When I was in Australia, Russell Schultz and his wife took me to see John Brady. For those of you that don't know, John is one of Australia's best-known whip artists. He traveled around the world, entertaining crowds with his whip cracking, rope spinning, boomerang throwing and trick riding, among other skills.
Above are a couple pics of an old whip that John had that I think some of you might be interested in. This whip had a really smooth finish, and I can only imagine how good it looked when it was new. John thought that it might have been made by Cecil Henderson, but he wasn't sure.
John used this whip for 'flogging', which essentially looks like a rapid succession of body wraps, allowing only the fall of the whip to wrap around his assistant before lifting it off to set up the next partial wrap.
You can see that the fall hitches of the whip aren't looking to hot, with all the string and everything. John had pretty much retired this whip, and he had another whipmaker, Tom Hill, make a few copies of this whip. I guess the copies weren't as good as the original since John said if he needed a whip that would absolutely work, he'd use this one.
John is 78 now and pretty much retired from performing, but he's still very active and practices his trick roping every day.
-Adam
PS: A note on using cigarettes for targeting--While nowadays most whip artists use pasta and styrofoam for targets, cigarette cutting with a whip was a standard trick back in the day. The trick would not be to just to cut the cigarette, but to first take off the cherry, then cut the cigarette in half, then cut it at the filter.
John showed me an old stockwhip that he would use for this trick. Unfortunately I didn't get to see John crack whips when I was there, as his shoulders are in pretty bad shape after decades of performing, but I did get some video of him doing some rope spinning.
