Hampshire and Isle of Wight Folk Tales

by Michael O'Leary

  Then the piper played a different tune and the children followed him into the woods behind Francheville. When the parents ran after them, they were all gone – vanished into the trees – and the sound of the pipes had faded into the whispering of the wood.

  In 1377, the French attacked Francheville – but the generation that would have provided the young fighting men was gone, so only the middle-aged and ancient were there to defend it, and they didn’t stand a chance. Francheville was destroyed. Francheville became Newtown, and struggled on, but never regained its former importance. It kept its importance politically though, and the Town Hall was built in the sixteenth century. This was because Newtown had two parliamentary seats; it became one of the most notorious rotten boroughs in England, which lasted till the Reform Act of 1832.

  Visitors to the Isle of Wight often neglect this area of the Island’s north coast. Naturally enough they go to one of the amusement parks or attractions, or to the lovely undercliff around Ventnor, or to Alum Bay and The Needles. I think that one of the pleasures of the Island, though, is to visit quiet little Newtown and, on a warm summer’s evening, watch the red sky over the mud flats, and listen to the sea-birds and waders, and maybe wonder what happened to all those children.

  THE BUILDING OF GODSHILL CHURCH

  There are several other nationally known legends attached to the Isle of Wight. We have already heard how the Romans were unable to build their capital on Old Winchester Hill because every night the building stones rolled themselves back down into the valley. The same is said of Christchurch Cathedral, which, though it is now in East Dorset, used to be in Hampshire. On the Isle of Wight the story is told about Godshill Church; though, characteristically for the Island, the legend is reversed. The church now stands at the top of the hill, and the stories say that the builders were attempting to construct it at the bottom. The stones were rolled back up by some supernatural agency – and maybe this made life a bit easier for the labourers, who at least had gravity on their side when rolling them back down. In spite of this, they still had to give up.

  One story says that the land at the bottom belonged to a farmer, who was such a sinner that a church could never be built there – something that suited the farmer very well; he didn’t want to lose his land. The other story says that the field at the bottom of the hill was a fairy field, and the church would prevent the fairies from holding their revels. So, every night, the fairies toiled up the hill, hauling the stones behind them. Finally, the ecclesiastical authorities had to give up, and, on the day of the church’s consecration at the top of the hill, the fairies could be heard holding their revels in the field at the bottom of the hill.

  THE PHANTOM PARTY

  Another nationally known legend has attached itself to the Isle of Wight, but it has attached itself to a very appropriate place. Knighton Gorges isn’t a series of gorges, like Cheddar Gorge or the Avon Gorge; it was once a house, indeed one of the grandest houses on the Island. In 1821, in an appalling fit of pique, it was destroyed by its owner, George Maurice Bisset, because he wanted to prevent his daughter from inheriting it. This was because she had had the temerity to marry a clergyman without her father’s consent. All that is left of the house now are two gateposts standing next to the road under Knighton Down.

  In the 1920s, a young man was walking the Island; maybe he was collecting stories. He’d crossed Arreton Down and, as an early winter evening drew in, he knew he needed to find somewhere to sleep for the night. As he ambled down the lane, there were two gateposts with heraldic beasts on the top of them. He was very impressed, and, given that it was New Year’s Eve, he wondered if he could get a night’s shelter there.

  He walked down the drive and saw that there were lights blazing in every window of the manor house, and the sounds of gaiety and laughter; there was a great party going on. It was obviously a fancy-dress party, because the men wore powdered wigs and the women were resplendent in Georgian dresses. He banged on the door, and tapped on the window, but couldn’t get any attention. Eventually he gave up; but he was halfway up the drive when he thought he’d go back and try again. As he turned, a black carriage pulled by black horses came thundering towards him from the house; he flung himself into a ditch before he was trampled beneath the hooves. He was shaken, bruised and angry, and decided not to return.

  The young man got himself lodgings down in the village. When he told his story to the landlady, she told him that the house was long gone; it had been knocked down in her great-granny’s time. The next day, the young man returned and found that there were just two gateposts; there was no drive, no heraldic beasts on the gateposts, and no house. All he could see was a field, a tumbledown barn, an old orchard, and a tangle of weeds.

