Murder at the Inn

by James Moore

  Another famous murder case where the initial inquest was heard in a pub was the killing of 3-year-old Francis Saville Kent in 1860 in the village of Rode, then in Wiltshire. His body had been found under a privy at the family home. Proceedings were initially held at the Red Lion in the village, where the verdict was ‘wilful murder’ by a person or persons unknown. Francis’ half-sister Constance, who had been 16 at the time, was tried for the murder some five years later and imprisoned for life. The case would become the subject of a best-selling book, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Or the murder at Road Hill House, by Kate Summerscale.

  Pub inquests only began to die away after the 1875 Public Health Act ordered the setting up of public mortuaries and coroners’ courts across the country. The 1902 Licensing Act went further by forbidding the holding of inquests in public houses if any decent alternative existed, though some were still being carried out right up until the 1920s.

  LOCATIONS: The Bell Inn, Purton Stoke, Swindon, Wiltshire, SN5 9JG, 01793 770434, www.arkells.com; Red Lion, Dunkirk, Faversham, Kent, ME13 9LL, 01227 750224, www.theredlionpubdunkirk.co.uk; Crown Inn, No. 57 High Street, Hardingstone, NN4 6BZ, 01604 708726.

  6

  COURTROOMS AND PRISONS

  As well as venues for inquests, inns were used as courtrooms right up until the turn of the twentieth century. The practice of magistrates holding sessions in licensed premises was not outlawed until 1902. Before the widespread provision of police courts, large inns were sometimes the most convenient places for more minor cases to be heard, especially in rural areas. From the start of the eighteenth century, pubs were most often the setting for monthly petty sessions, the lowest tier of the court system where misdemeanours like theft and assault were handled along with, ironically, cases of drunkenness and the provision of licences for public houses. Matters were judged without a jury by local justices of the peace, who would decide whether the case needed to be passed on to the next level, the quarter sessions. The Cock Hotel in Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire, was one inn that held petty sessions, as was The White Hart in Welwyn, Hertfordshire. Some, like the Sun Hotel in Lancaster, heard more serious cases in quarter sessions four times a year. Proceedings were often held in back or upstairs rooms. There were other types of court held at inns. The George and Dragon at Baldock, Herts, which dates back to 1465, had an archdeacons’ court, while The Speech House in Coleford, Gloucestershire, is still the venue for meetings of the ancient verderers’ court, charged with administering the Forest of Dean.

  Down the centuries, inns have also been used as makeshift prisons. This was often linked to executions. Before modern methods of communication it might take several days to take a prisoner to the place at which they were to be tried or hanged. Constables and their charges would often lodge overnight at an inn, sometimes tied together while they slept (See the Red Barn Murder, here). In 1555, for example, George Tankerfield was kept overnight at the now demolished Cross Keys Inn at St Albans, Hertfordshire, before he could be burned at the stake for his heretical religious views. Prisoners were also kept overnight at the Boar’s Head in Standish on their way to meet their executioners in Lancaster after being found guilty at the Chester Assizes. Even the most esteemed guests could be shut up at inns. In 1569 Mary Queen of Scots, confined by Queen Elizabeth I of England, was briefly moved from her ‘prison’ at Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire to the walled city of Coventry after an uprising in the north for safekeeping. She was lodged at the long gone Bull Inn. During the following years Mary was given a large degree of freedom and, although strictly a prisoner, was allowed to spend summers at the spa town of Buxton, staying at the New Hall or the Inne of the Sign of the Talbot. Her movements were strictly regulated but she enjoyed her stay.

  The same building is now a hotel called the Old Hall and it was here that Mary scratched a message with a diamond ring into one of the bedroom window panes, which read ‘Buxton, whose warm waters have made thy name famous, perchance I shall visit thee no more, farewell.’ In the summer of 1586, after being implicated in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth, Mary was moved to Fotheringay from her imprisonment in another Staffordshire castle, staying at The Swan, now known as The Haycock Hotel, on her way. She was executed at Fotheringay on 8 February 1587. Mary wasn’t the last supposed enemy of the state to be shut up at an inn. As recently as the Napoleonic Wars, high profile French prisoners could find themselves under a kind of ‘public house’ arrest. After the Battle of Trafalgar, the captured commander of the British and French forces, Admiral Villeneuve, did not find himself thrown in a rancid cell as you might expect, but lodged at the Crown Inn at Bishop’s Waltham in Hampshire.

