by Peter Moore
‘Barnett did not mention it,’ the Captain declared flatly. He told Pyndar that the first he had heard about Parker’s murder was from Thomas Green, who had burst into his parlour and exclaimed, ‘Good God! Have you heard the news?’ Evans had asked him what he meant. ‘Mr Parker is shot!’ the tailor had replied. Evans told Pyndar that he had then turned to Barnett, saying ‘Surely it was not true?’ ‘It was too true,’ Barnett had replied.
This account appears almost impossibly bizarre. Pyndar did not challenge him on the point, but the truth about the evening meeting at Church Farm was clouded further when he found John Barnett at Pound Farm. He asked Barnett whether he had spoken to the Captain about Parker’s murder on Midsummer Day. Barnett replied that he had ‘informed Captain Evans of the murder before Green came in’, and also that Mary and Catherine Banks had joined the Captain and himself in the parlour, and had been ‘talking over’ the news ‘before Green came in’.
It was a glaring contradiction. Pyndar may not have been trained in the art of deduction, but he was a long-serving magistrate with experience of distinguishing truthful evidence from false statements. It was clear to Pyndar that the Captain was lying, and in doing so was attempting to hide the details of his conversation with Barnett. It was a first slip and an early indication to Pyndar that his investigation was leading him into darker territory than he had encountered before. As the search for Richard Heming stretched out across the country, in Oddingley Church Farm and the role of the Captain were coming increasingly into focus.
fn1 A ship breaker dismantled old vessels, salvaging what he could and selling it on, and disposing of the rest.
fn2 Such questions fuelled the discipline of phrenology, which in 1806 was gaining popularity due to the work of Dr Joseph Gall (1757–1828). Phrenology focused on the size and shape of a human skull, which were taken as indications of the mind contained.
CHAPTER 11
A Dirty Job for Captain Evans
Oddingley and Worcester, June, July 1806
ON SATURDAY 28 June an advertisement appeared in the Worcester Herald. Under the sensational title ‘A most Barbarous and Inhumane MURDER!’ it read:
Whereas on Tuesday Evening,1 the 24 instant, about five o’Clock the Rev. GEORGE PARKER, Rector of Oddingley, in the County of Worcester, was most cruelly MURDERED, in a Field within the Parish of Oddingley, and within a short distance of his own Dwelling-house, by receiving a shot from a Gun – which entered the right Side of his Body, near the short Ribs; his Skull fractured and his head otherwise very much beaten with the butt End thereof …
And whereas RICHARD HEMING, late of the Borough of Droitwich, but heretofore of the Chapelry of Norton, near Bredon, in the same County, Carpenter and Wheelwright, stands suspected as being the Perpetrator of such cruel and inhuman Murder. The said Richard Heming is about five Feet four of five inches high, tight made, large Features, a large bald or high Forehead, dark brown Hair, inclined to curl, black Beard, round Face, rather a wide Mouth, sharp Nose, dark hazel Eyes, ruddy Complexion, but looked pale when pursued immediately after committing this most diabolical act; had on at the time such Murder was committed, a dark blue Coat, with white metal Buttons, which appeared too long for him, an old fashioned Hat with a low crown.
Four days had now passed since Parker’s murder and three since Barneby’s inquest. Heming was still at large and the authorities were changing their tone. This was an official announcement, not a piece penned by a journalist. It featured prominently in the middle pages of the newspaper, in the popular column on home news. The elusive ‘man’ who had appeared in Berrow’s Journal was now being named as Heming. The tone of the piece was urgent and the detail it gave impressive. It marked a new phase in the investigation. Whereas Pyndar had seemed to be working alone for much of Tuesday evening and Wednesday, it was now clear that he had the support and attention of other powers.
‘Whoever will apprehend the said Richard Heming, and lodge him in any of his Majesty’s Gaols in the United Kingdoms, and thereof give Information to George Harris, attorney at Law, Edgar Street, Worcester,’ the announcement concluded, ‘will be handsomely rewarded for their trouble, and all reasonable expenses paid.’
