The Toronto Star has an interesting profile of John Radclive—Canada's first professional hangman.
Quite apart from his profession, Radclive was a hard man to warm to. In 1892 he started a brawl in Hull after he announced in a bar that he had "come to hang a Frenchman, and hoped it would not be the last." He was badly beaten and had to be rescued by a wagonload of police.
A few years later in Vancouver, the Star reported, he proposed to cut off the queue (pigtail) of a condemned Chinese man "and divide it up as souvenirs of the occasion, and altogether expressed himself in ways that show him to be a person of coarse temperament."
He was also notorious for selling rope to the curious after hangings – that might or might not have actually been used.
Interviewed in the 1930s, [Arthur] English said a British Columbia sheriff once actually caught Radclive in a hardware store buying lengths of rope to sell. [Link]
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