Do you remember that Harry Enfield sketch? Women, know your limits! It was a joke, an excellent parody, yet something which comes to mind often when I’m working through inquests and court cases. Silly women! If only they’d stayed at home and lived on a huge unearned income! Then this never would have happened…
Today’s story is from the land by Corby Tunnel in Northamptonshire between Corby and Gretton, in early 1879. The Kettering to Manton stretch of railway was built between 1875 and 1880. This was difficult terrain to cover, dipping and rising along the Welland valley. Just north of Gretton is the magnificent brick Welland Viaduct at Harringworth, which took four years to build.
We often pass by this viaduct, and every time, I wonder how many men died building this stretch of line.
But I never thought to wonder whether any women died.
George Hibbs was born at the end of 1846, and raised near Mangotsfield in Gloucestershire. His father, Isaac, was a resourceful man and would do whatever work was available. Initially, he worked on the land, then in a coalmine, and then he joined the railway as a labourer. Railways were everywhere: new ones were planned and begun at lightning speed as the appetite for faster transit grew. And they required a workforce that didn’t mind hard work and hard living conditions. The labourers were known as navvies, a name derived from navigator, and inherited from canal-diggers a century earlier. Navvies had to be prepared to move around to work, and to live wherever they could. George Cornish lodged in a pub, but navvy camps - collections of wooden huts - sprang up in more remote areas. Isaac and George Hibbs left Gloucestershire and began to follow the work.
Elizabeth Harriet Hemmings, who later reversed her first names, was born in Dudley on 9th September 1847. Her father, James, was also a navvy, and went where the work was. Soon after her birth, her parents travelled to Merthyr Tydfil, where James was engaged in sinking coal shafts. Harriet was left behind in Dudley with family: indeed, the Hemmings family took advantage of familial connections to lodge their children in Dudley and London, which freed James up to move for work. In Harriet’s childhood, her parents moved to Devonport and then London, working on new naval docks. Harriet seems to have joined them in London in the early 1860s.
She almost certainly met George Hibbs because he was working alongside her father. They married on Christmas Day 1865 at Battersea, when Harriet was eighteen and George was nineteen. Christmas Day was a popular day for weddings, because they were usually held for free. George and Harriet moved into West Ham after their marriage, and lived there for about five years. Harriet’s mother died during this time, as did their second child. They moved to Brighton from here, and then to Barrow-in-Furness, which was in the midst of a steel boom.
George had progressed by this point from navvy to ganger. A ganger assembled groups of navvies to work on projects, like a foreman, although they had more direct management of the men, and acted as pay agents. They could run groups of up to three hundred men.
George’s father, Isaac was also a ganger. In 1875, Isaac travelled (with his wife and younger children) to Seaton in Rutland to work at Cyprus Camp, the home of the navvies building the Welland Viaduct, and George followed, although he still worked in Brighton from time to time. Cyprus Camp was massive, home of more than 500 people. Once in Seaton, George was promoted to sub-contractor, responsible for all the labour on the stretch of line.
By January 1879, they had moved up the line to Corby Wood, at the end of the tunnel that was under construction. In between stood the navvy camp at Gretton. This was much smaller than Seaton: a group of twelve huts. Although as subcontractor, George would have had the best accomodation, it wasn’t particularly comfortable for the family, which now comprised the two adults, plus Annie (aged twelve), George (aged eight), Maggie (aged six), John (about to turn four) and the baby Albert (just turned two). The younger children do not appear to have always lived with their parents, and possibly spent time with Isaac and Ann Hibbs in Seaton.
Navvy life is often depicted as solitary and masculine, a world of men away from their families, drinking, swearing, betting and fighting. The men at work on this railway, however, lived with their families. There were women, children and well-established homes, albeit on the edge of respectable society… this was not quite the Wild West. Nevertheless, there was drink.
On 19th January 1879, Harriet and her daughter Annie went to visit another married couple named Jones, who lived just outside Gretton, in a hut. This was less than a mile from the Hibbs’ household. There was a tunnel under construction on this part of the line, with a tramway built to the side to allow an easy removal of materials. The Jones’ hut had no neighbours, and seems to have been an unofficial pub. At 5pm, George and another man named Linger came to the hut - Mr Linger was the timekeeper. George was already drunk; he’d been drinking since lunch.
Around the same time, Harriet went to leave in a borrowed pony trap, with her daughter. George did not want her to go, so she sent Annie on ahead and stayed with her husband. Three other men, including Mr Jones, made up the party. Everyone was drinking: the men in the kitchen, the women in the bedroom which the Jones’ used as a sitting room in the day. Harriet had what amounted to a few shots of gin.
For the next couple of hours, Harriet repeatedly asked George to come away, to come home. He refused. Eventually, a 7:30pm, he threw his hat at her and told her to go. She left with Mary Jones and Mary’s son, William (14), leaving her husband to catch up.
After a few hundred yards, they reached the tramway that went over the route of the tunnel, and provided a well-marked track home. Mary turned back here. It was midwinter, the snow was deep and it was too cold to accompany her all the way back. However, she told William to stay with her. They bumped into a man named Thomas Lines, who lived in Gretton, and Harriet asked him to join them so they had a light. He declined.
As Mary approached home, George Hibbs came out of the darkness, running fast. As he drew level with her, she bid him a good evening, and he shouted something she couldn’t understand.
George ran up behind William and Harriet, and swung at them both. William was not sure who he was aiming at, but in his terror, he left Harriet and ran across the fields.
A few moments later, William heard a woman screaming for help, and George shouting
“Go home, you bitch”
Elizabeth Roe, who lived in a hut nearby, heard a woman screaming “Murder!” at the same time. She heard a man shout “Get up” and then silence. She went to ask another neighbour if she’d heard anything, but did not go out to check. Thomas Lines heard the same thing, but also didn’t go and look.
