The Little Book of Surrey E-Book

Rupert Matthews

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

The Little Book of Surrey is a funny, fast-paced, fact-packed compendium of the sort of frivolous, fantastic or simply strange information which no-one will want to be without. The county's most unusual crimes and punishments, eccentric inhabitants, famous sons and daughters, royal connections and literally hundreds of wacky facts about Surrey's landscape, towns and villages (plus some authentically bizarre bits of historic trivia), come together to make it essential reading for visitors and locals alike.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction

1. Crime & Punishment

2. Royal Surrey

3. Place Names

4. People & Characters

5. Transport

6. Business & Leisure

7. Religion

8. Literary Surrey

9. Natural Surrey

10. The Rivers

11. Surrey at War

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

Surrey is one of the most charming of English counties, but for those who think they know it, there are some surprises in store. The county is not all suburban gardens, rolling hills and quiet villages. History has been made here, tragedy has struck and fortune has smiled.

Surrey folk today might not notice, but the bridge they drive over may be 700 years old, or might be only the latest in a string of bridges that go back to Roman times. They may, if they go shopping in Epsom, make a purchase in a shop that was once home to Nell Gwyn, the witty mistress of Charles II. Others unknowingly walk on battlefields where brave men fought and died for the causes they believed in.

Those who think Surrey is a peaceful place might be surprised to hear that the army had to be called out to end a riot in Guildford that left houses in flames and a policeman dead. And there have been brutal murders aplenty; some of the killers ended up swinging from a gibbet, but others got away with their brutal crimes.

Not everything in Surrey has been a success either. Take the grandly named Staines, Wokingham & Woking Junction Railway which never got as far as Woking. Then there was the great playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan who moved to Leatherhead to find peace and quiet in which to work, but who got so distracted by the fine fishing that he didn’t write a single word the whole time he was there.

But Surrey is not all about the past. There is plenty to be seen today, be it theatres or country walks, wildlife or fine churches. Wherever you are going in Surrey, slip this book into your pocket and prepare to be surprised.

1

CRIME & PUNISHMENT

HIGHWAYMEN

The Golden Farmer

Bagshot Heath was once reputedly the most dangerous place in England – all because of the activities of a particularly cool, violent and careful highwayman who operated there from about 1647 to 1689. This particular highwayman was known for the guile that he used. He once rode up to a gentleman and told him that there were two disreputable men hanging about the heath and suggested that they travel together for safety. The gentleman agreed, adding that he had 50 guineas on him but that they were sewn into a secret panel of his coat and so would be safe from robbers. After riding for a while, the highwayman remarked conversationally, ‘I believe here is nobody will take the pains of robbing you or me today. Therefore I think I had as good take the trouble upon me of robbing you myself, so pray give me your coat.’ He produced a pistol and a sword to enforce his demands.

A highwayman confronts the gibbet that stood on Bagshot Heath. This area of virtually uninhabited country was a notorious haunt of robbers and criminals of all kinds.

Another victim came in for rougher treatment. Four ladies in a coach were stopped on Bagshot Heath by the highwayman. Three of them handed over their jewellery but the fourth, an elderly Quaker, said she had nothing of value on her. The highwayman punched her to the ground and shouted, ‘You canting bitch, are you so greedy as to lose your life for the sake of Mammon. Come, come, open your purse quickly or else I shall send you out of the land of the living.’ His sword then found the lady’s neck and prodded, at which point she produced a purse of gold coins and a diamond ring.

A highwayman of the early eighteenth century. The years 1690 to 1730 were the heyday of highwaymen as the authorities had not yet instituted an effective force to police the open roads.

One of the puzzles about this particular highwayman was that nobody who was robbed either recognised him or saw him again. It was almost as if he robbed, then vanished. The man’s luck ran out in November 1689 when a former victim recognised him drinking in a tavern in Fleet Street, London, and called the watch. The notorious highwayman of Bagshot Heath turned out to be an apparently law-abiding farmer in Gloucestershire named William Davis. This Davis lived a blameless life on his farm, but went on frequent visits to London returning with large amounts of money that he said he had won at the gaming tables. So much wealth did Davis bring home that his neighbours nicknamed him the ‘Golden Farmer’. He was hanged before the year was out.

The Roaring Girl

One of the few highwaywomen on record also robbed on the heaths of north Surrey. Mary Frith (more famously known as Moll Cutpurse) spent most of her criminal career as a fence, receiving and selling-on stolen goods, but in the conditions of chaos of the English Civil War she decided to try her hand at highway robbery. In 1651 she and her henchmen stopped a coach that was carrying no less a person than Sir Thomas Fairfax, commander-in-chief of the Parliamentary armed forces.

The frontispiece for a version of the popular play The Roaring Girle, which was based on the colourful criminal career of Surrey girl Mary Frith.

