by Peter Moore
Heming had joined the ranks of the misty Georgian underworld, a concealed society of beggars, petty thieves, sharpers, rustlers, dossers and cheats; a class of entrenched criminals who festered in gloomy, unseen corners. His ability to source such a wide variety of products suggested that he may have had links with the smuggling gang at Trench Wood. Perhaps he was the resident of the robber’s den discovered in 1805, less than a year before? No proof of this was ever presented to the authorities, but a report in Berrow’s Worcester Journal as far back as March in 1801 records, ‘Committed to our house of correction8 by the Rev. Arthur Onslow … of Worcester, Richard Heming, on suspicion of stealing out of the building of George Brooke at Kinlet, an iron mattock, a chisel, several boards and other things.’ Whether this was our Richard Heming or not is once again uncertain as Kinlet lay almost 20 miles and a good day’s walk to the northeast of Droitwich, but the details fit with the pattern in his behaviour.
Whatever scrapes with the law Heming had endured in the past six years, in the early months of 1806 he was at large in Oddingley, continuing his eccentric lifestyle: begging cider, bothering villagers, appearing from behind hedgerows one moment before vanishing into byways the next. Shades of Heming’s character can be found in Great Expectations, in the wretched biography of the convict Abel Magwitch, who confesses to Pip shortly after his appearance that he spent many years in his youth ‘Tramping, begging, thieving,9 working sometimes when I could, though that wasn’t as often as you may think … bit of a poacher, bit of a labourer, bit of a wagoner, a bit of a haymaker, a bit of a hawker, a bit of most things that don’t pay and lead to trouble’.
Heming’s was a capricious existence that might have brought him notoriety and certainly did not win him friends. When he approached William Colley, one of Oddingley’s most hardbitten labourers, in the middle of May, asking whether he could borrow his horse for a trip to Eckington – a riverside village in the south of the county close to his mother’s home at Bredon – Colley flatly refused. His decision was reflective of local opinion: ‘Heming was a bad one,’ Colley later said.
Throughout early June sightings of Heming intensified. He would loiter in Barnett’s meadows, engaging labourers in conversation when they passed. Susan Surman saw him regularly when fetching the cows down to Pound Farm for milking. ‘For three week previous to the murder,’ she claimed ‘night and morning he used to walk up and down the meadow called the Middle Wash Pool. He came I thought to court me; he had made quite a path in the mowing grass and it leads to no place.’
Surman’s suspicions were not based on mere vanity. There was little obvious reason for him to be lurking in the lanes when he could be working elsewhere. To her he was a perplexing stranger and his attentions were unwelcome. At some point before the murder she had complained to John Barnett that this odd man was ‘detaining’ her in the fields. Perhaps this was too cryptic for Barnett, who rather than investigate the matter further ‘scoffed’ at her. He used the episode as an excuse to tease Surman, referring to this mysterious man as her ‘sweetheart’.
And Heming did not just cut a suspicious figure, but also a notable one. ‘Heming used to dress in a dark blue coat, red handkerchief and corduroy breeches,’ Surman recollected, a fact which in itself was odd. During harvest most labourers donned smock frocks, airy linen overgarments that were easily washed and mended – over loose-fitting breeches – which combined to keep them cool as they worked under the summer sun. But Heming’s coat was reported over and over again in eye-witness accounts. At once it seems clumsy, heavy, uncomfortable and intriguing, its spacious pockets a possible home for any number of hidden objects.
In the early nineteenth century Britons relied on greatcoats from October to April, not just for warmth but also for their other function – as something like a portable suitcase. They were especially popular with artisans, who had to haul their tools about from job to job, but they weren’t just limited to the lower classes; even the great Dr Johnson preserved an air of his humble beginnings by sporting a greatcoat long after he had become a national celebrity. In Boswell’s Life of Dr Johnson the author wrote, ‘Upon his tour,10 when journeying, he wore boots, and a very wide brown cloth great coat, with pockets which might have almost held the two volumes of his folio dictionary.’