Meanwhile, Annie Hibbs was at home looking after her siblings and became worried that her parents had been out so long. She went out to find them with her little brother George, and they found the adults in the snow. Harriet was unconcious, and George kneeling beside her. George told her that Harriet was drunk and couldn’t get up, and he carried her home on his back. They fell over a lot, although Harriet managed to stagger some of the way.
Annie and George put her to bed, with some difficulty. George would not let Annie light the bedroom.
At 4am, George woke Annie up and told her that her mother was dead. He asked her to fetch some help from the neighbours, but Annie was afraid to. Instead, she walked to Seaton, five miles along the line, and fetched her grandparents. This took the better part of four hours.
The police were called, although not by the Hibbs family. Next to one of the shafts venting the tunnel about 500 yards from the Jones’ house, was an upended trolleycar. Under the car was Harriet’s hat. There was blood in the snow, and marks that suggested Harriet was dragged several yards. A piece of velvet that belonged to her was found nearby.
The inquest was held on 23rd January in Corby, and a verdict of manslaughter was returned. On the 30th January, at a special sessions, George was taken before the magistrates. Unusually, he had representation.
The evidence was conflicting. Mary and William Jones and Thomas Lines all testified that Harriet was sober when she set off home. Mary Jones may have been trying to protect herself from prosecution for running an unlicensed pub. Conversely, Annie and George Hibbs, her children, both testified that their mother was a one-pot screamer, frequently would fight and screech when she’d been drinking. Neither of them gave accurate evidence about the time that they found their parents in the snow: Annie said it was quarter past eight, George that it was half past ten. Their grandmother, Ann Hibbs, said that Harriet was an alcoholic who had fits.
The post-mortem was damning, as they so often are. Harriet was covered in fresh, and severe bruises, on her face, arms and legs. There was a small wound behind her left ear. This injury had caused bleeding in the brain, which killed her. The doctor said the bruises COULD have been caused by falls…but only if there had been a great many of them.
George’s representative asked the magistrates to commit him for manslaughter, not murder. They said that was a matter for the jury, and committed him to a murder trial. He was not bailed.
The trial was held on 23rd April, at Northampton. The evidence was much the same, only Annie wept when she addressed the court. Ann Hibbs again testified that her daughter-in-law was an alcoholic, although nobody else agreed with her assessment. The surgeon who performed the post-mortem had gone insane in the three months since the inquest, and was unable to testify himself. His evidence was, therefore, given second-hand by a doctor who never saw Harriet’s body. This significantly weakened the prosecution.
The judge was not convinced by the evidence of Mary or William Jones, believing they were trying to protect their illegal pub. He was far more convinced by the weeping figure of Annie Hibbs. In fact, he said:
“I was impressed with what the daughter said and I think her evidence is much more consistent with what really occurred than the testimony of Mrs Jones […] If [Harriet] was in that state, one cannot wonder at her falling about. You see, the woman makes no complaint that she has been ill-used and there is no evidence of it. Then her daughter says that she has been guilty of intoxication, and if she made an attempt to go home, having taken what her daughter says she did take, there is no wonder such should be her state on such a cold night.”
The jury agreed that the evidence did not substantiate the charge, and the charge was dismissed.
George was free.
It’s likely that, as with so many marginal communities, the navvies along this stretch of line had a healthy distrust of the police. They had an illegal pub to protect, nicely isolated near the tunnel, and they weren’t going to interfere if a couple were having a fight. But someone DID go to the police. Had the Hibbs family hoped to have been able to keep it quiet otherwise?
I believe that George was livid with his wife for leaving the gathering at Jones’ house, although there’s no obvious reason why. He was not generally a violent man, and everyone considered he got on well with his wife. But on this occasion, he was furious.
I believe that he smacked Harriet about, and then hit her hard, throwing or pushing her down, against the trolleycar. It seems that she caught her head as she hit it, knocking her out. George then dragged her away from the cart, bruising her all over her body, and managed to rouse her enough (perhaps using snow) to get her home. On the way, he fell many times, because he was unquestionably drunk. He then avoided light, so his children couldn’t see the state their mother was in.
The Hibbs family were a closed unit. Where Isaac and Ann went, George and Harriet followed. The children were raised across both households. Neither George nor Annie wanted to fetch a neighbour after Harriet was discovered to be dead, and I think Annie’s decision to go on a lengthy trip to fetch her grandmother is perhaps the most curious element of this case, although one entirely ignored by the prosecution. This long delay - where neither doctor nor policeman was summoned - gave the family a chance to get their story straight. The easiest way to explain away the bruises and Harriet’s death was that she was drunk and falling over. The easiest way to explain her screams for help was that it was what she did when she was drunk. There was nobody to speak for Harriet: her mother was long dead, her father awol, her siblings scattered across Wales.
The slow bleed into her brain caused her to become more unsteady, more slurring, more… drunk-seeming, supporting their version of events. And although Harriet had only had three small glasses of gin (according to both her daughter and Mrs Jones) this was enough for the judge to consider it the primary factor in her death, despite the medical evidence that she’d been given a serious beating. The fact that she’d been drinking was enough for the judge to dismiss the charge, declaring her guilty of intoxication, and framing her death as an act of self-harm.
When Harriet died, this stretch of line was almost complete: it opened in 1880. George had links to Brighton, and the family - including Isaac and Ann - moved there together. They lived on Franklin Street, and in early 1881, George remarried. He moved around with his new wife, with a daughter born in Sydenham in 1883. However, by 1891, he had abandoned his wife and their three children in Brighton, leaving her to work in the hospitality industry. I cannot trace him after this, although I believe he died in London in 1920.
Harriet Elizabeth Hibbs
(1847-1879)