Murder at the Inn Read online

  Less reviled criminals, however, have escaped censure. The Margaret Catchpole in Ipswich pays homage to a remarkable real-life character from the eighteenth century. In the summer of 1797, Catchpole stole a horse and rode it 70 miles to London before being arrested. She then managed to escape from Ipswich jail using a clothes line. She was sentenced to death but this was commuted to transportation for life and Catchpole ended her days in Australia. The Alice Lisle in Ringwood, Hampshire, gets its name from Lady Alice Lisle who sheltered fugitives from the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685. She was beheaded for the ‘crime’ on 2 September 1685 in Winchester market place opposite what is now the Eclipse Inn, a pub her restless soul is said to haunt.

  There are also pubs named after more mythical criminals. Sawney Bean’s Howff in Saltcoats, Clyde, is named after the almost certainly fictitious Sawney Bean, who was said to have led a family of cannibal brigands living in Galloway in the 1500s. The Wicked Lady, in Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire, is named after Lady Katherine Ferrers. She was a genuine seventeenth-century aristocrat who, legend has it, turned to highway robbery and died after being shot in an attempted robbery, though there is little evidence to support the stories about her criminal activities.

  Some pub names recall specific crimes rather than their perpetrators, though the details of what exactly happened have been lost. The Quiet Woman near Buxton in Derbyshire recalls a landlord’s wife who supposedly met a sticky end. The Bucket of Blood in Phillack, Cornwall, got its gruesome name when a former landlord went to the well nearby and found blood when he pulled up the bucket. A corpse of a murdered man was found at the bottom. Other drinking establishments wallow in the execution of criminals, with a host of pubs calling themselves The Gallows. One, on Great Tower Street in London, is called The Hung Drawn And Quartered. It was the penalty in medieval times for those found guilty of high treason to be hanged, disembowelled and then cut up into pieces. There is also The Three Legged Mare in York, which refers to a special gallows which consisted of a wooden triangle supported by pillars that could hang three people at the same time.

  But what about those who administer the law and bring the guilty to justice? Surely they deserve to be commemorated on a few pub signs? Sadly, while there are a few pubs named after judges, there are none, it seems, named after policemen. Fictional detective Sherlock Holmes does, however, have his own pub on Northumberland Street in London’s West End.

  LOCATIONS: The Nevison’s Leap, Ferrybridge Road, Pontefract, West Yorkshire, WF8 2PG, 01977 702529; The Nevison Inn, No. 96 Plank Lane, Leigh, Lancashire, WN7 4QE, 01942 671 394; Sixteen String Jack, Coppice Row, Theydon Bois, CM16 7DS, 01992 814920; Gullivers Tavern, No. 1492 Wimborne Road, Bournemouth, Dorset, BH11 9AD, 01202 580739; The Margaret Catchpole, Cliff Lane, Ipswich IP3 0PQ, 01473 252450; The Alice Lisle, Rockford Green, Rockford, Ringwood, Hampshire, BH24 3NA, 01425 474700, alice-lisle-ringwood.co.uk; The Eclipse Inn, No. 25 The Square, Winchester, SO23 9EX, 01962 865676, www.eclipseinnwinchester.co.uk; Sawney Bean’s Howff, No. 82 Dockhead Street, Saltcoats, Ayrshire, KA21 5EL, 01294 603342; The Wicked Lady, Normansland, Wheathampstead, St Albans, Hertfordshire, AL4 8EL, 01582 832128, www.thewickedladypub.co.uk; The Quiet Woman, Earl Sterndale, Buxton, Derbyshire, SK17 0BU, 01298 83211; Bucket of Blood, Phillack, Hayle, Cornwall, TR27 5AD, 01736 752378; The Hung Drawn and Quartered, Nos 26–27 Great Tower Street, London, EC3R 5AQ, 020 7626 6123, hung-drawn-and-quartered.co.uk; The Three Legged Mare, No. 15 High Petergate, York, North Yorkshire, YO1 7EN, 01904 638246, www.york-brewery.co.uk

  10

  POLICING THE PUB

  The link between crime and our national drinking establishments has been giving local and national governments a headache for centuries. Perceived as hotbeds of violence and disorder as well as promoting general drunkenness, alehouses and inns, then pubs and bars, have often been blamed for social ills down the ages, not always with just cause. Since Saxon times there have been countless attempts to regulate and police them, often with little effect.

