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Overview
As the iron and steel industries grew in the Victorian period, several villages merged into the town of Scunthorpe, an area with more than its fair share of sordid and bloody secrets. Although mainly rural, the region has been notorious in the annals of crime, from the sixteenth-century rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace to the sensational murder cases of the twentieth century. Some of Scunthorpe’s killings were merely tragic domestic affairs, as industrial workers cracked with stress and alcohol. Other were more appalling, baffling, and the stuff of nightmares to this day.
True crime historian Stephen Wade delves into Scunthorpe’s shadowy past: its bizarre murder-suicides, random slayings, cop-killers, pirates and bandits, cold-cases, night-stalkers and “The Black-Out Terror” of 1941. Centuries of dark scandal from the town’s deceptively tranquil fields to the violent mean streets.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783038046 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pen & Sword Books Limited |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2019 |
| Series: | Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Sales rank: | 1,027,021 |
| File size: | 25 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Smugglers, Pirates and Villains by the Humber
... there were pirate ships sailing this way from Dunkirk ...
It is generally thought that today we have no 'capital punishment crimes' in Britain, but we do: the sentence is mandatory for the offence of piracy when murder is attempted. This is subject to the mercy of the royal prerogative. North Lincolnshire and its coast in the Humber estuary has seen plenty of this, and it is doubtful that much mercy has ever been shown to the villains involved.
In 2003, a piece in the Nostalgia supplement of The Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph gave an account of the Humber keel, the John William, and mentioned that in recent years it had been in the way when customs and excise had to unload a massive load of contraband cigarettes. Somehow, this modern anecdote fits into a long history of smuggling just north of Scunthorpe on the Humber shores.
Since about AD 500 there have been Viking boats raiding the shores, and there must have been hundreds of 'foul deeds' in those early Dark Age years not far from Scunthorpe and Burton. Over the centuries, the villages along from Burton to Barton have been involved in the traffic of political and insurgent factions, and there have even been pirates along that waterway.
In the early seventeenth century a pamphlet was published, giving an account of a particularly effective pirating fleet from the Middle East, and it is clear that this 'Sally fleet' as it is known, was part of a well-established network of villains around the Humber and the marshlands of Hatfield. In fact, at one time the expedition against these slave-gathering vessels was led by William Rainbarrowe, whose son had been brutally killed in Doncaster in 1648.
Edward Peacock, the local Victorian antiquary, relates that there were also pirate ships sailing this way from Dunkirk, and that these became known as 'Dunkirkes'. He also makes it clear that for centuries, the east Coast of Yorkshire and the Humber were open to attack in this way. Much of this history is as yet unresearched, but there is one story, from the Tudor period, that shows what these activities were like. Unbelievably, at that time, no less a person than the Abbot of Whitby was involved in dealing with these privateers and thieves from abroad. The Star Chamber investigation into his business uncovered the fact that he, John Hexham, was in league with a gang of disreputable characters, and that they all bought a ship in their enterprise. Piracy thus had a 'reputable' fence and name in the criminal transactions across the East Riding and North Lincolnshire.
The story of their robberies is a fitting one to begin this narrative of crime in the Scunthorpe area, as some of the articles this gang stole were then called 'osmands' and, as Edward Peacock tells us, these were 'the very best used for the finest purposes, such as arrow-heads, fishhooks. ... And the works of clocks.'
Smuggling in the area has a long history, too. When there was an embargo on the export of wool, for instance, in 1274, a group of Louth men sold sacks of wool to Flemish traders and (using bribes) got them to a port and away from home. There was a notably large-scale operation in this trade in 1785, when at Goxhill no less than ninety tons were put aboard ship to go to France. All that can be said about the piracy and smuggling of gangs through the centuries is that most of their stories are still untold, and the tales that were uncovered illustrate the extent of the trade: the fact that a man could be murdered in Doncaster because of a family link to one side of a faction tells us a great deal about the vendettas that could emerge from these nefarious dealings.
Nothing could really put a stop to this business; not even Sir Robert Walpole's Excise Bill of 1733, nor the formation of a corps of elite 'Riding Officers' in 1698, who could be joined by the dragoons if need be.
As the historian Roy Porter said, 'smuggling gave moonlighting employment along the coastal strips.' The fact is that the Humber provided one of the most hospitable and defensible areas for this kind of 'moonless' nightwork.
Another villain close to the Humber was undoubtedly Dean Fletcher and his very foul deed at Thornton Abbey, not far from Barton. In the late fourteenth century, the Abbot, Thomas de Gretham, was enjoying a liaison with his student, Heloise. In a complex plot involving the Abbot, a tough called 'The Green Devil' locally, and a stolen deed of land ownership, we have a tale of awful punishment, being inflicted on the Abbot by Fletcher (for 'lax living' according to one source) and the victim reputedly immured in the abbey.