Why should Heming have persisted with his coat in May and June? It must have had a purpose. Was he making use of its deep pockets to carry his carpentry tools – chisels, hammers and measuring rules – about the county? Was the coat merely a faithful travelling companion to protect him from sudden turns in the capricious Worcestershire weather? Or did the long blue coat have a more sinister purpose? Did Heming need a bulky overcoat to conceal a weapon as he prowled the hedgerows and lanes? John Chellingworth, the labourer who had left Oddingley heading south before dawn on Midsummer morning, had recently seen Heming ‘carrying a bag with something in it like a long stick’ – ‘It seemed long enough for a gun,’ he mused later.
A romanticised lithograph of an English gentleman out snipe hunting with a flintlock shotgun from Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, 1809
The need to conceal this gun perhaps explains why Heming persisted with the greatcoat in the late spring and early summer. The round hat that Lench and Giles observed on the day of the murder may also have had a sinister purpose – to shield his eyes as he lowered the shotgun and took aim. Brought together, these objects leave a powerful portrait of Heming the murderer. As John Lench explained to James Tustin as they raced towards Pound Farm earlier that evening: it was the man in the long blue coat.
On Midsummer evening Reverend Pyndar did not yet have evidence from Susan Surman, Joseph Colley4 or John Chellingworth. But Colwell’s account was sufficiently detailed and certain for the magistrate to presume that Heming was the man they were after. It was time to cast his net. At around 8 p.m. he dispatched George Lloyd – the father of Sarah Lloyd – to the home of Richard Allen, a constable in Droitwich. Pyndar’s instructions were simple. He was to search Heming’s home, and if nothing was found, to keep a watch upon the property throughout the night.
Allen and Lloyd reached Heming’s house at around 9 p.m., ‘enquiring’ tentatively of Elizabeth whether Richard was there. She replied that he was not and nor had she seen him since early that morning. The constable thanked her and slipped across the street and into the shadows.
Elizabeth Heming was many things that Richard was not. She was assiduous and level-headed, carefully recording his business accounts in a ledger and managing the family’s income. She was not unduly concerned by the constable’s first knock. Her husband’s lifestyle was erratic and it was not unusual for him to be away from home at any hour. On Midsummer night11 she had her mother to keep her company and help watch her elder two daughters as she nursed Harriet, her two-month-old baby girl.
Half an hour later Allen knocked again, and Elizabeth repeated that she had not seen or heard from Richard. The constable returned for a third time at 10 p.m., and Elizabeth, growing uneasy, begged him to tell her what had happened.
Allen informed her that Reverend Parker of Oddingley had been murdered at five o’clock that afternoon, that Richard was the chief suspect in the case and that there were seven constables scouring the county for him. He requested permission to search the house, which she immediately granted. Finding nothing, he left.
Allen then widened his search. He called at several other properties in and around Droitwich during the few hours of darkness that night. One was particularly notable. It belonged to Charles Burton, Elizabeth’s younger brother. Burton and Heming had evidently been close, but his house was searched without success.
The hunt for Heming was gathering pace in other quarters too. At Oddingley Reverend Pyndar ordered the clerk John Pardoe and Edward Stephens, a labourer, to ride to Worcester and have a handbill printed with both the butchers’ and Colwell’s descriptions of the murderer.
One possibility was that Heming had bypassed Worcester altogether and headed towards
Bredon, where he might find protection from his family and old friends. With this in mind, John Perkins and Thomas Colwell were ordered to take the road south, accompanied by George Day, Parker’s servant, who had just returned from Worcester. Pyndar was making best use of the scant resources he had available to him, coordinating the community which had seemed so useless only hours before. Perkins lent Thomas Colwell a nag and George Day took Parker’s horse, and as the sun set over Oddingley on Midsummer Day the three men headed out of the village. They passed the church and Netherwood Farm and then crossed the parish boundary towards Worcester, the same route that Pritchard and Chellingworth had taken much earlier that day.