  The first attempts to limit the number of alehouses came as early as the reign of King Edgar in the tenth century who limited villages to one alehouse. In the time of King Aethelred II there was a law passed which decreed that ‘In the case of (a) breach of the peace in an alehouse six half marks shall be paid in compensation if a man is slain and twelve ores if no-one is slain.’

  During the Middle Ages, alehouses often cropped up in criminal cases of theft and dishonesty, but most of the issues that arose surrounded the selling of short measures. By the Tudor and Stuart period, with a booming number of ‘tippling houses’ and an increase in the strength of beer, they became more worrisome to the authorities. In many ways alehouses and inns were still seen as essential, because ale or beer still formed an important, nutritious element of the average person’s daily diet. But there were increasing concerns that drinking dens were rowdy places that could encourage disturbances and that they fostered indolence and immorality as many sold sexual services along with booze. Alehouses were also seen as breeding grounds for political unrest and dangerous secularism. Justice William Lambarde, writing in the sixteenth century, branded them ‘nurseries of naughtiness’, while in the 1600s Puritan preacher Robert Harris wrote that they were responsible for ‘riot, excess and idleness’.

  Alehouses first had to have a licence from 1552, to be granted by local justices of the peace, though inns did not need one until later. During the following 500 years there has been much legislation directed against pubs and drinking, which the writer Nicholas Dorn described as ‘a roll-call of crisis points in English history’. In the early 1600s came tough measures designed at punishing drunkenness, while the early eighteenth century saw more legislation in response to the rise of gin fever. Despite being stronger than beer, the latter was taxed and gin was actually cheaper to drink. This gave rise to gin shops, separate from alehouses, and by 1730 there were 7,000 in London alone. There was panic in the upper echelons of society about the effect that spirits were having on the public and it was feared that the gin epidemic would bring about the ruination of the working classes. Commentators like the writer Henry Fielding blamed a rise in crime on excessive gin consumption. The problem was graphically illustrated in William Hogarth’s satirical print ‘Gin Lane’. The government passed a string of Gin Acts in the mid-eighteenth century which initially caused riots, but as the trade slowly moved to established licensed premises, the gin craze began to wane.

  In the early nineteenth century there was a renewed interest in spirit drinking, which saw the rise of ‘gin palaces’. The Beer Act of 1830 was an attempt to persuade drinkers to choose beer over spirits and made it easier to open a simple beer house alongside the existing pubs and inns. But it was widely condemned as giving rise to more bad behaviour. One commentator, Sydney Smith, wrote, ‘The Beer Act has begun its operations. Everyone is drunk. Those who are not singing are sprawling.’ The number of pubs mushroomed by 50 per cent between 1830 and 1880. In 1869 the numbers had grown so much that there were efforts to stem their expansion and eventually the humbler beer houses became assimilated into what we know as pubs today. Nevertheless, at the turn of the twentieth century there were 100,000 licensed premises, twice the number today.

  Although they were relaxed in the early nineteenth century, the regulation of hours was also seen as a way of stopping disorder as the Victorian period went on. The most severe restrictions came in during the First World War when pubs were limited to opening at lunchtimes and in the early evenings, regulations that were only significantly loosened in recent times. The relaxation of opening hours in the twenty-first century once again led to a debate about crime and the pub. In 2013 the police reported that twenty-four hour drinking had led to chaos in the early hours, with 400,000 fines dished out for drunk and disorderly behaviour since changes to the law were introduced in 2005.

  Despite all these regulations and laws, pubs and hotels have survived as places in which to relax, celebrate and socialise and, for the most part, to
the betterment of our culture.

  11

  CATCH THEM WHILE

  YOU CAN

  The writer Hilaire Belloc once said, ‘When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves – for you will have lost the last of England.’ At the time of writing, pubs are closing at the rate of twenty-eight a week and often a lot of history goes along with them. Once lost, pubs rarely reopen, severing a link with our past and the chance to visit places linked to notorious crimes and criminals too. The first murder on a train in Britain, for example, involved a pub which has recently faced closure. On 9 July 1864 Thomas Briggs, a city banker, got on a train at London’s Fenchurch Street station bound for north London. At around 10 p.m. he was robbed and thrown out of the train. When he was spotted lying next to the tracks by another train driver near Bow, Briggs was taken to The Mitford Castle pub in Cadogan Terrace where he soon died. The pub later became an Irish pub called Top o’ the Morning. A tailor by the name of Franz Müller, who had left his hat behind in the train compartment and was seen wearing Briggs’ watch, was eventually arrested in New York after a chase across the Atlantic Ocean. Müller was executed at Newgate Prison on 14 November 1864 amid scenes of drunken disorder in the 50,000 strong crowd.