In the 1830s, workmen found a secret room, where there was a skeleton on the floor, which turned to dust when touched. It was wearing a monk's habit. It most likely was the Abbot. But there are other candidates for the identity of the remains. A 1935 report talks of a certain Walter Munton who was also an 'evil liver.' As with most of Britain in the last decades of the fourteenth century, there was anarchy around. The 'Green Devil', whoever he was, was keen on robbery and pillage in the area: he had his own gang of followers and they were apparently feared by all in and around Barton.
CHAPTER 2Captain Cobbler and Robert Aske 1536
He [Robert Aske] was dragged through York, but asked Bystanders not to pray for him.
Few people around Scunthorpe and Burton-on-Stather today will be aware that in the 1530s, when Henry VIII and his repressive measures against common people and monastery land were raging, revolutionary leaders were travelling hastily across from Louth and Caistor to board a ferry or race towards important meetings in Doncaster. In 1536, a small army of men from Louth walked to Caistor and that village became a central focus in the story of the Pilgrimage of Grace.
In that year, as a Louth man called Nicholas Melton (a shoemaker) emerged as the leader of the local rebellion and became known widely as Captain Cobbler, there were murders done only fifteen miles from Scunthorpe.
The Pilgrimage accelerated as people had more than they could stand of a series of heartless and rapacious measures which were taken against the provinces: common land was being enclosed and so ordinary people lost rights to grazing and some of their food supplies; Henry had disposed of 1,593 areas of monastic land; direct and indirect taxes were summarily increased. Even worse, he was sending hard-nosed commissioners up north and north east, to extort possessions from the middle classes and bully people in general who were vulnerable.
Northerners (anyone north of the Trent/Severn line) felt very distant from government, and they were often written about as a blunt and barbarous people, part-savages. The grudges were mounting as people were executed for quite minor offences. Action needed to be taken, and it was in Lincolnshire that it all began. The catalyst was the punishment of a local man, the Vicar of Louth, Thomas Kendall. His profound beliefs were challenged and tested by the Henrician regime, and he gave a sermon that can only be described as an invitation to rebel. The church bells rang to communicate a rebellion, and they were rung backwards – a sign that there was trouble brewing.
Captain Cobbler started his work in earnest. He was the leader and he had the nucleus of a gang with him from the beginning. A rebellion across the Humber was heard of, and steps were taken to make a connection, for greater strength. A key figure came through now, one Guy Kyme. He became the link-man and messenger between Robert Aske's men in Yorkshire and Cobbler's Lincolnshire force. Soon, a huge mass of over 3,000 men was walking towards Caistor. This body was not to be crossed, and they had their first killing quite soon. A bunch of King's men were pursued and galloped away, but a servant of Lord Burgh's was grabbed and killed, beaten to death by the mob. Not long after, others were killed, including a man in Horncastle.
The activity in North Lincolnshire came to a head on Hambleton Hill near Market Rasen, and there were so many powerful men involved now, that the whole rebellion was escalating into a national event. It is at this point that Robert Aske made a connection with the Caistor and Barton area. On August 4 at Barton, Aske came off the ferry and, although we know only little about him, he was to have a massive impact on the Pilgrimage. He was a Yorkshireman, with land around Richmond, but also had connections with Aughton, near Howden. This made crossing to Lincolnshire an easy matter for him. In August he made links and associations; and by October he was moving south, passing through Sawcliffe, a few miles north of Scunthorpe, on his way to the Great North Road, accompanied by his nephews.
Aske made a union with the Axholme rebels, and found out that legally, the area around Burton was part of Yorkshire and thus he could appeal to a certain variety of local feeling, all helping the communication process. Aske was to spend a year in negotiations, playing political games, taking part in an accord at Doncaster, and even visiting the King himself at one point, with a guarantee of safe passage. But it was doomed to failure.
Aske was hanged in York in July 1537. We do not really know what happened to King Cobbler. He disappeared from the stage of history during this period. Aske died on market day, on Clifford's Tower. He was dragged through York, but asked bystanders to pray for him. Of course, skirmishes and reprisals went on for some time, but one of the most significant events in English history had had its beginnings and formed the hub of its communication network, just a few miles from Scunthorpe.