  This is a version of a story found throughout Britain and Ireland, but rarely is the name of the house given so specifically. The Isle of Wight has developed quite a ghost-hunting industry, not least because the Island became a tourist destination in Victorian times. And, should you go on a ghost tour, you will very likely be taken to those gateposts. If you wish to see the house, though, you will have to go alone, and probably on New Year’s Eve.

  THE KING’S HEAD

  Among its many ghosts, the Island can boast of the head of King Charles I. During the Civil War, the king was imprisoned at Hampton Court, but he escaped to the Isle of Wight. The king had some intention of continuing the war from Carisbrooke Castle, and this put the governor, Colonel Hammond, in a very difficult position. He had little choice but to imprison the king, though at first the king was treated as an honoured guest and allowed the freedom of the Island. The king tried to escape, and so was imprisoned in the castle. Stories arose that, during his escape attempt, he’d taken refuge at Billingham Manor, near Chillerton, but he was unable to stand the claustrophobia of the narrow space he had to hide in, and so returned to Carisbrooke. At Carisbrooke, Colonel Hammond got to hear about another planned escape, and so greeted the king with, ‘I have come to take leave of your majesty, for I hear you are going away.’ After this, the king was returned to London, where he lost his head on 30 January 1649.

  Billingham Manor, however, acquired the king’s ghost. In 1928, a couple were renting the manor, and they saw glowing phosphorescence through the cracks around a wooden panel. When they moved the panel, the severed head of Charles I floated in front of them, glowing with a greenish light, till it finally faded into the darkness. It transpired that this apparition was seen every time there was an execution on the Island – and on that very day, in 1928, a prisoner had been executed in Newport. The story may be fanciful, but, to me, the idea that the ghost of an executed king should associate himself with the execution of commoners, is a rather touching aspect of the tale. One of the saddest things, though, is to hear about the death of the king’s fourteen-year-old daughter at Carisbrooke in 1650. She had rickets, and she died of pneumonia. Amongst stories of wars and battles, and the manoeuvrings of the mighty, these little vignettes sometimes tell more of reality.

  MICHAEL MOREY’S HUMP

  To continue the theme of decapitation we come to Michael Morey’s Hump, and a man who would murder his own grandson. Michael Morey was a woodsman, and he’d never seen large amounts of money – but the boy had inherited a small sum; from whom I don’t know. Oh, Michael Morey wanted that money. Why should a boy have more than him? Should not the eldest be the one who held the purse strings?

  ‘Come and help your old grandfather at his work,’ said Michael Morey, who, being in his sixties, was not as old as all that.

  Down to the woods they went, and there Michael Morey hacked off his grandson’s head with a bill hook. Then he hacked off the boy’s arms and legs, stuffed them into some old leather saddlebags, and hid them in the undergrowth.

  Michael Morey may have been a greedy man, but he wasn’t a clever man, so he was soon caught and taken to Winchester to stand trial. He was found guilty and hanged. The body was returned to the Island and a gibbet was erected on an old tumulus,
and there the tarred corpse swung in the wind – before it fell to earth and the remains were buried in the old mound.

  Should you go to that mound at midnight, and should you circle it widdershins (anticlockwise) twelve times, and then call out ‘Michael Morey’ three times, his ghost will appear. Why anyone would want to do that is beyond me, but some impressionable ghost hunters recently did so. No one knows what they saw, because none of them will talk about it, but I gather they’ve all given up ghost hunting. The gibbet post is said to have been incorporated into a beam in the nearby Hare & Hounds pub, and the pub is also said to own the skull of Michael Morey.

  It is not a pleasant story, and maybe it has survived as folklore because of the unnaturalness of a grandfather murdering his grandson. It could be, though, that the location has kept the story alive, for Michael Morey’s Hump is a Bronze Age barrow, which also has Saxon remains buried in it. Should you go there, you will be rewarded by a wonderful view of eastern Wight. It is one of those singular places, and maybe the grisly tale of Michael Morey has added itself to more ancient stories.

