The Gallows Bracket

At 21, finding myself marooned from the tailend of recession where no one I knew worked. Having left home at 15 I followed a route of psychedelia that led to living in Cornwall, The Yorkshire Dales and finally in a caravan in Kent as a 'New Age Traveller', strange term, old age pensioner, new age traveller.
Moved back to Leeds my home town and teamed up with Andy to run a market stall selling tat we bought from jumble sales, a bit of pot and homebrew under the counter. Elliots Records, 2nd hand vinyl were in his infancy there too. Read 'last shop standing 'by graham jones.
In a dole figure fiddling measure, the government were running Topps courses, a six month course leading to a wholly unwarranted city and guilds, in my case carpentry and joinery.
We started at the beginning, sharpenning a blade, hand rip sawing a piece of 8 by 4 then planing our blocks true and square. I bought the bug.
For me it culminated in the Gallows bracket. A vertical member is upright, another piece perpendicular to its top, joined by dovetail, a third piece jointed in to tryangulate the frame. A simple shelf support.
The structure carpenters erected to formally execute people in Britain.
In france they worked with blacksmiths, ropemakers to create the guillotine, over in the middle east the crucifix, symbolic, in America the electric chair.
As a symbol, as a man raised in Britain I choose the Gallows bracket.
Lynching is a hideous practice but reading Albert Pierrepoints' book with his scientific rope length to body size, weight and strength ratio, it is hard to argue against his method.
After the execution of Gary Glitter, and all the issues it raised, I stick with the Gallows Bracket as my carpentry symbol. As I look at my heaving shelf of books supported by something I made more than half a lifetime ago, I stick with the Gallows Bracket as my carpentry symbol.