A Horrid History of Christmas E-Book

Nicola Sly

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

This grisly collection of historic, horrid happenings from across the country demonstrates that Christmas is not necessarily a time of peace, joy and goodwill to all men. The holiday season has witnessed a plethora of almost unbelievable accidents, such as the amateur mechanic who died with his head stuck in a car engine, the footballer who leaped into a quarry to retrieve a lost ball, and the Christmas party guest who fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. There are fatal rail crashes in Oxfordshire, Bedfordshire, Cheshire, Cumbria and Scotland; freak weather conditions and devastating fires, such as the Christmas Eve fire in Glasgow that cost the lives of four firemen in 1927. Among the chilling crimes featured here is that of Nottinghamshire man Edward Kesteven, who killed his wife on Christmas Day 1894, and the murder of Thirza Kelly in Norfolk by a local teenager on Christmas Eve 1900. Full of merry madness and hearty heartache, A Horrid History of Christmas will make you want to bypass the festivities altogether!

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction & Acknowledgements

ONE South West

TWO South East

THREE London

FOUR Eastern

FIVE West Midlands

SIX East Midlands

SEVEN Yorkshire and Humber

EIGHT North East

NINE North West

TEN Northern Ireland

ELEVEN Wales

TWELEVE Scotland

Bibliography

Also by the Author

Copyright

INTRODUCTION & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHRISTMAS IS USUALLY thought of as a happy time but, to quote The Times of 26 December 1910, ‘It is curious how Christmastide has been associated with disasters of all kinds’. The paper then goes on to list some of these Christmas disasters, beginning with no less than sixteen rail accidents occurring in the United Kingdom between 1864 and 1906, which collectively resulted in almost 200 fatalities. Yet, if rail travel during the festive season seems dangerous, there are other activities which are equally perilous, such as playing football, shooting, working, ice skating, visiting relatives, going to parties or pantomimes, eating and, perhaps deadliest of all, the consumption of copious quantities of alcohol.

The following gruesome collection of true tales of Christmas past, drawn entirely from accounts in the contemporary newspapers listed in the bibliography at the rear of the book, serves to illustrate that the festive season is not always associated with peace on earth and goodwill to all men. However, much as today, not everything in the historical newspapers was reported accurately and there were frequent discrepancies between publications, with differing dates and variations in names and spelling.

As always, I must thank my editor at The History Press, Matilda Richards, for seeing this book through from the initial idea to print and, on a more personal level, my husband Richard for his love and support.

Skating on the Serpentine could be a dangerous pastime. (Author’s collection)

Every effort has been made to clear copyright, however, my apologies to anyone I may have inadvertently missed. I can assure you it was not deliberate but an oversight on my part.

Finally, wherever and whenever you’re reading this, I would like to wish every one of my readers a very happy Christmas and hope that your future festive celebrations are always calamity and catastrophe free.

Nicola Sly, 2012

SOUTH WEST

Devonport, Plymouth

On Christmas Eve 1885, twenty-year-old Ella Mary Fitzroy and her eighteen-year-old sister Maud of Plymouth, Devon were getting ready to go to a ball when Ella’s dress accidentally came into contact with a lighted candle and, within seconds, she was enveloped in a ball of flames.

She rushed screaming from her bedroom onto the landing. Maud ran to help her sister and tried to beat out the flames, but her own dress caught fire and she fled downstairs in a state of panic. Her stepfather, Edward St Aubyn, wrapped her in a blanket but both girls were extensively burned.

Surgeon Mr Toms attended and found that both girls were burned all over their bodies. He administered morphine to ease their excruciating pain but Maud succumbed on Christmas Day, while Ella lingered until 11 January 1886. Inquests later returned verdicts of accidental death on both girls.

Winchcomb

Towards the end of 1864, fifty-year-old retired surgeon Richard Smith of Winchcomb, Gloucestershire began to behave in a most peculiar manner. He became convinced that he was about to be kidnapped and sent to America and was sometimes seen sitting at the side of the road, ‘fishing’ with a rod and line.

On 27 December, the Smiths’ sons visited their parents and saw nothing unusual about their father’s behaviour, although when they left, their father cautioned them to run all the way home as he feared they would be waylaid and robbed. At nine o’clock, a neighbour heard what sounded like a gunshot coming from Smith’s house. She went outside and listened but could only hear Smith talking and the sound of furniture being moved.

