The Spike

Hallowe'en 1898

Last week, I asked readers whether they’d rather have a free post for Hallowe’en or Christmas. Hallowe’en won, with 65%. If this is simply not enough death content for you, come and see me speak about railway death next week!!

I started this substack three years ago with a ghost story but I don’t believe in ghosts. If ghosts were real, Peterborough’s railway line would be awash with them. You wouldn’t be able to cross Crescent Bridge without hitting a wall of desolate spirits. Every time I write up a murder, I go beyond the veil, pulling the dead back to tell us their stories. But I don’t use a ouija board to do that. I use source-based analysis and research skills.

I often wonder if the people I write about would recognise my version of their story, indeed ANY version of their story. Reconstructing homicide is a job for the coroner, a job for the police, a job for the forensics team, a job for the prosecution, for the journalists and later, years later, for people like me. I go back to the original sources to try and get the least filtered version, but the filters are there.

I do my best to remind you that these were real people and this really happened.

This week’s murder takes us to Saffron Walden workhouse in 1898, an act of shocking, unprovoked violence… on Hallowe’en.

In the 1830s, England and Wales was divided up into a new administrative unit called a Union. Each Union agglomerated a group of parishes under a single umbrella, bringing them together to issue welfare to the impoverished masses. Each parish supplied a Guardian to sit upon the Board of Guardians, and this Board oversaw the administration of welfare, of poor relief. Every Union had a workhouse, a place for the poorest citizens to find shelter, meagre food, but these citizens had to have settlement in a parish within the Union. Every workhouse had a casual ward, where the unsettled poor could spend one night per month, provided they performed some work.

The vagrant poor, the tramps, they figured out routes that meant they could sleep in a bed - if you could describe such places as beds - every few days without breaching the casual ward rules. Every person seeking shelter in the casual ward had to be sober on arrival. Every person was searched to make sure they had no money, booze or cigarettes on them, so the enterprising tramp buried his or her stash first. They queued for entry, because the doors to the casual ward did not open until 5 or 6pm. The casuals were admitted, searched, stripped and bathed. Their clothes were taken, and ‘stoved’, heated up to disinfect them. They were given workhouse clothing, a paltry meal and shown to a dormitory of straw palliases and rag blankets. The door was locked behind them. No privacy, no comfort. Those who arrived after the doors were locked were usually made to sleep in an outhouse.

In the morning, they had to perform some meaningless forced labour - rock breaking, corn grinding, oakum picking - for a set time. Their own clothes - sometimes heat-damaged - were returned once the work was completed, so they could leave. If the tramp left in the workhouse clothes, they could be prosecuted for theft. An ingeniously awful system to ensure these meagre lodgings were ‘paid’ for.

It was far from paradise, some said it was worse than penal servitude, yet people lived like this for years.

Saffron Walden became a Union in 1834, and covered twenty-four, mostly rural, parishes. The workhouse was built a couple of years later on Radwinter Road. Most of the site now contains the hospital, but some remnants of the workhouse remain, converted into flats. They are called The Spike, which references the nickname of a workhouse’s casual ward. At Saffron Walden, the ward was completely separate to the rest of the building, to the south-west. It contained nine cells for sleeping along one side, each with a sliding door. These faced nine cells for rock-breaking, along the other side. It was illuminated by tiny round windows. Judging by the single chimney, there was only one fireplace.

William Woollard was around sixty-four years old, He was born in Walden, married there in 1866, and spent most of his life working as a bricklayer’s labourer. However, William fell on hard times in older age, as so many did. His wife, Susan, died in 1884. They had no children to help support him. He went to live at the workhouse.

Workhouses were staffed by their inmates. There was a master, in charge of everything and beholden to the Guardians of the Poor. There was usually a matron, the wife of the master, in charge of the women and children. And that was it for permanent live-in staff. The Medical Officer came and went as necessary. All the nursing, childcare, gardening, cleaning and cooking was the responsibility of the inmates. William was found work as the Tramp Master. His job was to oversee the casuals overnight, presumably sleeping in the ward, and to alert the porter if anything went wrong. In the morning, he returned the casuals’ clothing to them. A labour master ensured the casuals completed their work in the morning.

Thomas King arrived in Saffron Walden on October 30th 1898, begging. A beggar was nothing new, but when people refused to give him money, Thomas was unusually aggressive. In the evening, he made his way to the workhouse and was admitted to the casual ward. He had not been there before, according to their records.

The following morning, Thomas was roused from sleep and told to get breaking stone. Thomas initially refused, but when the labour master threatened to take him before the magistrates, he agreed to work. He was led to one of the work cells, given 400kg of granite and a hammer and told to get chipping. His release depended on breaking down the granite.

It was around 8am when Thomas finally got to work. William was sweeping the quadrangle just outside the casual block. Without any warning, Thomas took the hammer, left his bench, went to William and beat him to death. He left the hammer lodged in William’s skull.

