Damn His Blood

by Peter Moore

  Smith having left the courtroom, Thomas Colwell, who along with Lench was the only surviving witness from Barneby’s original inquest in 1806, was called. He told the court how he had seen Heming on Midsummer Day, fleeing from the murder scene. His evidence was delivered quickly. The emphasis had now shifted away from Parker’s murder and towards Heming’s.

  John Collins was called with an air of expectation. Like Smith he had worked at Netherwood during the summer of 1806 and had been employed there on 24 June. Having seen his old workmate admonished by the court just moments before, Collins began his testimony by revealing that Clewes had also approached him that morning. Their meeting had been brief, Collins said, and the content of their conversation inconsequential. The labourer then began his evidence. He said that he had left Netherwood Farm at Michaelmas in 1806 and had not seen Thomas Clewes since. It was clear any emotional ties to his old master had long since faded, and his evidence appeared carefully recalled and objective.

  Collins told the court that he had been out working in the fields on Midsummer Day and had arrived back at Netherwood at 9 p.m., finding the barns and the brewhouse shut up and the curtains drawn as usual. He had his supper and retired for the night.

  ‘Did you know Richard Heming and have you ever seen him with Thomas Clewes?’ the coroner enquired, changing the subject.

  ‘I know Heming,’ Collins replied. ‘I have seen him at Clewes’. He was there on the Sunday morning before the murder.’

  ‘What was Heming doing?’

  ‘It was between breakfast time and church time. I saw Heming and Thomas Clewes on a footpath leading into the inside of Trench Wood.’

  Collins explained that they had not seemed surprised to see him, but when he approached they had walked away. It was the first time he had ever seen them by the wood. It was about midday when Clewes returned home, he added.

  ‘When else have you seen Heming?’

  ‘Heming had been at Clewes’ backwards and forwards, a fortnight or three weeks before.’

  ‘Did Heming ever work for Clewes?’

  ‘No. To the best of my remembrance he did not.’

  The importance of Collins’ testimony and his willingness to speak was lost on nobody. It was becoming increasingly clear that Clewes had been central to arranging Parker’s murder. Whether doing so on Captain Evans’ orders or of his own accord was unclear, but the evidence that had been growing since Burton’s spade had hit Heming’s shoe was now looking almost conclusive. Collins had now been questioned for around half an hour, and with his efforts still being rewarded, Smith continued, turning his focus to the barn.

  This part of Collins’ evidence turned out to be the most revealing. He remembered the barn being almost empty on 24 June 1806, but for ‘some rough straw’. A few weeks later Clewes had asked the labourer to dig some marl from the field nearest the house, which was carted away and put into the barn. ‘I went to work between six and seven in the morning, we drawed [sic] six cartloads,’ Collins said. He could not remember who put the marl into the barn, but reasoned that ‘Clewes would have had time to shoot the marl and level it, as well as cart it whilst I was away at the pit.’

  ‘Did you ever hear any odd noises coming from the barn, Mr Collins?’ Smith asked.

  ‘I never heard any moaning or cry of murder,’ Collins concluded.

  The day had progressed as badly as it possibly could for Clewes. A clear narrative had emerged from the evidence. It began with Clewes’ visits to Heming’s Droitwich home, continued with the drinking session at the Red Lion and the surreptitious meeting in Trench Wood on the Sunday before Parker’s murder. Finally, on Midsummer morning Clewes had wished to find a dead parson on his return, and that is exactly what he got.

  By Collins’ estimation it was a week before harvest when the marl was tipped into the barn, giving Clewes about a month to commit the second murder. Around this same time, Collins then remembered, a field of vetches – tall climbing plants – were also ‘put in the bay next to the pool’. Each incident flowed neatly, like a series of tributaries into a widening river, into the main thrust of the theory – that Clewes had arranged Parker’s death and then murdered Heming.

  The remainder of the afternoon passed amid such conjectures. Clewes had also attempted to interfere with the next witness, William Crockett, needlessly as it transpired, as he had little to say. Then a further witness remembered riding to Worcester on Midsummer night with the parish clerk, John Pardoe, who was now dead. He recalled Pardoe saying that he had heard Clewes making many threats against Parker.

