Two Sides of the Same Coin
Another jealous lover, a very different outcome
This week, I’ve been preparing for the Social History Society conference, reading up on community grieving, community violence and social control. My paper’s almost done, and I can’t wait to see everyone.
But FIRST, another 1861 wife-murder, the third in a row. I decided to write about this one because the perpetrator protested bitterly that he was being executed when John Grayson Farquhar was not. There were a number of similarities…
John Thompson was born in 1819, in Sutton Coldfield. He married Eliza Faulkner in 1843, and they lived with his father and mother on Reddicap Hill. John was a wire drawer, and his job was to draw wire from long rods, using a template to get the size right. A decent job, fairly well paid, John worked in a factory in Aston, and was known as a steady worker.
In October 1857, his wife died in childbirth, leaving John with seven children aged between twelve and newly born, although the baby died a few months later. John was supported by his mother.
Ann Walker was born in 1829, but was assumed to be ten years older. She was also known as Ann Lines and Nancy Dawson, but her birth name was Honora Ann Lyons. She was born in Birmingham, the daughter of Irish immigrants, and grew up in a huge family. She married a glassworker in 1849 (her father was a glass cutter), and moved to Manchester. However, she abandoned her husband and three children in approximately 1856. The newspapers blamed her desertion on alcoholism, but it’s impossible to know whether this was the real reason.
She moved to Birmingham and lived with various men. When she wasn’t cohabiting, she worked in a brothel on Tanter Street. This is almost certainly where she met John. In May 1861, she moved in with him. She believed that she was pregnant, due in January.
At the end of August, the fair came to Birmingham. John and Ann, among thousands of others, went into town to celebrate. On Saturday 28th August, the pair got very drunk and went to Ann’s old brothel on Tanter Street to find somewhere to sleep. Tanter Street was roughly where Ryder Street is now, a warren of courtyards and alleyways. The house was three storeys high, with a cellar, but each floor had only one room, which opened directly onto the narrow staircase. There were no internal doors. Each room had multiple beds - there was no privacy for the average prostitute. After they arrived, Emma Beresford gave them her bed and slept on the floor.
The night passed without incident. They dressed, washed and went out again in the morning. They went back to the house around lunch, and then went out again. They drank in the Engine Spirit Vaults, a beerhouse at Dale End, and evidently somewhere Ann knew well. While there, one of her ex-partners spoke to her.
Ann went back to Tanter Street in the middle of the afternoon. , again a bit drunk, and asked if she could borrow Emma’s bed to lie down. John followed a few moments later, went upstairs. Emma went to check on them about twenty minutes later, and John was trying to persuade Ann to come home. She refused.
Emma went downstairs and closed up the brothel so she could get some rest - she was in the habit of an afternoon nap to prepare for her evening work. She went to sit in the cellar, but heard a scream from Ann’s room. She ran up to break what she thought was a fight up, saying
There shall not be a bother here on a Sunday afternoon!
As she reached the bedroom, Ann called “I told him I would go Emma, I told him I would go.” Ann was lying on the bed, blood pouring down her neck, and John stood facing the doorway, knife in hand. Emma turned and ran, screaming Murder and alerting the other women of the house. She kept running and came back with the police and a doctor. By the time she returned, a crowd had gathered. One man disarmed John, and he was duly arrested.
Ann died amid the chaos, lying on the floor in the gap between the beds. John had cut her throat twice. The first time, she was lying on the bed, and it wasn’t a deep cut. John then dragged her from the bed to the floor and cut her deeply from ear to ear.
The inquest was held at The Anchor on Coleshill Road, attended by several thousand noisy locals. John attempted to cross examine the witnesses, but only really challenged the witness who claimed that John told him he’d done it. The verdict was wilful murder, and this was confirmed at the magistrates court on October 2nd. A friend of Ann’s wrote to her husband to tell him what had happened, and John waited for his trial.
Ann was buried at St George’s church on 7th September. Her estranged husband paid for the funeral.
John Thompson was tried immediately after John Grayson Farquhar, at Warwick in December 1861. Unlike Farquhar, John had no expensive defence lawyer. He had no representation at all. A representative was assigned, having had no time to read the case, and he proposed that the death was manslaughter. They were drunk, they had a fight, these things happen.
The judge pointed out to the jury that
The fact of being drunk is no palliation in point of law
and the jury found him guilty of murder.
The judge passed the death sentence and John went to Warwick Prison, which had opened a year earlier. He did not have to wait long to be executed, although he spent his time complaining about the injustice of being sentenced to death when Farquhar was not. Farquhar - still held at Warwick at this point - attended divine service with John and sobbed noisily throughout.
John, unsurprised by the guilty verdict and reasonably stoic in the face of death, remained bolshy until the end, accusing most of the witnesses against him of perjury, and refusing to explain why he’d killed her, only saying “there was a cause”.
John was executed alongside another wife-murderer (who I will discuss next week) at Warwick on 30th December 1861.
John Thompson was right: his murder of Ann was not dissimilar to John Grayson Farquhar’s murder of Elizabeth Brookes. Both women had been engaged as housekeepers, both were actually their employer’s lover, and both were murdered because of jealousy.
John never explained why he killed Ann, only saying it was done through jealousy. Ann had told Emma Beresford that she was about halfway through a pregnancy. Ann had delivered three children in fairly swift succession after her marriage, and it’s likely she knew what she was talking about. The doctor who examined her body said that she was not pregnant, but he did not do a post-mortem, so it’s possible that she was less pregnant than she thought.
Ann had only known John for three months, so it’s unlikely he was the father. Perhaps the man she had formerly cohabited with, who she spoke to in the pub, was the real father. And perhaps this is what upset John.
Or perhaps, like Farquhar, he just couldn’t bear the idea of Ann with another man.
(Honora) Ann Walker
(1829-1861)