October 10, 1800 - William Calcraft
Calcraft's four-and-a-half decades as Britain's most active public executioner make him a figure of grim institutional significance — less a perpetrator of violence in the conventional sense than an instrument of state power operating at extraordinary volume. His preferred short-drop method, which caused death by slow strangulation rather than the cleaner long-drop, drew sustained criticism from contemporaries and prompted him to manually hasten deaths at the gallows. The spectacle of an official executioner pulling on the legs of the condemned placed the mechanics of capital punishment in unusually stark public view, fueling debates about method and suffering that would reshape British execution practice in the decades that followed.
From Wikipedia
William Calcraft (11 October 1800 – 13 December 1879) was an English hangman, one of the most prolific of British executioners. It is estimated in his 45-year career he carried out 450 executions.
A cobbler by trade, Calcraft was initially recruited to flog juvenile offenders held in Newgate Prison. While selling meat pies on streets around the prison, Calcraft met the City of London's hangman, John Foxton. After Foxton's death in 1829 the government appointed Calcraft the official Executioner for the City of London and Middlesex. His services were in great demand throughout England.
Nevertheless, some considered Calcraft incompetent, in particular for his controversial use of the short-drop hanging method in which the condemned were slowly strangled to death, instead of having their necks broken. Because with his methods the condemned took several minutes to die, to hasten death Calcraft would sometimes dramatically pull on legs or climb on shoulders in an effort to break the victim's neck.
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