Friday, May 4, 2018

Hangman Jack Ketch by Katherine Pym

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Tyburn Tree

Hangmen have been hated throughout history. After all, they killed people. Some of these men found their calling so appealing, they took their jobs to a new level. Jack Ketch was one of them.

Little is known of the man except he was married to a woman named Katherine. Almost always drunk on and off the job, he was a sadist and an artisan in his field.

He loved torture and knew how to delay death. He’d purposefully botch jobs. When at a hanging, he tied the noose around the victim’s neck so that the knot was awry. Once the prisoner was shoved off the back end of a cart, their necks wouldn’t break and the person would dance the jig while he choked to death. Loved ones would run under the gallows to aide in their deaths or pay Jack to bring a quick end. They hung on the body until the trachea snapped.   

A Gibbet
A Gibbet
Other lucrative perks included: Payment to torture a person. He’d receive monies when he sent corpses to Surgeon’s Hall for dissection. He auctioned off lengths of the noose at a nearby tavern, sell the dead body’s shoes and clothing.

For the dead who committed treason, Ketch quartered them beneath the gallows. When he gibbeted corpses, he’d retreat to his chambers (later called Ketch’s Kitchen) in Newgate Prison, where he parboiled the cadavers then covered them in pitch to keep the flesh from rotting too quickly. These gibbets, a large cage, were hung at crossroads or busy byways as a warning to passersby.  

Ketch was not a good executioner. He preferred other methods than the axe. Maybe, he wasn’t burly enough to wield one, or he did not look handsome as he swung it toward a person’s neck.






Lord Russell saying goodbye
Lord Russell, executed for high treason.
Ketch chopped on Russell’s neck so often, missing his mark or only maiming him, (One stroke hit his shoulder.) that those who watched became incensed by his cruelty. Later, Ketch felt impelled to write an apology.

“'The Apologie of John Ketch, Esquire in vindication of himself as to the execution of the late Lord Russell, 21 July 1683.' Ketch repudiated the charge that he had been given 'twenty guineas the night before that after the first blow my lord should say, "You dog, did I give you ten guineas to use me so inhumanly?..”

This exchange must have thrown off Ketch’s aim, but it does not explain how he could have bungled the execution so badly. John Evelyn who wrote a journal during this time, described the messy affair as done in a ‘butcherly fashion’. 


Duke of Monmouth

When it came to the Duke of Monmouth in 1685, Ketch had not improved his disposition or attempts to make a clean kill.

“At Monmouth's execution, 15 July 1685, Ketch played a prominent part. Monmouth, in his address to him on the scaffold, alluded to his treatment of Russell, and this appears to have totally unnerved him. After three ineffectual blows he threw down the axe with the words, 'I can't do it,' and was only induced to complete his task by the threats of the sheriffs. Sir John Bramston {Autobiog. p. 192) and others confirm the fact that Ketch dealt at least five strokes, and even then, according to Macaulay, he had recourse to a knife to completely sever the head from the trunk (Macaulay, Hist.; Somers Tracts, x. 264-5).”

John Evelyn again at the execution, he wrote that the crowds would have torn Ketch to pieces had he not been guarded.

Ketch not quite getting it right
Ketch died in 1686 or 1687.

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Thanks to:
Wikicommons, public domain



Hanson, Neil, The Great Fire of London, in that Apocalypic Year, 1666, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., NJ USA 2002


Sidney Lee, editor, Dictionary of National Biography, Vol XXXI, Kennett-Lambart, Macmillan and Co. NY, London, 1892


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