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October, 2014:

Drama at Nettlecombe

Oct 30th, 2014
by Dorset Ancestors.
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Our true story begins at Powerstock, a village in West Dorset near Beaminster. You will have to decide if this tale is about the Real Lives of two lonely people seeking solace one from the other following the early passing of their spouses, or a coldly calculating couple capable of murder, twice over.

On a chilly afternoon one day early in February 1839 the Revd George Cookson, the vicar of Powerstock, found two of his parishioners at his door. They had come from the nearby hamlet of Nettlecombe to ask him to publish their marriage banns and to marry them the following month. Surprise would best describe Cookson’s reaction to this request but as he thought about the matter, surprise turned to shock.

Not twelve weeks had passed since the vicar had officiated at the burial of the man’s wife and it was just a fortnight since he had buried the woman’s husband. Those events recorded on page 60 of the parish burial register; entries 479 and 480. It is perhaps not surprising that by the following morning Cookson’s shock had turned to suspicion.

As the days passed George Cookson became increasingly vexed. He knew full well the affair would become public knowledge following the first publication of the banns and he anticipated many of his parishioners would be horrified. He was not wrong: members of the congregation at St. Mary’s considered the matter a scandal and were not slow to make their feelings known. It is no light matter to forbid the banns without good reason. The consequences could be serious but, taking full responsibility, the vicar employed someone to forbid the banns at second reading and he sent a message to Mr Frampton of Cerne Abbas, the County Coroner.

When John Hounsell and Elizabeth Gale visited their vicar they had no idea of the storm that was about to engulf them. Within a few days their dream of a married life together had turned into a nightmare that could end with the hangman dispatching them both on the long drop into eternity.

There were sufficient grounds for suspicion the Coroner agreed, and he ordered that the bodies of the departed spouses should be exhumed and an inquest take place on February 20th in the village at the Three Horse Shoes alehouse. Of what followed we have an eye-witness report.

Riding into Beaminster on the morning of February 20th our informant expecting to attend a meeting of the Board of Guardians was surprised to meet the chairman coming away from the town. “I am going to Powerstock. The doctor tells me there is an inquest to be held there this morning upon two bodies which have been exhumed and a strong suspicion of murder” said the chairman. Needing no second bidding our informant turned around and the pair was at Powerstock within the hour.

At the gate to the churchyard they found a group of men watched by half a dozen or so old people and some children. There were the Coroner, the jury, and half a dozen doctors from Beaminster and Bridport; some had been summoned to attend others were present out of curiosity. The coroner, our two observers were told by the vicar, who had joined them, had the day before sent his order for the opening of the graves and this had been done during the night. The inquest was being held at the little alehouse and the jury were now about to view the bodies. “The bodies are in their coffins in the chancel of the church,” the vicar explained to the pair, adding that he would not go into the church and went home.

The friends, on reaching the church door, were advised by the sexton to stay outside unless their presence was required. They noticed a pile of earth against the church wall and by standing on this they could see everything through the chancel window as well as if they had been inside.

The jurors, made up of small farmers and villagers, made their way up the “damp and dreary” nave evidently dreading what they were about to witness. It was a duty but on this miserable winter’s morning all of them would have preferred to be anywhere other than this place.

The two coffins had been placed unopened inside the altar rail and the coroner, the jury and the doctors gathered around. One coffin had been in the ground for three months, the other for two or three weeks. Everyone present was filled with foreboding and was dreading what would be revealed when the coffins were opened; even the doctors had little idea what to expect.

There was a pause of some minutes, broken by the coroner asking the sexton to unscrew the lids of the coffins and remove them; this he did without hesitation. Those watching through the chancel window observed one to the other that “both bodies lay in their coffins perfectly arranged…yet they had been brought down from upper rooms in cottages, they had been carried on men’s shoulder, they had been dug up again; yet in neither was there any sign of its having been shaken or disturbed. Not only were the shrouds and grave clothes in order and in decent folds, but the little branches of herbs and evergreen which had been put upon each body were just as they had been first laid.”

When asked to remove the grave clothes from the faces the sexton refused: his courage failed him. He would not listen to either command or persuasion and according to our eyewitness “drew back in evident fear.” No one else volunteered; the doctors said it was not their business, the jury members shuffled about with bowed heads and the coroner clearly believed his part in the proceedings was to give the orders. The coroner barked out his order to the sexton who eventually and much to everyone else’s relief went to the first coffin and, turning his back and averting his eyes, removed the cloth covering the woman’s face.