The next morning, a woman called on the Smiths to buy milk. Richard Smith seemed perfectly normal, although he made no reply when the woman asked how his wife was. Soon afterwards, Smith’s sons were at their work on a farm when they saw their father walking towards them.

‘Where’s your sister?’ Smith asked them conversationally and, when told that Martha was not there, he continued casually, ‘Your mother’s dead.’

The young men were so shocked that they struggled to comprehend their father’s words, although they deduced from his rambling explanation that he had had a gun in his hand, which went off accidentally, killing his wife. One boy went for the police, while the other went to his parents’ cottage, finding Sarah Smith lying dead on the floor in the parlour.

Smith was charged with wilful murder and appeared at the Gloucester Assizes in April 1865. The current Winchcomb surgeon believed that he had been mentally unsound for at least twenty years and it was obvious to all concerned that Smith was not in his right mind. Having heard the details of the case, the jury needed only five minutes to find him guilty but insane and he was ordered to be confined as a criminal lunatic for the rest of his life.

Bristol

At about five o’clock in the afternoon of Christmas Day 1850, the Wooles family of The Blue Bowl Tavern in Tottersdown, Bristol, were preparing tea when a petty argument about toast sprang up between them. After a piece of toast was burned, Samuel Wooles threw it onto the fire and decreed that nobody would have toast that afternoon. His wife, Hannah (or Harriet) retaliated, telling Samuel that if she wanted toast she would have it, and went to another room to get some more bread. Samuel followed her and slapped his wife hard across the face.

The couple’s youngest son, Thomas, asked his father what he did that for and Samuel picked up a stick and swung it at the young man. Thomas seized the first thing that came to hand with which to defend himself, which happened to be a gun that his older brother had carelessly left lying around. Although Thomas didn’t aim the gun at his father or pull the trigger, it went off and Samuel was shot in the groin.

Hearing the gunshot, a neighbour rushed in and found Samuel lying on a settle moaning, ‘I shall die, I shall die.’ Thomas was horrified by what had just happened, begging the neighbour to run for a surgeon and repeating again and again, ‘I didn’t know the gun was loaded.’

When surgeon Robert Ellis arrived, Samuel had been put to bed. Ellis found a large round hole in Wooles’s abdomen and quickly realised that Wooles was mortally wounded. He died at about nine o’clock that evening.

At an inquest held by coroner Mr R. Uphill, the dead man’s oldest son, who was also called Samuel, explained that he bought his gun downstairs on Christmas morning in the hope of shooting a pigeon. By the time he got downstairs, the pigeons had flown away, so Samuel junior put his gun to one side and promptly forgot all about it. The inquest jury learned that there was no quarrel between father and son and that when Wooles learned that there was no hope for him, he asked to see a solicitor to make a will, leaving his fortune to be divided equally between Samuel and Thomas. This act alone suggested that the shooting was not deliberate, theorised the coroner, since Wooles obviously bore no malice towards his youngest son.

The inquest jury accepted the coroner’s suggestion that this was a parricide by misadventure rather than a deliberate act of violence, returning a verdict that the deceased was ‘accidentally shot’.

Taunton

On Boxing Day 1882, Anna ‘Nance’ Roswell was enjoying a quiet drink with friends in the Crown and Tower Inn in Silver Street, Taunton, when Frederick Ripley entered the pub and said, ‘Nance, I want to speak with you.’ The couple left the pub together and, minutes later, Nance staggered back, bleeding heavily from a single stab wound in her throat. A doctor was called and a cab summoned to take her to hospital, but she bled to death shortly after her arrival.

Nance and Ripley had been ‘walking out’ together for four years but Ripley was extremely jealous and Nance had ended their relationship as a result. Arrested and charged with her murder, Ripley told the police, ‘I done it.’

Tried for murder at the Somerset Assizes before Mr Justice Baggallay, Ripley insisted that he had been drinking at the time and had never intended to hurt his former girlfriend. In a written statement, he told the court that he was destitute, mainly because he had spent all his money on clothes for Anna, including the jacket that she was wearing when she died. Believing that Anna had ended their relationship because he had no money, he asked her for the return of the jacket and, when she refused and slapped his face he tried to cut it off her, accidentally stabbing her in the throat as he did so.