On the same day, 50 miles to the east of Worcester, the initial report from Berrow’s Worcester Journal was republished in Jackson’s Oxford Journal. And at some point over the weekend the article must have caught the attention of a newspaper editor in London. On Monday morning, 30 June, a lightly edited version was reprinted once again, this time on the third page of The Times in London. News of Parker’s murder was featured alongside reports of a gentleman who had tragically drowned in Hyde Park and the arrest of a surgeon’s assistant accused of bodysnatching in Bermondsey.
But as the story drew glances from as far away as London, in Worcestershire there was still no trace of Heming. Many were beginning to treat the labourer’s disappearance as almost as curious as the crime itself. There had been no confirmed sighting of him since the night of the murder, and it was assumed that he must be lying low in some woods or undergrowth, or being offered protection by a friend or confidant. The greater worry was that he had escaped either the county or the kingdom, evading the attention of the authorities in Bristol or London.
On 28 June Pyndar received responses to the two letters that he had written three days before. The first was a nimble note from Mr J. Read, chief magistrate of the Bow Street Office. He acknowledged receipt of Pyndar’s letter, promising to ‘take care that the description of Heming shall be circulated among the different Police Officers’. Read signed off optimistically, ‘if he should make his appearance in London I dare say we shall get him and in that case you shall have immediate notice of it’. At the bottom of the letter, as an afterthought, he promised Pyndar he would have the description of Heming inserted in the next edition of The Hue and Cry and Police Gazette, a popular circular published each Saturday and sold for 3d. Heming’s name would appear alongside those of wanted forgers, housebreakers, footpads, smugglers, rustlers and escaped convicts.
Read’s response was prompt and had been written with a confidence that perhaps reflected his urban surroundings. In 1806 London was already a vast smouldering metropolis, developing with furious speed and on the verge of becoming the first British city to boast a million inhabitants. The tens of thousands of migrants drawn to the capital each year came both to find work and escape the countryside’s hardships. Many of the poorest slipped invisibly into the labyrinth of London’s slums or ‘rookeries’ like bees into a honeycomb. Such areas were stews of skinny alleys and gnarled tenements thronged that day and night with innumerable people, among them the poor and destitute, petty and career criminals, and it would have been the most obvious destination for a fugitive, a place where they could dive into the crowds and disappear without trace.
But Read’s letter brought hope. Although there was no recognised police force in Britain, London was organised far better than the regional towns and cities. It was divided into seven administrative sections, each governed by police magistrates answerable directly to the home secretary. Within these areas a relatively high density of constables and watchmen was deployed, many with keener eyes than those of their counterparts in the countryside. Read’s office at Bow Street had grown in stature and reputation over the past few years to become the most important among the embryonic policing units. Three different magistrates operated out of it; 60 Bow Street Runners patrolled the roads that fed into London, and there was even a special team of Bow Street Thief-Takers, who hunted down known criminals for the rewards offered privately or by the government. If Heming had decided to head to London, the authorities had been warned and lay in wait.
The news from Bristol was equally optimistic. Mr Richard Ward, the magistrate who had received Pyndar’s letter, had immediately carried it to Richard Vaughan, the mayor, who had ordered his officials to use every means in their power to apprehend the murderer. Bristol was a busy port and only 50 miles to the south of
Worcestershire. Here spry colliers and lumbering freight boats navigated the River Avon night and day, carrying cargoes of woollen cloth, tea, muslin,2 coal and spices along a stretch of water deep enough to allow ships of 1,000 tons to pass. Their destinations ranged from Dublin and the east shores of Ireland to the West Indies and the Americas. Almost 11,000 Bristolians were employed at the port, and if Heming could convince any of them to engage his services, or allow him a berth on a ship, then almost all chances of capture would be lost.