CHAPTER 3Lawless Axholme
It could be summed up in the phrase 'stubborn independence'
The area of Axholme, only eight miles to the west of Scunthorpe, has a history teeming with incident and myth, yet it has suffered from the fate of most borderlands in the chronicles: being neglected as neither one nor the other. Is it Yorkshire or Lincolnshire, or some of both? Records of the area often mention Cornelius Vermuyden, the seventeenth century Dutch engineer who managed to convert a large area of the Isle from marsh to good farming country, but even this advance, as Colin Ella makes clear, caused local rebellions and The Drainage saw 'sporadic rioting for almost a century.'
The land in question is along the Trent at the eastern side, from Amcotts down to Gunthorpe, and then to Crowle moors and Wroot in the west. In the centre of all this is the Wesley home of Epworth rectory, and even this place of pilgrimage has not been free of conflict and strife. Something about the Isle generates characters, but also a particular type of enmity and fierce local pride. Some account for the myths around the place by mentioning ley lines; but much of the explanation rests on the distance from any really large settlement in years gone by, and the insular nature of the attitudes bred. It could be summed up in the phrase 'stubborn independence.'
Even when Axholme had a brief self rule, in the Saxon period, there was murder. A deep rift between the Mercian king and Ornulff ended in the latter's banishment. He had had an affair with Elfrida, the proposed future king's wife. Ornulff, sent as an emissary, fell in love with her himself and they married and had a child. When he was told to come home, Ornulff wisely left the country and kept out of the way for a long time.
The story came to a head when Ornulff, in possession of a letter from the Pope, returned home, thinking that all would be forgotten. He was wrong: letter from the Pontiff or not, the man was knifed, and the tale is that Elfrida was ruined and crazed by this and soon the king was defeated. Ornulff's son reigned in Axholme following this. The story shows the basic northern tendency never to forgive and to bear a grudge forever, and that is probably the point of the tale, almost a parable.
The Wesley's home, a prominent tourist attraction today, on the south side of the village, is reputed to have its ghost, but aside from paranormal activity, the life of the Wesley family there tells us a great deal about the law and order – or lack of it – in the Isle in past centuries. Samuel, John's rector father, was always subject to his home and grounds being packed with parishioners rioting, barracking and making their objections to him known. The English custom of 'rough music' was rife then, and as Samuel Wesley was a hard man who treated his family (daughters in particular) unfeelingly, at times he was far from popular.
Part of this rural Lincolnshire rough music was the stang nominy: local women had their own ways of meting out justice to a partner who was violent to a spouse. In Epworth at that time it would have been the 'ran tan song' that explains this:
Now all ye old women, and old women kind,
Get together and be in a mind;
Collar him, and take him to the shit-house,
And shove him over head ...
Added to this treatment would be the visit to the tannery where they would 'skelp' his backside. In Lincoln in 1556, a woman called Emma Kirkby was sentenced to a rough music punishment for adultery: she was to be 'ridden through the city and market in a cart and be rung out with basins.'
Nothing much changed in Victorian times: there was always the threat of riot and disturbance: in Axholme, at Owston, for instance, in 1873, a gang of youths caused fear and trembling in the church by rapping the pews, throwing wheat and yelling at everyone. In 1888, two men attacked a police constable; one of them fired a gun at the man and was lucky to do no harm. He was prosecuted for grievous bodily harm.
The Isle is on record as a place where violence settled many disputes and there is no doubt that rivalry between specific villages is at the heart of some of this. The Haxey Hood game on 6 January still commemorates the old traditions of rough and physical confrontation, as two villages gather all the men together and play a primitive version of football/rugby with a woman's hood.
Local historian, Colin Ella, sums up the Axholme history very well: he has summarised some of the crimes around Epworth, even back to the early seventeenth century, as recorded on the Court Rolls. The constables had a tough task, and perhaps the crimes recorded here are mostly concerned with maintaining the watch and the constables. It is surely symptomatic of the problems of the area when a certain John Fair was in court for failing to find a watch during a full day in June, 1625.
CHAPTER 4Crime and cruelty in the Eighteenth Century
... he broke her leg in a brutal and vicious way, angling it over a doorway and stamping on it.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century it is not difficult to find forms of punishment that can never be squared with the civilised veneer of what has always been called the Age of Reason. In 1757 a woman was burned to death in York for adultery; at Tyburn another woman was burned for coining in 1789. Most of the many hangings that took place were for theft; by a 1736 law, servants stealing from masters could be hanged. In Scotland, in 1697, there had even been an execution for blasphemy.
It is hard to imagine the vulnerability of country people in the eighteenth century; there was no police force, merely village constables. Private law suits were the only course of action, and if a crime was committed against you, your next step was to find a constable and hopefully some witnesses as well.
