stunned momentarily, he rose and shook his head. After Richter struggled with the guards, Pierrepoint managed to get the leather strap around Richter's wrists. He burst the leather strap from eye-hole to eye-hole and was free again. After another struggle, the strap was wrapped tightly around his wrists. He was brought to the scaffold where a strap was wrapped around his ankles, followed by a cap and noose. Just as Pierrepoint pushed the lever, Richter jumped up with bound feet. As Richter plummeted through the trapdoor, Pierrepoint could see that the noose had slipped, but it became stuck under Richter's nose. Despite the unusual position of the noose, the prison medical officer determined that it was an instantaneous, clean death. Writing about the execution in his memoirs, Pierrepoint called it "my toughest session on the scaffold during all my career as an executioner". The broken strap was given to Pierrepoint as a souvenir; he used it occasionally for what he thought were meaningful executions. In August 1943 Pierrepoint married Anne Fletcher after a courtship of five years. He did not tell her about his role of executioner until a few weeks after the nuptials, when he was flown to Gibraltar to hang two saboteurs; on his return he explained the reason for his absence and she accepted it, saying that she had known about his second job all along, after hearing gossip locally. In late 1945, following the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the subsequent trial of the camp's officials and functionaries, Pierrepoint was sent to Hamelin, Germany to carry out the executions of eleven of those sentenced to death, plus two other German war criminals convicted of murdering an RAF pilot in the Netherlands in March 1945. He disliked any publicity connected to his role and was unhappy that his name had been announced to the press by General Sir Bernard Montgomery. When he flew to Germany, he was followed across the airfield by the press, which he described as being "as unwelcome as a lynch mob". He was given the honorary military rank of lieutenant colonel and, on 13 December, he first executed the women individually, then the men two at a time. Pierrepoint travelled several times to Hamelin, and between December 1948 and October 1949 he executed 226 people, often over 10 a day, and on several occasions groups of up to 17 over 2 days. Six days after the Belsen hangings in December 1945, Pierrepoint hanged John Amery at Wandsworth prison. Amery, the eldest son of the cabinet minister Leo Amery, was a Nazi sympathiser who had visited prisoner-of-war camps in Germany to recruit allied prisoners for the British Free Corps; he had also broadcast to Britain to encourage men to join the Nazis. He pleaded guilty to treason. On 3 January 1946 Pierrepoint hanged William Joyce, also known as Lord Haw-Haw, who had been given the death sentence for high treason, although it was established that Joyce was born an American citizen, and therefore questionable if he was subject to the charge. The following day Pierrepoint hanged Theodore Schurch, a British soldier who had been found guilty under the Treachery Act 1940. Joyce was the last person to be executed in Britain for treason; the death penalty for treason was abolished with the introduction of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. Schurch was the last person to be hanged in Britain for treachery, and the last to be hanged for any offence other than murder. In September 1946 Pierrepoint travelled to Graz, Austria, to train staff at Karlau Prison in the British form of long-drop hanging. Previously, the Austrians had used a shorter drop, leaving the executed men to choke to death, rather than the faster long-drop kill. He undertook four double executions of prisoners, with his trainees acting as assistants. Despite Pierrepoint's expertise as an executioner and his experience with hanging the German war criminals at Hamelin, he was not selected as the hangman to carry out the sentences handed down at the Nuremberg trials; the job went to an American, Master Sergeant John C. Woods, who was relatively inexperienced. The press was invited to observe the process, and pictures were later circulated which suggested the hangings had been poorly done. Wilhelm Keitel took 20 minutes to die after the trapdoor opened; the trap was not wide enough, so that some of the men hit the edges as they fell—more than one person's nose was torn off in the process—and others were strangled, rather than having their necks broken. After the war, Pierrepoint left the delivery business, and took over the lease of a pub, the Help the Poor Struggler on Manchester Road, in the Hollinwood area of Oldham. In the 1950s he left the pub and took a lease of the larger Rose and Crown at Much Hoole near Preston, Lancashire. He later said that he changed his main occupation because: I wanted to run my own business so that I should be under no obligation when I took time off. ... I could take a three o'clock plane from Dublin after conducting an execution there and be opening my bar without comment at half past five. In 1948 Parliament debated a new Criminal Justice Bill, which raised the question of whether to continue with the death penalty or not. While the debates were proceeding, no executions took place, and Pierrepoint worked solely in his pub. When the bill failed in the House of Lords, hangings resumed after a nine-month gap. The following year, the Home Secretary, Chuter Ede, set up a Royal Commission to look into capital punishment in the UK. Pierrepoint gave evidence in November 1950 and included a mock hanging at Wandsworth prison for the commission members. The commission's report was published in 1953 and resulted