  LOCATIONS: The Cock Hotel, No. 72 High Street, Stony Stratford, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, MK11 1AH, 01908 567773; www.oldenglishinns.co.uk; The White Hart Hotel, No. 2 Prospect Place, Welwyn, Hertfordshire, AL6 9EN, 01438 715353, www.thewhiteharthotel.net; The Sun Hotel and Bar, Nos 63–65 Church Street, Lancaster, Lancs, LA1 1ET, 01524 66006, www.thesunhotelandbar.co.uk; The George and Dragon, No. 2 Hitchin Street, Baldock, Herts, SG7 6AL, www.thegeorgeatbaldock.co.uk; The Speech House Hotel, Coleford, Gloucestershire, GL16 7EL, 01594 822 607, www.thespeechhouse.co.uk; Boar’s Head, Wigan Road, Standish, Lancashire, 01942 749747, www.boarsheadstandish.co.uk; Old Hall Hotel, The Square, Buxton, SK17 6BD, 01298 22841, www.oldhallhotelbuxton.co.uk; The Haycock Hotel, Wansford, Peterborough, PE8 6JA, 01780 782223; Crown Inn, St George’s Square, Bishops Waltham, Hampshire, SO32 1AF, 01489 893350, www.crowninnbishopswaltham.co.uk.

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  INNS AND EXECUTIONS

  From the twelfth century until 1783, Tyburn, near today’s Marble Arch, was the principal place where criminals in the city of London would be executed. Over the centuries, hundreds of people were hanged here and each execution was a public spectacle, witnessed by hundreds of jeering onlookers. They were often provided with special stands constructed for the event. Even the traditional 2.5-mile journey from Newgate Prison in the city to Tyburn was a piece of theatre. Until the late eighteenth century, the route went via Holborn, St Giles and what is now Oxford Street, and the condemned person would be paraded in an open cart. On the way the prisoners also got to stop for a last alcoholic beverage, perhaps to steel their nerves and cause the hangman less trouble. The Bowl on St Giles High Street was one of the customary places to pause. In 1727 the author Jonathan Swift caught the atmosphere of these occasions when he wrote about the execution of Tom Clinch, based on the highwayman Tom Cox who had been hanged at Tyburn in 1691:

  As Clever Tom Clinch, while the Rabble was bawling,

  Rode stately through Holbourn, to die in his Calling;

  He stopt at the George for a Bottle of Sack,

  And promis’d to pay for it when he’d come back.

  The Mason’s Arms in Berkeley Street was probably the last port of call on the way to Tyburn. It is said that the prisoners were manacled to the walls of the basement, in case their last draught on earth might inspire them to try and escape. Jack Sheppard, a notorious eighteenth-century English thief who became known for a string of ingenious escapes from London prisons, was finally hanged at Tyburn in November 1724. Sheppard, who was only 22, took his final drink at the City of Oxford pub where he downed a pint of ‘sack’ (fortified wine). Other reports say he also stopped off at The White Hart in Drury Lane. His hanging was witnessed by a staggering 200,000 people. Similar last drinks were offered to those facing the gallows in other cities around the country.

  The notorious eighteenth-century thief Jack Sheppard, one of those condemned to die at Tyburn, who stopped at a tavern for a traditional last drink on the way to the gallows. (Courtesy of Wellcome Images)

  There was plenty of dark humour involved in these spectacles. Legend has it that in 1635 a condemned man by the name of Thomas Witherington asked for his procession from gaol to Tyburn not to go via the usual route past the Three Cups Inn because he still owed money there and didn’t want to be arrested for debt. Also, the phrase ‘on the waggon’, for
being abstemious, is thought to allude to the convict’s last drink in this world before getting back on the cart to make the final leg of their journey to the hangman.