In North Lincolnshire at this time, Scunthorpe was a tiny dot, along with other villages in the area. Luckily for most inhabitants of the area then, most criminals were inefficient and crime was mostly opportunist. There were highwaymen and footpads, of course. Dick Turpin himself was passing through Axholme to the Goole area around 1730. His favourite northern public house, the Dragon at Welton, is not too far north. But serious crime against the person was not common. For instance, in the 1770s, there were only six cases of murder at Lincoln Assizes, and only one resulted in an execution. In the same decade there were only eight robberies brought to court, and three cases of rape.
Historians have talked about the 'high level of personal violence' at this time, and the literature of the period certainly supports this. The novels of Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding testify to the generally tough and aggressive society of rural England up to the middle of the century. In the area between Epworth and Barton, there were plenty of violent and nasty assaults, in keeping with this trend. A typical crime of that era, repulsive to the modern reader, is the story of one William Paddison of Kirton Lindsey, who 'mayhemmed his wife' – that is, he broke her leg in a brutal and vicious way, angling it over a doorway and stamping on it. He was apparently set on breaking her other leg but neighbours intervened. There was a great deal of savage rage and assault in the family. One of the most terrible has to be the Flixborough man, called Ellis, who attacked his wife Sarah in a way that is beyond all reason. He actually threatened her life on several occasions, but one day set fire to the bed in which Sarah and their child were sleeping. He lit a dry furze bush under them. People reported that shortly before he had stalked her with a pitchfork, threatening to kill her.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths in & Around Scunthorpe"
by .
Copyright © 2005 Stephen Wade.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction,
Chapter 1 Smugglers and Pirates on the Humber,
Chapter 2 Captain Cobbler and Robert Aske, 1536,
Chapter 3 Lawless Axholme,
Chapter 4 Crime and Cruelty in the Eighteenth Century,
Chapter 5 Poisonings in Epworth, 1790s,
Chapter 6 Arsenic and Mary Milner, 1847,
Chapter 7 A Fatal Stabbing in Kirton, 1847,
Chapter 8 Six Months for Manslaughter, Barton, 1851,
Chapter 9 Ralph the Prison Houdini, 1854,
Chapter 10 Convict Stories, c 1800–1860,
Chapter 11 Arson in the Villages, 1861,
Chapter 12 Attempted Murder by Civil War Veteran at Barton, 1869,
Chapter 13 The Landlord Kills his Wife, Owston Ferry, 1883,
Chapter 14 Indecent Assault – or Lies? 1890,
Chapter 15 Poisoning at the Newcastle Arms, 1892,
Chapter 16 A Fight in the Schoolroom, 1892,
Chapter 17 Broughton Attacks, 1892,
Chapter 18 Brutality to his Wife, 1898,
Chapter 19 The Murderer's Suicide Note, 1901,
Chapter 20 A Tragic Suicide, Brigg, 1905,
Chapter 21 The Brute of Manley Street, 1911,
Chapter 22 Murder Talk in the Talbot, 1920,
Chapter 23 Death Sentence for a Teenager: Waddingham, 1931,
Chapter 24 An Attack in Ashby, 1938,
Chapter 25 The Black-Out Terror, 1940–41,
Chapter 26 The Neighbour Thief, 1941,
Chapter 27 Unexplained Death of a Doctor, 1948,
Chapter 28 Murder on Queensway, 1948,
Chapter 29 Robbery with Violence, Laughton, 1953,
Chapter 30 Mother Kills Her Daughter, 1953,
Chapter 31 Arson at Midnight, 1953,
Chapter 32 A Street Stabbing, 1953,
Chapter 33 Terrible Neglect by a Brigg Couple, 1954,
Chapter 34 A Baffling Brigg Drowning, 1954,
Chapter 35 Two Attacks on Police Officers, 1954,
Chapter 36 A Frenzied Killing on Winterton Road: Roberts Case, 1955,
Chapter 37 A Neck-Tie Attack, 1960,
Chapter 38 A Killing in the Steelworks, 1966,
Chapter 39 Armed raider at Bigby Road Post Office, 1968,
Chapter 40 The Unsolved Stephenson Case, 1969,
Chapter 41 Father Attacks Son, 1971,
Chapter 42 The Killer Constable, 1971,
Chapter 43 Double Murder in Grosvenor Street, 1971,
Chapter 44 The Mystery of Christine, 1973,
Chapter 45 Masked Raid by Dangerous Men, 1974,
Chapter 46 The Unsolved Park Murder, Ashby, 1978,
Chapter 47 Destination: Lucy Tower and Greetwell Road,
Sources,