  Another pub with a chequered history stopped trading in 2012, though there is a campaign to have it reopened in the near future. In January 1920, the 53-year-old landlady of the 300-year-old Cross Keys in Lawrence Street, Chelsea, was found in the cellar of the pub, having been murdered. The body of Frances Buxton had been discovered in the early hours of the morning by a policeman who had noticed that the premises were not locked. Frances had been attacked with a bottle and the culprit had even tried to burn the body. Her murder remains unsolved.

  The Sun Inn, located in Bedlington, Northumberland, was recently up for sale. It was the scene of a triple murder in 1913 which remains one of the north east’s most shocking crimes. John Vickers Amos was licensee of the pub, but on 15 April he argued with the owner over missing money. PC George Mussell was called to the fracas but was shot twice by Amos. Sergeant Barton was also shot and killed when he arrived, as was the wife of the pub’s manager. Amos was hanged on 22 July in Newcastle.

  While some historic pubs and hotels face closure, others have opened in buildings which were once scenes of major crimes. The Radnorshire Arms Hotel in Presteigne, Powys, a grand Jacobean building, was once the home of Sir Henry Vaughan, who was accused of committing ‘unnatural and repugnant acts’ in 1754. Before the authorities arrived to arrest him, a mob assembled and Vaughan was lynched in the grounds.

  Another hotel with a dark history is the Dunsley Hall Hotel in the Black Country. In 1812, the owner of Dunsley Hall, Benjamin Robins, was shot on his way back from business in Stourbridge. Despite being shot in the spine, Robins managed to get back home, leaving a trail of blood up the staircase. He lived for ten days, long enough to give a description of his assailant, William Howe, who was executed and gibbeted for the crime.

  LOCATIONS: The Radnorshire Arms Hotel, High Street, Presteigne, Powys, LD8 2BE, 01544 267406, www.radnorshirearmshotel.com; Dunsley Hall Hotel, Dunsley Road, Kinver, Stourbridge, West Midlands, DY7 6LU, 01384 877077, www.dunsleyhallhotel.co.uk

  PART 2:

  THE CASES

  GOLDEN AGE OF THE

  SCOUNDREL 1600–1700S

  CAUGHT IN A TAVERN – THE HIGHWAYMAN WHO MADE THE LADIES SWOON, 1670

  The Marquis, London; Holt Hotel, Steeple Ashton, Oxfordshire; The Claude Du Vall, Camberley, Surrey; Talbot Inn, Ripley, Surrey; The Bell, Moseley, Surrey

  Not many of those hanged at London’s notorious Tyburn could expect an epitaph as poetic as that given to the urbane highwayman Claude Du Vall. On 21 January 1670, Du Vall swung from the gallows, despite calls for clemency from some of his wealthier admirers, including Charles II. Judge Sir William Morton had found him guilty of at least six robberies. Du Vall’s body was exhibited at the nearby Tangier Tavern for the eager crowd to inspect, before being buried at St Paul’s church, Covent Garden. An inscription above his tombstone, though now destroyed, read:

  Here lies DuVall: Reder, if male thou art,

  Look to thy purse; if female, to thy heart.

  Much havoc has he made of both; for all

  Men he made stand, and women he made fall.

  The second Conqueror of the Norman race,

  Knights to his arms did yield, and Ladies to

  his face.

  The Marquis, on the site of the Hole-in-the-Wall, where highwayman Claude Du Vall was arrested. (© James Moore)

  Old Tyburn’s glory; England’s illustrious

  thief, Du Vall, the Ladies’ Joy; Du Vall, the Ladies’

  grief.

  Claude was just 27 years old when he met his fate. He had been caught, drunk, at a London inn called The Hole-in-the Wall, which is today the site of The Marquis pub in Chandos Place near Charing Cross Station. Despite his youth, Du Vall had already built up an image which, in his day, made him as famous as a later highwayman, Dick Turpin. And his career of highway robbery is intertwined with a string of Britain’s oldest hostelries and inns.

