by Peter Moore
In concluding our account8 of this tragical event, we wish to caution our readers not to prejudge the case against the prisoners, more especially Banks and Barnett; though two atrocious murders have been committed; they may be innocent of participation in them; they still have to be tried by God and their County; may the Jury calmly weigh every fact that has a favourable bearing towards them – and, if innocent – God grant them a true deliverance. Let justice be done at all events.
Press involvement had long tainted the objectivity of legal procedures. In 1828 Justice Gaslee at the Old Bailey had complained, ‘It was much to be lamented that … no case now occurred … which was not forestalled by [accounts in the newspapers] which created a prejudice against accused persons from which it was very difficult, if not impossible, to divest themselves.’ The trial for the Elstree murder9 in 1823 was notoriously marred by press intrusion. The chief suspect John Thurtell, a frivolous libertine who had killed a fellow gambler after an argument, was falsely accused by The Times of having murdered before, and the Morning Chronicle managed to refer to all three suspects in the case as ‘the murderers’ before any verdict was reached. The Elstree murder ended up generating so much public attention that two plays telling the story were scheduled for the weeks before the trial. Eventually Thurtell managed to have his trial postponed for a month to allow the excitement to subside, but this did little to improve his chances, and it was said that a crowd of 40,000 watched his execution.
Although the reports of the Oddingley murders did not plunge to such depths, even outside the county the case remained a distracting sensation. Long accounts of the crimes were published in London, Canterbury, Newcastle and Edinburgh, and across the sea in Belfast and Dublin. Each retelling of the story adopted a different slant, attributing the murders variously to the evils of the tithing system, the wickedness of the farmers or the obstinacy of Parker.
In particular, attention was turning to Captain Evans. If Clewes was to be believed, then the Captain was the most culpable of them all. He had organised the opposition to the tithe. He had cursed Parker more violently than anyone else. On Midsummer night Heming had turned to him for protection, and it was on Evans’ orders that he had hidden at Netherwood. On 25 June events had been driven by the Captain, who had improvised, summoning one of his wolfish contacts – James Taylor – to remove Heming for good. How could this behaviour have gone unpunished? How could the Captain have expired peacefully in his own bed, rather than swing from the gallows before the eyes of a pitying crowd?
This puzzle was solved by the growing number of accounts of the Captain’s miserable death. Papers dwelt on the report of sleepless nights, tormented visions and wild furies that characterised Evans’ last days. Berrow’s soared to new heights of imagery, evoking the ‘scorpion stings of conscience’10 and on Saturday 20 February the Ipswich Journal added,
Captain Evans, who in May last,11 passed to ‘that bourne from whence no traveller returns,’ and whose name has been mixed up with the diabolical murders at Oddingley, appears to have been singularly visited with compunctious feelings of conscience, after those acts had been committed. An aged man named Doone, engaged with the monster, after his participation in the crimes, as servant; but such was his turbulent character, such his dread of persons approaching the house, lest apprehension should follow their entry, that ingress was rendered sometimes troublesome, in consequence of the doors and window shutters being kept in a state of closure and bolted; but this fear seems to have somewhat subsided as the case became involved in perpetuity and mystery. These agitated movements, however, plainly betokened that there was something within that harrowed the soul, and held him a felon in his own mind until the day that death ‘marked him as his own’.
More unsettling accounts seeped out into the newspapers. There were reports of neurotic swearing and fervent prayers. At times both Heming and Parker would loom horribly over his bedside as Evans quivered in their shadows below. While Clewes’ suffering had been portrayed through subtle stories of barroom slips, heavy drinking and insomnia, the Captain’s torments were presented in a more dramatic and unnerving way to a readership familiar with the concepts of punishment and atonement. These were not just themes preached from the pulpit but ones that featured heavily in contemporary literature. Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, a towering literary figure of the day, lamented in a passage which seemed eerily relevant to the Captain’s plight, ‘Memory brought madness with it,12 and when I thought of what had passed, a real insanity possessed me; sometimes low and despondent, I neither spoke nor looked at anyone, but sat motionless, bewildered by the multitude of miseries that overcame me.’
