THE tragic melodrama of Nazi Germany has moved towards its grim climax. After trials without precedent, but exhaustively fair, some of the war criminals have been hanged; others are still to die. In the tarry-scented homeliness of an old-established tent-making works in the Old Kent Road, an elderly Londoner, Harry Moakes by name, sits spreading molten gutta-percha over the operative end of a hangman’s rope. This firm, John Edgington’s, are the only producers of this grisly speciality. Mr. Moakes, now 61, has been working for them since he was 14: he has finished the ropes which have finished the lives of hundreds of celebrated murderers.
He is Edgington’s only practitioner of this craft and therefore presumably—astonishingly—unique in the world. He is, as the historic irony of the contrast demands, a quiet, phlegmatic little Cockney—a teetotaller and non-smoker, his only hobbies a bit of carpentry or a visit to a music-hall, resident always near his work in this much-blitzed heart of South London.
He does not regard this as a hereditary profession: none of his four children is following him in it. A hangman’s rope by Edgington’s is a nice piece of English craftsmanship. (The raw material comes from Italy.) It is not just a cut off the coil and spliced, but specially woven round the ‘thimble’ as the rigid brass ring is called which ensures a swift and easy run-through and tightening of the noose.
There are no knots. The noose itself, where it encircles the neck, is covered neatly in soft calf the kind known in the trade as white russet hide. The gutta-percha, too, is another amenity. It is a smooth coating for the only possibly abrasive part of the noose, where it joins the thimble: “musn’t ever draw blood,” is a maxim of every self-respecting hangman; “mustn’t break the skin.” At-the other end of the rope is another brass fitment, which is attached to a bolt in the beam overhead.
Once, in a much earlier generation, one of Edgington’s ropes did go wrong. Historians of the rope dispute the exact details of what happened, but it is clear that, although the hanged man died, he died more clumsily than was proper; possibly blood was drawn.
At any rate, Edgington’s were sent for. A member of the firm hurried to the prison. A door was opened to him and there, before his appalled gaze, still swung the unhandily dis-patched corpse. The poor man went back to work; but it is on record that he himself died suddenly two days later, of shock or of shame.
A rope for hanging is made to measure. It may be 9ft or 11ft long: the height and weight of the man who is to be hanged decide the drop.
The drop is invariably sharp enough to crack the gutta-percha. So the same rope comes hack again and again to Harry Moakes to be re-done. Some ropes have been coming back to him for twenty or thirty years —”very near ever since I’ve been doing ‘em,” he says. There seems, therefore, to be no truth now (though there may have been in the past) in the common legend that a hangman’s rope is used only once and is the hangman’s perquisite.
This may still be true in some Dominions and Colonies, to which Edgington’s supply ropes in considerable quantities possibly because the facilities for repairing the gutta-percha finish, and the knack of doing so, are not available outside the Old Kent Road.
Orders for these ropes come to Edgington’s from H.M. Prison Commissioners. In the case of the Belsen war criminals, Pierrepoint, the hangman, took twenty-four ropes to Germany with him: as some of the accused escaped the death-sentence, only eleven were needed. (It has been suggested that disused ropes would make quaint stair-rails for the inn in which Pierrepoint has now set up.)
The firm of John Edgington was founded in 1805. There were several brothers of the same name, all in the tent-making and kindred trades. One other, Benjamin, is still listed in the London Directory: “they’ve rather drifted,” said a member of the firm of John Edgington, with a look of faint distaste, “gone in for chauffeurs’ liveries and that kind of thing.”
The executives of Edgington’s, including the works manager, Mr. Kenneth Fun, a man full of humorous anecdote of the firm’s history, speak with proper restraint and dignity of their unique relationship to crime, and are indeed inclined to be affronted if the curious layman dwells too emphatically oh this side of their business.
Hangmen’s ropes are, after all, an infinitesimal fraction of their total output, which varies from gigantic marquees for Henley regatta to the diving apparatus used in Admiralty salvage work. (In this connection they show with just pride photographs of sunken vessels and aircraft being refloated on their inflatable pontoons.)