Ripley’s defence argued that he was insane, due to the effects of drink and that the offence was manslaughter rather than murder, on the grounds that Anna had provoked him by slapping him. However, the jury disagreed, finding twenty-one-year-old Ripley guilty of wilful murder, although recommending mercy on the grounds of his youth and previous good character. Although sentenced to death, Ripley was later reprieved and sent to Portland Prison in Dorset.

Portland Convict Prison. (Author’s collection)

Note: In contemporary reports of the case, the victim’s name is variously recorded as Ann, Annie or Anna Roswell, Rowsell and Russell.

Awliscombe

The Pring family of Awliscombe, Devon, were planning to spend Christmas Day 1852 at the farm in the village owned by Mr Pring senior. As twelve-year-old Ann waited to leave in the porch with her cousin Mary Haynes and the family servant, there was a sudden bang and Ann dropped to the ground dead.

Ann’s father, Francis, had already left to go to his father’s farm and, before doing so, had asked his wife’s nephew, John Wall, to fire a few shots in a newly planted wheat field to scare away rooks. Francis Pring had left the gun in a bacon rack in the kitchen but he neglected to mention that it was loaded and, when John picked it up, he pulled the trigger, accidentally shooting his cousin Ann behind the ear.

It was in a way fortunate that Ann took the full force of the blast, since John was only 3 or 4 feet away when the gun was fired and could easily have killed Mary Haynes and the servant too. As it was, the other two women suffered only minor injuries. The fact that the inquest returned a verdict of ‘accidental death’ was of little comfort to Wall, who was said to be much distressed by the shooting.

Plymouth

In 1858, the 17th Foot Regiment and the 2nd Warwick Militia were both quartered in the Citadel in Plymouth and for many months there had been bad blood between them. On Boxing Day, the underlying tension boiled over when Sergeant Henry Clay of the Warwicks went into The George and Dragon public house in Stonehouse Lane.

A number of the 17th Regiment were already drinking there and one told Clay, ‘There’s none of your sort here.’

Clay took exception to the man’s tone and ordered his men to draw their bayonets. The 17th Regiment saw this as a challenge and a physical fight broke out, during which the 17th Regiment lashed out at the Warwicks with their brass-tipped belts. Charles Lawler was in the act of striking Clay when Clay plunged his bayonet six inches into his opponent’s chest. The point penetrated a large artery near Lawler’s heart and he rushed back into the pub shouting ‘I’m stabbed’, dying from internal haemorrhage within five minutes.

An inquest returned a verdict of manslaughter against Clay, who was tried at the Devon Lent Assizes in March 1859. There were a number of witnesses, all giving conflicting evidence, but as the case progressed it began to appear more and more as if the 17th Regiment were the aggressors.

Twenty-two-year-old Clay was known as a mild, inoffensive man, who was an excellent soldier. Immediately after the stabbing, witnesses noted that he had marks of a blow on his face and it was pointed out that, if used with force, the belts wielded by the 17th Regiment could easily fracture a man’s skull.

Clay’s defence counsel insisted that their client had no intention of hurting anyone, but was defending himself against a brutal attack when Lawler accidentally ran onto his bayonet.

The trial judge summed up the evidence for the jury, stating that he personally believed that Clay was justified in giving an order to draw bayonets, since it was his duty to ensure the safety of his own men. He asked the jury to decide if Clay deliberately struck the blow or if Lawler rushed onto the bayonet and the jury gave Clay the benefit of the doubt, finding him not guilty after a brief deliberation.

Plymouth Citadel. (Author’s collection)

Bristol

Thirty-eight-year-old George Drewett, the former manager of a tannery in Bedminster, had taken a new job in Plymouth and returned to Bristol to arrange for his family to join him there but, on Christmas morning 1882, he was suddenly taken ill and died within hours. A post-mortem examination showed that he was suffering from acute meningitis.

On 5 March 1882, Drewett had tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head and the bullet was so deeply embedded in his brain that it was impossible to remove surgically. Even so, Drewett apparently made a complete recovery and showed no ill effects from the shooting. Charged with attempted suicide, he assured magistrates that he no longer had any wish to kill himself and was discharged.

Doctors thought it unlikely that the shooting was in any way connected to the meningitis that ultimately killed Drewett.