“The face of the dead woman was scarcely changed…every feature was distinct, the eyes scarcely sunk, the nose and mouth were natural and her black hair plainly drawn across her forehead added to the calm and almost living expression…” There was no difficulty in identifying her.

Bolstered by this experience the sexton removed the covering from the man’s face; he had been buried not three weeks but the sight was shocking to look at and beyond recognition. No one could swear that the occupant of the coffin was James Gale. Confirmation was arrived at following evidence of the carpenter and the sexton who swore that they had seen James Gale’s body in the same coffin that had been exhumed the night before and was now before them.

Satisfied with the evidence of identity the coroner hesitated about what to do next and after discussion with the doctors two of them removed the “faded old covering from the Communion table and lifted the table itself to a more convenient position, close under the light of the chancel window.” At the realisation of what was about to take place some members of the jury voiced concern: was it not bad enough that the church was being used as a kind of charnel house? The coroner decided that what had been done so far had been “done decently and with a solemn quiet and propriety.” Had he been present George Cookson, the vicar, may have taken a different view.

The doctors were instructed to carry on and after some discussion the body of the woman was taken out of her coffin, uncovered as was necessary and laid at full length upon the table. The doctors arranged their instruments and two of them rolled up their sleeves; basins of water were called for and the post mortem commenced. Several professional men were soon busy at their work and quickly fell into their usual talk and habits perhaps forgetting where they were. More than two hours passed before the examination of both bodies was completed.

Proceedings then moved to the Three Horse Shoes, a small ale house in the village. The doctors reported they had found enough arsenic in the woman’s stomach to kill half-a-dozen people. The extraordinary preservative powers of the arsenic was responsible for the body of the women and character of her face appearing unchanged from when she passed away. The result of the examination of the man’s body was less conclusive: if he had of been poisoned it must have been a vegetable poison and the doctors found nothing to prove the case one way or the other. “Wilful murder” was the verdict of the coroner’s jury.

To be continued in Part 2 when we will tell you what happened next. You will have to decide for yourself if John Hounsell was a murderer and Elizabeth Gale his willing accomplice.

 

A Day Out at Blandford

Oct 12th, 2014
by Dorset Ancestors.
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It’s been called England’s finest Georgian rural market town. The streets around the Market Square are very much as they were rebuilt after a disastrous fire in 1731 that started in a tallow chandler’s. I quaffed a cider on the site: it’s now the King’s Arms, just off Salisbury Road, 100 yards from the square. Only 150 yards further on, the Ryves Almshouses escaped the fire because the roof was tile instead of thatch. The building was just less than 50 years old at the time of the conflagration: rebuilding of the town took around 40 years.

In Salisbury Road over a cycle shop is an inscription in memory of Alfred Stevens who created the impressive memorial to the Duke of Wellington in St. Paul’s Cathedral. (Visit Archived Articles Section and click on ‘Alfred Stevens – Painter and Sculptor.’ Pub. July 2003. Ed.) Nearby, at the entrance to the United Reformed Church, men were converting into flats a butcher’s and a printer’s, evidence of the fast increasing population. People must like Blandford.

After a generous pot of tea in the friendly Half Crown Café, I crossed the Market place to talk to Police Constable Liz Spicer, who patrols the town with a purposeful stride. “I like getting out and talking to people” she told me. But in this Georgian show place, down the road from Bryanstone School with its grand entrance arch and drive, on this day she was talking to magazine sellers, beggars and drifters, of whom I saw less than half a dozen all day.

Well, every town has had beggars and rough sleepers over the centuries. At the end of the afternoon I nearly became one myself, when my Editor was late turning up! In this connection, one of the inscriptions chiselled in professional manner into the kerbs and pavements says: “We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Well, that’s nice to know. The Rogers family are thought to have contributed to the earlier 15th century church. They owned much of Blandford and were Stewards there for hundreds of years.

Another inscription relating to the Bastard family name and a “careless tallow chandler” I would rather not repeat. It was the founders of the famous Blandford School of Architects, John and William Bastard, who rebuilt the church and Town Hall after the fire, which incidentally followed another in 1713. Only primitive ‘fire engines’ were available.

