William Calcraft
While attempting to earn a living by selling meat pies on the streets around Newgate Prison he made the acquaintance of John Foxton, who was the City of London's hangman for 40 years.
He also received an allowance for cats o' nine tails and birch rods,[1] and supplemented his income by selling sections of the rope used to hang his victims,[4] for which he charged between five shillings and £1 per inch.
Calcraft carried out the last public execution in Britain on 26 May 1868, when he hanged the Fenian Michael Barrett in front of Newgate Prison for his part in the Clerkenwell Outrage.
Eighteen-year-old Thomas Wells, who had been convicted of the murder of his superior Edward Walshe, the stationmaster at Dover Priory railway station,[9] was hanged on 13 August 1868 in a former timber yard inside Maidstone Gaol.
Members of the press were allowed to attend and reported that Wells, who wore his railway porter's uniform,[10] did not die quickly, "struggling on the end of the rope for several minutes".
[1] Reporting on Calcraft's visit to Dundee to perform an execution in that city in April 1873, The Times newspaper observed that "if their visitor had been a Royal personage, or an eminent statesman he could hardly have been treated with greater consideration".
They further reported that Calcraft arrived with only one piece of hand luggage, a carpet bag containing "a new rope, a white cap, and some pinioning straps".
He walked steadily up the winding staircase to the tower on which the gallows was erected, and preserved his extraordinary firmness even on the drop while Calcraft was adjusting the rope.
Although Calcraft's career as a hangman spanned 45 years, he appears to have been "particularly incompetent", frequently having to "rush below the scaffold to pull on his victim's legs to hasten death".
[1] Those being hanged had their arms pinioned to their sides with leather straps before being walked to the gallows, where they were placed on a trapdoor and their heads and faces covered with a white cap, or hood.
Historians Anthony Stokes and Theodore Dalrymple have suggested that Calcraft's "controversial" use of the short-drop allowed him a couple of minutes to entertain the large crowds of 30,000 plus that sometimes attended his public executions.
A Catholic priest in attendance, Father Gadd, reported that: The other two ropes, stretched taut and tense by their breathing twitching burdens, were in ominous and distracting movement.
[1] Calcraft was ordered to pay 3 shillings a week towards her upkeep,[5] to which he objected, arguing that his brother and sister should be made to help, and that he had three children of his own to support, although there is no record of his marriage.
[1] After reluctantly being forced to retire from office because of old age in 1874, Calcraft received a pension of 25 shillings a week from the City of London and was succeeded as hangman by William Marwood.
[22] Although as a younger man Calcraft had been considered to be "genial", with a love of breeding rabbits, in his later years he was described as "surly and sinister-looking, with long hair and beard, in scruffy black attire and a fob chain".
The earliest of them was an octavo pamphlet published in 1846 entitled The Groans of the Gallows; or; The Past and Present Life of William Calcraft, the Living Hangman of Newgate.
