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Findthee Swing
From Discworld & Pratchett Wiki
| Captain Findthee Swing | |
 | |
| Name | Findthee Swing |
| Age | |
| Race | Human |
| Occupation | Captain of the Cable Street Particulars |
| Looks | Thin, balding with hair swept over to cover and screwed up eyes like a pet rat |
| Residence | Ankh-Morpork |
| Death | At the hands of Sam Vimes, well the ruler |
| Parents | |
| Relatives | |
| Children | |
| Marital Status | |
| Books | Night Watch |
| Cameos | |
Captain Findthee Swing ("please smirk if you find it amusing") was the boil on the top of the seething lake of pus created by the rule of the grotesque Lord Winder. He ran the Unmentionables during this latter's reign. The Unmentionables were pretty much the Gestapo of Ankh-Morpork: you didn't dare get noticed by them, you didn't dare complain, and you most certainly didn't argue. Those few people who managed to walk out of their clutches in Cable Street seemed to have fingers pointing the wrong way or lumps and burns that they couldn't quite explain (horrible echoes of Room 101 from Orwell's 1984).
Swing, who had a mind that "had arrived at thuggery by the long route and was capable of devising in the name of reason the kind of atrocities that unreason could only dream of", invented craniometrics. Take it away Terry: "Bad coppers had always had their ways of finding out if someone was guilty. Back in the old days - hah, now - they included thumbscrews, hammers, small pointed bits of wood, and, of course, the common desk drawer, always a boon to the copper in a hurry. Swing didn't need any of this. He could tell if you were guilty by looking at your eyebrows.
"He measured people. He used calipers and a steel ruler. And he quietly wrote down the measurements, and did some sums, such as dividing the length of the nose by the circumference of the head and multiplying it by the width of the space betwen the eyes. And from such figures he could, infallibly, tell that you were devious, untrustworthy, and congenitally criminal. After you spent the next twenty minutes in the company of his staff and their less sophisticated tools, he would, amazingly, be proven right."
He dies, very satisfactorily, when Captain Sam Vimes and he have a set-to, Swing with his swordstick and Vimes with one of Swing's own steel rulers for measuring people up. Vimes manages to hit him in the throat and clearly breaks his larynx, which is invariably fatal. Shame.
Vimes was there due to a temporal disturbance in which he fell through the dome of Unseen University with the arch-criminal Carcer and was relocated in time back to his own past. All of this is related in the marvelous Night Watch.
Annotation
Horrifyingly, on Roundworld, craniometrics was also entirely true: scientists a hundred years ago used it not only to hunt for criminal types in the human population, but also to "prove" a correlation between physiognomy and intelligence. This led directly to eugenics and justifications for segregation. Craniometrics was extensively used by the Nazis to provide theoretical plausibility for their ideas. A whole department of Heinrich Himmler's SS - the Racial Purity Bureau - was given over to taking the facial measurements by which the world was divided into Aryans and varying degrees of untermenschen. In Poland and other occupied countries, if a child's facial measurements "proved" that they really belonged to the Aryan race, then that child could be removed from its unworthy Slavonic parents to be brought up by a German family. Conversely, in cases of doubt as to parentage or race, an unfavourable set of craniometrics was a ticket to a death camp.
Prinz-Albrecht Strasse in Berlin, where the Gestapo had its headquarters, is an unremarkeable airy suburban street with the usual genteel Berliner mix of shops and offices downstairs, flats and apartments on upper floors. Number 54 is as unremarkeable as any other address on the street - at least today... No dfoubt Cable Street, whose other noteable premises are Gimlet's dwarf delicatessen, a betting shop, and the upstairs Temple of Anoioa, would have looked just as unremarkably suburban.
