Damn His Blood

by Peter Moore

  People still visit this spot, some from as far away as America, to see the barn, which stands like an almost forgotten outpost of English history that nonetheless retains a flicker of its old pull. And for those who do make the journey to the mid-Worcestershire countryside, Oddingley remains very much as it was back in 1806. Its grassy meadows and tangled hedges still flank the narrow lanes that weave and dive through the valley. Pound Farm is still here, as are Pineapple Farm, Park Farm and Old Mr Hardcourt’s former home near the crossroads. Church Farm and St James’ Church both survive intact too, lasting symbols of the struggle between the farmers and Reverend George Parker. They gaze out across a sedate, picturesque landscape – the Birmingham and Worcester Canal in the foreground, Trench Wood looming darkly in the distance.

  Other buildings connected with the murders have vanished. The Barnetts’ Pigeon House has been converted into a modern home; the rectory is gone, as are the farms that were leased by Samuel Jones and John Perkins. Lost too is Parker’s glebe and the site of the first murder. In the early twentieth century Captain Hubert Berkeley of nearby Clink Gate Farm developed a special interest in the murders. To commemorate the events, he erected a stone in the old glebe meadows on the spot where he estimated Parker had been shot. It was another plain memorial: an irregularly shaped stone no more than two feet in height several yards from a sparse hedge and a shallow ditch. The stone was adorned, presumably by Captain Berkeley himself, with the pithy inscription ‘G.P.’ and, below, ‘24 JN. 1806’.

  Parker’s stone remained until the early 1960s when Oddingley gained another national transport artery. In 1962–3 the opening stretch of the new M5 motorway sliced unsentimentally through the parish, passing Berkeley’s old home at Clink Gate, through the glebe meadows and towards Worcester. At some point during construction Parker’s memorial stone was lost. Some say it was thrown into a nearby pool; others maintain that after being rescued by an interested villager it was declared unlucky and discarded. Whatever the truth, Reverend Parker must be accustomed to such discourtesies by now, the scene of his death being – and perhaps uniquely so – now crossed by many thousands of travellers every day.

  A handful of miles away, at St Peter’s Church in Droitwich, I find Evans’ grave similary disturbed. ‘Pitifully behold the sorrows of our hearts,’ reads an inscription carved into the oak of a pointed lychgate at the entrance to the churchyard. I walk along a tunnel of neatly clipped conifers which opens out into a sombre mass of stones and crosses. The Captain lies in a far corner, to the left of an old yew tree. There was room for an epitaph on the face of his stone, but the job was never completed as Evans intended. After Heming’s skeleton was discovered at Netherwood and the coroner’s inquest and trial exposed the role he had played in the conspiracy, it was decided to utilise the space for a different purpose. The alternative inscription carried not an air of malice or vindictiveness, but one of calculated rectitude; so much so that the words could almost have come from Judge Littledale himself. Under the name of Catherine Banks, with whom the Captain shares the grave, it reads, ‘Here also lies Captain Samuel Evans whose name is connected with the double murder at Oddingley in the year 1806.’

  The monument the Captain had intended to serve as testament to his power and importance in Droitwich had been turned forever for another use, standing for more than a century and a half as a reminder of what he did. I cannot read the inscription today, and perhaps nobody has been able to decipher the words clearly for a generation. Two centuries of English rain, wind and frost have worn down the lettering and eaten into the stone, which is now half-consumed by moss. The grave was in this state in the early 1990s, when vandals broke into the churchyard. The attack was indiscriminate. They hit the Captain’s stone with something like a sledge-hammer and left it very nearly cracked in two, as it remains today.

