Ducking stool not offensive

I really do wonder if Will Parsons has actual evidence of women being offended by the replica ducking stool near the Eastbridge [Gazette, June 11]? To many visitors in punts it is an attraction and provokes more amusement than horror. Obviously we no longer accept such form of punishment any more than hanging.

If Will Parsons feels offended by the ducking stool, I might well feel offended by the Tower of London, retained as no more than a historical pleasure park and number one attraction for countless generation of children and visitors from home and abroad. Yet it was built as a fortress and prison where judicial torture, and execution was carried out as late as 1941. Within its walls prisoners were racked, crushed and those of noble birth suffered execution on neighbouring Tower Green. The very King whose statue stands on the west front of Canterbury Cathedral treated his women far worse than giving them a ducking.

Prisoners of lesser birth were executed on adjacent Tower Hill providing entertainment for the populace. And those whose appetite is not fully sated by the sight of the axe and block can sit on Tower Green eating their sandwiches as they perhaps contemplate the barbaric execution of William Wallace in 1305, dragged naked from the Tower to Smithfield to be hung drawn and quartered, and his head stuck on a pole on London Bridge.

But we cannot close the Tower you may say, as it would deny us viewing the Crown Jewels. How many have ever thought of where from, and how did the Culinan and Koh-i-noor diamonds come to be in the crowns?

It can become rather dangerous trying to change history by destroying evidence of objects with which we may feel uncomfortable, or perhaps creating specious claims for removing them.

I find mild amusement in the replica ducking stool whereas the sight of the axe which was used to sever the heads of Anne Boleyn and St Thomas More among other famous Tower prisoners chills me. Meanwhile, has Will Parsons set eyes on the replica Combe Gibbet high up on the Berkshire Down near Newbury yet I wonder?

Hubert Pragnell Meadow Road, Canterbury