On the 24th of September in that year three men—Edward Lonegon, Michael Casey, and James Marshall—were tramping to Portsmouth in search of employment, when they met the sailor near Esher. He treated them to drink, and offered to bear the expense of their journey, and they continued together down the road. At the “Red Lion,” in Road Lane, beyond Godalming, where they stopped for refreshment, they were observed by two labouring men who chanced to be in the house, and who, later in the day, followed in their footsteps when returning home. On coming to the Devil’s Punch Bowl they noticed something lying below, amid the heather, that looked like a dead sheep, but on climbing down to examine it, they found it to be the dead body of the sailor they had seen drinking in the “Red Lion.” His villainous companions had knocked him down and killed him, “each agreeing to have two cuts at his throat,” and after stripping the body they had rolled it into the hollow.
An alarm was raised, and the three murderers were overtaken at the hamlet of Sheet, near Petersfield, where they were actually selling the clothes of their victim in a public-house. Arrested here, they were tried at the Spring Assizes of 1787, held at Kingston-on-Thames, were sentenced to death, and hanged on April 7, their bodies being afterwards gibbeted on Hindhead, the scene of their crime. For years afterwards the place was known as Gibbet Hill, and, indeed, the country folk still speak of it by that name. The tall post of the gibbet appears in Turner’s view of Hindhead in the “Liber Studiorum,” and the road is shown winding amid the downs, with a coach in the distance. Turner’s view must be accepted with all reserve, as a view, for he never sank the artist in the mere topographical draughtsman; and the gibbet is quite an effort of his imagination, for even so early as Gilbert White’s time, it was shattered in a terrific thunderstorm, as the old naturalist relates.
But although Turner has exaggerated the ruggedness of Hindhead in his picture, the place is not at all gracious or suave. Cobbett roundly declared that it was “certainly the most villainous spot that God ever made”; and how wild it was in the seventeenth century, before even the old high-road was in existence, we may gather from an entry in Pepys’ Diary of August 6, 1668: “So to coach again, and got to Liphook, late over Hindhead, having an old man, a guide, in the coach with us; but got thither with great fear of being out of our way, it being ten at night.” Hindhead was in the direct line of signalling semaphores between Greenwich and Portsmouth before the days of the electric telegraph, and every day at one o’clock the time was passed down from the Observatory. People used to set their watches by the waving semaphore arms.
Until 1826 the old Portsmouth Road went along the very summit of Hindhead, and its course, although deeply rutted and much overgrown with grass, can still be readily traced near by the great cross of Cornish granite, erected here, 345 feet above the deepest depths of the Devil’s Punch Bowl, by Sir William Erle, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, in 1851, in memory of the murdered sailor. The Latin inscriptions, In luce spes, Post tenebras lux, and others, do not seem particularly appropriate to either the place or the occasion.
The old highway followed the very brink of the Punch Bowl, and was in winter-time extremely dangerous for coaches. To avoid the chance of accident a new roadway was constructed some sixty feet lower, with a substantial earthen embankment on the outer side, to prevent any unlooked-for descent into this precipitous gulf.
THURSLEY
The headstone which was set up to mark the spot where the sailor was murdered has been removed, and placed beside this newer road, where its position renders its legend peculiarly vivid and terrible, although it is couched only in the plainest and least affected of phrases. One side is shown in the illustration, the other repeats the date of its erection, and invokes a curse upon “the man who injureth or removeth this stone”; but whether or no the man who thus invites the wrath of heaven would have included the Ordnance Surveyors, I cannot say. Certainly they have “injured this stone” by carving upon it the Governmental “broad arrow.” The body of the murdered sailor was buried at the little village of Thursley, some two miles distant, and there, in the churchyard, shadowed by dark fir trees, stands a gruesome tombstone, an unconscionable product of local art, with a carving in relief of the three murderers in the act of dispatching their victim. Beneath this melodrama, the circumstances are recounted at great length, and some halting verses conclude the mournful narration.
TOMBSTONE, THURSLEY.