  The Angel and Royal Hotel in Grantham, Lincolnshire, where Richard III signed the Duke of Buckingham’s death warrant in 1483 (Courtesy of the Angel and Royal Hotel)

  Inns have also been the location for both the ordering and carrying out of executions. On 19 October 1483, Richard III was staying at one of the nation’s grandest and oldest inns, The Angel in Grantham, now known as The Angel & Royal Hotel, when he signed the death warrant against his cousin, the Duke of Buckingham, for treason. Despite Buckingham’s attempts to escape he was caught and brought to Salisbury. On 2 November he was executed in the courtyard of the Blue Boar.

  In a remote part of Wales, executions may once have actually been carried out inside an inn. The Skirrid claims to date back to 1100, which would make it one of the oldest surviving pubs in Britain. Though there is little in the way of documentary evidence, local legend, passed down from generation to generation, has it that men sentenced to die by the local courts which sat in the inn were dispatched from a beam at the bottom of a set of stairs where rope marks can still be seen. According to the story, some 180 people were hanged this way, the last being for stealing sheep in the seventeenth century.

  A number of old inns have ‘gallows’ signs – ones that extend out over the road from the premises. Most of these were purely for the purposes of advertising. But at the seventeenth-century George at Crawley in Sussex, later a haunt of serial killer John George Haigh (see here), there was an actual gallows outside the inn and condemned men were kept in cells beneath the Brewery Shades pub nearby, with subterranean passageways linking the two hostelries. In 1784 at Mudeford Quay there was a battle between smugglers barricaded inside the Haven House Inn and excise men. George Coombes, one of the bootleggers, was later hanged for his involvement and gibbeted outside the pub.

  LOCATIONS: The Mason’s Arms, No. 51 Upper Berkeley Street, London, W1H 7QW, 020 7723 2131; The White Hart, No. 191 Drury Lane, London, WC2B 5QD, 020 7242 2317, www.whitehartdrurylane.co.uk; The Angel & Royal Hotel, High Street, Grantham, Lincolnshire, NG31 6PN, 01476 565816, www.angelandroyal.co.uk, The Skirrid Mountain Inn, Llanvihangel Crucorney, Monmouthshire, NP7 8DH, 01873 890258, www.skirridmountaininn.co.uk; The George Hotel is now the Ramada Crawley Gatwick, High Street, Crawley, RH10 1BS, 01293 524 215, www.ramadagatwickhotel.com; The Brewery Shades, No. 85 High Street, Crawley, West Sussex, RH10 1BA, 01293 514105; The Haven House Inn, Mudeford Quay, Christchurch, Dorset, 01425 272609

  8

  LANDLORDS AND HANGMEN

  Britain’s best known hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, also ran a pub. Along with his job as an executioner during the middle of the twentieth century, he was landlord of the curiously named Help the Poor Struggler in Oldham, Lancashire. Pierrepoint took on the pub after the Second World War, when his reputation for expertly despatching the condemned was already well established. His persona at the pub could not have been more different from his grim job behind the walls of the nation’s prisons.

  At the Struggler he entertained customers with sing-a-longs and bar tricks. His identity as an executioner soon came to light after he was flown to Germany to hang Nazi war criminals, and many called at the pub, along with another hostelry he ran called the Rose and Crown at Hoole near Preston, to glimpse the dapper Pierrepoint pulling pints. The Rose and Crown is now an Indian restaurant, while the Struggler was demolished in 1972 for a new road.

