CALCRAFT, THE ENGLISH EXECUTIONER.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume 4, Issue 383, 6 April 1880, Page 3

CALCRAFT, THE ENGLISH EXECUTIONER.

From the Neio York Herald we glean the following particulars of the life of Calcraft :—

Calcraft, the English executioner, who expired a few days since of. sheer old age, was a niaii about whom the outside world was alwuya most curious, but of whom, outside his official functions, little or nothing was known, save by the eelect few that hud a personal acquaintance with him. Something less than fifty years ago, the then Sheriffs of the City oi London fouud themselves in the unpleasant position of being left without a hangman to officiate at Newgate, through the clashing of cxc cutions at York and London. Calcraft, a young shoemaker of some twenty-five years of age, on the evening preceding the execution, happened to c; 11 at Newgate with a pair of boots that he had made for one of the warders. The sheriff's dilemma was at that moment a fruitful source of discussion among the prison officials, and Calcraft at once volunteered to undertake the job. At this time the common hangman was the especial object of the execrations of the lower orders of society, and the sheriffs were then sitting in Newgate ruefully discussing the immediate probability of their being compelled to " do " the culprits to death on the following morning. The young shoemaker's voluntary offer was eagerly accepted. The next morning, in the presence of a howling, shrieking multitude of depraved wretches, Calcraft launched into eternity the two inalfactors whose legal extinction had caused such perturbation in the minds of the sheriffs. For a period of close upon lifty years from that date, almost every criminal that was sacrificed on the shrine of the oifonded majusty of the law met his death at the hands of Calcraft. For many years after ho assumed the position of public executioner the position was a lucrative one. He received iilO for each execution, and a liberal allowance for travelling expenses when the dire work was performed out of London. In addition to this, the clothes of the culprit, being part and parcel of the felon's estate forfeited to the Crown, reverted to the hangman as his ghastly perquisites. These cast-off garments of criminals were readily saleable, at high prices, to the proprietors of waxwork exhibitions, who pandered them, as now, to the morbid sensibilities of the people. Many a hundred pouuds, too, found its way into Caleraft's pocket when he hung some plutocratic murderer whose relatives, rather than see the coat and boots of their departed kinsman louring on his •waxen effigy in the stately saloon of Mine. Tussaud, in Baker Street, or standing cheek-by-jowl with the Queen of Sheba and the Man in the Iron Mask, in the booth of a travelling waxwork exhibition, outbid the speculative proprietors of these establishments for the possession of the culprit's property. Calcratt's interviews with his intended patients, were, if possible, more painful to the executioner than to the culprit, for strange though it may appear, Calcraft was of a very sensitive nature, and it was for this reason that he could never be induced to see the man whom he had to operate on until the last moment, and, further, he always especially enjoined the officials on no account to notify the prisoner of his arrival until he himself walked into the cell. Once in the presence of the prisoner, until within the last twelve mouths of liH holding his hateful office, when his nervous organisation utterly broke down, uompelliug bis retirement. Calcraft was as cool and self-possessed as though he was putting the finishing touches to the toilet of a bridegroom instead of adjusting- the paraphernalia of ignominious death.

In his domestic relations Calcraft was a devoted husband and an affectionate father. Two unmarried daughters, who, for the four years before his death, tended their bedridden father, and a servant, comprised the hangman's household for t!ie past twenty years, he hiving been a widower about that length of time. The house where he died, No 2. Poole Place, Poole Street, Horton, a district of London lying east of the City road, between Islington and Shoreditch, was his own property, as well as several of the adjacent houses.

It has been the hangman's-custom to preserve a piace of rope as a memento of each execution he had conducted, and when he did happen to unbend to a favoured guest from his habitual taciturnly, he would chatter on by the hour, each piece of labelled rope he handled giving the name of its victim and date of his execution, affording fresh food for the relation of starting incidents. On the scaffold Calcraftalways appeared in a suit of the darkest blue serge, and these habiliments were known in Hoxton as his hanging clothes. He would put them on when leaving his home to start for the scene of the execution, and take them off again on his return, and never wore them on any other occasion. No one ever saw him outside his house during the three days immediately succeeding an execution, and stolidly as he comported himself during the progress of the dread scene he invariably arrived home suffering from extreme nervousness and great mental prostration. If on a fine summer evening the aged hangman, with downcast eyes, bowed shoulders, and his chin sunk on his breast, arrayed in his hanging clothes, and carrying his little black bag, was seen looking down Poole street, on his way to his house, his humble neighbours gathered on the sidewalk smoking their pipes', and chatting after the day's toil, would stand aside, and, pausing in tkeir conversation, make way for the old man to pass without so much as bidding him good evening,for it was well known that on these occasions he was a silent man, and would not exchange a word even with his most intimate friends. In appearance, ac the writer knew him any time during the last fifteen years, Calcraft was a stout, powerful built man of some five feet eight, with a long snowwhite beard and whiskers, the upper lip only'being closely shaven. He had an unusually large broad forehead, a coarse, thick nose, and eyes of a pecular cold blue tint; a mouth expressing determination and secrotiveness in its tightly compressed thin lips and absence of curve, and a full, fleshy face, utterly wanting in color, pretty accurately describes the general appearance of this remarkable man. In addition to the house property belonging to him in Poole street, Calcraft owned considerable houses and land at Phipp's Bridge, a mile and a half west of Mitchen, nine miles from London, in the county of Surrey, and altogether he has probably died worth £23,000.