This week’s murder is brought to you by the time-honoured process of me working through the assize (how do YOU pronounce it?) records of Northamptonshire until I hit a homicide. I have quite a lot on this month: a public lecture (video coming soon), a seminar paper, an essay, my kids being at home from school roughly every other day, half-term, a wedding, EUROVISION, my husband’s birthday, the coronation. So much to look forward to, let’s ruin all that with a murder.
As you’ve probably guessed, we’re back in Northampton, to a family fight that went horribly wrong.
John Cooch was nineteen when he married Mary Ann Cumberpatch at St Sepulchre in Northampton, on 29th January 1844. Mary Ann was almost eighteen. She was probably pregnant, and this was perhaps an elopement. The baby - presuming there was one - didn’t survive long enough to be baptised, and the couple went to live in Kingsthorpe, where Mary Ann was born and raised.
Unusually for Northampton, John was not a shoemaker. He was a navvy, an excavator, a human digger, so he was strong and heavily built. He worked hard, and kept his family well, but he wasn’t kind to them and appears to have been a brute to his wife. He built some of the London docks, moving the family to Poplar in the 1860s. After they went back to Kingsthorpe in 1863 or so, he left the family there to work away from home. He wasn’t a virtuous man: he was convicted of stealing copper and alcohol twice. He was a drinker.
Mary Ann was the opposite. Clean, sober, hard-working, generally liked and terribly afflicted by loss. Over nineteen years, Mary Ann gave birth to eleven children, but their mortality was pitiful. Samuel (1847-1852), George (1848-1849), George (1849-1852), Elizabeth (1852-1869), Sarah (1859-1860), Sarah Elizabeth (1861-1863) and Charlotte (1866-1871) were all dead before our story truly begins, in 1877. The survivors were Samuel, (born 1854), Harriet (born 1856), William (born 1857) and Mary Jane (born 1863). Samuel and Harriet both married in 1876, although they remained in Kingsthorpe. However, by 1877 the household was very small: John, Mary Ann, William and Mary Jane.
They lived in a house on Derby Place in Kingsthorpe, long since vanished, close to two of Mary Ann’s sisters:
William, aged twenty, worked as a bricklayer, and often fought with his father. Sometimes, their fights spilled into the streets, especially when they’d been drinking. In May or June 1877 William did something that surprised most of the people he knew: he enlisted in the army. John was livid. He bought him out, ‘discharge by purchase’. However in early September, William re-enlisted at Gibraltar barracks, about a mile down the road from his house. Although he was a very new recruit, his build, determination, and manner suggested he’d do well enough in the army. He was close enough to home to come back at the weekend, and on 15th September, that’s what he did, along with two other new recruits.
William went to the pub with his friends, several pubs actually. He wasn’t properly drunk, although he’d had at least three pints. At around half ten that evening, he stood outside the Cock Inn, opposite Derby Place, talking with Mr Law the landlord. Mary Jane, then aged fourteen, ran to him.
“Come home Bill, or father will kill mother.”
William went immediately. Mary Ann had been locked out of the house. William burst through the house door. He barged up the stairs, and forced the bedroom door open, breaking it. As soon as he entered the bedroom, John Cooch stabbed him deeply in the armpit with a large pocketknife.
This was no light jab: John stabbed William with such force that the three-inch knife penetrated his army uniform, and went five inches into his flesh.
Mary Ann began to scream for help, and within moments the police had arrived. Despite pouring blood across the house, William accompanied Sergeant Delworth and PC Dent as they went upstairs to arrest a contrary and mulish John. William kicked the bedroom door in. Again.
John was not in the mood to be arrested, and he was ready to fight. As soon as the door opened, he snuffed out the candle, forcing the policemen to find him in the dark. He lunged at the officers, knife in hand. They cornered him, threw him to the bed and disarmed him. When he arrived at the police station, he said:
“I meant to do it three weeks ago. I should settle anyone who came into my room as no-one had any right there. I can only swing for it.”
