Death and misery at a not-so-merry Christmas
UNTIL well into the last century December 25 was a normal working day. Local newspapers were published and from them we learn that Christmas was by no means all festive jollity. Which brings us to this murky miscellany of gleanings.
Readers of the Cheltenham Examiner, browsing its columns over their turkey with all the trimmings in 1849, learned of Lady Pinn’s unfortunate demise. Her ladyship, a resident of the Promenade, was dozing by the fire when a stray spark spat from the hearth and set her muslin nightie alight.
On December 25, 1888 the Gloucester Journal reported that “Lettie Davies, a decrepit old woman, was charged with being drunk and incapable” on the previous evening. “PC Barting, of the Bearlands station, found the prisoner lying on the pavement in such a state of drink that he had to remove her to the station in a sack truck.”
No more cheerful was a report of Mr Daniel Alder, of Imperial Circus, Cheltenham, who had a very trying Christmas Day. While he was lying in bed seriously ill, he was given the news that his wife had just dropped dead and that a bailiff was waiting downstairs to serve him with a bankruptcy order.
In 1862, the festive day issue of the Cheltenham Looker-on described the graphic scene of fog so pea-soup thick that a Charlton Kings pork butcher named Attwell and resident of Cudnall Street lost his bearings and drove his gig into a deep pond. “Mr Attwell was got out without serious injury,” the report informs us, “but the horse drowned.”
It was again the Gloucester Journal that told the unusual tale of Mrs Oakel, who lived in Marshfield, near Chipping Sodbury, in what was then the south of Gloucestershire, rather than South Gloucestershire.
The attention of neighbours was attracted by whoops of joy from the Oakel home, followed by the appearance of Mrs O at the door pronouncing with unbridled pleasure that her husband of many years Billy had just died.
She turned back into the house to reemerge a few moments later dragging the still warm deceased behind her, then gave the corpse a good thrashing with her broom. When asked why, she replied that Billy had beaten her often enough when he was alive and this was the opportunity she’d been waiting for to get her own back.
This paragraph, taken from the Tewkesbury Examiner of 1876, reminds us that high jinks have long been part and parcel of the Yuletide festivities. “Groups of young fellows furnished with nipple canons paraded the streets and discharged the canons against a lamp post with deafening noise. A large mob at the Cross pelted passers with squibs, crackers and other flaming missiles which caused horses to be frightened. Shortly after 9pm the gig house near the old eagle factory was a mass of flame and was destroyed with its contents”. Anyone know what nipple canons are, by the way?
During the 19th century, many local shepherds were lured to Australia and New Zealand by the promise of better wages, working conditions and a more clement climate.
For some the adventure was the making of them, which is why so many families from Down Under trace their roots back to this part of the world. But on others fate smiled less kindly.
On the village green at Shipton under Wychwood is a fountain that commemorates 17 local men who sailed with hundreds of other would-be immigrants to New Zealand in 1874. En route, the ship caught fire and of the 500 on board just three survived.
Eli Hatton was the last man to be hanged in chains from the gibbet on Pingery Tump, near Mitcheldean. After his execution for murder in 1732, Hatton’s body was left in public view. Eventually it reached such a stage of decomposition that traders in Mitcheldean market protested that flies from the corpse were tainting their meat.
There were no newspapers in 1143, but it is recorded that at Christmas time that year Milo Fitzwater, the founder of St Briavels castle in the Forest of Dean, was killed while hunting by an arrow that rebounded off a tree.
And on that note, happy Christmas.