There are more parallels with Thomas Hood’s ballad The Dream of Eugene Aram, which was composed in 1828, just two years before Heming’s bones were discovered. This enormously popular work revisited the story of Eugene Aram, an eighteenth-century schoolmaster and philologist executed in 1759 for the murder of Daniel Clark. Aram had killed Clark 14 years earlier and concealed his body in a shallow grave near Knaresborough in Yorkshire. Aram then left the area and started a new life in King’s Lynn in Norfolk, where he worked at a school as an usher. These are the years in which Hood’s ballad is set, depicting Aram as a kindly, able man with a blackened soul and a terrible secret.
Hood’s Aram is a ‘melancholy man’ detached from the happy society and beautiful countryside that surrounds him. One day Aram comes across a schoolboy reading the story of Cain and Abel. He sits with the boy and begins to talk of Cain ‘And, long since then, of bloody men / Whose deeds tradition saves / Of lonely folks cut off unseen / And hid in sudden graves.’ Aram continues, explaining to the schoolboy,
He told how murderes walk the earth
Beneath the curse of Cain, –
With crimson clouds before their eyes,
And flames about their brain:
For blood has left upon their souls
Its everlasting stain
Did the Captain suffer like Aram? Did he retain the same clear picture of the murder scene? Had Heming’s or even Parker’s blood stained his soul as Daniel Clark’s had stained Aram’s? These misfortunes were all suggested in the newspaper accounts of his death and supported by the testimony of his housekeeper, Catherine Bowkett. But could it be that these accounts were exaggerations? That the Captain suffered no more than any elderly invalid with an iron will and a thirst for life? The stories of frenzied fits might have been influenced by the social and cultural mores of the time. As the Georgian era drew to a close and the Victorian age beckoned, people were becoming more concerned with questions of personal morality, guilt and repentance. Felons like Aram and Evans were expected to suffer, and just as Aram had been mythologised by Thomas Hood, the Captain may have received the same fate at the hands of his housekeeper and the newspapers.
Ballads and woodcuts combined in The Worcestershire Murders, a broadsheet printed by W. Wright in February 1830 and sold in Birmingham
Meanwhile relatively little attention was given to James Taylor, who according to Clewes had dealt Heming the fatal blows. The Morning Chronicle published the story about the communion plate at Hampton Lovett and how Taylor had escaped due to a ‘legal quibble’, but the Liverpool Mercury was typical of many regional newspapers, doing little more than observing, ‘James Taylor was a farrier at Droitwich,14 he is dead.’
The newspapers were not the only medium to spread the story. By mid-February three woodcuts published by a W. Wright of Birmingham charting the Oddingley case were circulating. The first shows Heming’s head peeping malevolently out from a hedgerow as he levels his gun at Parker. The second depicts Heming’s murder the following day: Taylor with his blood stick held high in the midnight gloom, the scene lit only by the lazy light of the Captain’s lantern. The third of the set shows two men (presumably Pierpoint and Smith) wearing tall hats and greatcoats pointing in astonishment at the exposed bones. Four other figures are shown: one must be Charles Burton, who is leaning on his shovel w
ith a satisfied expression on his face, while the others (perhaps members of the Waterson family) look on, aghast.