She got away with a hefty £250, but Fairfax was furious and had the authority to organise a massive operation against highwaymen near London. Frith was caught, but bought her freedom by paying a fine of £2,000 – then a colossal sum of cash. She then wisely turned honest to evade the notice of the authorities. She died in 1659 and left £20 in her will to fund a party for named individuals should England ever become a kingdom again, which it did the following year. A play about her life, called The Roaring Girle, was written with her assistance.

The Butcher of Bagshot

James Whitney was a butcher’s son from Hertfordshire who tired of the hard work involved in his father’s trade at a young age. He then ran off to London to lead a life of petty crime, heavy drinking and wanton womanising.

In 1683, at the age of twenty-three, Whitney decided that he needed to improve himself. He bought himself an elegant suit of fine clothes together with a rapier and a pistol, then stole the best horse he could lay his hands on and became a highwayman. Because many of the first highwaymen had been gentlemen fallen on hard times through supporting the king in the Civil War, the criminal classes looked up to highwaymen as being a social cut above mere pickpockets and burglars. Whitney ostentatiously lived up to the ideal by wearing flashy jewellery, exquisitely tailored suits and behaving with impeccable politeness at all times – even when holding a gun to a man’s head he remembered to say please and thank you.

By 1690 Whitney was leading a gang of some fifty men. Not all of them rode with him, some lolled about in inns looking for rich victims, others fenced stolen goods and at least one worked for the Surrey magistrates to keep an eye on what they were doing. It was this spy who reported that Mr William Hull had sworn that he would one day watch Whitney ride his horse backwards – a reference to the fact that men to be hanged were taken to the gallows tied sitting backwards on a horse. Whitney led his gang to waylay Hull a week later. The unfortunate man was robbed, then tied backwards on his saddle and let loose across Bagshot Heath while the highwaymen jeered at him.

A contemporary engraving of James Whitney in prison awaiting execution. the inset shows his famous encounter with William Hull.

Whitney was getting bolder. One of his spies reported that a gentleman in a coach was carrying a chest filled with gold and silver coins and was escorted by a dozen dragoons. Whitney rounded up forty of his gang and launched an attack on the dragoons and the coach. But his spy had got things wrong: the twelve dragoons were only the advance of a guard totalling over fifty men. The gentleman in the coach was the Duke of Marlborough, hero of the wars against the French and he was not about to hand over his army’s pay chest to a common highwayman. A pitched battle ensued that saw ten of Whitney’s men killed and others captured and wounded. One of those wounded men talked to save his own life and Whitney was soon arrested. He was hanged in December 1692. Mr Hull was watching.

Jack Rann

Perhaps the best dressed highwayman active in Surrey was Jack Rann, nicknamed ‘Sixteen String Jack’ because he wore sixteen ribbons about his knees – then a great fashion among gentlemen. Officially Rann was a self-employed coachman who hired himself and his coach out to whomever had need of it, but few people ever saw him work. The act was merely a cover for his criminal activities. Like Whitney before him, Rann ostentatiously adopted fine clothes and fine manners, especially when at work on the roads. In 1773 he appeared at the Barnet Races in a blue silk three-piece suit trimmed with lace woven from pure silver thread, and he created quite a sensation. When he was finally arrested in September 1774 he called for a tailor to make him a new suit of pea green wool trimmed with silver lace, and he bought a selection of ruffled linen shirts so that he could have a fresh shirt for each day of his trial. After being found guilty he threw a series of parties in prison, the last of which was for seven of his girlfriends. He was hanged the next day, in yet another new suit.

A contemporary engraving of Jack Rann at his trial. Rann was a notorious criminal, but was at least as well known for his outstanding fashion sense.

UNSOLVEDMURDERS

The Wrecclesham Groom

On 17 April 1904 the body of sixteen-year-old horsegroom George White was found in Forest Row, Wrecclesham. He had been hit over the head with a heavy stick, after which his throat had been cut. Police discovered that shortly before, White had started courting a girl named Mary who had previously been seeing an eighteen-year-old named Frank Fry. Fry was arrested, questioned and charged with murder. However, the police were unable to find any evidence firmly linking him to the murder so, despite a fair amount of circumstantial evidence, he was set free. The crime was never solved.

The Hogg Sisters

At 5 p.m. on 11 June 1906 the postman called at the home of the elderly Hogg sisters in Heathfield. The door was open but nobody answered his call, so he looked inside to find Mary Hogg, sixty-eight, lying dead on the floor. The other sister, Caroline, aged sixty-two, was lying beside her, alive, but drenched in blood. Police and a doctor were called. Both women had been struck on the head with a hammer and then stabbed with a knife but neither weapon was to be found. When she recovered her senses, Caroline said that a scruffy-looking man had knocked on the door claiming to be unemployed and asking for food. Mary had not liked him and had refused, whereupon the man burst in and attacked the two women. Nobody was ever arrested for the murder and assault.

