Once again, the Friday Murder is a Saturday Murder due to industrial action.
A vast amount of murder and manslaughter trials in the nineteenth century were raised after deaths in fights. These fights could have been part of standard Friday-night-fighting culture: the crowds gathered, bets were taken, shirts were removed, weapons prohibited.
Fights occured outside of this reasonably well-regulated sphere, especially after a few drinks. Again, as long as they were unarmed and didn’t burst into riot, they were tolerated by the community.
The police and magistrates hated fighting: public violence was unacceptable, as was street gambling. Coroners would raise homicide indictments if anyone died.
And when people died fighting, which of course they did, especially in the absence of any neurological medicine, the courts had to decide what to do with the (usually) young man who caused the death. They acquitted fairly often, particuarly if the victim had any underlying physical ailments. Where they could not acquit, they gave short sentences: one such death in my data resulted in a three-month prison sentence. These fight deaths were usually the result of a single punch, or a bad fall.
However, sometimes, weekend fighting took an unexpected turn. This is one such case.
Our scene is Wells in Somerset, early August 1868. The Full Moon pub on Southover still stands, so for once, we can set our scene with some confidence:
Mrs Palmer ran the pub in the 1860s, and had a fairly rough clientele. In 1868, the Cheddar Valley railway extension into Wells was being built into the station near the junction of Priory road and Southover, and the local pubs were full of navvies. George Cornish was one of them. He was twenty-one, raised in Odcombe by his widowed mother. He was staying at the Full Moon with his common-law wife, Elizabeth Perry.
Robert Sweet and Elizabeth Drew were both raised in Wells, and both born in 1845, although their ages were reported as 20 and 22 respectively. Robert was an ostler, a groom who worked at a pub, and Elizabeth was a prostitute. She’d previously been a servant at Palace Farm, on Silver Street, and knew the area extremely well. Neither of them had a clean criminal record - Robert was a petty thief with a conviction for assault, and Elizabeth had convictions for using obscene language, theft, and vagrancy. Robert and Elizabeth were in a relationship, but they didn’t live together.
William Bisgrove was also from Wells, born in 1848, although he grew up in Wookey and spent his adolescence in Radstock. He had been a sailor, and a coal miner, but was working at a paper mill. He had no criminal past. Elizabeth, who also had ties to Wookey, knew William.
It was the first weekend of August 1868, and everyone I’ve mentioned so far was drunk. On the Saturday - the first - Wiliam and George had got into it in the Full Moon. William had insulted Elizabeth Perry, and George had taken offence. The two men had stripped to the waist - the customary way to signal your readiness for a scrap - but the men were separated, and the fight dissolved. Temporarily.
Sunday 2nd August was a warm, and brightly moonlit night. Robert and Elizabeth spent the evening in the Somerset Hotel. Meanwhile, William and George planned to finish their fight at the Camp Field, a field opposite the Full Moon. At 10pm, Robert, Elizabeth and William met up for a drink at the Blacksmith’s Arms, and left together when the pub closed.
Soon after, George - still drunk, with his slop jacket tied around his neck - jumped out of his bedroom window at the pub, and went to the field to meet William for the fight. Elizabeth and Robert were outside the Full Moon at the time, and had a row with Elizabeth Perry through the window. They likened her to a sheep’s head hanging outside a butcher’s shop. Elizabeth Perry said she would fight Elizabeth Drew for half a crown. Robert said he’d back Drew in the fight, with five shillings: fighting for money was not a male-only sport.
At midnight, Elizabeth (Drew) knocked on the door of the Somerset Hotel and asked for a jar of beer to take to the Camp Field. This was evidently a normal Sunday practice, to allow the pubs to get around licensing laws. The landlady was reluctant, and Elizabeth told the landlady not to worry about the police - they were breaking up a fight on Southover. Elizabeth was accompanied by William and Robert, who were trying to make themselves inconspicuous. The landlady declined to give them any beer, and Robert said:
“I don’t care a damn. We’ll go back without it and I’ll murder the bastard.”
Elizabeth thought nothing of this: Robert swore and cursed all the time when he was drunk.
A woman who lived on Silver Street overheard the three making their way to Camp Field around 12:45pm. Elizabeth was begging Robert not to do something, and he told her to shut her mouth. This neighbour had seen Robert beat Elizabeth before, which is why she paid attention to their words. Elizabeth later testified that Robert punched her three times during this conversation.
This conversation was about sex. William wanted to have sex with Elizabeth, and offered her a shilling. Elizabeth was up for it, but Robert was not happy. He tried to persuade her not to go, although he said nothing to William. William asked for his money back, and this is what persuaded her to go into Camp Field with him.
So, William and Elizabeth went into the field and William suggested lying down next to another man - George. Elizabeth was not keen, but seems to have got on with it anyway. It didn’t take long, and William gave her another shilling when he was done. She then left the field, and was followed around Wells by a moody, silent, furious Robert for the next three hours.
At 1:30am, a policeman went to the Camp Field and noticed two men. One was lying down, the other kneeling over him. To his horror, the policeman saw the man on the floor was dying. It was, of course, George, with William by his side. George was lying in a pool of his own blood - the policeman couldn’t see the extent of the damage, because his slop jacket had flapped up over his head. William claimed ignorance. He said he saw a tall navvy with a stone climb over the stile, beat George with it, throw the stone in the river and leave the scene. He said he hadn’t intervened because he was afraid.