What dominates the town centre as it is on an island of high ground is this parish church of Saints Peter and Paul. Much of its contents survived from earlier times. And in the museum opposite are archaeological finds from a garden dig, which pre-date the church: they go back to the 17th century. Here is a scrap of paper with the draft wording in John Bastard’s own hand for his fire memorial of 1760, the arched construction in one corner of the churchyard. The Bastard family home is said to be nearby.

The museum has pictures of the railway station demolished in the late 1960’s and of “Blandford Forum”, the apple-green express passenger locomotive of the “West Country” class. Happy days! Unusually, there are also stone cuttings from buildings and pavements in the town and a large case entitled “Victorian Blandford.” In charge of the museum when I had a look around was a conversational Jewish lady who told me, on inquiry, that she escaped to Britain as a girl in 1938 from Vienna.

In the Close beyond and uphill from the church is one of the few buildings which survived the fire – the Old House – and the handsome Post Office and helpful library. Around the corner in Dorset Street I took a photograph of the one-time home of an honorary freeman of the borough. He was Jack Counter, who won the Victoria Cross in France in the First World War. If the Bastards were two of Blandford’s 18th century heroes, Jack Counter was one to bring honour to the town in the twentieth. His home is now Dorset House.

The Great Fire caused the deaths of 13 people and 480 families were made homeless. That is a measure of the disaster, which came upon a town, which by the previous century had become an important stage on the Exeter to London coach route. Someone has said: “The location of the town…has made it a natural centre since mediaeval times.”

Approaching it you look down on it lying in a broad valley between the grand rolling chalk downs, which have proved excellent for military exercises, and is why the headquarters of the Royal Corps of Signals is found here and has an excellent museum of its own, tracing the history of military communications.

Once there were cottage industries, making bone lace, buttons and gloves. Today sees expanding light industries, but the town actually depends on its shops and businesses.

Despite the existence of an eastern bypass, opened nearly 20 years ago, there is a constant stream of traffic through the town all day at around 10 m.p.h. which makes crossing the road hard for pedestrians, and this is where the crossings come into their own. A local motorist told me that it’s simply quicker to drive through the town, which stands the reasoning for bypasses on its head.

I asked which way to the river, was directed down a side road and was soon there. What a wonderful sward of grass, with a millstream running through it. And there was the Stour, much covered with green duckweed. Downstream the meadows were once the park of Lord Portman’s Bryanstone House, now a public school, as we have seen. No development is allowed here.

I approached the handsome suspension bridge leading to Blandford St. Mary village and its brewery, which rises up, as all breweries seem to, like some bizarre continental castle with distinctive chimney and smell of malt and hops. About 100 tonnes of barley are trucked in every week, and hops come from Kent or Worcestershire, and even Bavaria. Some 450 people work here, and at full pressure 57,000 cans or 18,000 bottles can be filled every hour. When you think that beer sales are falling as drinkers get older, this factory needs to make the most of its quality products. In fact, soft drinks are also produced, and actually account for 55 per cent of total volume.

Before leaving Blandford, the visitor should not miss the Crown Hotel and the Greyhouse and Red Lion buildings. The Great Dorset Steam fair, held near the town for the greater part of a week in the late summer or early autumn, brings crowds to visit the greatest show of its kind not only in the land but in the world, with around 100 fair organs and probably the greatest working display of steam traction and stationary engines anywhere.

In an entirely different sphere is the restored St. Leonard Chapel, a leper hospice in the 13th century as originally built, and which has apparently not been used as a chapel since 1760.

It was in the later mediaeval period that Blandford Forum, as it is generally known, developed as one of the major market towns in eastern Dorset. All through history it has been an important crossing-point of the Stour, at first by ford. Here the main roads from Poole to Shaftesbury and Salisbury to Dorchester meet. In 40 year the population has grown from 3,000 to around 9,000 – a staggering rise. People obviously like the place.

At the end of the day, from its restaurants, bistros, pubs and cafes, I chose a takeaway opposite the parish church and went home with a huge burger, salad and French fries. A cool late September breeze was blowing as we climbed the downs and distanced ourselves from Blandford and in an hour it was quite dark over the Dorset hills.

 

This article was first published on our earlier site in November 2003