  The story as remembered today at the Fir Tree Inn in Dunhampstead, on the edge of Oddingley parish, where Thomas Clewes was once the landlord

  Artefacts from the Oddingley case have dispersed, some of them into public libraries and others into private collections. The Fir Tree Inn in nearby Dunhampstead, where Thomas Clewes once served as landlord, displays a shrine to events. There is a ‘Murderers’ Bar’ replete with a flintlock shotgun hanging malevolently from a beam, a copy of one of the ballads, a parochial map and a black and white photograph, supposedly of the tithe barn. Outside a sign stands in the car park: ‘Every old inn has a story to tell but none as gruesome as the Oddingley murderers.’ The history has been harnessed well here, yet the shotgun is not the murder weapon. That has long since disappeared, last sighted in the hands of Richard Barneby in 1830. Also vanished without trace are Richard Heming’s bones and James Taylor’s blood stick, both of which were last displayed publicly at the Guildhall in 1830.

  For more than a century local researchers have returned to the story, drawing out details and lingering on the finer points of the case. One of these was Reverend Sterry-Cooper, who lived and worked in Droitwich in the first half of the twentieth century. On 14 July 1939 Sterry-Cooper received a letter from Captain Berkeley. ‘I am 75¼, I am probably near the end,1 but must show you the site of the robber’s cave (now a hole) in the Trench Wood,’ he urged. Ten years had passed since Berkeley had ventured into the wood, and when Sterry-Cooper joined him to search the following week it was without success. The den Berrow’s Journal had described so eagerly in 1805 had gone, either overgrown or filled in, and over the next decade it would be followed by much of Trench Wood, which was clear-felled during the 1940s, with many oak, elm and ash trees being replaced by other species designed to yield quick timber for paintbrush and broom handles.

  Sterry-Cooper’s interest, though, extended beyond Trench Wood: he delved into details of the tithe dispute and explored the finer points of law. The clergyman hoped to prove that the Oddingley case was a catalyst for the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836. This was a grand thesis and difficult to justify, but it brought Sterry-Cooper back to Oddingley again and again. On these visits he befriended locals, scribbled notes and, intriguingly, produced a set of atmospheric, grizzled black and white photographs which now provide something of a window into the village’s past.

  In one picture there stands the ghostly figure of a matriarch, hands on hips, outside Park Farm. She glares into the lens suspiciously from a distance of 15 yards. The brick farmhouse, several barns and a little slatted wooden fence stand behind her, but the picture still feels sparse and lonely. Another is taken on a dry winter’s day at the village crossroads. A girl stands pencil-straight on the verge outside Pound Farm; a spry terrier dances at her feet. In the background the hedgerow is neatly trimmed and the half-timbered farmhouse stands proudly, its three great chimney stacks rising high into the sky. It was a century since the Barnetts had given their orders in the fold-yard, and in that time the property had shifted from farmhouse to poor house then back into private ownership. At one point the building also served as the village inn, being known as the Bricklayer’s Arms. During this time a cryptic warning hung from its sign: ‘Blazing fire, here lies danger. A friend must pay as well as a stranger.’

  Pound Farm in the 1930s, taken by Reverend Sterry-Cooper.2 The farm is almost unchanged from how it was a century earlier when Barnett and Parker clashed in the fold-yard

  Sterry-Cooper’s photographs give one of the earliest glimpses of Oddingley, an empty place of wizened oaks, overgrown gardens, abandoned buildings and outhouses. There are only fleeting traces of the farmhands, dairymaids, shepherds and drovers and there is little sense of action, movement or purpose. There’s an elusive quality that seems to befit the Oddingley story, where the complete picture is always obscured. In the years after the trial, the nineteenth century would come into sharper focus with a new-found thirst for statistical data and record-keeping, and the invention of photography. From 1841 onwards, increasingly detailed censuses recorded more facts than ever before about the lives of British subjects. The landscape was captured, too, by a w
ave of tithe commissions that trawled the country in the 1840s, noting down the names of buildings, fields, woods, hills, roads and streams. The Oddingley Murders languish in the shadows of nineteenth-century history, just before this new modern age. Only the single untrustworthy woodcut of Parker and Heming remains, and there are no pictures of Clewes, Barnett or Banks. When he died in 1850, Robert Peel would be the last prime minister not to be photographed. Like Sterry-Cooper’s black and white images of Oddingley in the 1930s, the surviving documents suggest much but they don’t reveal all.