However, later, when the shock wore off and John realised what he’d done, he became regretful, and self-pitying, stating that he wish he’d been killed instead.
Meanwhile, William had collapsed. He was tended by the landlady of the Cock Inn, with a local surgeon doing everything in his power to stem the bloodloss. William almost bled to death there in the room, but somehow clung to life. Once dawn broke, William was taken back to the barracks to be tended by the army surgeons. The wound was terrible, piercing his axillary artery, and was treated with a touniquet. Once William arrived at the barracks, the wound was opened up, and the artery tied off. Before the operation to tie off the artery, he made a sworn statement:
I was cut in the arm at Kingsthorpe last night, about half past ten, on the top of the stairs. My father did not say anything. He would not let my mother go to bed and I went up to open the door. I had no quarrel with my father. He had had some beer. He did it with his pocket knife. I believe I am dangerously wounded and may not recover.
It briefly seemed that William would miraculously survive, despite near exsanguination. However, starved of blood, and therefore oxygen, for hours, his arm became gangrenous extremely quickly. William died on Tuesday 18th September, three days after being stabbed.
An inquest was held at the Town Hall on 20th September, attended by Mary Ann and her daughter. The newspaper reported that not many people attended, which is unusual - perhaps they were kept out. The jury found a verdict of wilful murder against John. He appeared at the magistrate’s court twice, and remanded to stand trial at the winter assize.
William was buried in Kingsthorpe on the 21st September.
The trial was held on Wednesday 14th November, at Northampton. John’s defence was not great - there was no doubt that he’d stabbed his son, but whether he’d done it on purpose was up for debate. The defence questioned the medical witnesses, determined to show that the operation to tie off the axillary artery was the cause of death, not the five inch stab wound, bisecting that artery, and subsequent bloodloss.
And according to the defence, John was as a good husband, and a good father, who had tried to save his son from the army (!) but failed. William must have been terribly drunk, as all soldiers were, and was known to have bullied his poor elderly father (!) and BROKE DOWN THE DOOR. He was, clearly, asking to be stabbed. And John was also drunk, and therefore not culpable.
Aye.
Mary Ann’s terror of her husband, her cowering outside the house she was locked out of, and her absolute horror at her son’s murder did not make it into the defence’s speech. Mary Ann was not allowed to give evidence, but Mary Jane was. Her evidence was unsatisfactory: no mention of the reason WHY William burst into the house was made, and Mary Jane had run away after her brother was stabbed.
The judge told the jury that, if they deemed no malice present, they could return a verdict of manslaughter, and after ninety seconds, they did, with a strong recommendation to mercy.
The judge was pleased that the jury wanted mercy, and sentenced John to six months in prison with hard labour.
John Cooch was livid that William had joined the army, although it’s unclear why. Perhaps he resented the loss of a second household income. Perhaps he was threatened by the idea of his son being stronger and better armed than him.
Nobody explained why Mary Jane believed he was going to kill her mother on the night of the murder, not even Mary Jane herself. In court, she didn’t mentioned fetching her brother from the pub, missing that section of the evening out entirely. But why? Fear? Divided loyalty?All that can be gleaned from the record is that John wouldn’t let his wife in the house.
William was fatally protective of his mother, and perhaps this is why he joined the army. Perhaps he thought being a physical threat to his father was the best way to defend his mother. But perhaps he was just sick of living with a father who was rarely there, yet ruled the household with a drunken fist when he was home.
John Cooch left prison in 1878, but I cannot trace him until 1901, when he was living with his son in Kingsthorpe. He died in 1903.
Mary Ann remained in Kingsthorpe apparently without him: it’s not impossible that they reconciled, but I can see no evidence of them doing so. It’s Mary Ann that I feel for the most. Her daughter Harriet died in 1878, aged twenty-two. Mary Jane died young in 1882, aged nineteen. Her sole surviving child, Samuel, lived on the High Street in Kingsthorpe…but John eventually moved in with him. How do you come back from something like this?
Mary Ann buried ten of her children, before dying in 1893.
William Cooch
(1857-1877)