  John Perkins, so long a thorn in the other farmers’ sides, then delivered a typically scathing account of life in Oddingley in 1806. It included an account of the quarrel at the Plough in Tibberton, Captain Evans’ vicious oaths and curses directed at Parker, and his memory of Clewes and Heming drinking together at Droitwich. He finished darkly, ‘Clewes paid for Heming’. The coroner had heard enough. At five o’clock in the afternoon, as the jury broke for refreshments, Smith called Mr Bass, the foreman of the jury, and Reverend Clifton, a city magistrate, into a private room and stated his conviction that ‘such evidence had been adduced … to believe that Thomas Clewes had guilty knowledge of Richard Heming’s murder’. Under common law this was sufficient for an arrest, and Smith recommended that he be taken into custody until the inquest had concluded. Clifton and Bass agreed. Clewes was summoned into the room and informed of their decision.

  ‘He betrayed not the slightest agitation; he protested himself entirely innocent of having been in the slightest degree privy to Heming’s death, and when told that he was about to be sent to prison, said he should go there without any fear as to the result,’ one journalist later recorded. Clewes was led from the Talbot by two constables who escorted him the short distance to Worcester County Gaol.

  All evidence now seemed to strengthen the case. It even seemed oddly distracting when others rose to speak later that evening. Thomas Green testified about the perplexing meeting between Captain Evans and John Barnett that had so preoccupied Reverend Pyndar; Thomas Langford reminded the jury that Heming had been at Church Farm on Midsummer morning; and Betty Perkins delivered a stinging attack on John Barnett for not joining the chase.

  Such matters seemed of secondary importance. Captain Evans was dead, and Barnett had not been inconvenienced by the sudden appearance of a skeleton in one of his barns. More interesting was the evidence of Thomas Arden, another labourer who had worked at Netherwood in 1806. He remembered Heming visiting before the murder. Even the appearance of George Banks, now a respectable bailiff in his mid-40s, did little to capture the attention of the room, which had been distracted by Clewes’ arrest.

  The day had been a spectacular success, even eclipsing the thrill of identifying Heming’s skeleton three days before. It was to end, however, on a poignant note. The final witness was Mary Parker, who along with Elizabeth Newbury was perhaps the individual who had been most touched by the case. She was now approaching her seventieth birthday and had travelled to Worcester accompanied by her daughter from their home in Lichfield, Staffordshire. As a mark of respect, in a gesture of sympathy not extended to any other witness, she was excused from testifying before the court. Instead the evidence she gave in 1806 was read aloud in her presence. She listened to it carefully: to the reports of the stones against the window, to Captain Evans’ curses and, finally, her dead husband’s tragic epitaph: ‘I know not what they want, unless it is my life!’ She indicated that it was accurate and then stood down.

  It was half past nine at night when Smith adjourned the inquest for the second time. Exhaustion mixed with exhilaration as those present tramped out into the street in the knowledge that on Tuesday the inquest would reconvene yet again. As the courtroom candles were extinguished and the skeleton gathered up for safekeeping, a quarter of a mile away Thomas Clewes was in a cell at the gaol on Castle Street, left to endure the memory of a ruinous day.

  ‘This is an altogether strange case
,’ mused a journalist from the Morning Chronicle,4 setting down his thoughts that night for his readership in London. A double murder, ‘the second arising out of the first, is a singular event’. Stories of tithe disputes and parish quarrels were familiar enough, ‘though they seldom reach the height of inducing the parishioners to offer a purse for the assassination of the parson’. In this respect, he concluded, the affair at Oddingley was unique. In this unhappy parish a quarrel had culminated in two successive flashes of violence. The case was a terrible one, and over the past few days it had been gaining notoriety in the British newspapers, which were now publishing their reports under the stark headline: ‘The Case of the Murdered Murderer’.8