  The skull in the Hare & Hounds is much more ancient than Michael Morey; it is from one of the original prehistoric burials.

  TALES OF BENJAMIN SNUDDON

  No one would try and excuse Michael Morey’s actions. When we come to smuggling, though – well, it was hardly considered a crime. On the mainland, a lot of smuggling was carried out by organised gangs – some of which, like the Hawkhurst Gang, operated over an area stretching from Kent to Dorset, through Sussex and Hampshire. These were vicious criminals, and murder and torture were part of their stock in trade. On the Isle of Wight, however, smuggling was just a way of life, and there were no big, organised, smuggling gangs, and none of the mainland gangs could get a foothold on the Island. Cork Heads had little time for rule from the mainland anyway. Lots of tales grew up around illicit liquor and the various hiding places for the contraband, and some of them seem to have attached themselves to Benjamin Snuddon, a guileless and innocent man from Niton; or possibly a man who was very full of guile – various stories seem to give contradictory accounts.

  Niton is at the very southernmost tip of the Island – next stop France. Of Niton, the nineteenth-century writer Dobell wrote:

  The whole population here are smugglers. Everyone has an ostensible occupation, but nobody gets his money by it, or cares to work in it. Here are fishermen who never fish, but always have pockets full of money, and farmers whose farming consists in ploughing the deep by night, and whose daily time is spent standing like herons on lookout posts.

  We have to presume that Benjamin Snuddon was an innocent who somehow knew nothing of all this. One night, he was passing through the churchyard with a belly full of beer, and he was unaware that one of the tombs was a hiding place for smuggled goods. As he passed by, a marble slab slowly lifted itself up, and a face appeared.

  ‘What o’clock is it, Benjamin Snuddon?’ said the face.

  ‘’tis the Day of Judgement,’ cried Benjamin, and fled the scene in terror.

  Benjamin was prone to misadventures in graveyards. On another occasion, he left the hostelry on a dismal, rainy night. As he stumbled across the churchyard, he failed to notice a freshly dug grave, ready to receive a nice new corpse the next morning. Benjamin tumbled into the waiting hole, and then tried to clamber out. The rain poured down and the more he scrabbled at the wet earth with his fingers, the more he fell back into the waiting grave. Then one of Benjamin’s cronies also came staggering out of the pub, across the graveyard, and tumbled into the grave.

  ‘You’ll never get out of here, Albert,’ said Benjamin, laying his cold, wet, clammy hand on Albert’s shoulder.

  But, by Christ, Albert did!

  Other stories present Benjamin as not only being guileful, rather than guileless, but of being capable of outsmarting both smugglers and excise officers. One day, Benjamin stumbled across a keg of spirits that had been tucked away by the smugglers. He poured the spirits into a milk pail, and then filled the keg with seawater. Tying it about with fishing floats, Benjamin floated the keg out to sea. Off he then went to the coastguard and claimed the reward for discovering contraband. Benjamin reckoned those cows gave the very best milk!

  The stories arise, though, from widespread sympathy – indeed involvement – with the smugglers. On the north coast, in Whippingham churchyard, there is an epitaph on a gravestone for a smuggler killed by the excise men, and it reads:

  All you that pass pray look and see

  How soon my life was took from me

  By those officers as you hear

  They spilt my blood that was so dear

  But God is good, is just and true

  And will reward to each their due

  Smuggling still takes place around the Island, but now it is those criminal gangs. In 2002, smugglers intended to land a £90 million consignment of cocaine at a bay near Ventnor. The weather beat the yacht back to Windy Bay, a mile away, and they had to lug their cargo, like eighteenth-century smugglers, along cliff-top paths. They got nicked.

  THE QUEEN OF CHANTILLY

  St Helens is on the eastern end of the Island, and is a beautiful place – all set around village greens, with its ruined old church and the sound of the sea. In the 1790s, a smuggler and fisherman called Dicky Daws lived in St Helens, and the family lived well enough – though more on the proceeds of smuggling than the proceeds of fishing. Unfortunately for the family, Dicky Daws was a bit too partial to the liquor that he was smuggling, and the drink killed him. His wife, son and two daughters were left eking out a living winkle picking on Bembridge Beach. They ended up in the workhouse.