The policeman put his hand to George’s chest, and felt his heartbeat give out shortly before 2am on Monday 3rd August.
At 5am, Elizabeth Perry fell asleep in the window of the Full Moon, having sat there all night, waiting for her lover to come home. She had no idea he was bleeding to death a few yards away. She identified his body in Wells workhouse later that day, and had it brought back to the Full Moon. George had threepence on him when he left the pub, and nothing when he was found. A post-mortem revealed the shocking level of violence meted out to George Cornish: his ear had been torn off, and his skull caved in. This was not a normal fight death.
A large stone was found in the (almost dry) river, covered in blood and hair. It weighed more than 23kg. Based on William’s story about the death, this was the murder weapon.
Robert, Elizabeth and William were all arrested. They spent most of the next four months in Shepton Mallett prison, being taken to Wells for various magistrates’ court appearances. The coroner’s inquest indicted William and Robert for murder, but all three of them were committed to a murder trial by the magistrates. But Elizabeth turned Crown’s evidence. The trial was held on the 14th and 15th of December at Taunton.
Robert and Elizabeth denied everything, but William had been found with the body and had more to deny, hence the mysterious, tall navvy. He said he’d been ill before the murder, suffering nosebleeds and fainting, and that he’d passed out in the field and knew nothing. His story changed at least twice between the murder and his trial appearance. Robert’s story also changed. None of them had alibis, except for each other.
After three hours of deliberation, the two men were found guilty of murder, and sentenced to death.
But the actual murder remained a bit murky. The doctor’s evidence suggested that George must have been attacked a few minutes before he was discovered by the police officer, in the short window of time after Elizabeth left the field. But why was George there at all? Had he just got drunk and gone to sleep in the field? Had he gone specifically to fight William? If so, what happened during the fight? Was George asleep or unconscious when William and Elizabeth had sex next to him?
And why would William beat an unconcious man to death with an enormous rock? Unless his story was true, and the tall navvy was actually Robert? Had Robert murdered George thinking he was William in a post-coital glow? This was certainly the opinion of several newspaper commentators, when they weren’t being scathing about the two Elizabeths’ moral character.
On 16th December 1868, William made a full confession.
“I desire to state I done the murder. I went to the river and picked up the stone. I brought it over and throw’d it on the man’s head. I picked three pence out of his pocket. Sweet had nothing to do with it. I don’t know that he know I done it. I never said anything to him or he to me. I can’t say if he see me done it but he never help did it. I throw’d the stone back over the river over the hedge where I told the police man. I should not like Sweet to have to suffer for me. I was very worse for beer. I had been all day drinking. I went with the woman but I don’t believe she knew anything about it. When I laid down near the man she said I would not lay there for a gold watch. After I laid down I went to sleep. When I waked up I was going away, but something seemed to tell me I must murder that man and then I went to the river and found the stone and brought it over my head and I thrown it down on the man’s head. I believe it was twice or three times - which, I am not prepared to say but it was more than once I throw it at his head […] Whatever made me do it, I can’t think. It was not for money. I had no thought of money. I can’t think why I done it.”
As is common with confessions, it leaves much unsaid. Did William and George ever finish their fight? The doctor was convinced George had only been hit by the stone once, so why did William claim to have hit him three times? But as it also common with confessions, it helped tie up some loose ends. Importantly, it completely exonerated Robert Sweet of murder. Shortly before the end of the year, he was pardoned and released from Taunton prison.
William’s execution was due to take place on 4th January 1869. The executioner was appointed, the coroner made a visit to Taunton prison to check the arrangements for the necessary inquest. William wrote to his friends and family, and prayed.
The execution never happened. His death sentenced was respited late on the 3rd January. The Home Office sent some doctors to examine William, and they came to the conclusion that he was mad: not only did he suffer from nosebleeds and epilepsy, the murder itself only made sense as an act of homicidal mania. In 1866, it was said, he’d seen a man crushed to death by a large rock in a coal mine, and this was said to have given him ideas.* The Home Office checked up on these claims, and found them to substantially true. William was illegitimate, young, illiterate, weak, traumatised, and foolish.
A few weeks later, it was decided that William was criminally insane. He was admitted to Broadmoor on 26th January 1869, aged nineteen.
*This was a reference to the death of poor Azariah Pratton. He did not die from a single stone falling on his head: he was killed in a seam collapse. Five hundred kilos of stone fell on him at Cudlass Pit in March 1866. He was thirty-four.
Did Robert and Elizabeth learn anything from this hideous brush with the hangman’s noose?
Not really.
They stayed together until around 1871. In 1871, Robert was indicted for knifing a teenager in a fight, but the case was dismissed after the boy’s mother said she did not want it to proceed. He remained in Wells, getting in trouble on a fairly regular basis, until at least 1882, when he appears to have repented and joined the Salvation Army. He married in 1889, and sold pigs. He died in 1903, and his funeral was attended by hundreds of locals.
The same grace was not extended to Elizabeth. She became an alcoholic, and her criminal record is littered with convictions for drunkeness, vagrancy and fighting. She died in 1880, aged thirty-five.
And what of William Bisgrove?
He should have spent the rest of his life in Broadmoor. But in 1873, when taken for a walk in the fields near the hospital, he escaped. In a remarkable echo of the murder of George Cornish, he hit his attendant on the head with a stone, attempted to strangle him and then ran away.
He was never found, the only Broadmoor escapee to never be re-apprehended.
George Cornish
1847-1868
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