Pyndar’s letter galvanised Ward. After visiting the mayor he called on the collector of customs, who in turn issued an order that all boats were to be searched before they were allowed to leave dock. ‘If he is in the city or neighbourhood and should attempt to quit the kingdom by way of this port, I have every reason to believe that he will be taken, Ward noted, adopting a similar tone to Read in London. He signed off his letter ‘in great haste’, promising Pyndar, ‘Everything will be done, I hope, that can possibly be done.’
There were reasons for Pyndar to believe that Bristol was Heming’s target. There had been a sighting of him south of Worcester, near Pershore, close to the Cheltenham and Gloucester road, and Pyndar had also heard that Heming was involved with a notorious smuggler who lived near his old home in the Tewkesbury area. This smuggler, Pyndar learnt in a note from a Worcester resident, had contacts in Gloucester and Bristol, where many of his goods passed through the port. ‘That the course of his flight is towards that part of the country is highly probable,’ the note concluded.
The letters from Bristol and London had been written on the same date, Friday 27 June, and the fact that they had been penned in such different quarters of the country was testament to Pyndar’s swift action. But although he had dealt with the two most obvious destinations there were still many other routes of escape that remained open. Portsmouth and Liverpool both operated enormous ports, and just to the north of Oddingley and Droitwich industrial towns like Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Stourbridge offered anonymous urban havens.
On that same Friday Pyndar’s thoughts were temporarily distracted from the investigation as he stepped beneath the thick oak porch into Oddingley Church for Parker’s funeral. John Perkins and George Banks were among the mourners, but there were few other farmers and no representative from Worcester Cathedral. Parker was honoured, though, with a burial in the heart of the church, in the chancel, a little to the left of the pulpit and under the warm light of the tall stained-glass windows. His grave had been prepared that morning by Joseph Kendall, a stonemason from neighbouring Crowle. It bore a short inscription that made no reference to his murder: ‘Sacred to the memory of the Rev. George Parker. Late rector of this parish, who departed this life, June 24, 1806, Aged 43 years.’
After the service finished Joseph Kendall witnessed a disquieting incident. Kendall was a respected tradesman from neighbouring Crowle. He occasionally took jobs in Oddingley parish and only a few months beforehand had replastered the church walls for Parker. Once the funeral had concluded and the congregation left, his final job was to close and seal the crypt, and the stonemason had waited patiently at the rear of the church as the mourners filed out. But before Kendall rose to complete his task, there was a fleeting moment when there was both an empty church and an open grave. Kendall explained what happened next, ‘I saw George Banks3 there. As soon as the corpse was put in the grave, George Banks came and looked at it and laughed … He made a good deal of fun of it and seemed as though he was pleased that the parson was dead.’
Kendall was appalled by Banks’ behaviour, and though he did not inform Pyndar about it directly may well have mentioned it to his workmen when he returned to Crowle that afternoon. Shortly afterwards the magistrate received a note from Kendall: ‘This is to say that John Bridge an apprentice of mine heard Mr Evans abuse the Rev. Mr Parker a short time before his death and Thomas Perkins a workman of mine heard the same when they were repairing Oddingley Church. – Joseph Kendall, Crowle.’
This was an important moment. While everyone in Oddingley knew about Parker’s quarrel with the farmers, there is little evidence to suggest Pyndar was aware of its extent. Buried within the parish were all the stories of drunken meetings, swearing and brazen threats. That a stonemason from a neighbouring parish was among the first to volunteer information is revealing. Oddingley, like any parish of its kind, was bound tightly together by ties of personal loyalty, decades-old friendships and blunt common sense. The farmhands knew that there was little alternative to working for the farmers, and villagers like Susan Surman, Sarah Lloyd and James Tustin would have been enormously reluctant to speak out against their employers, something which might well have cast their families into unemployment and distress. An employee who sided with the authorities against their employer also risked social stigma: being branded a snitch, turncoat, rascal or mischief-maker – a person better to be avoided.