  In the nineteenth century the Oddingley case had a long afterlife. Nine months after the assize trial finished The Age magazine included the story in its annual round-up, alongside the accession of William IV and the eruption of Mount Etna. A decade on, in 1842, Erskine Neale’s The Bishop’s Daughter was published, and later in the century Theodore Galton wrote Madeline of St Pol. Both fictionalised retellings of the story which drew on the authors’ local connections and knowledge. Thomas Hardy, a habitual note-taker, included a nimble description of the Oddingley affair among his research papers: ‘Murder of clergyman planned by several villagers,3 because he was obnoxious to them by rigid manner in wh. he exacted his tithes &c. Murder carried out by one named Heming. Heming soon after disappears – It is found years after that a reward being offered the planners feared H wd. not stand it & murdered him in barn – Skeleton found there, a 2ft rule beside it. He was a carpenter.’

  But as the century wore on, Britons busied themselves with a fresh set of horrible yet fascinating crimes. George Orwell would later describe the second half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth as an ‘Elizabethan Period’4 in English murder, citing the cases of Dr Palmer the Rugeley Poisoner, Jack the Ripper, Dr Neill Cream and Dr Crippen as examples. And as each new case emerged, its details were reported in increasingly intense and complex ways by a more professional press, whose coverage had evolved to include photographs of suspects, victims, crime scenes and crowds – jeering, hissing or sobbing – outside the courtroom.

  These fresh scandals and sensations overtook the Oddingley affair, which dwindled into shy obscurity in the early years of the twentieth century, a position it has retained ever since. And even when set beside contemporary stories like the Ratcliffe Highway Murders, John Thurtell, the Red Barn Murder and, at a stretch, Eugene Aram, it feels somehow lost, often absent from period articles or anthologies of nineteenth-century crime. Perhaps because no one was ever successfully prosecuted for either murder – most sensational criminal investigations concluded with an execution, a climactic moment in the arc of the story. The Oddingley case did not.

  Long into the nineteenth century thousands of spectators of all classes gathered to witness the execution of a murderer. An estimated 7,000 turned up to see William Corder hanged in Suffolk in 1828 and an enormous assembly of between 30,000 and 50,000 watched the final moments of the notorious Frederick and Maria Manning at Horsemonger Lane in Southwark in 1847. On these occasions a diverse and fantastic array of memorabilia was offered for sale, including scraps of the hangman’s rope, pieces of the condemned felons’ clothes, transcripts of their last confessions and even, on special occasions, limited-edition medallions struck by enterprising local mints. In high-profile cases a second wave of mementos would follow the first: engravings of the scene, public waxworks and death masks and other macabre relics from the anatomised bodies.

  However narrowly, Thomas Clewes, George Banks and John Barnett avoided such a fate. The law had declared them innocent, and they were free to merge back into society, thus robbing the press of a dramatic conclusion and the public of an awful spectacle. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why the Oddingley case was later overshadowed by others. Had Clewes, Banks and Barnett been executed, the sheer density of tangible objects recording their fate – the chapbooks, the pottery figures, the artistic recreations would have been far greater. All of these objects would have served as tactile little hooks, catching over and over again in people’s minds and dragging their memories and imaginations back to the case anew.

  In Worcestershire, however, the story has always been remembered with strength and feeling. When Mary Pyndar, the youngest daughter of the Reverend, died in 1894 at the great age of 98, she left a bequest of ‘letters, papers, memoranda, notes of evidence, and copies of the local newspaper’ to the county records office, all of them concerning her father’s role in the original investigation. It was an extraordinary collection, and its receipt was announced in an article that reminded readers of the importance of the case. The piece began darkly, ‘Perhaps no event in the catalogue of crime5 ever occasioned more horror and excitement in this part of the country than the double murder at Oddingley.’ Its author enthused, the ‘circumstances of this frightful occurrence have so often been narrated that it was by no means expected that anything hitherto untold with regard to it would turn up, especially after a lapse of nearly a century’. It was a matter of profound interest, then, that these papers had come to light, all of them ‘relating to the awful tragedy which has made the little village of Oddingley unenviably conspicuous ever since’.

