Black Seas
A story of jealousy by the North Sea
My friend Carla Linford has just started a project, funded by Create North East Lincolnshire, to research and write about the working-class women of nineteenth-century Grimsby. And I have signed on as her mentor!
So, this week’s Friday Murder is a little tribute to this exciting new project. It’s a story I’ve told before, a couple of years ago on Twitter… but it deserves a full retelling.
This is the story of Annie Insole, and an insight into the community that Carla’s work will be focused on.
Sarah Ann Robinson was born in Hull in the summer of 1864. Her parents - Henry and Delilah (Delia/Amelia) - were born in Nottingham and Liverpool. Delilah’s parents were from Galway. They married in Manchester in 1850, but moved to New Brunswick in 1856. They appear to have returned to England in time for Sarah’s birth. Henry Robinson was a salesman, and by 1871, he sold insurance.
In the 1870s, the family moved to Grimsby, and lived at Trinity Square, off modern Trinity Street. This was before the land was reclaimed to build the modern dockland, and was more or less on the waterfront. Henry and Delilah had at least eleven children, but in 1881, only their three youngest daughters - Sarah, Henrietta and Eliza - lived at home. The others were either at sea or working in service. Sarah Ann was usually known as Annie.
Richard Insole was born in London in 1862, the son of a blind sailor working out of East London. Both his parents were originally from Romford, and they moved to Hull in the early 1860s - they met the Robinsons there, and his mother helped Delia Robinson when Annie was born. They arrived in Grimsby in 1870, and lived on Albion Street. Richard’s father, John, was often at sea, but was abusive when home. In 1870, his mother, Sarah, told the magistrates how she’d been in fear of her life for a year, that John regularly pulled her out of bed, strangled her and threatened to run her through with a poker. Sarah had very recently given birth to her sixth son, and a lot of her complaints have a sexualised overtone. However, her husband claimed she drank all his wages so the magistrate told Sarah to “behave properly to her husband”, go home and try and live happily together. This was the reality of domestic abuse in the mid-19th century: as long as nobody died, nobody really cared. It was perhaps a relief to the Insole family when John Insole died in 1873. However, his death left the family - consisting of Sarah and her four dependent sons, aged 16, 14, 11, and 2 - in dire straits. Her eldest son was already at sea, and all her boys followed him. Richard joined the merchant navy as an apprentice in May 1875, aged twelve, claiming to be fourteen. He lodged with his family’s friends, the Robinsons, who had moved to a house on Wellington Terrace (now a car park). By 1881, he was crewing trawlers out of Grimsby.
Richard married Sarah Ann (Annie) Robinson in Grimsby on 17th May 1882. He was nineteen, and she was seventeen. They appear to have married as soon as Richard completed his apprenticeship, presumably with the blessing of their parents, and lived with Annie’s parents. Their first baby was born in the summer of 1883 and named Lilian Delia after Annie’s mother.
Their early marriage was difficult, and Annie suggested they moved out, to see if they could do better away from her family. Towards the end of 1884, they did just that. Another baby, George, was born in the spring of 1885. He died just before Christmas the same year, and this is where the difficulties seem to have started.
Richard was always an abusive husband, but as his mother’s story shows, there wasn’t much Annie could do about that. His violent temper was well-known to the Robinsons, but they do not appear to have interfered. However, in 1885, he came home from sea and was told Annie was having an affair with his friend, a man named James Shepherd. Annie vehemently denied this. In July 1886, Richard seriously assaulted Annie. I have not been able to find a report of the assault, but it must have been serious because he went to prison for six weeks and Annie was granted a separation order. When he came out, he gave up the lease on their house and sold everything they owned. Annie moved back in with her parents on Wellington Terrace. Her married sister, Margaret, also lived there.
In September 1886, around the time he was released from prison, Richard was taken to court for failing to pay Annie maintenance. And there, he dragged her name through the mud and back, claiming she was a prostitute, a drunk who haunted the theatres by night. A neighbour claimed to have heard her having sex when her husband was at sea. Annie steadfastly maintained her innocence, and the magistrates ordered Richard to pay her 7 shillings and sixpence a week to maintain her. However, he warned Annie that if it was proved that she was committing adultery, the order would be rescinded.
Annie went to work at a fish processing plant, a fairly common job for young women in Grimsby. It wasn’t well paid and the evidence I’ve seen suggests exploitation and sexual harassment was common. But it meant she had some money of her own, and her parents helped look after little Lilian, who was not quite old enough for school. She still saw Richard from time to time, but refused to live with him.
Richard had stopped paying Annie any maintenance by early January - if he ever paid it at all - although Annie still claimed his wages from his employer, while Richard was at sea. She kept the money without spending it - 44 shillings in all - because she suspected Richard would want it back. Richard took thirteen shillings back, but then he heard she had a new dress, and he got suspicious. On 7th January 1887, instead of talking to her about it, or indeed, acting like a normal human being, he went and bought a revolver. Then he went to a different shop and bought fifty bullets.
That evening, he followed Annie’s into her parents’ house. It was around 10pm, and he’d evidently followed her there from town, pestering her to move back in with him. Annie was not happy about Richard being in the house, and asked him to go outside. Her parents, asked her what was happening and she ignored them. Her father immediately sensed something was amiss, and left to fetch a policeman. And as soon as he’d gone, Richard held a gun to his wife’s head and said:
“I want my answer”
Annie asked him to wait outside for ten minutes, she’d come to him and give him an answer. She did not want him in the house, not like this, not armed, not with her child asleep upstairs.