  CHAPTER 15

  In the Words of Thomas Clewes

  The City Gaol, Castle Street, Worcester, 29 January–2 February 1830

  THE WORCESTER COUNTY Gaol1 was a formidable structure, a tangible symbol of power and punishment that stood on Castle Street, north of the city centre. Opened in 1809, this building had replaced the previous prison, which had been derided in the press as unfit for purpose. It had cost the county a total of £19,000 and catered for all types of inmate from thieves and debtors to murderers. Its cells, walls and yards were concealed behind a 20-foot wall of palisaded Bath stone, which radiated all the menace of a fortress. The entrance to the gaol – through which Clewes was escorted at half past five on Friday 30 January in the careful company of two constables and Reverend Robert Clifton, the arresting magistrate – was through a neat arch flanked by two battlemented turrets. Clewes was apprised of his rights by the governor, Mr Lavender – he was still only a suspect and would therefore enjoy more privileges than most of the other inmates. He was then conveyed to his cell.

  Life inside the gaol was hard and unpleasant, locals regarding it as a place of punishment and correction rather than moral reform and tuition. The unheated cells were cold and damp in winter, and a sour, fetid stench escaped from the latrines. Apart from the officials’ quarters, no part of the building was lit, meaning that after dark prisoners saw little more than the occasional swing of a warder’s lantern till dawn. There was minimal flexibility in the treatment of inmates. Daily life was simple but exhausting. It was considered best to keep prisoners busy with the maximum amount of work. ‘Labour is severe,’ the author of a report into working standards at the prison reported in the 1820s. Prisoners worked all day beating hemp, cranking handmills or feeding looms. In 1824 the authorities had controversially voted to erect a treadmill, a vast frame of slatted steps that projected from a revolving cylinder, in the yard. Teams of inmates silently turned the treadmill in endless shifts, the exhausting machine serving two functions: grinding the corn used to make the prison bread, and satisfying the prevailing belief that dangerous criminals should be occupied with continuous activity so their minds would be diverted from schemes or subversive thoughts.

  Those who broke the rules were punished in several ways. They could have their ration of tobacco or snuff taken away, or in more serious cases they could be thrown into one of the seven solitary cells, two of which were completely dark. One visitor in 1823 found four prisoners in this state, two of whom had been in confinement for three days. ‘The door of one of these dark cells being opened,’ it was declared, ‘the poor fellow immediately fell on his knees, most earnestly entreating that some alteration might be made in his situation.’

  By six o’clock it was long since dark and Clewes was left alone in his cell, a sparsely furnished room with an iron bedstead, straw bed, pillow, two blankets2 and a rug. He was left with painful memories of Collins’ evidence and his foolish attempts to interfere with the other witnesses. Worse still, he had no idea of what was now being said at the Talbot. Smith would continue to question witnesses for three and a half hours yet, and if any villager was to testify to screaming or shouting at Netherwood in the summer of 1806, however vague their recollection might be, then his fate might well be sealed. Clewes had no one to advise or console him. His wife and family were in Oddingley, and no lawyer or clergyman came to counsel him. He could only dwell on a situation that had worsened by the day, the combined agonies of fear, conjecture and detachment closing in on him.

  Just a few weeks before, the year had started brightly. Clewes had been appointed temporary bailiff at a nearby farm, signalling a welcome change of status and better wages. After many years toiling in Trench Wood with his axe, it was an opportunity that Clewes seemed determined to seize. Within a few days he had taken lodgings at the farm and applied himself to his new position, drawing up lists of fold-yard tasks and planning for a thaw in the snow.

  This was Clewes’ situation on 21 January, the date of Burton’s find. His first reaction to the news – like his later reaction to his arrest – had been of cool reticence. Marta Davis,3 the housekeeper at the farm, had not noticed any perceptible change in his manner or attitude, only observing that he arrived back from the first day of the inquest ‘hungry and tired’. Davis had asked him whether the business was over and he had replied that it was not, and that he was going again on Friday.

  On Thursday evening Clewes told Davis that he needed to visit his home at Trench Wood. Perhaps he wished to spend the evening with his family or to have some uninterrupted time to think. He called in the following morning, though, in a frantic rush. Davis saw him hurry into a room and change his clothes. He explained that he was ‘rather late … had a cup of cider and left’. On his way to the Talbot Clewes would talk to William Smith and John Collins, his old farmhands. It was an imprudent move. He would not return that night.