The labour master, gardener and a messenger boy were all nearby as this horror unfolded. They seized Thomas, who fought back hard. Once he was subdued, they sent for a doctor. William was still, somehow, alive when the doctor arrived but died at 11:45am.

Thomas was immediately taken to the police station. The deputy mayor, a magistrate, arrived at the police station that afternoon to hear the case, but the case was adjourned. The inquest opened on 2nd November at the workhouse. The case was uncomplicated, and ended in a wilful murder verdict against Thomas. The inquest jury suggested that the workhouse tighten up security in the casual ward. The magistrate’s hearing concluded on 4th November by sending Thomas to the next Chelmsford assize for a murder trial.

Thomas did not co-operate with enquiries, saying he did not know his real name. He said William looked like a “black pudding” after the attack, and asked to see the body during the inquest (this was refused). In fact, Thomas remained extremely agitated throughout proceedings, so much so that people believed he must be insane. However, the Saffron Walden Weekly News stated unequivocally that Thomas King was sane and rational.

While Thomas sat in prison, his previous criminal and psychiatric record was uncovered. He had seven convictions for assault and four for damage along with five convictions for drunken behaviour and one for vagrancy. However, this only accounted for the previous three years: Thomas’ true criminal past was hidden under a sea of aliases and county borders. The prison authorities determined that he had spent time in Claybury Asylum in Woodford Bridge, under a different name.

On 11th November, just twelve days after the murder, Thomas was taken before the judge at Chelmsford. He was a shabby and strange figure in the dock, with an oddly twisted smile on his face throughout. He pleaded not guilty, and the prosecution asked the judge whether he thought Thomas was fit to stand trial. A jury was empanelled to decide Thomas’ mental state and the prison’s physician testified that he believed Thomas was suffering from mania and delusions.

Thomas told the court

Ask me to plead guilty to murder, give me the rope and have done with it. That’s all you’ve got to do! They are killing the tramps, as they call them, in the workhouse and grinding their bones to flour. You may laugh but it’s true. At Saffron Walden workhouse, they are scratching for blood. I know a poor man is sure to be made out to be a lunatic! In ‘92 I was electrified in bed at Dorking, noxious gasses were passed through me to make a man talk. It’s a kind of drug that’s an Indian drug, put it in a man’s bread and butter and it makes him talk. I was done at Dorking and Guildford, and at Guildford police station and ever since the police have been after me, I’ve been locked up several times. In the cell at Dorking, they knocked me about, there was blood all over the cell, and they sent me to Lewes for two months for assault and instead of that, it was them who assaulted me.

The judge told the jury it would be monstrous to hang an insane man, and used the standard phrasing for incarceration in an asylum “until her majesty’s pleasure is know”. Thomas interjected:

Her Majesty! She will never die what I can see of it! I am of the same opinion as the French painter - she is contented with the throne

The jury asked about Thomas’ delusions, which mainly focused on a strange fear of electricity and telegraph wires. Then they said they believed he was unfit to plead. Justice Hawkins sent Thomas to Broadmoor. As he was removed from court, he said:

I suppose her Majesty will have two or three jubilees before I come out. Good night Mr Hawkins, may you sleep well.

---

Thomas arrived in Broadmoor just seven days later: Chelmsford couldn’t wait to be rid of him.

They reproduced Thomas’ words in the newspaper to make sure the public knew he was a madman… but… to me… he sounds like a man who came out of an asylum thoroughly traumatised. Electroconvulsive therapy was in unregulated use in asylums in the nineteenth century, particularly for mania. Drugs to ‘make a man talk’ suggest drugs to treat catatonia, something ECT was also used for. Drugs could be administered by vapour or mixed into food without consent: medical ethics were virtually non-existant in the asylum system. Nothing about Thomas’ account of asylum treatment sounds insane.

The poor were infinitely more likely to be publicly branded insane. Workhouse inmates did eat bones, albeit not human ones (we hope) and that story is from years before Thomas was born, but one can see why rumours might spread about such things. The casual system did seem to prefer tramps dead rather than inconveniently alive. The police did beat the shit out of difficult prisoners, and nobody ever believed their complaints. Queen Victoria had been on the throne for sixty-one years and it was widely said that she’d never die.

But none of this explains why Thomas brutally murdered William, a man who had done him no harm but formed the focus of every atom of his rage.

Thomas King’s origins remain unknown. He was probably born in Lambeth in 1868, but that’s as far as I can get from digitised sources. He died in Broadmoor on 30th April 1917, aged forty-nine.

These are the real horror stories. The wrong-place, wrong-time murders, where the victim doesn’t know the perpetrator, hasn’t done anything wrong. The unpredictable violence, the sudden spurt of blood, the person here one moment and gone the next.

William Woollard lies unremembered in Saffron Walden, a victim of circumstance.

William Woollard
(1834-1898)

---

This post is free, so please share it!