  When she was thirteen, the youngest daughter, Sophie, went to work on a farm, but as she grew older she realised that her beauty was an asset that could be used; a quality that could lift her out of poverty. The Island couldn’t hold her, and she ran away to Portsmouth. She used her sexuality, her cunning, her intelligence, and her capacity for survival, to become an actress in London’s Covent Garden, and then become the mistress of a wealthy gentleman from Turnham Green. After this, she was to be found in a brothel in Piccadilly; but this wasn’t some seething brothel above an inn, this was a high-class establishment, and she managed to become mistress of the Duc de Bourbon, an exile from revolutionary France. She proved that she had intelligence as well as cunning by successfully receiving an education in French, Latin, Greek and music.

  When the Duc de Bourbon returned to France after the fall of Napoleon, Sophie came with him as his daughter, and was married off to a major in the royal guard of Louis XVIII. Unbeknownst to her husband, she continued as the mistress of the Duc de Bourbon, only he was now the Prince de Condé. She then showed her true loyalty – a loyalty to the past and to her background, a loyalty that gainsays the often rather prurient and slightly disdainful accounts of her life. She brought her mother, her sister Charlotte and her brother James across to France, and installed them on the estate.

  The story goes on in a similar vein: Sophie’s husband discovered her relationship with Condé, and Sophie was ejected from the court, but she used her powerful personality and got a large slice of Condé’s estate. She was received back in court by the next king, Charles X.

  Condé was eventually found hanging from a window, and Sophie was suspected of organising his murder. He may well have perished whilst indulging in the solitary pleasure of autoerotic asphyxiation – that we’ll never know – but the French public blamed that foreign guttersnipe, Sophie, and they turned against her. So, Sophie ended up living very well in England, where she was known as the Queen of Chantilly. Her brother died before her, and his grave is in St Helens churchyard.

  There is also, in St Helens, a cottage on the village green that bears a plaque, a plaque which I saw before I knew the story, and which made me curious. The inscription says:

  SOPHIE DAWES

  MADAME DE FEUCHERES

  Daughter of Richard Dawes

  Fisherman & Sm
uggler

  known as

  THE QUEEN OF CHANTILLY

  was born here

  about 1792

  So an historical story becomes a legend, and a remarkable woman uses whatever means she can to escape the work-house and rise to the top of French society. Argentina may have Evita, but the Isle of Wight has Sophie Dawes, Queen of Chantilly.

  PEACE, LOVE AND LATRINES

  In 1970 I was a teenager hitchhiking south through England, after a visit to Ireland. As I stood by the roadside, I encountered lines of weary, bedraggled, but generally happy people, hitchhiking north. They were returning home after attending the Isle of Wight Festival. That year there had been 600,000 people attending the festival – more than there had been at Woodstock. The following year, the Isle of Wight Act was passed, preventing gatherings of more than 5,000 people on the Island without a special licence.

  But is this folklore? Well, it was such an event – the time when visitors to the Island outnumbered residents, when Jimi Hendrix made his last appearance, the time when the Island was seen by many through a haze of hallucinogenic drugs – that it became so. It became the focus of stories, some exaggerated, and it changed the nature of the Island.

  When Queen Victoria had Osborne House built on the Island and spent a lot of time in residence, she opened the Island up to tourism. A lot of well-heeled ‘overners’ went to live there, and the Island became famous for the yachting fraternity. It did, however, become a little dull. A lot of those 1970 visitors stayed, or liked the Island and returned. They brought a fresh vigour and, arguably, a greater connection with the old, established Islanders, the Cork Heads. Sometimes, when I wander the Island now, I come across people whose residence started just after 1970, and we can sit and talk about old times and talk about the Island; they seem to have a great love for the place they chose as home. Their children, as with the children of Cork Heads, tend to grow up and leave the Island. As they get older, though, and have children of their own, they often return.