  After his committal locals discussed Clewes’ position. While it certainly seemed as if he had had some hand in Heming’s murder, there was still no hard evidence against him. Just as the smuggler waited for a dark lonely field and a burglar for an empty house, Clewes might have found a quiet moment in his barn to dispose of Heming. If this was so, then how would it be possible to mount a successful prosecution? If nobody had seen and nobody had heard, what could be proved?

  *

  That Friday night there was no sign of an improvement in the freezing weather, which had coated the streets in ice, and Berrow’s Worcester Journal had begun to urge ‘the sprinkling of salt4 on the pavements’. In the city residents could huddle around their hearths to shelter from the cold, but at the gaol there was no adequate means of keeping the inmates warm. It was a brutal initiation for Clewes. Even in fine weather the prison was a nest of disease, a hundred or so coughing and wheezing bodies thrust into a tiny area and given insufficient protection from the elements. The weakest of the inmates succumbed to fevers and jaundices or went down with other, putrid infections: abscesses in the ears or ulcers on the legs and hips – some within days of their arrival. For Clewes, who was now in his sixtieth year, the prospect of prolonged exposure to this environment must have been terrifying. And his age did not just make him physically vulnerable; it also singled him out from the transient and mainly young prison population. The days ahead would be a test of both mind and body.

  Worcester glowed white in the snow that night, beneath a clear starry sky. Clewes lay hunched on his iron bed, wrapped in blankets, glassy-eyed, lost in thought. This picture of the prisoner on his first night in gaol comes from the surviving sources and knowledge of subsequent events. It is one of the enduring images of the Oddingley story. In 1818 Mary Shelley wrote, ‘Nothing is as painful to the human mind5 as a great and sudden change.’ Clewes had begun January 1830 as a fallen farmer, he had glimpsed financial and social redemption for a few fleeting weeks, but then it had gone, and he had ended the month a murder suspect, his disgrace and downfall played out in public. William Smith’s inquest had narrowed the beam on him alone. He had come to represent both murders: his name was becoming synonymous with both crimes. The scrutiny of others – Captain Evans, John and William Barnett and George Banks – was fading into nothing.

  At dawn on Saturday the turnkeys noticed a change in Clewes’ manner. He was no longer the c
onfident and protesting man he had been the evening before. He applied for a Bible and prayer book and at midday asked to see a clergyman. The request was relayed to the governor, who in turn sent a note to Reverend Robert Clifton.6

  The request reached Clifton’s home in the early afternoon. He lived a quarter of an hour’s walk away from the gaol at St Nicholas’ Rectory in the city centre. William Smith had asked Clifton to escort the farmer to gaol the previous evening in his capacity as a magistrate, and it was under his authority that Clewes had been detained. Many clergymen enjoyed a dual identity as spiritual leader and law enforcer, but it was rare for them to be employed in both positions in the same case. This may have struck Clifton but it did not prevent him setting out for the gaol. Clifton was a man of form and duty. He supplemented his chief role as rector of St Nicholas Church with a lengthy list of additional responsibilities. As well as being a city magistrate, he was the official county chaplain and secretary of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. He had a master’s degree, was erudite and evidently pious, but when it came to magisterial matters of law and form, he was horribly inexperienced.

  Clifton spent Saturday afternoon locked in private conversation with Clewes. It was dark when he returned to his rectory. Bewildered by what the farmer had revealed to him, he decided to write to the home secretary for advice. He began his letter to Peel the following morning.

  In the course of yesterday I visited Clewes in the Gaol, and after a very long interview, in which I drew from him certain expressions which confirmed me in the opinion that he had guilty knowledge of the affair, I told him that probably I could obtain the promise of his majesty’s pardon for any person (but the actual striker of the fatal blow) who might give information which might lead to the conviction of any person present at, or accessory to, the murder of Heming. He then made some declarations but not sufficient in my judgement to secure the conviction of any living participant in the crime.