in the Homicide Act 1957 which reduced the grounds for execution by differentiating between capital and non-capital charges for homicide. From the late 1940s and into the 1950s Pierrepoint, Britain's most experienced executioner, carried out several more hangings, including those of prisoners described by his biographer, Brian Bailey, as "the most notorious murderers of the period ... [and] three of the most controversial executions in the latter years of the death penalty." In August 1949 he hanged John Haigh, nicknamed "the Acid Bath Murderer", as he had dissolved the bodies of his victims in sulphuric acid; Haigh admitted to nine murders, and tried to avoid hanging by saying he drank the blood of his victims and claiming insanity. The following year Pierrepoint hanged James Corbitt, one of the regular customers at Pierrepoint's pub; the two had sung duets together and while Pierrepoint called Corbitt "Tish", Corbitt returned the nickname "Tosh". In his autobiography, Pierrepoint considered the matter: As I polished the glasses, I thought if any man had a deterrent to murder poised before him, it was this troubadour whom I called Tish, coming to terms with his obsessions in the singing room of Help The Poor Struggler. He was not only aware of the rope, he had the man who handled it beside him, singing a duet. ... The deterrent did not work. He killed the thing he loved. In March 1950 Pierrepoint hanged Timothy Evans, a 25-year-old man who had the vocabulary of a 14-year-old and the mental age of a ten-year-old. Evans was arrested for the murder of his wife and daughter at their home, the top floor flat of 10 Rillington Place, London. His statements to the police were contradictory, telling them that he killed her, and also that he was innocent. He was tried and convicted for the murder of his daughter. Three years later Evans's landlord, John Christie, was arrested for the murder of several women, whose bodies he hid in the house. He subsequently admitted to the murder of Evans's wife, but not the daughter. Pierrepoint hanged him in July 1953 in Pentonville Prison, but the case showed Evans's conviction and hanging had been a miscarriage of justice. The matter led to further questions on the use of the death penalty in Britain. In the months before he hanged Christie, Pierrepoint undertook another controversial execution, that of Derek Bentley, a 19-year-old man who had been an accomplice of Christopher Craig, a 16-year-old boy who shot and killed a policeman. Bentley was described in his trial as: a youth of low intelligence, shown by testing to be just above the level of a feeble-minded person, illiterate, unable to read or write, and when tested in a way which did not involve scholastic knowledge shown to have a mental age between 11 and 12 years. At the time the policeman was shot, Bentley had been under arrest for 15 minutes, and the words he said to Craig—"Let him have it, Chris"—could either have been taken for an incitement to shoot, or for Craig to hand his gun over (one policeman had asked him to hand the gun over just beforehand). Bentley was found guilty by the English law principle of joint enterprise. Pierrepoint hanged Ruth Ellis for murder in July 1955. Ellis was in an abusive relationship with David Blakely, a racing driver; she shot him four times after what her biographer, Jane Dunn, called "three days of sleeplessness, panic, and pathological jealousy, fuelled by quantities of Pernod and a reckless consumption of tranquillizers". The case attracted great interest from the press and public. The matter was discussed in Cabinet and a petition of 50,000 signatures was sent to the Home Secretary, Gwilym Lloyd George, to ask for a reprieve; he refused to grant one. Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Two weeks after Ellis's execution, Pierrepoint hanged Norman Green, who had confessed to killing two boys in the Wigan area; it was Pierrepoint's last execution. In early January 1956 Pierrepoint travelled to Manchester for another execution and paid for staff to cover the bar in his absence. He spent the afternoon in the prison calculating the drop and setting up the rope to the right length. That evening the prisoner was given a reprieve. Pierrepoint left the prison and, because of heavy snow, stayed overnight in a local hotel before returning home. Two weeks later he received from the instructing sheriff a cheque for his travelling expenses, but not his execution fee. He wrote to the Prison Commissioners to point out that he had received a full fee in other cases of reprieve, and that he had spent additional money in employing bar staff. The Commissioners advised he speak to the instructing sheriff, as it was his responsibility, not theirs; they also reminded him that his conditions of employment were that he was paid only for the execution, not in the case of a reprieve. Shortly afterwards he received a letter from the sheriff offering £4 as a compromise. On 23 February he replied to the Prison Commissioners and informed them that he was resigning with immediate effect, and requested that his name be taken from the list of executioners. There were soon rumours in the press that his resignation was connected with the hanging of Ellis. In his autobiography he denied this was the case: At the execution of Ruth Ellis no untoward incident happened which in any way appalled me or anyone else, and the execution had absolutely no connection with my resignation seven months later. Nor did I leave the list, as one newspaper said, by being arbitrarily taken off it, to shut my mouth, because I was about to reveal the last words of Ruth Ellis. She never spoke. Pierrepoint's autobiography does not give any reasons for his