Broker’s Wood, near Trowbridge

Early on the morning of Boxing Day 1896, Henry Turner walked into the police station at Westbury, Wiltshire and told officers there that he wished to give himself up for murdering his wife. Asked for more information, Turner explained that he and his wife had not quarrelled but he had simply hit her over the head with a hatchet earlier that morning then locked his house door and come to turn himself in.

The police officers rushed to Turner’s cottage with a surgeon. Once inside, they could hear moaning coming from upstairs, where they found Sarah Jane Turner lying face-up on her bed, her head hanging over the edge. She died soon afterwards without regaining consciousness, at which point Turner was charged with her murder. ‘I thought she’d be better dead than alive,’ he explained, adding, ‘if she died, she’d go to heaven’.

An inquest heard that sixty-year-old Turner was known as a sober, hard-working and steady man. However, he had also been admitted to the lunatic asylum at Devizes on three separate occasions, although he was not known to be violent.

Unable to consider Turner’s mental state, the inquest jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against him and he was committed for trial at the Assizes. He didn’t have long to wait since the next Wiltshire Assizes were in January 1897. By that time, he had been medically examined and found to be completely insane, and, judged unfit to plead, was ordered to be detained during Her Majesty’s pleasure.

Bath

On 17 December 1925, five-year-old Dennis Evans of Bath, Somerset, was suffering from a very heavy cold and his mother decided to put him to bed early, leaving a gas fire burning in his room to keep him warm. Before long, she heard her son screaming and ran to see what the matter was.

Dennis had climbed out of bed and walked to the fireplace to peer up the chimney. His pyjamas came into contact with the lighted gas fire and burst into a ball of flames. ‘I wanted to see Father Christmas,’ he told his mother, shortly before dying from the effects of his burns.

Bristol

Priscilla Jenkins lived at Penn Street, St Paul’s, as did William and Sarah Priddes and their family and Mrs Murphy. On 23 December 1883, Priscilla heard a commotion outside their house and, looking out of her window, saw Mrs Murphy, an epileptic, lying in the street in the throes of a fit. She was being supported by William Priddes and Priscilla rushed to help him.

With the assistance of another neighbour, Priscilla and William carried Mrs Murphy upstairs to her room. Later that day, Sarah Priddes noticed her husband rubbing his arm and asked him if he had hurt it. William dismissed her concerns, saying that he had just scratched himself, but, on Christmas Day, he asked his wife for some hot water to bathe his arm.

Sarah bathed it for him and, noticing that it looked slightly swollen, put a poultice on it. During that night, William himself suffered a fit but, although Sarah begged him to go to the Infirmary, he refused. On Boxing Day, his arm was so badly swollen and inflamed that she took matters into her own hands and procured a cab to take him there in spite of his protests.

Forty-seven-year-old William died at half-past eight that evening and house surgeon Mr Penny found that he had blood poisoning, arising from a human bite on his upper arm.

Bristol Royal Infirmary, 1910. (Author’s collection)

Coroner Mr H.S. Wasbrough held an inquest at the Bristol General Hospital, at which Priscilla Jenkins recalled seeing William start as he was carrying Mrs Murphy upstairs, as if she had bitten or scratched him. The jury returned a verdict that ‘… death was due to blood poisoning resulting from an accidental bite inflicted by a woman whilst in a fit.’

Radstock

On Christmas Day 1876, Mr Coombs tried to shoot a blackbird in his garden. The gun failed to fire and Coombs took it back into his house at Radstock, Somerset, telling his wife that it was loaded but that he was unable to fire it. The gun normally hung on the wall, out of reach of the children, but now Mrs Coombs was afraid to touch it and simply stood it in a corner.

A little later, Mr and Mrs Coombs went out to see relatives, leaving their ten-year-old twin sons alone at home. A favourite pastime for the boys was detonating the heads of Lucifer matches in their toy pistol and, spotting their father’s gun standing in the kitchen, they tried to do the same with a real gun. John tried first but failed. He went to wash his hands and his brother, Francis, picked up the gun and managed to fire it. Sadly, he shot his brother through the left loin and John died from his injuries three hours later.

At the subsequent inquest on John’s death, deputy coroner Mr R. Biggs told the jury that blaming his twin brother was pointless. Although the jury fell short of recommending any legal action for negligence against John’s parents, in returning a verdict of ‘accidental death’ they asked the coroner to strongly reprimand them for leaving the children alone in the house with a loaded gun.