  And at intervals, like a periodic comet, the Oddingley story has returned to delight new audiences. In 1901 E. Perronet Thompson wrote a long essay for the Gentleman’s Magazine documenting the peculiarities and legal implications of the case. In 1960 David Scott Daniel published Fifty Pounds for a Dead Parson, a novel loosely based on the events, and in 1975 Angela Lanyon composed a play entitled The Oddingley Affair. The first faithful recreation of the murders would be published in America in 1991 by a American historian named Carlos Flick. His book The Oddingley Murders carried the tale across the Atlantic to a new readership, 185 years after Heming had supposedly made the journey himself.

  It is Easter time in Oddingley now, and the verges are dotted with daffodils and dandelion. A gentle spring breeze blows from the Malvern Hills to the south-west. There is blackbird song, and lambs play in the pastures. Half a mile away Trench Wood looms on the escarpment above Netherwood Farm, where primroses, bluebells and pink campion are rising in the glades. In the sky a solitary buzzard circles over the young crops, its eyes fixed on the ground below.

  Author’s Note

  Damn His Blood is a true story. This account is based entirely on contemporary and near-contemporary evidence of events in Oddingley and Worcester during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. All speech is drawn directly from source material – court reports, private letters, newspaper articles, printed chapbooks and pamphlets, and witness testimony.

  Although written English was fast becoming standardised at this time, there are still variations in the spelling of several characters’ names. In particular Richard Heming was often recorded as ‘Hemming’ and George Banks often written as ‘Bankes’. I have chosen to drop one ‘m’ from Heming and the ‘e’ from Banks.

  Notes

  Abbreviations

  The following commonly cited publications have been abbreviated:

  CFP – Case for the Prosecution

  TWM – E. Lees, The Worcestershire Miscellany

  TOM – E. Lees, The Oddingley Murders

  TTC – T. Eaton, The Trial of Thomas Clewes

  PP – Papers Formerly in the Possession of the Reverend Reginald Pyndar

  Inq – Inquisition on the Body of the Reverend George Parker at the Parish of Oddingley, 25 June 1806

  WNC – T.C. Tuberville, Worcestershire in the Nineteenth Century

  Archives:

  WRO – Worcester Records’ Office

  BCA – Birmingham City Archives

  NA – National Archives

  BRO – Berkshire Records’ Office

  HO – Home Office files at the National Archives

  EPIGRAPHS

  1 ‘Tis a sad thing to die …’, Letter from Arian Elwood to Bishop Compton, 28 October 1697, DRO, Chanter 757.

  2 ‘I fled, and cried out DEATH! …’ John Milton, Paradise
Lost.

  INTRODUCTION

  1 ‘Expect the French every dark night’, William Pitt the Younger, quoted from a letter to Josiah Wedgwood on 10 October 1803 by his son. From R.C. Litchfield, Tom Wedgwood: The First Photographer.

  2 ‘Mysterious conspiracy’, Caledonian Mercury, 6 February 1830 ‘Strange case’, Morning Chronicle, 2 February 1830, Examiner, 7 February 1830.

  3 ‘If ever there was a secluded, humble, quiet-looking village …’, Mary Sherwood, The Oddingley Murders: An Account of the two Murders in Oddingley, Worcestershire.

  PROLOGUE

  This account of events in Oddingley on 24 June 1806 and the movements of characters is chiefly drawn from E. Lees, The Worcestershire Miscellany, E. Lees, The Oddingley Murders, T. Eaton, The Inquest Held Upon the Remains of Richard Heming and the unpublished brief for the prosecution held at WRO ref. 899.749, BA/10106. The primary source of information about Parker’s murder comes from Inquisition on the Body of the Reverend George Parker at the Parish of Oddingley, 25 June 1806, kept at the NA, ASSI 5/126/23.

  1 ‘The most vivid flashes of lightning’, Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 19 June 1806.