resignation—he states that the Prison Commissioners asked him to keep the details private. The Home Office contacted the Sheriff of Lancashire, who paid Pierrepoint the full fee of £15 for his services, but he was adamant that he was still retiring. He had received an offer for £30,000 to £40,000 from the Empire News and Sunday Chronicle to publish weekly stories about his experiences. The Home Office considered prosecuting him under the Official Secrets Act 1939, but when two of the stories appeared that contained information that contradicted the recollections of other witnesses, they did not do so. Instead pressure was put on the publishers, who stopped the stories. Pierrepoint and his wife ran their pub until they retired to the seaside town of Southport in the 1960s. In 1974 he published his autobiography, Executioner: Pierrepoint. He died on 10 July 1992, aged 87, in the nursing home where he had lived for the last four years of his life. In his 1974 autobiography, Pierrepoint changed his view on capital punishment, and wrote that hanging: ... is said to be a deterrent. I cannot agree. There have been murders since the beginning of time, and we shall go on looking for deterrents until the end of time. If death were a deterrent, I might be expected to know. It is I who have faced them last, young lads and girls, working men, grandmothers. I have been amazed to see the courage with which they take that walk into the unknown. It did not deter them then, and it had not deterred them when they committed what they were convicted for. All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment convince me that in what I have done I have not prevented a single murder. In a 1976 interview with BBC Radio Merseyside, Pierrepoint expressed his uncertainty towards the sentiments, and said that when the autobiography was originally written, "there was not a lot of crime. Not like there is today. I am now honestly on a balance and I don't know which way to think because it changes every day." Pierrepoint's position as an opponent of capital punishment was questioned by his long-time former assistant, Syd Dernley, in his 1989 autobiography, The Hangman's Tale: Even the great Pierrepoint developed some strange ideas in the end. I do not think I will ever get over the shock of reading in his autobiography, many years ago, that like the Victorian executioner James Berry before him, he had turned against capital punishment and now believed that none of the executions he had carried out had achieved anything! This from the man who proudly told me that he had done more jobs than any other executioner in English history. I just could not believe it. When you have hanged more than 680 people, it's a hell of a time to find out you do not believe capital punishment achieves anything! Pierrepoint described his approach to hanging in his autobiography. He did so in what Lizzie Seal, a reader in criminology, calls "quasi-religious language", including the phrase that a "higher power" selected him as an executioner. When asked by the Royal Commission about his role, he replied that "It is sacred to me". In his autobiography, Pierrepoint describes his ethos thus: I have gone on record ... as saying that my job is sacred to me. That sanctity must be most apparent at the hour of death. A condemned prisoner is entrusted to me, after decisions have been made which I cannot alter. He is a man, she is a woman, who, the church says, still merits some mercy. The supreme mercy I can extend to them is to give them and sustain in them their dignity in dying and death. The gentleness must remain. Brian Bailey highlights Pierrepoint's phrasing relating to hangings; the autobiography reads "I had to hang Derek Bentley", "I had to execute John Christie" and "I had to execute Mrs Louisa Merrifield". Bailey comments that Pierrepoint "never had to hang anybody". The exact number of people executed by Pierrepoint has never been established. Bailey, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and Leonora Klein, one of his biographers, state it was over 400; Steven Fielding, another biographer, puts the figure at 435—based on the Prison Execution Books held at The National Archives; the obituarists of The Times and The Guardian put the figure at 17 women and 433 men. The Irish Times puts the figure at 530 people, The Independent considers the figure to be 530 men and 20 women, while the BBC states it is "up to 600" people. In addition to his 1974 autobiography, Pierrepoint has been the subject of several biographies, either focusing on him, or alongside other executioners. These include Pierrepoint: A Family of Executioners by Fielding, published in 2006, and Leonora Klein's 2006 book A Very English Hangman: The Life and Times of Albert Pierrepoint. There have been several television and radio documentaries about or including Pierrepoint, and he has been portrayed on stage and screen, and in literature. On Pierrepoint's resignation, two assistant executioners were promoted to lead executioner: Jock Stewart and Harry Allen. Over the next seven years they carried out the remaining thirty-four executions in the UK. On 13 August 1964 Allen hanged Gwynne Evans at Strangeways Prison in Manchester for the murder of John Alan West; at the same time, Stewart hanged Evans's accomplice, Peter Allen, at Walton Gaol in Liverpool. They were the last hangings in English legal history. The following year the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 was passed, which imposed a five-year moratorium on executions. The temporary ban was made permanent on 18 December 1969. Locations of executions conducted by Albert Pierrepoint List of executioners BBC story on the qualities needed of an executioner