Gloucester

Frederick Harris of Morpeth Street, Gloucester, was seriously ill and, on 22 December 1929, he was admitted to hospital. He was not expected to return home.

On Christmas Eve, a relative called at Harris’s home, but, although Mrs Harris and her son and daughter should have been in, there was no response to the man’s knocks. Eventually he broke into the house and found three bodies in an upstairs bedroom.

Mary Emma Harris, aged forty-three, her daughter Dora, aged twenty-two and her eighteen-year-old son George lay on a bed. The room had been carefully sealed with felt and sticky tape and a stove, ring and gas jet were all turned on but unlit, discharging deadly gas into the room. Downstairs was an empty bottle of wine containing a little powdery sediment and one of three empty glasses in the bedroom also contained traces of powder. The family doctor would later tell an inquest that he had given Mrs Harris four tablets of morphia for her husband and that he had also prescribed sleeping powders for her after she had a nervous breakdown.

Mrs Harris left two letters, one of which was addressed to her mother-in-law. It read: ‘We must be there to meet dear Fred. We loved each other so. I am sure dear Dora and George would never get over the loss of us both. I am so sorry. God bless us all. No one will ever know what it has cost me to write this.’ Relatives of the family stated that the family were exceptionally close and loving and that Mrs Harris often said that she didn’t know if she could live without her husband.

The cause of all three deaths was gas poisoning and no tests were performed to establish whether or not any of the deceased was drugged. Hearing that, following her breakdown, any strain might have unhinged Mary Harris’s reason, the inquest jury concluded that she committed suicide whilst of unsound mind and that her son and daughter died from gas poisoning, there being no evidence to show how it was administered.

Fifty-three-year-old Frederick Harris is believed to have died early in 1930.

Batheaston

Eighteen-year-old Mary Holloway, who was a servant at Old House Farm, Batheaston in Somerset, died on Christmas Day 1892 from serious burns received two days earlier. Farmer Charles Milsom Smith told an inquest that he and his wife heard a crash coming from the farm kitchen and when Smith went to investigate, he found Mary Holloway enveloped in flames.

Smith rushed Mary outside and rolled her on a bed of turnip greens until the fire was fully extinguished. However, by then Mary had received such terrible burns to the lower half of her body that she died in hospital on Christmas morning. It was thought that the paraffin in a lamp in the kitchen had become heated due to the wick being turned up too high, causing the lamp to explode.

The inquest jury returned a verdict of accidental death.

Devonport

Mrs Parnell of Devonport, Plymouth, gave birth to a baby shortly before Christmas 1875 and, after the birth, her mother offered to help her around the house. On 23 December, the elderly lady made a batch of nourishing broth, which was given to Mrs Parnell and the nurse who was attending her confinement, along with the charwoman and Mrs Parnell’s three-year-old daughter, Susanna Ellen Parnell.

Mrs Parnell and the nurse found the broth too bitter and each ate only a few mouthfuls. Even so, both were violently sick afterwards, while Mrs Parnell’s mother, daughter and the charwoman, who ate much more of the soup, became terribly ill with violent stomach cramps and vomiting. While the two women ultimately recovered, Susanna died on Christmas Eve and doctors determined that her death resulted from eating deadly poisonous monkshood, which the child’s grandmother accidentally mistook for parsley and added to the broth.

Long Ashton

On Christmas Eve 1885, ten-year-old Edward Light was found at Long Ashton, Somerset, having been missing from home for six days. Edward told his rescuers, Mr Bryant and Mr Cook, that he had run away from home because he had spent his school money. Some boys had pushed him into a pool and he had taken his wet boots off, but it was so cold that his feet had swollen and he was unable to get them back on. Chilled to the bone, he clambered inside a hollow tree on the Ashton Court estate to try and get warm but got stuck.

Although he could lie down inside the tree, he was unable to extricate himself. All he could do was put one hand through a hole in the trunk and wave it in the hope of attracting attention. On the first day, he had eaten some orange peel from his pocket but, since then, had eaten or drunk nothing.

Every time a cart had passed on the nearby lane, he had shouted for help but nobody answered his desperate cries until 24 December, when some children playing on the lane finally heard his shouts.

