Worcestershire in the Nineteenth Century / A Complete Digest of Facts Occuring in the County since the Commencement of the year 1800

by T. C. Turberville

1844—At the Lent Assizes was tried the Queen v. Smith, being an action brought by William Harris, the parish clerk of Overbury, against the Rev. William Smith, the vicar, for dismissing him from his situation. Mr. Smith alleged that the clerk had been guilty of drunkenness, had read the responses irreverently, and had interrupted the celebration of the sacrament on a particular occasion. Harris denied the whole of these charges, and the present trial was on a return to a mandamus in the Court of Queen’s Bench to ascertain their truth. Various witnesses were examined on both sides: those for Harris asserting that it was Mr. Smith’s eccentricities that alone caused the clerk to err. The jury found that the charges of drunkenness were proved, and that Harris had spoken the responses loudly to annoy Mr. Smith, but that the charge of interrupting the sacrament was not true. The court, thereupon, ordered the verdict to be entered for defendant.

1844—March 23—At Hereford Assizes was tried Bellers v. Chalk and Holl, being an action for libel, said to be contained in a paragraph in the Worcester Herald of the 2nd of December, 1843. Colonel Bund, of Malvern, gave some information to the proprietors of the Herald, on the strength of which they inserted a paragraph charging Mr. Bellers, of Barnard’s Green, with cruelty to his mare, by shutting her up for years in solitary confinement in such a position that she could not lie down. Several statements afterwards appeared in the Herald to the effect that the cruelty to the mare had been abated after the publication of the paragraph, and reporting the proceedings of a meeting, held at Gloucester, for establishing a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. The Lord Bishop of the Diocese presided at that meeting; and Mr. Thomas, the secretary of the Society in London for Preventing Cruelty to Animals, attended, and stated that he had personally inquired into the alleged case of cruelty, and had found the statement in the Herald to be correct. On the trial, Mr. Whateley, Mr. Gray, and Mr. Godson were counsel for plaintiff; Mr. Sergeant Talfourd and Mr. Valentine Lee for the defendants. Acting on the advice of counsel, defendants had not pleaded a justification. The publication of the libel was admitted; of course, no evidence could be offered in justification, and the jury found a verdict for plaintiff, as they were bound to do under the circumstances: damages, £150.

1844—At the Midsummer Assizes, John Bowen, a man of about fifty years, formerly an officer in the navy, was tried on the charge of defacing the parish registers of Croome D’Abitot, and sentenced to seven years’ transportation. It was shown that Bowen was engaged in making out a pedigree for a John Wood, who wanted to establish himself as a relation to the celebrated James Wood, of Gloucester, and had visited the Croome D’Abitot rectory several times for that purpose. While the curate was looking in another direction he tore a leaf out of the register. Mr. Sergeant Talfourd was for the prosecution, and Mr. F. V. Lee for the defence.

The Queen v. Newton, also tried at the Assizes, was a charge against the eccentric barrister of that name, who used to come the Oxford circuit, of having committed perjury, said to have been committed in some affidavits. The presiding judge, Mr. Sergeant Atcherley, stopped the case, as insufficiently supported in the evidence.

1844—At the Michaelmas Quarter Sessions a singular trial took place of two farmers, named Swan and Patrick, who were charged with killing deer belonging to W. L. Childe, Esq., in Kyre Parva park. The witness against them was a boy named Passey, who said he saw the parties accused chase a fine buck into one corner of the inclosure and then shoot it; but there were some discrepancies in his testimony. Both these farmers lived close to Mr. Child, and as the fences were not in the best possible condition, the deer used frequently to get on their land and eat their corn. Mr. Lee made an ingenious speech for the defence, and called many witnesses to character; after which the jury returned a verdict of not guilty, amid the applause of the court.