  During his twenty-five years at the gallows, Pierrepoint hanged more than 400 people, including the wartime traitor Lord Haw Haw, the acid bath murderer John George Haigh and Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. But the execution that probably made the biggest impression on Pierrepoint was of someone whose crime did not become a national sensation. In 1950 Pierrepoint was charged with hanging James Corbitt, one of the regulars at his own pub. The pair had even sung duets together there. In fact they had sung ‘Danny Boy’ together on the night that Corbitt had gone on to murder his girlfriend, Eliza Wood, at the now defunct Prince of Wales Hotel in Ashton-under-Lyne. Before escorting him to the noose in November 1950, Pierrepoint was said to have put Corbitt more at ease by using his nickname, Tish. The unpleasant task of hanging a friend from his ‘other life’ contributed to Pierrepoint’s growing belief that the death penalty didn’t work. In his 1974 autobiography, Executioner: Pierrepoint, he recalled returning to the pub after carrying out Corbitt’s execution at Strangeways Prison in Manchester. He wrote:

  As I polished the glasses, I thought if any man had a deterrent to murder poised before him, it was this troubadour whom I called Tish. He was not only aware of the rope, he had the man who handled it beside him singing a duet. The deterrent did not work.

  Pierrepoint is often referred to as England’s last hangman, but that isn’t quite correct. He retired in 1956 and one of the two final hangings were carried out on 13 August 1964 by Harry Allen. Like Pierrepoint, Allen was also a publican, running both the Rope and Anchor in Farnworth near Bolton and the Junction Inn at Whitefield, Manchester.

  Interestingly drink had long been an issue with the job of hangman. Pierrepoint’s own father, Henry, had been sacked from the role in 1910 after being found drunk before he was due to carry out an execution in Chelmsford, Essex. It wasn’t the first incident of its type. In the 1880s the hangman Bartholomew Binns frequently turned up at the gallows worse for wear, botching executions. He was finally dismissed after his drunkenness was believed to have contributed to the horrible end of a man who was sentenced to death in Liverpool. The prisoner had choked to death over a quarter of an hour.

  Another Victorian hangman, James Berry, would hold court in local pubs before a hanging, telling tales and singing songs. Indeed, in October 1885, the Home Office became so concerned about the behaviour of hangmen that they wrote to the Prison Commission advising that executioners should reside in the prison on the night before undertaking their duties, presumably so that they would avoid the temptations of drink.

  9

  SIGNS OF THE CRIMES

  We are used to encountering pubs with names that recall national heroes like Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington. But there are also plenty of watering holes named after some of the less upstanding citizens from our past, even where there is no direct link between the bar and the individual. When it comes to pubs named after criminals, Dick Turpin wins hands down. Scores more claim to have harboured the eighteenth-century rogue, who has become a much romanticised figure, though he was no stranger to committing violent theft and bloody murder (see here).

  Turpin is not the only highwayman to find himself immortalised on a pub sign. John Nevison, nicknamed Swift Nick, was another of the supposed ‘gentleman highwayman’ operating in the century before, and details of his life, most notably his alleged flight to York from the south, have since been wrongly credited to the now much better known Turpin. But Nevison has not been forgotten by the brewing industry. His exploits are remembered at The Nevison’s Leap in Pontefract and The Nevison Inn at Leigh in Lancashire. Sixteen String Jack, a pub in Theydon Bois, Essex, commemorates Jack Rann, a highwayman who was tried and acquitted six times for highway robbery before finally being convicted and hanged in 1774. The 24-year-old was said to have danced a jig before being executed at Tyburn. There are at least twenty-six more pubs across Britain called simply The Highwayman.

  Smugglers are another favourite when it comes to pub names. As well as generic names such as The Smugglers, specific bootleggers are recalled at places like Gulliver’s Tavern in Kinson, Bournemouth. Isaac Gulliver led a band of fifty smugglers operating along the south coast at the end of the eighteenth century. He once escaped investigating customs men by lying in an open coffin with white powder on his face. Gulliver’s wife told the officers that her husband had died. Gulliver later became a respected figure in the local community and died a wealthy man. Like many pubs, the Gulliver’s T
avern is supposed to have a secret tunnel used by the smugglers to avoid detection.

  Of course most smugglers and highwaymen were actually hardened criminals, but society seems to be less squeamish about toasting these ne’er-do-wells of yesteryear than plain murderers, even in the case of the world’s most infamous and still unidentified killer, Jack the Ripper. When The Ten Bells in London’s Spitalfields (see here) briefly changed its name to Jack the Ripper, on account of the fact that many of his victims drank there in the late 1880s, it was soon changed back again. The moniker had been deemed distasteful.