Light, who was said to be ‘reduced almost to a skeleton’, was rushed to the hospital at the Bedminster Union Workhouse. He was first given liquid food and then gradually weaned onto a light diet and, by the end of the first week in January 1887, was said to be well on the way to recovery. His legs were still swollen and his feet affected by frostbite, and doctors thought that it would be some time before he could walk again.

Sydling St Nicholas

As carter George King passed the cottage in Sydling St Nicholas, Dorset, occupied by Herbert and Emily Croad on Boxing Day 1892, he heard groans coming from an upstairs room. Unable to get into the house, King called for assistance and several men from the village tried without success to break in.

Eventually, Emily Croad’s brother was called and, having forced open the back door with a crowbar, he went upstairs. There he found his sister lying on the bed covered in blood, her neck, face and hands slashed. Herbert lay on the bedroom floor, his throat cut and a bloody razor clutched in his hand. Both Herbert and Emily were still alive but very seriously injured.

The Croads were known to have been suffering from depression in recent months. Emily was particularly badly affected, so much so that Herbert had been advised to put her into the asylum. Herbert, who was devoted to his wife, was most unwilling, telling people that he had saved a little money and wanted to enjoy it with Emily first.

Herbert Croad died within a couple of hours but Emily lingered on, although little hope was held out for her recovery. At the inquest on Herbert’s death held in the village by coroner Mr A.G. Symonds, the jury recorded a verdict of ‘suicide while temporarily insane.’ Emily survived the incident – as she was known to have been suicidal, it was widely believed that she had somehow persuaded her devoted husband that they should die together.

Bristol

Without the knowledge of his parents, fourteen-year-old George Parsons Pritchard bought a revolver from a shop and, on Christmas Eve 1888, he and a friend locked themselves in the loft of a brewery, with the intention of firing a few practice shots.

The boys fixed up a cigarette box for a target and were about to start shooting when George’s companion heard noises in the street outside and suggested that they waited until the coast was clear. As George held the revolver and amused himself by looking into one of the chambers, it suddenly went off, shooting George through one eye and killing him instantly.

Bristol coroner Mr Wasbrough opened an inquest immediately after Christmas and the jury returned a verdict of ‘accidental death’, adding a rider condemning the shopkeeper who had sold the gun to Pritchard. Wasbrough agreed, saying that it seemed very reprehensible that a schoolboy should be able to go into a shop and purchase a deadly weapon without any questions being asked.

Trowbridge

Commercial traveller Edward Charles Ingram Richards met his colleague Samuel Gay (or Gray) on the evening of 23 December 1925. The men were representatives for Usher’s Brewery and after calling on hotels in the Bath area, collecting orders and payments, they had supper before heading home to Trowbridge in Wiltshire. The weather had deteriorated and it was snowing heavily, thus Richards didn’t arrive home until the early hours of Christmas Eve.

Richards shared his house in Victoria Road with Walter Stourton and his wife, who were sleeping soundly when they heard him shouting from the garden. Thinking that he had lost his key, Walter called that the back door was open but Richards wanted Walter to come downstairs.

Walter found Richards lying on his back in the garden with a head wound, clutching a recently fired revolver and claiming to have been shot. ‘It was two men,’ he told Walter, clutching his stomach and writhing in agony. He died within minutes of reaching hospital and a post-mortem examination revealed three wounds on the left-hand side of his head, along with a single bullet wound, which had perforated a lung and his heart.

The police started their investigations at the barracks of the Royal Horse Artillery, where they found that two bombardiers had been unaccountably absent at the time of the shooting. When the police discovered that one of them knew Richards and his normal routine, they were taken in for further questioning and, when a spot of fresh blood was found on a raincoat belonging to one of them, twenty-year-old Ian Ronald Maxwell Stewart and twenty-three-year-old Ignatius Emmanuel Napthall Trebitsch Lincoln (aka John Lincoln) were charged with wilful murder.

At their trial at the Wiltshire Assizes in January 1926, there was insufficient evidence to convict Stewart, who was discharged and immediately charged with robbery with violence. Knowing that Richards would be unable to pay the cash he received from his customers into his office because of the Christmas holidays, the two men broke into his house, lying in wait with the intention of robbing him. They shared half a bottle of brandy and had just started to make inroads on a crate of beer when the back door opened and a man’s voice said, ‘The game’s up!’