Two important jobs they have recently undertaken: the export to South Africa of an assortment of banners, flags and shields for the King’s Visit next year; and the decoration of a ceiling at the ‘Britain Can Make It’ exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum with 5,000 yards of Celanese, 36 inches wide, in 160 panels, and 2,000 yards of pale blue mercerised Egyptian cotton fabric. (Unfortunately, having been fireproofed, none of this will do for shirts or pyjamas when the show is over.)
The war work of Edgington’s was immense in scope and usefulness. Apart from tents of all kinds—including tents in two-season camouflage, white one side, green and brown the other,for mountain warfare, the remnants of which they are now supplying to Danish boy scouts—they produced, for instance, ‘Swiss rolls’ (tracks suspended on water by tension wires~ protective covers for aircraft and waterproof containers and floats for D-day; the most perfectly deceptive fake tank-transporters; and flags for the bonnet of Field-Marshal Montgomery's car.
In splicing rope the craftsman uses, for leverage, a tapering baton-like instrument of hard lignum vitce, called a fid. There are still lying around at Edgington’s several gargantuan fids, cracked and shattered, which were specially made for splicing the Mulberry tow-ropes, 20 inches and more in circumference. These had to be sledge-hammered into the ropes: “We smashed dozens of ‘em,” say Edgington’s. So huge and unwieldy were these ropes that it was almost impossible to bend them for stowing in the lorries.
Once the Ministry of Aircraft Production asked them to do a particularly secret job with special urgency. Yes, it was so vital, said the Ministry man, that they could have all the extra labour they wanted. How many more men did they need? Twenty, said Edgington’s. Okay, said the Ministry man: they’d be along right away. A week went by. The Ministry man came back. “Get those twenty men all right?” he said. Edgington’s replied that, so far, only one man had been sent—and, in view of the nature of the job, it was with some slight melancholy amusement that they added that he was a Chinese conjuror and that the last employment recorded in his papers had been at the Hotel Adlon, Berlin. However, they did the job, which was to make some special “dark-room” tents for the high—speed development of reconnaissance photographs.
Quite a few foreigners are among Edgington’s two hundred or so employees. Many of these are Scandinavian: they drift in from the seamen’s hostels, and work as “palm-and-needle” sewers in the marquee-finishing department ”doing things a machine can’t do.”
What with marquees (some fifty this year, of which some are as large as 240 ft. by 40 ft.), and hundreds of tents for campers, and a gay profusion of flags, there is a pleasant air of peace and festivity about Edgington’s just now.
They made the canvas cover for the centre court at Wimbledon, and the flagstaff on the roof of Buckingham Palace; they made for Selfridge’s at the time of the Coronation eight flags which must be among the largest ever made - 50 ft. by 21ft.; they make the flags for the Cenotaph, which are renewed twice a year (there is a great demand for the discarded ones for war memorials overseas).
IT is a long time since the last horse-cabby called in at Edgington’s for a fresh coat of tarpaulin dressing on his bowler hat: It is a long time since war artists sat, easels propped comfortably before them, in tents such as those shown in their old advertisements.
It is also a long time since Harry Moakes first went to work for them, or Sam Ward (who was on the ‘Britain Can Make It’ job), or many others among their older workers. In the continuity of their tradition is one of the secrets of the strength of the Mulberry tow-ropes.
Sam Ward was bombed out of his home. Edgington’s suffered severely from incendiaries. The hangmen’s ropes are not, intrinsically, an important part of their business; but it is not, perhaps, too fanciful to see in those which were sent to Germany a symbol of Cockney retribution. Mr. Moakes is surely entitled, as he deftly smoothes his boiling gutta-percha, to whistle a jaunty bar or two from that old and authentically English ditty, ”Knocked ‘em in the Old Kent Road.”
The old firm John Edgington of The Old Kent Road London
John Edgington - The Man Behind the Hangman - Published 1946
|