Kendall, who lived outside Oddingley and had a wider pool of customers, clearly felt he could risk speaking out against Captain Evans – there is a hint of disrespect in his note when he refers to him as ‘Mr’ instead of ‘Captain’ – but his evidence was compromised by his failure to inform the magistrate about Banks’ behaviour after the funeral. Pyndar’s task, therefore, was a delicate one. He had to coax information from wary or unwilling subjects, record testimonies that were better not written, recall conversations that were better not had. Pyndar could offer to cleanse a person’s conscience and he might appeal to their sense of moral right, but he could afford them very little protection from the consequences of their actions.
John Perkins, though, was willing to talk. ‘Capt. Evans said there is no more harm in shooting Mr P. than a mad dog,’ he told Pyndar on Thursday morning as the two men walked from St James’ Church back up to Oddingley.
Perkins’ evidence tallied with what Pyndar had learnt from Kendall, and it stirred him to further action. Over the next few days he sought out various villagers beginning with those who he knew or felt were most likely to reveal something. He carefully recorded interesting points from these meetings, dividing his scraps of parchment into halves and then quarters, underlining key points, jotting down supplementary questions, striking out factual inaccuracies and wondering out loud. Studying these documents at a distance of two centuries you can glean a sense of Pyndar’s brain beginning to tick and a theory beginning to crystallise as his quill is applied with more or less pressure, as it stops for a second to be dipped into the ink or when a firm cross denotes a puzzling dead end.
Pyndar met Clement Churchill and Joseph Colley, two labourers who told him a little of what they knew, but not all. Churchill could have recalled the scene in Church Farm on Midsummer Day and Colley could have recounted the damning toasts in the Red Lion. Neither man did, but they both – in separate interviews – explained how they had heard John Barnett claim that ‘he would give any man five guineas that would shoot Mr Parker’. The consistency between their accounts is striking. Colley’s evidence matched Churchill’s almost word for word.
‘Last Saturday month I observed to Mr Parker that I was surprised that he was not afraid to go out at night for fear he should be knocked on the head,’ John Pardoe, the parish clerk, informed Pyndar shortly after. Edward Stephens, a friend of Pardoe’s who had travelled with him to Worcester on the night of the murder, corroborated this. Stephens also mentioned that Pardoe had told him that he’d heard Thomas Clewes say, ‘he wished somebody would blow the parson’s brains out’. It later transpired that Pardoe had been afraid to mention this as Clewes owed him £20 – a sum he was worried he might lose if the farmer was ‘taken up and hanged’.4
These six men’s evidence suggested to Pyndar that the farmers who had quarrelled with Parker had finally determined to have him killed. All the evidence fitted. He already knew about the curious meeting between Barnett and Evans at Church Farm on Midsummer night, and he knew that the farmers had been unwilling to join the chase. This was reinforced when Betty Perkins volunteere
d further information on Sunday 29 June, telling Pyndar how Mrs Barnett had forbade Tustin from joining Mr Hemmus in pursuit of Heming. She included Tustin’s claim that ‘his mistress would not let him go, or he would have gone in a minute’. Underneath the account Pyndar noted, ‘This all happened before I got there.’
Pyndar had held suspicions against Barnett and Evans from the very start, and by the weekend after the murder they were beginning to harden. There was a definite connection between Captain Evans and Heming; the tithe dispute offered a motive; the reported threats proved that at least three men – Evans, Clewes and Barnett – bore malice towards Parker; and there was also Barnett’s failure to join the manhunt.
But there were reasons for the magistrate’s initial reluctance to pursue the farmers. Heming was a well-known rogue and mischief-maker, and the possibility of him killing Parker for material gain could not instantly be dismissed. Equally, there is no evidence that Pyndar was aware of how bad relations in Oddingley had become. Tithe disputes were relatively common, and George Parker was an unusually proud man. It is possible that he shielded the embarrassing details of his arguments from his friend and peer in the neighbouring parish. So to immediately conclude that the farmers had plotted to have him killed would have been extraordinarily bold. And by committing himself to such a theory Reverend Pyndar was accusing several notable and respectable parishioners of being accessories to murder. That he shied away from this until he had the necessary evidence is wholly understandable.
