On this day in 1741, the Court Minutes recorded that “John Thrift the Executioner this day attended on a complaint made against him by the Beadles for obstructing the Bodys being brought from Tyburne to the Hall for dissection and threatning to prevent the Company’s measures for obtaining the same, when after he had been reproved, was Dismissed, But the Court then agreed (in order to prevent his intended proceedings) to attend the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen that they may on complaint made be releived therein.”
Execution days were held up to eight times a year at Tyburn, with the Company of Barbers and Surgeons of London entitled by the Act of 1540 to four bodies for the purposes of dissection and anatomy demonstration. The Beadle was responsible for bringing these bodies to the Hall, often having to fight off the family of the executed and their sympathisers, not always successfully. Payments were regularly made to Beadles by way of compensation for the beatings they endured. The reason for Thrift’s obstruction of the Beadle in 1741 may have been because of a bribe given him by the family of the executed, or by a competing demand for the body for a private dissection.
Nicknamed Jack Ketch, as were all successors of the eponymous executioner who held the position from 1663 to 1686, John Thrift (d. 1752) was London’s public hangman for 18 years from 1735. After the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, having already executed 11 condemned participants, he was responsible for the last public execution by beheading in Britain, of Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat on April 9 1747.
Thrift was himself found guilty of murder and sentenced to death in 1750 and the satirical print illustrated here shows him in his condemned cell taunted by his Jacobite victims. After his death sentence was commuted to transportation, Thrift received a pardon and resumed the hangman’s work.
Despite the previous complaint by the Beadle against him, John Thrift was given a Christmas box of 7 shillings and sixpence by the Company in 1743. This was a regular Company perk for the hangmen at a time when they did not receive a standard fee for their work. The Company’s receipt book for the period shows that he signed with an X. Sidney Young in Annals of the Barber Surgeons reported that “the Clerk has humorously styled him “John Thrift, Esqre Hangman.” “