The men arrived in Eckington, just north of their intended destination, in the early hours of Wednesday morning. There was no sign of Heming. At 4 a.m., as the sun rose, they searched his parents’ home at Bredon’s Norton but found nothing. On their way back to Oddingley in the morning ‘they made every enquiry12 on the Road, but could get no intelligence of Heming, except that he had been seen at Whittington [a small village on the outskirts of Worcester] that night and had a Pint of Ale’.
Once again, Richard Heming had vanished.
CHAPTER 9
Droitwich
Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire, 1783–1806
LOOKING WEST FROM the edge of the escarpment that hung over Oddingley, and from the outer canopy of Trench Wood, villagers could watch over the variety of lanes and pathways that cleaved through the parish and out across the vista. Beyond Smite Hill, just out of view, was the bustling coach road, turnpiked in 1714, that ran between Droitwich and Worcester. Passing through the village were Oddingley Lane, Netherwood Lane, Church Lane, Pineapple Lane and Hull Lane. Then there were by-paths, bridal ways, drovers’ roads and farmers’ tracks, some of them well defined and worn bare, others overgrown and almost impassable for anyone but those with the lightest feet. Just to the north of the village the ancient saltways radiated out from Droitwich, jutting south towards the nearby villages of Sale Way and Sale Green.
This labyrinth of rural pathways was replicated right across the surrounding countryside, and confused Pyndar’s hunt for Heming. Everyone knew their own favourite route, their own ingenious shortcut. And if he hadn’t already vanished into Worcester’s anonymous streets or the waiting door of a stage coach, then Heming’s mastery of the roads and lanes would offer him his finest hope of eluding those who chased him.
Worcester had already been pinpointed as Heming’s most likely destination, but Pyndar had been wise not to limit his attentions. Just seven miles to the northeast of the county city and little more than two miles from Oddingley was Droitwich. Heming could easily have doubled back and risked the trip homeward, which he would have been able to complete, at a pace, in little more than an hour.
And for Pyndar there were already hints that whatever had taken place in Oddingley that afternoon had its roots in Droitwich. Not only did Heming live there but he had been seen with Clewes in the Red Lion’s taproom, damning Reverend Parker just weeks before. Surely such an indiscretion would only occur in an environment where the men felt comfortable? A second reason to draw suspicion towards Droitwich was that the gun bag had smelled of salt.
Salt defined Droitwich. In his history of Worcestershire T. C. Tuberville observed, ‘Salt manufacture at Droitwich1 is one of the most ancient businesses in the kingdom,’ and the industry had left its scars on the landscape: the sheds, workshops and tall smouldering chimneys of the salt works, served by a steady stream of carts clattering to and fro between the pits (wiches) and packhorses lumbering off to distant traders and their markets.
The market town itself was inconspicuous, set in a valley through which the gentle River Salwarp flowed. To the untrained eye there was little to set it apart from any other place of its sort, but 173 feet beneath the marl-capped surface of the valley floor a subterranean stream – just 22 inches deep – passed over a sheet of rock salt, transforming the water into strong brine. ‘The brine from all the pits is perfectly limpid,’ reported a paper for the Philosophical Magazine in 1812, ‘… and when in a large body2 had a pale greenish hue similar to that of sea water. To the taste it is intensely saline, but without any degree of bitterness.’
The process for converting this brine into Droitwich salt was curious. The weekly Victorian magazine Household Words explained the method to its readers in a lucid and colourful article in the 1850s.
Brine boiling and salt making3 is hot, steaming work. Go into any of the works [at Droitwich] and you will see men naked to the waist, employed in an atmosphere only just bearable by strangers. You will see that the brine is pumped up from the pits into reservoirs; you will see ranges of large shallow quadrangular iron pans, placed over firecely heated furnaces; you will see the brine flow into the pans, and in due time bubble and boil and evaporate with great rapidity: you see that the salt evidently separates by degrees from the water and granulates at the bottom of the pan; you see men ladle up this granulated salt with flattish shovels and transfer it to draining vessels; and you finally see it put into oblong boxes, whence it is to be carried to the store room to be dried.