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4. Mary Mallon (1869 - 1938)

With an HPI of 59.44, Mary Mallon is the 4th most famous British Celebrity.  Her biography has been translated into 40 different languages.

Mary Mallon (September 23, 1869 – November 11, 1938), commonly known as Typhoid Mary, was an Irish-born American cook who is believed to have infected between 51 and 122 people with typhoid fever. The infections caused three confirmed deaths, with unconfirmed estimates of as many as 50. She was the first person in the United States identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogenic bacteria Salmonella typhi. She was forcibly quarantined twice by authorities, the second time for the remainder of her life because she persisted in working as a cook and thereby exposed others to the disease. Mallon died after a total of nearly 30 years quarantined. Her popular nickname has since become a term for persons who spread disease or other misfortune.

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5. Alice Keppel (1868 - 1947)

With an HPI of 57.33, Alice Keppel is the 5th most famous British Celebrity.  Her biography has been translated into 16 different languages.

Alice Frederica Keppel (née Edmonstone; 29 April 1868 – 11 September 1947) was an aristocrat, British society hostess and a long-time mistress of King Edward VII. Keppel grew up at Duntreath Castle, the family seat of the Edmonstone baronets in Scotland. She was the youngest child of Mary Elizabeth, née Parsons, and Sir William Edmonstone, 4th Baronet. In 1891 she married George Keppel, an army officer, and they had two daughters. Alice Keppel became one of the most prominent society hostesses of the Edwardian era. Her beauty, charm and discretion impressed London society and brought her to the attention of the future King Edward VII in 1898, when he was still Prince of Wales, whose mistress she remained until his death, lightening the dark moods of his later years, and holding considerable influence. Through her younger daughter, Sonia Cubitt, Alice Keppel is the great-grandmother of Queen Camilla, the second wife of Edward VII's great-great-grandson King Charles III.