These woodcuts were published on a single broadsheet which also featured the transcript of a street ballad inspired by Burton’s discovery. With access to newspapers still limited and literacy largely confined to small areas, the street ballad was an essential link in the dissemination of any sensational story – murder, divorce, affair or fraud. They were sung to a familiar rhythm by balladeers outside shops, public houses or markets. Many ballads have been lost, but this one survives. It begins:
The greatest of all miracles13
Is going to unfold
Of two atrocious murders
As true as ever told
A horrid band of miscreants
A cruel plot did lay
Against Parker their Church Minister
To take his life away
One Heming there a carpenter
They did send for with speed
And promise to him fifty pounds
If he would do the deed
And for the sake of cursed games
Until their voice did yield
And Mr Parker soon he shot
Within a lonesome field
This ballad is likely to have appeared very early in February, shortly after Clewes’ confession, as it includes information that could only have been drawn from that document. It pins the blame squarely on Clewes: ‘A strong suspicion fell on Clewes / being one of the crew/ connected in both murders / of Heming and Parker too’. No other farmers are mentioned at all – not Captain Evans, John Barnett or George Banks. It is an example of how street ballads could distil a story in a simple linear narrative to render it comprehensible, but it demonstrates how Clewes was continuing to receive little sympathy from the general public.
A second ballad survives. It is different in tone, more didactic and literary, and it sees the Oddingley murders through a disapproving Christian eye, as evil drifts imperceptibly into the parish, subverting its inhabitants and poisoning the air. Instead of explaining Heming’s disappearance, it dwells on the farmers’ fate, particularly that of the Captain (‘Ill thoughts to drown, he deeply quaff’d / Th’ intoxicating bowl; / But madness curs’d the frequent draught, / And horror fill’d his soul’) and Clewes (‘He droop’d, an alter’d, broken, man, / Cowering ‘neath human eyes. / Like one guilt-stain’d – so gossip ran – / But who on such relies?’).
Whereas the first ballad is populist, the second is a morality tale, its imagery and frequent references to the scriptures designed to shock and provoke. Oddingley’s sunny lanes and fertile fields form a blithe and bucolic scene, but even here there is evil. Heming is depicted as a personification of sin, creeping invisibly through the parish with terrible intent. The Captain and Thomas Clewes, who are responsible for Heming’s appearance, will suffer divine vengeance. All of them are damned.
As the ballads and engravings circulated, other publications continued to emerge. Three chapbooks were printed and distributed in both Worcester and London, where the Morning Chronicle continued its steady coverage of the case: ‘Publications, taking all shapes15 and bearing many names are daily issuing from the Press upon the above theme [the Oddingley Murders]. A Mrs Sherwood, the authoress of Stories for Infant Minds, has unfolded a tale, and a Rev. Gentleman, in a pamphlet replete with quotations from Macbeth & the Scriptures, has, in the sublimest language, enlarged upon the Providence that never fails to discover the murderer,’ one report concluded.
As news of the crimes continued to swirl across the country, Clewes, Banks and Barnett remained in gaol. Of the three, Banks took his confinement most harshly, the Worcester Herald noticing ‘the alteration which had taken place16 in his person since his apprehension’. Initially Banks refused to see anyone, and only at the end of February did he talk to Mrs Parks, his landlady. Others were refused altogether. ‘It pains me to see them,’ Banks told one of the turnkeys.
Clewes seemed in brighter spirits. For most of February he remained ‘cheerful and composed’ and was visited by his wife and children. Only at the end of the month, as the trial drew near, did he succumb to a bout of depression. In another ward John Barnett remained stoical, stoutly protesting his innocence and his confidence that he would soon be acquitted. His chief concern, it was said by his visiting family, was the danger the gaol posed to his delicate health.
The incarcerated farmers had been far from idle. Despite Banks’ protestations in the Talbot Inn that he wanted no legal adviser, he had quickly changed his mind once the gravity of his situation had become apparent. In early February he engaged Spurrier and Ingleby of Birmingham to conduct his defence. Shortly after, perhaps in an attempt to present a united front against Clewes, Barnett had also signed with the firm.