By the time this article was written Droitwich was producing around 60,000 tons of salt each year. This was a much smaller amount than came from Cheshire, where miners dug out salt with ‘the pick, the shovel, the blast and the forge’, but evaporation was a far more economical process. The effect of the industry on the neighbourhood was profound. It not only resulted in the ‘saltways’, which fanned out across the country, but also necessitated the building of Droitwich Canal4 – a masterpiece of enlightened engineering by James Brindley – for the enormous sum of £23,500 between 1767 and 1771. Furthermore, it was one of the chief factors in the near-total destruction of Feckenham Forest, with Hugh Miller, the Scottish geologist and writer, claiming that ‘six thousand loads of young pole wood,5 easily cloven’ were required to fuel the furnaces each year.
Long before 1806 the trees in Oddingley parish would have been among the first parts of Feckenham Forest lost to the salt works. Logging had continued until the completion of Droitwich Canal made coal a more efficient source of energy. Traffic along the saltways had also thinned, as packhorses had been replaced with barges. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the nineteenth century Droitwich’s streets and the surrounding lanes were still a ferment of business and enterprise. Household Words contrasted the town with the more upmarket Malvern. It observed, ‘If Worcester has a fashionable neighbour6 on the one side, Malvern, it has a sober industrious neighbour on the other, Droitwich. The one spends money; the other makes money. Worcester acts as a metropolis for both.’
To Hugh Miller, who arrived on a bleak autumnal day, Droitwich appeared a dull dispiriting place. The fields on either side of the valley had a ‘dank blackened look’ and the town’s roads and streets ‘were dark with mud’. He continued:
Most of the houses wore the dingy tints of a remote and somewhat neglected antiquity. Droitwich was altogether, as I saw it, a sombre looking place, with its grey old church looking down upon it from a scraggy wood covered hill; and what struck me as peculiarly picturesque was, that from this dark centre there should be passing continually outwards, by road or canal, waggons, carts, track-boats, barges all laden with pure white salt, that looked in their piled up heaps like wreaths of drifted snow. There could not be two things more unlike than the great staple of the town and the town itself. There hung too, over the blackened roofs, a white volume of vapour – the steam of numerous salt pans driven off in the course of evaporation by the heat – which also strikingly contrasted with the general blackness.
Droitwich was a prosperous place – the salt works yielded an enormous annual sum of £250,000. Such a steady flow of money meant it was more than a mere market town; it was also a destination for traders and a hive for the financially ambitious. For Oddingley it was a centre of trade, a place to meet friends, strike deals, purchase farming tools or seek new services. Most weeks farme
rs like Thomas Clewes and John Barnett would travel to the town for its Friday Market, stopping for a drink in the Barley Mow, the Black Boy or the Red Lion.
The town had also played a vital role in Captain Evans’ life. In March 1783, when he retired from the 89th Foot, he had swapped a successful military career for an uncertain civilian future. Then aged about 50, Evans entered his retirement in strong financial shape. Several years of officer’s pay would have been bolstered by any spoils he might have secured during the recruitment crisis or on his Atlantic tour, where captured enemy property and money would have been divided among the soldiers. But although he had money, Captain Evans decided against establishing his own household. Instead he took a room with the Banks family in Whitton, a village three miles from Ludlow. Why he preferred to do this is uncertain. His regiment had been stationed in the area the previous year, and Evans, being billeted with them and enjoying their company, might have simply decided to stay. Perhaps he enjoyed living in a traditional family unit, unaccustomed as he was to life outside his regiment. There is no sign that the Captain had any blood relations of his own.
The Banks family was headed by Mary and her husband William. They had a family of seven children, five daughters and two sons. The eldest son, George Banks, the future bailiff of Church Farm, was baptised in Whitton in 1782. This date coincides with Evans’ retirement from the 89th Foot and when he first met the family. The later rumours that suggest he was George’s natural father are questionable given William Banks was still alive at this point. It is clear, however, that whatever connection there was between Evans and George Banks stretched right back to his very beginning.