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6. Christine Keeler (1942 - 2017)

With an HPI of 54.50, Christine Keeler is the 6th most famous British Celebrity.  Her biography has been translated into 28 different languages.

Christine Margaret Keeler (22 February 1942 – 4 December 2017) was an English model and showgirl. Her meeting at a dance club with society osteopath Stephen Ward drew her into fashionable circles. At the height of the Cold War, she became sexually involved with a married Cabinet minister, John Profumo, as well as with a Soviet naval attaché, Yevgeny Ivanov. A shooting incident involving a third lover caused the press to investigate her, revealing that her affairs could be threatening national security. In the House of Commons, Profumo denied any improper conduct but later admitted to having lied. This incident discredited the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan in 1963, in what became known as the Profumo affair. Keeler was alleged to have been a prostitute, which was not a criminal offence. Ward was, however, found guilty of being her pimp; a trial was instigated after the embarrassment caused to the government. The trial has since been considered a miscarriage of justice and a charade by the establishment to protect itself.

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7. Daisy, Princess of Pless (1873 - 1943)

With an HPI of 53.86, Daisy, Princess of Pless is the 7th most famous British Celebrity.  Her biography has been translated into 16 different languages.

Daisy, Princess of Pless (Mary Theresa Olivia; née Cornwallis-West; 28 June 1873 – 29 June 1943) was a noted society beauty in the Edwardian period. During her marriage, she was a member of one of the wealthiest European noble families. Daisy and her husband Prince Hans Heinrich XV were the owners of large estates and coal mines in Silesia (now in Poland) which brought an enormous fortune to the Hochbergs .

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8. Mary Ann Bevan (1874 - 1933)

With an HPI of 51.70, Mary Ann Bevan is the 8th most famous British Celebrity.  Her biography has been translated into 17 different languages.

Mary Ann Bevan (née Webster; 20 December 1874 – 26 December 1933) was an English nurse, who, after developing acromegaly, toured the circus sideshow circuit as "the ugliest woman in the world".

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9. Jane Morris (1839 - 1914)

With an HPI of 51.63, Jane Morris is the 9th most famous British Celebrity.  Her biography has been translated into 18 different languages.

Jane Morris (née Burden; 19 October 1839 – 26 January 1914) was an English embroiderer in the Arts and Crafts movement and an artists' model who embodied the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of beauty. She was a model and muse to her husband William Morris and to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her sister was the embroiderer and teacher Elizabeth Burden.

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10. Louise Brown (b. 1978)

With an HPI of 40.70, Louise Brown is the 10th most famous British Celebrity.  Her biography has been translated into 36 different languages.

Louise Joy Brown (born 25 July 1978) is an English woman who was the first human to have been born after conception by in vitro fertilisation experiment (IVF). Her birth, following a procedure pioneered in Britain, has been lauded among "the most remarkable medical breakthroughs of the 20th Century".

People

Pantheon has 13 people classified as British celebrities born between 1839 and 1999. Of these 13, 2 (15.38%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living British celebrities include Louise Brown, and Brooklyn Beckham. The most famous deceased British celebrities include Millvina Dean, Joseph Merrick, and Albert Pierrepoint. As of April 2024, 4 new British celebrities have been added to Pantheon including Daisy, Princess of Pless, Mary Ann Bevan, and Rosemarie Frankland.

Living British Celebrities

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Deceased British Celebrities

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Newly Added British Celebrities (2024)

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Overlapping Lives

Which Celebrities were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 10 most globally memorable Celebrities since 1700.