A shot was fired and Lincoln ran through the house to the front door. Unable to unlock it, he went to the back door and poked his gun round the edge of it, firing three times in rapid succession. Although he hadn’t aimed the gun and couldn’t see where he was firing, Lincoln said that he ‘accidentally’ shot Richards as he fled through the garden trying to make his escape.

Lincoln’s defence counsel insisted that his client was guilty of manslaughter rather than murder, since he was befuddled by alcohol and in fear for his life at the time of the shooting and hadn’t aimed at Richards, so couldn’t have intended to kill him. However, the jury disagreed and found Lincoln guilty of wilful murder.

Stewart’s charge was again dismissed and he was then charged with burglary and eventually sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude. Lincoln’s death sentence was appealed but he was executed by Thomas Pierrepoint at Shepton Mallet Prison on 2 March 1926.

Bristol

Although the theatre doors didn’t open until seven o’clock in the evening, on 27 December 1869 people formed long queues outside the New Theatre Royal at Bristol to see the Christmas pantomime, Robinson Crusoe. Some arrived as early as four o’clock in the afternoon and by six o’clock, the steep narrow gangway leading to the pit and gallery was crammed with hundreds of people.

As the doors opened and the crowd stampeded into the theatre, a woman was seen to trip and fall in the doorway. Several people tripped over her, while those behind continued to push for entrance, unaware that there was an obstruction ahead, scrambling over the fallen in their desperation to secure seats for the performance. Eventually, the police resorted to shouting ‘Fire!’ to try and clear the crowds.

By the time anyone could get to help them, twenty-three theatregoers were unconscious and fourteen at the very bottom of the pile were dead. Fearful of the consequences of cancelling the performance, the theatre manager had the six women, four men and four children carried to the refreshment room, while the injured were rushed to The Bristol Royal Infirmary, where a further four people died.

At an inquest held by coroner Mr H.S. Wasbrough, the jury recorded verdicts of accidental death on Mary Helen Sherwood (16), Thomas Marchant (19), Eliza Lucas (18), Patrick Donovan (15), Alfred Kew (18), Thomas Pearson (21), Samuel Hill (12), John Davis (14), Henry Charles Vining, George Potter (11), Ellen Jones (15), Sarah Ann Bilby (18), Elizabeth Hall (52), Catherine Brewer (16), Joseph Smith (15), Charles Pring (18), William Samuel Alden (21) and Charles Talbot. All eighteen victims were either crushed or suffocated.

Theatre Royal, Bristol, 1905. (Author’s collection)

Bristol Royal Infirmary. (Author’s collection)

Falmouth

When Albert Bateman didn’t return home on Christmas Eve 1942, his wife went to look for him, finding his tobacconists shop in Falmouth, Cornwall, locked up. Concerned, Mrs Bateman contacted the police, who forced the shop door and found sixty-one-year-old Albert lying dead behind the counter. Although he had been battered to death rather than shot, a Webley revolver lay on the counter, which Mrs Bateman confirmed did not belong to her husband.

The police traced the ownership of the gun to Falmouth Docks, where they were told that a man named Gordon Horace Trenoweth had ready access to it. Trenoweth was a married man with five children, who was known to the police for refusing to support his wife. Mrs Trenoweth had lived in a mental institution since 1941 and her husband had recently served a prison sentence for defaulting on his payments for her maintenance.

Trenoweth was arrested at his parents’ house in the early hours of Christmas Day, when he was found to have two packs of cigarettes in his possession, along with a torn banknote that had been repaired with a piece of paper bearing Bateman’s shop letterhead. Later tests showed fibres from his jacket on the revolver and traces of gun oil in his pocket, as well as bloodstains of the same blood group as Bateman.

Although Trenoweth’s father, sister and a man he approached looking for a job all gave him an alibi for the time of the murder, when Trenoweth was tried at the Exeter Assizes, the jury chose to believe the forensic evidence and the testimony from two witnesses, who stated that he had been spending money freely on the night of the murder. They found Trenoweth guilty, although they recommended mercy. The recommendation was not heeded, since Gordon Trenoweth became the last person ever to be hanged at Exeter Prison, keeping his appointment with executioner Thomas Pierrepoint on 6 April 1943.