AXE AND ROPE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 4957, 18 February 1937, Page 6

AXE AND ROPE

EXECUTIONERS' GRIM CALLING. Men appear to have become executioners pretty much as they have become shoemakers or bricklayers, soldiers or lawyers, says a writer in the Sunday Express. In some cases the grim calling has been adopted from just those little trivial accidents and incidents that determine so many other affairs in life. For instance, Calcraft, who was for many years Newgate executioner, obtained the appointment from happening to go along Finsbury Spuare one miserably wet and cold morning, and, stopping for a moment, to speak with a man keeping a coffee stall in the street. The stallkeeper was the Newgate executioner, and Calcraft was acquainted with him. In course of conversation the executioner complained that he was very unwell and was getting feeble, and should soon have to give up his post as hangman. "Well, when you give it up, I'll take to it," said Calcraft, apparently not very seriously thinking of the matter. However, the hangman did actually resign immediately after, snd in doing so mentioned what Calcraft had said. The authorities in the city at once sent for the volunteer, and, finding him a suitable man, appointed him there and then. From a similar acquaintanceship Geo. Brandon, one of his early predecessors, seems to have stepped into the office. He had known the man who had been executioner to the City of London for about fifty years, and during the latter part of the time had helped him in his duties.

Derrick fought under the Earl of Essex in Spain, and had there been condemned to death for a disgraceful outrage. Essex pardoned him and set him to work to hang a score or so of his men who had been sentenced, little dreaming that he was thus sparing the life of his own executioner. When, however, the time came for Essex to lay his head upon the block for rebellion, Derrick was the man who had to wield the axe. His predecessor was one named Bull, who is the earliest of whom we have any record among city hangmen. First came Bull, then Derrick; next Gregory Brandon, and he was succeeded by his son. Brandon the "younger —Richard Brandon—is generally supposed to have been the masked executioner who struck off the head of

Charles I. There were two of them on the scaffold in Whitehall, but Brandon was the chief executioner, and is thought to have been the one who dealt the blow. Great pains were taken to conceal his identity, but, like a great many others of his horrible craft, he seems to have had a certain pride in his profession, and could not keep his secret. He is said to have had, by way of perquisite, a handkerchief out of the King's pocket and an orange stuck full of cloves, and he boasted that immediately after the execution he recived £3O in halfcrowns. Next to Richard Brandon came Dunn, who was followed by the notorious Jack Ketch, who executed Lord. Russell and the Duke of Monmouth. It seems to have been the man's real name, and it caught the public fancy, as so appropriate to the office that almost to our own day it remained a synonym for "hangmen."