1806 he was appointed clerk of the ordnance, and acquired considerable reputation for the efficient manner in which he discharged his duties. At the general election in that year he was returned for the city of Rochester, defeating Admiral Sir Sidney Smith both at the polling-booth and before the election committee of the House of Commons. For Rochester he sat until 1818, when he was again returned for Wareham, which he represented until 1831. Down to 1828 Calcraft had been a staunch whig, but on the formation of the Duke of Wellington's administration he consented to hold the post of paymaster-general (1828–30), and was created a privy councillor 16 June 1828. In 1831 he reverted to his old faith, voting for the Reform Bill when it was carried by one vote 22 March 1831, and at the subsequent dissolution he contested and carried the county of Dorset in the reform interest. Under the reproaches of the tories, with whom he had co-operated from 1828 to 1830, his mind became unhinged, and he committed suicide at Whitehall Place, London, 11 Sept. 1831. On 17 Sept. he was buried in the chancel vault of St. James's Church, Piccadilly, and at a later date a monument was erected to his memory in St. Mary's, Wareham. He married, 5 March 1790, Elizabeth, third daughter and coheiress of Sir Thomas Pym Hales of Bekesbourne, Kent. She died at Clifford Street, London, 2 July 1815, aged 45. Calcraft was one of the earliest reformers of the liquor traffic, his proposition being to ‘throw open the retail trade in malt liquor.’ There is in the British Museum ‘a dispassionate appeal to the legislature, magistrates, and clergy,’ by a county magistrate against this suggestion. The titles of numerous broadsides on Calcraft's election for Dorset in 1831 are printed in C. H. Mayo's bibliography of that county.
[Gent. Mag. 1790, pt. i. 273, 1815, pt. ii. 92, 1831, pt. ii. 465–6; Hutchins's Dorset (1861 ed.), i. 113, 534; Wilson's House of Commons, 1808, pp. 510–11; Le Marchant's Memoir of Earl Spencer, p. 303.]
CALCRAFT, WILLIAM (1800–1879), executioner, was born at Baddow, near Chelmsford, in 1800. He was a shoemaker by trade, but at one time was watchman at Reid's brewery in Liquorpond Street (now Clerkenwell Road), London, and afterwards butler to a gentleman at Greenwich. At a later period, while obtaining a hawker's precarious living, he accidentally made the acquaintance of Foxton, the hangman, which led to his employment at Newgate to flog juvenile offenders, at ten shillings a week. On an emergency during 1828 he was sent to Lincoln, where he put two men to death. John Foxton, who had been the executioner in the city of London for forty years, died on 14 Feb. 1829. Calcraft was appointed his successor, and sworn in on 4 April 1829. The emolument was a guinea a week and an extra guinea for every execution, besides half a crown for every man he flogged, and an allowance to provide cats or birch rods. For acting as executioner of Horsemonger Lane gaol, in Surrey, he received a retaining fee of five guineas, with the usual guinea when he had to officiate on the scaffold; he was also at liberty to engage himself in the country, where he demanded, and was paid, 10l. on each occasion. During his tenure of office the act of parliament was passed ordering criminals to be put to death privately. The last public execution in England took place in front of Newgate 26 May 1868. The first private execution under the new law was in Maidstone gaol, 3 Aug. 1868. Calcraft's last official act was the hanging of James Godwin, on 25 May 1874. Old age then obliged him to retire from office, and he was pensioned by the city of London on twenty-five shillings a week. He died at Poole Street, New North Road, Hoxton, on 13 Dec. 1879. He was of kindly disposition; was very fond of his children and his grandchildren, and took a great interest in his pigeons and other pet animals. ‘The Groans of the Gallows,’ or ‘The Life of W. Calcraft,’ 1846, which ran to numerous editions, ‘The Hangman's Letter to the Queen,’ 1861, ‘The Heroes of the Guillotine and Gallows, Askern, Smith, and Calcraft,’ three publications of little worth, and not countenanced by the executioner, contain very few facts relating to his history.
[Arthur Griffith's Chronicles of Newgate (1884), ii. 272–3, 411–15; Daily Telegraph, 17 Dec. 1879, p. 5; Life and Recollections of Calcraft, with portrait, London, 1880.]
CALDECOTT, JOHN (1800–1849), astronomer and meteorologist, had been acting during about four years as commercial agent to the government of Travancore at the port of Allepey, when, in 1836, he became impressed with the advantages derivable to science from the establishment of an astronomical station in southern India. His views, enforced by the British resident, Colonel Fraser, were at once acceded to by Rama Vurmah, then rajah of Travancore. An observatory (described in the Madras Journal, vi. 56) was built at Trevandrum, Caldecott was appointed its director, and in July 1837 observations were begun with portable instruments, the use of which had long constituted his recreation. The completion of a