The Cutt Mill Killings

On the evening of 8 October 1932 an odd-job man called at Cutt Mill to discuss some work with the owners, Mr and Mrs Keen. He found Mrs Keen lying dead on the kitchen floor with her throat cut and a meal cooking on the stove. He ran off to fetch the police. The police quickly found Mr Keen floating dead in a nearby pond and that a large sum of money that the Keens had owned was missing. Almost as quickly the police found a gamekeeper in nearby woods who told them that he had seen a man acting suspiciously in the woods near Cutt Mill that afternoon, and said the man was a local called Godfrey Nobes. The police promptly arrested Nobes, who was found to own a jacket with bloodstains on it. At his trial, Nobes claimed the blood came from a nosebleed. There was no other evidence against him and he was found not guilty. Nobes immediately booked himself a ticket to Australia and was never heard from again. In 2002, Nobes’ jacket was subjected to new tests that showed the blood was not his and that it had sprayed from in front, not fallen from above. Nobes had been guilty, but he had got away with it and the case remains officially unsolved.

SENSATIONAL MURDERS

The Unknown Sailor

On 22 September 1786 a sailor stopped at the Bear Hotel in Esher. He told the landlord that he was walking to Portsmouth from London to look for work on a ship. The sailor was clearly better set up than most, for he paid his overnight bill with a golden guinea and pocketed the silver change. The same sailor stopped again at the Red Lion near Thursley. He left next morning in the company of three other men who had stayed the night at the inn. Later that day two cottagers spotted a dead body, stripped naked and lying in the Devil’s Punch Bowl a couple of miles south of Thursley. They carried the body to the Red Lion where the landlord recognised it as that of the wealthy sailor. Men were sent riding in all directions, and one found the three men in Petersfield in the process of selling the dead man’s clothes. They were arrested, tried and hanged beside the Portsmouth Road where it curves around the Devil’s Punch Bowl. The gibbet was still there in the 1820s, but has now been replaced by an upright stone which bears the inscription:

Erected in detestation of a barbarous murder committed here on an unknown sailor on Sepr. 24th 1786 by Edwd Lonegan, Michale Casey and Jas Marshall, who were all taken the same day and hung in chains on this place.

THE CHALKPIT MURDER

On 30 November 1946 a dead body was found dumped in a chalkpit at Woldingham. The body was soon identified as that of John Mudie, a barman from Wimbledon. Police rapidly found that Mudie had been seeing a woman named Maggie Brook and concluded that Brook’s long-term lover, Thomas Ley, was the prime suspect. That was when they hit a problem: Thomas Ley was not only a very rich and well-respected businessman, he was also a former MP and minister in the Australian Government. Treading carefully, the Surrey police contacted the Australian police. They found that – although nothing had been proved – Ley was suspected of at least two murders in Australia and that some of his business dealings had been highly dubious. The break came when a man working for Ley told police that he had been paid by Ley to follow Mudie for some days before the murder – Ley’s story had been that the Mudie was a blackmailer. Ley was found guilty of the murder, but was judged to be insane and was sent to Broadmoor where he remained until his death.

THE PRINCE OF WALES’ NURSE

On 11 June 1854 a man walking down Church Street, Esher, noticed a dark liquid oozing out from under a front door. He bent down and was horrified to find it was blood. The man kicked the door open to find a woman lying on the floor with her throat cut and a razor lying beside her. He staunched the blood with a handkerchief while shouting out to passers-by to fetch a doctor and a policeman. Both arrived promptly and while the doctor tended the woman, PC Martell investigated the rest of the house. He found six children, all dead, who had had their throats cut. The woman was found to be the householder, Mrs Mary Brough, a local wet nurse who had tended the Prince of Wales during Queen Victoria’s visits to nearby Claremont. Her husband, George Brough, had left her two days earlier telling friends that he suspected Mary of having an affair. He vowed that he would take the children away from her as soon as he had found a house to rent. When Mary Brough recovered consciousness it was quite clear that she was insane. She calmly confessed to the murders of her six children and was later sent to an asylum.

THE CHURCHYARD MURDER

On Sunday 4 August 1901 Mr and Mrs Alfred Heaver of Westcott were walking to the morning church service, along with most of the other villagers. They had just reached the gate to the churchyard when a young man stepped up to them and said, ‘Hello, Alfred.’ The man then pulled out a revolver and shot Mr Heaver in the chest. Mr Heaver collapsed, whereupon the man bent forward, put the gun to the wounded man’s head and fired twice more. The man then calmly walked off towards Dorking railway station. Having recovered from their shock and horror, four of the villagers gave chase. When the man saw them, he turned the gun on himself and blew his brains out. It transpired that the gunman was Mrs Heaver’s brother, who had an imagined grievance against his brother-in-law.