Clewes did not have the resources of the other men. His years as an aspiring young farmer at Netherwood were well behind him, and at 59 years old his finances were as worn as his body. He judged himself too poor to afford the counsel of attorneys or solicitors and stated that he would have to rely on the presiding judge to ask questions on his behalf. However, in early March Clewes’ relatives hired Stephen Godson, a local attorney. Godson was not of the rank or education of Banks’ or Barnett’s representatives, but he did give Clewes access to a degree of legal expertise.
The brief for the prosecution was passed to William Smith, the coroner, and his firm, Smith and Parker. Smith was at the height of his reputation following his successful inquest, and knowing the facts of the case far better than any other lawyer, it made perfect sense for him to take the role of state prosecutor. Over the next few weeks, sergeants, King’s councils and barristers were added to the growing number of legal representatives. They would each play a role when the assize judges had concluded their business in Oxfordshire and completed the 50-mile journey to Worcester.
The legal tussle ahead would be decided by the finest of subtleties. While English law remained highly technical and afforded prisoners various routes of escape, the system favoured the prosecution. None of the defendants would be given notice of the specific case to be answered until the day of their trial, and the prosecution was not compelled to disclose the material it was planning to use, raising the unnerving possibility of surprise witnesses. Furthermore, there was no court of appeal, meaning that judgements were usually final.
William Smith spent much of February preparing his case, faced with the troubling question of whether to bring additional charges against the men. The 1826 statute repealing the need for the principal perpetrator to be first convicted raised the possibility of a prosecution for Parker’s murder, but this, as Smith conceded in his notes, was unlikely to succeed. There was a much stronger chance of convicting the men for Heming’s killing. But should additional charges be laid in addition to those brought by the inquest? Was Clewes merely an accessory to the murder or was it possible that he had landed the fatal blow himself?
In his city office William Smith had his clerks draw up a detailed document entitled The Case for the Prosecution. This survives today and much of what is known about the Oddingley case comes from it. On the first page Smith outlined his intention to prosecute all three of the prisoners as accessories before the fact in Parker’s murder as well as for their involvement in Heming’s. He collected together proofs of the coroner’s inquest in 1806, minutes from Captain Evans’ and John Barnett’s interrogations at the Crown Inn in 1806, all the depositions taken informally by Reverend Pyndar and copies of the voluminous evidence given at the coroner’s inquest over the past few weeks.
On 7 March, little more than a month after the inquest had concluded, the assizes arrived for the Lent session in Worcester. At least ten different journalists from newspapers across the country were waiting in the city, where for weeks the Worcester Herald had been promising readers a special edition containing ‘a full and accurate Report of the Trials of the above Assizes and more particularly of that of Thomas Clews and Others for the murder of Heming’. It
s rival, Berrow’s Worcester Journal, reassured its readers, ‘we shall use every exertions to furnish a full report in our journal published that evening [11 March]. If the trial is not concluded when we go to press, we shall on the following day continue the report in A Second Edition.’
The entry of an assize judge into a town was intended to be an impressive affair, a vivid and lasting symbol of the Crown’s power before its subjects in the provinces. Late on Sunday 7 March Justice Joseph Littledale was met at the county boundary and escorted into the city by the high sheriff to the ringing of the cathedral bells. Spring was advancing and only the cold breeze lingered as a reminder of the frosty winter weather. The Star and Garter, Unicorn and Rein Deer hostelries were already busier than usual, the Morning Chronicle17 noting that the ‘innkeepers are in eager expectation of a plentiful result, and look proportionally smiling and jolly’.
The article continued,
With respect to Oddingley itself, the excitement to visit it is in a great measure passed away, for the barn where the body of Heming for so long lay undiscovered is razed to the ground – the hole that served for his grave is filled up, and the bones of the murderer are long since removed. With all of these drawbacks to the scene of action, the curiosity of the public mind naturally turns to those it presumes to be the living monuments of the transaction; and, therefore, instead of Oddingley being the great attraction for the marvel-hunters and wonder-lovers, the run is all in favour of Worcester, with an anxious expectation for the result of the trial.