1845—At the Lent Assizes, eleven poachers were put on their trial for the murder of Thomas Staite, one of the Earl of Coventry’s watchers, who was killed in a very desperate affray which took place between the keepers and the prisoners on the 19th of the previous December. One of them, however, named George Lippett, was admitted as Queen’s evidence; and another, Francis Dingley, while in prison made a full confession of the whole transaction. The keepers and watchers were nine in number, and they encountered the party of poachers at the gate leading into Park Farm, Pirton. A fight with bludgeons took place, in which the keepers were altogether worsted, and one or two of them left for dead. The poachers also fired off two guns, but the shots did not take effect. The unfortunate man, Staite, was found by his comrades, after the affray was over, in a ditch close by the Park Farm house, so badly used that he could not speak; and, indeed, he never uttered a word from that hour. He was taken first to a neighbouring cottage, and then to the Worcester Infirmary, where he died in six days. The identity of all the prisoners, and the part they had each taken in the affray, was very clearly made out by the evidence of four of the watchers and the statement of the approver Lippett. Mr. Godson, in a very able speech for the prisoners, contended that the case was not made out by the evidence of the keepers, and that Lippett was not to be believed; ending with a protest against the game laws generally, as the cause of much injustice and innumerable crimes. The Lord Chief Baron Pollock, before whom the case was tried, told the jury that they might find the prisoners guilty of manslaughter; and, acting upon this hint, the jury returned a general verdict against all the prisoners of “Guilty of manslaughter.” Witnesses to character were then called on behalf of some of the prisoners, and his lordship sentenced them to different terms of transportation as they seemed to have taken an active part or otherwise in the attack upon the keepers. Francis Dingley, Samuel Turvey, Joseph Turvey, and Joseph Tandy were transported for life; Thomas Hooper, William Broomfield, and John Cook transported for ten years; George Brant for seven years; and Thomas Cosnett and William Collins were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. The prisoners were all Pershore men, but the case excited the most intense interest in that part of the county.

1846—At the Midsummer Assizes, Richard Farley, cabinet maker, fifty-three years of age, and Ann Jones, a married woman, were tried for forging the will of William Welch, of Llandilion, near Abergavenny. The will was first produced and attempted to be used in Worcester—hence the trial took place here. Farley was Welch’s son-in-law, and the will conveyed some property at Aston Ingham to him instead of to his own son, William Welch. A number of witnesses declared that the will was not in the handwriting of the deceased, and that one at least of the signatures was written by the prisoner himself. Ann Jones was an attesting witness, and repeatedly asserted the genuineness of the will. Farley was sentenced to fifteen years’ transportation, and Jones to twelve months’ imprisonment.

1847—At the Lent Assizes this year, a trial took place which excited considerable interest—that of Harris v. Grissell, being an action brought by Mr. George Harris, carpet manufacturer, of Stourport, against (really) the Severn Navigation Commissioners, though the ostensible defendants were the contractors of the works—Messrs. Grissell and Peto. Mr. Harris had a mill on the Stour, and he said that owing to the erection of the weir at Lincombe, the water in the Stour had been so pounded up as frequently to stop his undershot wheels, and to render his mill useless. A great number of witnesses were examined on both sides, and the learned judge (Mr. Sergeant Gazelee) having told the jury that there was no defence to the action, they returned a verdict for the plaintiff, with £500 damages; but this extraordinary summing up of the judge’s enabled the defendants to get a rule for a new trial, and the matter never proceeded further.

1847—At the Midsummer Assizes, Harklas Lovell Blewitt, a travelling tinker, was tried for the murder of his wife at Dudley, on the 3rd of June. They were staying at a lodging house, and the wife, to escape the ill-treatment of her brutal spouse, hid herself in the coalhole; he followed her there with a kettle of hot water, and, holding her down with one hand, poured it over her head and shoulders. She was so dreadfully scalded that she died in ten days; but though there was no pretence for saying that it was unintentionally done, the jury, to the amazement of the court, returned a verdict of “Guilty of manslaughter” only, and the fellow was sentenced to transportation for twenty years.

1848—At the Lent Assizes, four men, named Cartwright, Sweatman, Payne, and Turberfield, were charged with breaking into the toll house at Knighton-on-Teme, kept by an old man named John Mound, and his wife, and stealing £115. The burglars used very violent threats towards the poor old people, who most distinctly swore to all four of the men as the parties who robbed and assailed them. They were consequently found guilty, and sentenced to fifteen years’ transportation each. Yet it was afterwards distinctly proved that Turberfield was not engaged in the robbery, and he received a free pardon. Two other men, convicted of burglary at these assizes, on what appeared to be the clearest evidence, were discharged by the Secretary of State, because it was afterwards proved, beyond contradiction, that the crime had been committed by other men.