Word: axman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...HATCHETMAN: A literal derivation from the military vocabulary of coIonial America, when a hatchetman, or axman. chopped foliage in advance of troops operating in woods or swamp. On the political ladder, a henchman (etymologically, the Anglo-Saxon hengest-man, or horse groom) is one rung above a hanger-on but one rung below a hatchetman...
Letters from an Axman. The Mountbatten investigation was ordered when the Labor government came under at tack after the escape of Soviet Spy George Blake in October. Britain's Victorian prisons were not built for the liberal policies that today allow the inmates wide freedoms. "Most prisoners," said the report, "are kept in buildings that were constructed in the 19th century when, in effect, imprisonment was solitary confinement and all security depended on this fact...
...moors to watch search parties-and it was usually quite a show. On one manhunt, three platoons of British commandos each brought along a bagpiper. How the skirling would help catch the quarry, no one said. London newspapers printed letters from Frank Mitchell, 37, the so-called "mad axman of Broadmoor," who escaped last month and wanted it known that "I am sorry that my absence has caused certain people to think badly of men like Mr. Roy Jenkins." But all Home Secretary Jenkins could do was cut short his holiday and return to his office, determined to submit...
...with 104 of Britain's top prison officials at the Civil Defense Staff College in Berkshire, an unexpected phone call came for Governor Peter Jones of Dartmoor prison. As his colleagues stood by with mouths agape, Jones heard the news that his toughest criminal, the so-called "mad axman of Broadmoor," was at that very moment legging it for freedom. Frank Mitchell, 37, a jail bully who once attacked an elderly couple with an ax, had simply walked away from a work party, darted across the moor and disappeared into...
...skill that Cheever and Lee share, and it reached a danger point on one neighborly occasion at the Lee place, when the two held a woodcutting contest after a fine lunch, Lee with an ax and Cheever with a chain saw. In the heat of the competition, the axman came perilously close to clipping the sawman...