A GRUESOME memento from Haslemere Museum will feature in an episode of popular BBC antiques programme Flog It!, due to be screened in the new year.

The show’s presenter Paul Martin was filmed holding the piece of the Hindhead Gibbet from the museum collection, as he recalled the 1787 triple hanging of the three murderers of an unknown sailor, which shocked the nation.

Martin visited the Devil’s Punch Bowl as part of the episode to explore the area’s murky history as a notorious spot for highwaymen and robbers during the 18th century.

The most famous incident was the murder of the unknown sailor in 1786, who was walking back from London to his ship in Portsmouth when he was attacked.

The sailor had met three other seafarers at a public house in Milford, where he paid for their drinks and food and joined them on the journey to the docks. The group stopped again at The Red Lion in Thursley for more drinks and then followed the road via Hindhead.

It was in that secluded spot, his three companions stripped him, stole his money and stabbed him so violently they almost severed his head. Fortunately two shepherds witnessed the crime and ran back to The Red Lion to raise the alarm.

The three murderers were chased and arrested at Rake. Six months later they were tried at Kingston Assizes and two days after that, on April 7, 1787, they were hanged on a triple gibbet. Afterwards, their bodies were taken down, preserved in tar and then chained to the gibbet in iron cages as a dreadful warning to others. Soon afterwards the spot was re-named Gibbet Hill.

The sailor’s body was buried in Thursley churchyard and a memorial stone was erected on Gibbet Hill.

The gruesome murder struck a chord nationally and became so famous, it got a mention in Charles Dickens’s novel Nicholas Nickleby.

Haslemere Museum also holds five famous 19th-century paintings depicting the murder, donated by local historian and museum volunteer Tim Winter and his brothers – ‘The Red Lion’, ‘The Deed’, ‘The Arrest’, ‘The Hanging’ and ‘The Devil’s Punchbowl’.

Museum curator Julia Tanner and museum premises manager Nick Harding hand delivered the gibbet to the Flog It! presenter on an appropriately dark and stormy day.

“We were very pleased to be part of the programme and to help tell this local story to a new audience,” she said. “It was strange to think that centuries later we were reuniting the gibbet with its original place in the landscape.”