Foxton died on 14 February 1829, and Calcraft was appointed as his successor. He was sworn in as the official Executioner for the City of London and Middlesex on 4 April 1829, a position for which he was paid one guinea a week plus an additional guinea for each execution. He also received an allowance for
cats o' nine tails and birch rods, Calcraft's first duty in his new role was the execution of Thomas Lister and George Wingfield, hanged together on 27 March 1829, Lister for burglary and Wingfield for
highway robbery. Esther Hibner, known in the press as the "Evil Monster", was the first woman hanged by Calcraft. She was executed on 13 April 1829, having been found guilty of starving to death her apprentice, Frances Colppits. Hibner did not go to the scaffold willingly, but had to be restrained in a
straitjacket to prevent her from attacking her executioners. As she was hanged the watching crowd shouted out "Three cheers for the Hangman!" Calcraft was "in great demand" as an executioner elsewhere in the country as well, such as at
Reading Gaol. On 14th November 1864, Calcraft hanged
Franz Müller outside
Newgate Prison. Müller was convicted of murdering Thomas Briggs, a 69-year-old
City of London banker, on 9th July 1864. The murder was the first ever carried out on a British train. Müller's execution was witnessed by 50,000 spectators. The number of executions Calcraft carried out is unrecorded, but it has been estimated at 450, of whom 35 were women, making him one of the most active of British executioners. Among his better-known victims was
François Courvoisier, Calcraft officiated at one of the very few executions of a husband and wife, and the first since 1700, when he hanged
Marie and Frederick Manning at
Horsemonger Lane Gaol on 13 November 1849. After the noose had been secured around each victim's neck and the hangman had retired to a safe distance, the trapdoor was released. The bodies were left hanging for some time to ensure that death had occurred, before being lowered to the ground. Calcraft employed the
short-drop method of execution, in which the drop through the trapdoor might be around or so. That was often insufficient to break the prisoner's neck, and therefore death was not always instantaneous, typically occurring slowly by strangulation. Historians Anthony Stokes and
Theodore Dalrymple have suggested that Calcraft's "controversial" use of the short-drop allowed him a couple of minutes to entertain the large crowds of 30,000 plus that sometimes attended his public executions. "Renowned for his poor taste", he would sometimes swing from his victim's legs or climb onto their shoulders in an attempt to break their necks. In one of the first executions Calcraft carried out at the new Reading Gaol his victim, Thomas Jennings, took more than three minutes to die. On 31 March 1856, Calcraft executed William Bousfield, but a threat he had received that he would be shot on the scaffold unnerved him. After releasing the bolt securing the trapdoor on which the condemned man was standing, Calcraft ran off, leaving Bousfield hanging; a few moments later Bousfield raised one of his legs to support himself on the platform. Calcraft's assistant tried to push the victim off, but Bousfield repeatedly succeeded in supporting himself. The officiating chaplain forced the frightened Calcraft to return to the scaffold, where he "threw himself around his [Bousfield's] legs and by the force of his weight finally succeeded in strangling him". ==Later life==