Richard demanded an answer again. Annie told him she wouldn’t give him one. And then he said:
“Are you guilty, or am I? There’s James Shepherd between us… never mind, I’ll do it now”
and shot her.
The first bullet went wide, and Annie grabbed his hand to try and disarm him, an astonishingly brave thing to do. She was shot twice in the process, and fell backwards, falling into a heap on the floor.
“Oh mother! I’m shot! He’s killed me, I’m shot dead.”
Richard then deliberately shot her in the left side of her chest at point-blank range. He put the gun on a table, but took it with him when he left the house.
Annie said:
“Oh mother I’ve been killed”
and died.
And then he ran off to his mother’s house and stabbed himself, incredibly ineffectually, in the abdomen with his sea knife. The wound, barely an inch wide, was painful but far from fatal. The police arrested him there, bleeding and complaining, demanding to see his wife. He confessed:
“I own I shot her. She first promised she would live with me, then she wouldn’t, until it was too late.”
The inquest was held the following afternoon, at the infirmary where Richard was inpatient (Note: some reports claim the inquest was done at the Wellington Arms, but this is simply where the jury assembled before seeing Annie’s body). Three shots had hit Annie in the chest. The first had gone through her right arm. She bled to death from her heart. Richard had nothing to say for himself, and a verdict of wilful murder was returned. He was not initially well enough to be taken before the magistrates, but he did see his daughter.
On 17th January, Richard was finally well enough to be committed to trial. He offered no defence, merely groaned. The Winter Assize was due, and his trial was held in Lincoln on 31st January, less than a month after the murder. His defence was simple: Annie was a whore and deserved it.
Naturally, it was not presented quite so starkly. Richard’s defence gave a wonderfully florid speech, full of allusions to the black seas, the hopelessness of betrayal, and Richard not caring if his daughter lived or died. Annie had been ‘ill’ either with an STD or abortion, and although it was certainly a case of murder, there was extreme provocation. He then read an account of Richard’s marriage, written by Richard.
The judge had had enough at this point, and told the jury that Richard was entitled to say anything he liked in his defence, but it was not evidence and the jury were under no obligation to accept it as true. He took the paper from the defence, read it through himself, and announced it “could only have one effect, though he did not object to it having that effect if Mr Harris (barrister) pressed for it”.
Mr Harris withdrew the statement. He then proposed to call witnesses to prove Annie had been having an affair with James Shepherd. The judge suggested this might be counter-productive, so he didn’t.
The judge was disgused with the method that Richard used to slay his wife, and said so. Stabbing, strangling, bashing wives on the head was one thing, but to shoot your dying wife in the chest at point blank range was a step too far. He advised the jury that the only possible verdict was guilty.
But the jury wished to retire. The judge was surprised by this. After ten minutes they came back and said they found Richard guilty, but recommended mercy on account of the infidelity of his wife.
The judge was not impressed. Infidelity, especially unproven infidelity, was not a legally sound reason for mercy. He sent them back to reconsider. Fifteen minutes later, they came back. Guilty, but recommended for mercy because of provocation.
The judge donned his black cap, told Richard not to count on getting any mercy, and sentenced him to death. A petition was raised to commute Richard’s death sentence, but nobody much was interested - only about four hundred signatures were raised. The murder was simply too horrific.
On 15th February, Richard’s mother and little brother visited him in the condemned cell at Lincoln. Richard begged to see his daughter, but the Robinsons had taken her to Manchester to stay with family while the execution took place. He asked fifteen people to visit him, but only seven actually did. However, he was personally attended by the Bishop of Lincoln.
He was executed on 21st February, privately within the walls of HMP Lincoln.
We don’t know what Richard’s defence statement said (at least, not without making a trip to The National Archive) because none of the newspapers printed it. However, Henry Robinson, Annie’s father, was so disgusted that he had a rebuttal printed. So, we can guess from what Henry said that Richard -used the same arguments that he had in court in 1886. He claimed that Annie was a whore, sleeping with everyone in Grimsby, abandoning her children to get laid, spending all her money on drink. It’s not clear whether Richard actually believed this, or whether he simply thought it would get him out of trouble.
The Robinson and Insole family had known each other for Annie’s whole life. They’d watched Richard grow up alongside their daughter, and perhaps encouraged their teenage romance. So, Henry Robinson must have felt a certain level of responsibility for his daughter’s death, especially when Richard announced that he wouldn’t have shot her if Henry hadn’t left the house.
But this is ultimately a story of a man with no respect for his wife, and a young women trying her very best to crack on with life with a violent, unpredictable husband. Annie did everything a battered wife is supposed to do. She reported his violence to the police, removed herself from his domicile, refused to resume living with him no matter how much he promised to change, found herself a job, and took advantage of her family’s support. Perhaps her real crime, in Richard’s eyes, was achieving some level of independence.
He couldn’t control her, couldn’t know what she was doing (especially from the middle of the North Sea) and couldn’t make her come back.
So he executed her.
Although Richard protested, custody of their daughter, Lilian, was awarded to Henry and Delia Robinson. They took her to Manchester while Richard waited for death, and then moved to Hull. The Robinsons returned to Grimsby eventually, but Lilian did not. She married in 1900 and died in 1963.
Sarah Ann Insole
(1864-1887)