Stories · from · the · Stone · Caravan

This is more an appeal for imaginative brainstorming by community members, rather facts or details. It's an event that never actually took place, and as such it is a detail which is not easily searchable.

I have a character who is about to be hung, in front of a large crowd, at Tyburn, in the spring of 1740 - and I want him to be successfully rescued by a gang of street performers.

As a theatre director I have been involved in faked hangings on stage. I've researched the reality of early 18th Century hanging in some depth over the past 5 years - I've a walked the route from Newgate to Tyburn, and examined the skeleton of Jonathan Wild,(hung 1724) as part of research into the effects of short-drop hanging. I have spent happy hours with a magnifying glass studying Hogarth's print of the Idle Apprentice at Tyburn.

I have read the Newgate Calendar and tracked the careers of at least three attested survivors of bodged hangings. But these were accidental survivals, when the drop went wrong and the hangee revived sometime afterward, and I am creating a purely fictional scenario in which the hangee is rescued by his gang.

Here are the resources the gang have to hand.

1.) The condemned man, Quin, is smaller and lighter than average, and so would survive a short-drop hanging longer unless his friends can get to his legs and pull to shorten his death agony. He has successful escaped three times from custody in the previous 6 months - and as a result is being carefully guarded and the gang will find it hard to alert him of their plan to save him.

2.) The gang are the 18th Century equivalent of circus performers, so have access to special skills, props, illusions.; So far I have a sword swallower, a contortionist, a strong person, a giant, a crippled slackrope walker with professional knowledge of rope, puppeteers and actors, etc, etc.

3.) They also the co-operation of a young surgeon with access to the room in which the "dead man" will be brought to be dissected, and access to money and a private carriage to smuggle him out of London once he has been revived.

At present the scenario runs as follows:

A) - At the moment before Quin is turned off the cart to hang, some of the gang stage a diversion in the crowd, planned by a conjurer, to "mis-direct" the hangman's attention at a crucial point.

B.) ***One of the street performers uses his/her specialism to interfere with the hanging in increase the odds of Quin surviving despite being unable to communicate the details to him in advance***

B) - The Stong man and/or Giant fight their way to the foot of the gallows and appears to be tugging on Quin's legs to kill him, while in fact supporting him.

C.) The unconscious corpse is snatched and sold to the surgeon, who successfully revives him on the slab and provides a substitute corpse to dissect in public to cover Quin's complete disappearance.

Back to B - As far as I know no gang of street performers has ever actually secretly rescued a man from a public hanging, so it's not directly searchable. This is where imagination and lateral thinking has a part to play.

I'd like to compile as wild and wide a list as possible for circus-type skills which might be put use in this scenario, and I would like to harness the wilder imaginations of this community to do it!

Here it last is the bone of the problem with my story, the hard rotten core in
which I keep chipping my teeth.

In the first working draft "Paul" was smuggling political dissidents and
refuges out of the city in the expectation of a government crackdown.

The stakes were therefore exceptionally high; if "Lily" inadvertently revealed
during interrogation information that led back to "Paul", he would lose not
only his freedom, his career, possibly his life, but also his ability to
protect his family.

So he mistranslated her confession to deflect attention away from his
involvement.

Alas, further research, plus condensing the material so that it would cohere
as cinema made "Paul the people-smuggler" a non-starter. Not so much because
he couldn't or wouldn't have got involved, but because I couldn't see how
"Lily the forger" could have knowledge of it.

And the 3rd Act no longer worked, because everyone was behaving badly without
sufficient motive. The stakes were just not that high for Paul any more, and
he came across as a neurotic shit.

Every thing I have tried to invoke to replicate that original jeopardy -
without making the story over-complex* - has failed.

(*Good film is simple, not simplistic. The emotional journey can be complex,
the obstacles can be complex, but the hook for the story is simple.)