leading physicians of the chief watering places in the kingdom; and at his hands patients receive the most scientific treatment, he having been the first to introduce, many years ago, the electrolytic treatment, so effective in internal cases.
A “Home for Gentlewomen,” in reduced circumstances, and needing the Woodhall treatment, was established in 1894 by the present writer, in co-operation with Mr. Cuffe, as hon. medical officer. It is under the patronage of his Grace the Duke of Rutland, and other distinguished persons. It was at first located in two bungalows, but now occupies a roomy residence on the Horncastle-road. It has been very generously supported, and has proved a great boon in many needy cases.
The annals of the Woodhall neighbourhood are not without their tragic features; and deeds of lawlessness have occurred equal to anything of the kind recorded in modern times.
On June 22nd, in the year 1822, a young man named Stennet Jeffrey was returning from Horncastle Fair to the farm of his employer, Mr. Warrener (still occupied by members of the same family), when, as he was passing along the footpath through a part of Whitehall Wood, called “the Wilderness,” he was attacked by, as was supposed at the time, two men against whom he had given information of their poaching. They were accompanied by a female named Sophy Motley, still remembered by some of my informants as a big, masculine woman. After a desperate struggle for his life, a track being trampled down round the tree, by which he tried to elude them (the grass, as tradition says, never growing again afterwards), he was overpowered and foully done to death. His body was found thrown into the ditch near at hand, with the throat cut. They carried off his watch, which he had bought at the fair that day, and his money. A sovereign was found near the spot a few years afterwards by a man who was ploughing in the adjoining field. The present writer remembers being told in after years, by a man living at Woodhall, who was at the time working in a field not far off, that he heard cries for help, but did not know what they meant, and so the poor fellow was left to struggle unaided in the unequal conflict. The tree has been seen by the writer, round which he tried to escape. It stood at the south-west end of the path through the wood, about two miles from Woodhall Spa, and was inscribed with the rudely-cut names of many a visitor to
the spot. The parties to the murder were supposed to have come from Coningsby Moor, and this was confirmed by the fact that they afterwards stopped for refreshment at a small public house kept by Mrs. Copping, at Fulsby, which lay in the direction of Coningsby Moor. Near there some bloodstained clothes were found concealed in a hedge. A reward of £100 was offered for their apprehension. The woman Copping, at the public-house, was, it is said, fully aware of their guilt, but dared not say anything about it. The two men were convicted, and transported for life. The woman Motley was arrested on suspicion, but there was not sufficient evidence to convict her. In after years a man at Coningsby, named Paul Tomline, confessed on his deathbed that he had been a third party to the murder, having assisted in holding Jeffrey down while his throat was being cut. It is further stated that the woman, Sophy Motley, on her deathbed, said that the stolen watch would be found at the bottom of her box.
In the forties and fifties poaching was carried on in so openly defiant a manner, and on so formidable a scale, as is seldom heard of in these days. The writer was a party concerned in the following incident, not, be it said, in the immediate neighbourhood of Woodhall, although within easy reach of it. While he was visiting a worthy baronet for the purpose of shooting with him, they were informed by the head-keeper, as they met him one morning after breakfast, that he had received a private intimation that a gang of poachers, living in a neighbouring town, had chartered a special train to bring them down, on the following evening, to shoot some of the preserves, the line of railway skirting the property. We at once decided to give them a warm reception. This was not an entirely new thing for which we were unprepared, and the keeper had a most powerful mastiff, a monster Cerberus, who could plant his forepaws on the stoutest man’s shoulders and pull him down. The baronet’s only son, the writer’s great friend, with whom he had walked many a league in the Alps, and many a mile—with its “bittock”—over the Scotch moors, was “keen for the fray.” No less so was the writer. As the estate comprised three parishes, and it was not known at what point the poachers would “detrain,” it was evident that we should have an extended frontier to protect, and it was decided at once to despatch a messenger to the owner of an adjoining estate, the M.P. for the Division, asking for the loan of his keepers, to
co-operate with our own. Watchers were to be sent to various points, swift-footed vedettes, to come into immediate touch with the enemy on their arrival, and to report the direction taken by them, and their number. Everything was arranged in good time before the morning was over. It was settled that the keeper was to come to the hall at 9 p.m., when the son and the writer would be ready to join them. We were none of us to take firearms, but to be furnished with stout sticks. The evening passed slowly, in our eagerness for the “joust.” But at nine o’clock the keeper came with a look of disappointment on his countenance. News had got abroad of the preparations we had made for the gang’s reception; an ally, lurking near, had telegraphed that it would not be safe for them to venture on their raid, and the train had been countermanded. Since then the genial baronet has “crossed the bar,” as a Lincolnshire poet hath it; but of late the writer has had the pleasure, almost annually, of meeting her ladyship at Woodhall Spa. She was brought up in a parish closely connected with Woodhall, and she may almost be said to return to her “native heath” to renew her years.
The reader will please excuse this digression, as it illustrates the condition of things under which occurred the incident of local history which I am now about to give.
A no less atrocious murder than that in the Wilderness was committed, within less than a mile of the same place, at Well-Syke Wood, which again is about two miles from Woodhall Spa. The shooting of the wood belonged to the Rev. John Dymoke, afterwards the champion, who rented it from Lord Fortescue. In the year 1850, the head keeper, Richard Tasker, received a written intimation that a gang of poachers intended to visit the wood on a certain night, and the writer of the letter recommended him, for his own sake, to keep away. Tasker, however, was lodging not far from the wood, with a small farmer named Emanuel Howden, who also occasionally acted as a watchman; and the two men, accompanied by the “rabbiter,” James Donner, went to the wood, to protect their master’s pheasants. Howden hung back, not liking the undertaking; Donner went off to watch the wood from another point. Presently a shot was heard, and on Howden and Donner coming to Tasker, they found him lying on the ground severely wounded, and he died the following day. It was a bright moonlight
night, [21a] and Donner tried, for a time, to follow the poachers, but they eluded him. This occurred in a field just outside Well-Syke Wood, at the north-west corner, then occupied by William Hutchinson, grandfather of the present tenant, whose house adjoins the Horncastle-road, some two miles from Woodhall Spa. Most of the poachers were believed to have come from Horsington; two of them, brothers, named Bowring, and a third, Pearson Clarke, and another named Hinds; a man named Stennet was also arrested on suspicion; but they were all eventually discharged, there being no means of identifying them, as the murdered man was the only one who came to close quarters with any of them. Along with these, it is believed there was also a man named Joseph Kent, from Tattershall Thorpe, who is supposed to have fired the fatal shot. As Tasker approached the wood, this man came forward and recommended him to go home. Tasker called out that he was not yet going home, and that he knew him, whereupon Kent, finding that he was recognised, fined the shot. [21b]