  Born in Domfront, Normandy, Du Vall entered domestic service in Paris and is thought to have attached himself to English aristocrats in exile and then come to England on the restoration of Charles II. But it appears that he soon longed for something more thrilling than his new job as footman to the Duke of Richmond. He soon took to crime, forming a gang which became a menacing presence on the lonely roads out of London. In the seventeenth century the names of both Hounslow Heath and Bagshot Heath (where there is, today, a pub named after Du Vall) were notorious haunts of brigands, and travelling through them sent shivers down the spines of the well-to-do. Du Vall’s preferred inns of refuge, following hold-ups in these areas, included two Surrey inns which still exist, The Talbot at Ripley and The Bell in Molesey.

  The Bell, Molesey, Surrey, one of the alehouses favoured by Du Vall. (© James Moore)

  Du Vall, well-spoken and wearing the attire of an aristocrat, was said never to use violence during his career, though the threat of it must have been there. One of his victims was Squire Roper, Master of the Royal Buckhounds, from whom he managed to get fifty guineas before tying him to a tree. In another story about Du Vall he was said to have turned up in Beaconsfield. There was a summer fair going on in the town and dancing at The Crown Inn where Du Vall sat down and struck up conversation with a farmer who was nursing a drink and had a bag of money at his feet. Du Vall promised to look after it while the farmer went to join the revels. Meanwhile he struck up a deal with one of the grooms at the inn to help him escape. In a cunning wheeze, he asked the groom to dress up a dog in a cowhide, take it up to the roof and then lower it down the chimney on a rope. When the poor animal suddenly arrived in the middle of the room barking and spluttering along with clouds of soot many of the dancers thought the apparition was the devil himself and Du Vall managed to slip away amid the resulting chaos and panic.

  Many tales, especially in the years after his death, grew up about Du Vall’s gallantry at the point of a gun. He once robbed a coach but on finding that one of his accomplices had purloined a silver baby’s bottle he returned the item to the mother, and apologised to her, before fleeing the scene.

  The most famous story of all, recorded immediately after Du Vall had been sent to his maker, involved the robbery of a wealthy couple travelling in a coach across Hounslow Heath. The tale goes that on seeing Du Vall and his men approach, the lady immediately took out a flute and began to play. Du Vall was charmed by the music and said to her husband, ‘Your lady plays excellently and I make no doubt that she dances well. Will you please to step out of the coach and let me have the honour to dance one courante with her on the heath?’

  The man had little choice but to agree and when the dance was over he and his wife were allowed to go on their way. Instead of taking the £400 the pair were carrying, Du Vall only took £100 as ‘payment for the entertainment’. Other
legends about Du Vall abounded – one stated that he was a secret friend of Nell Gwynn, while another even suggested that he had saved King Charles II’s life.

  Seductive he may have been, but Du Vall’s success worried the authorities and there was soon a large reward on his head. For a time he fled to France. Returning in 1670 he made the mistake of making a spectacle of himself in the Hole-in-the Wall, also known as Mother Maberley’s tavern, and was soon locked up in Newgate Prison. As one nineteenth-century author put it, ‘He made an unlucky attack, not upon some ill-bred passengers, but upon several bottles of wine.’

  There was a chilling postscript to the ‘boy’s own’ style adventures of Du Vall. In the course of his banditry he used local inns as hideouts, including one called The Black Boy in Slough. Another of his favourite haunts was said to be Hopcroft House near Steeple Ashton in Oxfordshire. Here he planned his crimes, spent his loot and wooed the owner’s daughter. Indeed his ghost is said to haunt today’s Holt Hotel, which stands on the same spot. Nearly exactly a century after Du Vall swung at Tyburn, the landlord and landlady here, a Mr John Spurritt and his wife, were both brutally murdered. The crime was never solved.

  LOCATIONS: The Marquis, Nos 51–52 Chandos Place, London, WC2N 4HS, 020 7379 0367, www.themarquiscoventgarden.co.uk; Claude Du Vall, Nos 77–81 High Street, Town Centre, Camberley, GU15 3RB, 01276 672910; The Talbot, High Street, Ripley, Woking, Surrey, GU23 6BB, 01483 225188, thetalbotripley.com; The Bell, No. 4 Bell Road, East Molesey, Surrey, KT8 0SS, 020 8941 0400, www.johnbarras.com; The Holt Hotel, Oxford Road, Bicester, OX25 5QQ, 01869 340259, www.holthotel.co.uk