Urgh’s many visits to our region
Above, August 1977; meeting the pupils of Filton High School. The Duke and Queen had arrived on the Royal Yacht Britannia as part of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee tour. The new Portbury Dock was now the Royal Portbury Dock. The Royals were then driven to the school in a glass-topped Rolls-Royce and then went on to Thornbury, then back on the M32 into Bristol where, to a 21-gun salute, the Queen reviewed contingents of the Avon Reserve Forces
On the same October 1959 visit admiring the first aid skills of the Wheatsheaf Club at Lockleaze School. Girls were not at first eligible for the Award scheme, but this was quickly changed
May 20 1994: The Duke was a patron of the
project and arrived on College
Green by helicopter to lay the keel for the replica of Cabot’s ship, which would set sail on the
500th anniversary of the
original journey. He also donated a Douglas Fir from the Balmoral estate for the
ship’s mast
April 1965, at Badminton Horse Trials with the young Prince Charles
November 14 1957: A busy day for HRH. Cornwall first thing in the morning, then on to Westlands in Yeovil, then on to Bristol to see the Bristol Britannia in production at Filton. Before Filton, though, he came to the University to see the Physics and Engineering departments and, evidently, a gaggle of excited students. When BT published a photo from the same occasion of female students, we had a couple of letters explaining that the Duke was quite the heart-throb back in the day
Above, John Horwood, a contemporary sketch made at his trial a hanged man could cure a variety of illnesses.
The execution of John Horwood, however poignant the story behind it, would barely have merited a footnote in Bristol’s history – the first hanging to take place at the city’s New Gaol – had it not been for the gruesome developments afterwards.
There is a book of documents about the case which was bound in Horwood’s own skin. Until a couple of decades ago, school groups visiting the Bristol Record Office (now Bristol Archives) were shown the book – and were permitted to handle it.
In more recent times, Horwood’s skeleton was discovered by a distant descendant who was astonished to come across his story when researching her family tree.
The story of John Horwood, though, is not just some gory Horrible Histories tale, but one of a possible injustice which was done in order to protect the reputation of a wealthy and well-connected man. It also speaks volumes of the gross disrespect for working people on the part of those who considered themselves their superiors.
John Horwood was born in Hanham in 1803, one of at least ten children of Phoebe and Thomas Horwood, a family which made its living in the local mines. John worked in the pits when he was small and at least one of his brothers was killed in a mining accident. He later laboured at a local spelter (zinc) works.
At some point he became enamoured of Eliza Balsum (her surname has various spellings, but it’s ‘Balsum’ most contemporary accounts). They were of similar age and had probably known one another as children. They walked out together briefly, but Eliza ended the relationship.
Horwood took this very badly, becoming what in modern parlance we would call a stalker. By one account: “It appears that Horwood for some time past, teased the girl with proposals, which she had uniformly and indignantly refused: and having latterly endeavoured to intimidate her with his threats, she became alarmed at his conduct, and took every means of avoiding him.”
Over the next few months he supposedly attacked her – in one story he’s supposed to have thrown oil of vitriol (sulphuric acid) on her, burning her clothes. It was also suggested that he was a member of the notorious ‘Cock Road Gang’ of local criminals, though this seems to have been an attempt by the prosecution to paint as dark a picture of him as possible.
One late afternoon in January 1821 he saw Eliza in the company of two local boys and supposedly threw a stone at her, hitting her on the head.
At first, the injury seems to have been slight, but she sought medical attention at the Bristol Infirmary (it wasn’t ‘Royal’ until 1850). She visited a number of times, and was well enough to walk the ten miles
or so there and back again on each occasion.
Dr Richard Smith became interested in her case and diagnosed a skull fracture. Her condition worsened and so he decided that he needed to clean up an infection inside her skull. He trepanned her – cutting away a circular section of the bone.
Her condition deteriorated, and when it became clear to Smith that she was probably going to die, he had Horwood was arrested and brought to see her in her hospital bed. She refused to look at him. According to Smith’s memoirs he tried to impress on Horwood the severity of his situation by showing Horwood into a room where the skeletons of two executed felons were kept.
Eliza Smith died on February 17. Smith claimed that Eliza’s death was caused by an abscess which he found under her skull when he cut away the bone. However, an investigation published in the British Medical Journal in the 1890s suggested that infection after Smith’s trepanning was the cause of Eliza’s death, not Horwood’s stone.
Horwood was tried for murder at Bristol Assizes on April 11. Some accounts still bizarrely insist that the case was heard at the Star Inn in Bedminster. But it was at the Guildhall as usual. Inquests were usually held in pubs, but the inquest into the death of Eliza Balsum was at the Full Moon on North Street, Stokes Croft.
A decent defence lawyer would have questioned whether the stone or post-operative infection was the cause of death, though Richard Smith, as one of the most eminent medical men in the city, eloquently claimed in the court that death was caused by the original injury.
The court was told of Horwood’s obsession with Eliza, and allegations of threats and injuries in the past. What probably convinced the jury was the testimony of the dead girl herself, taken down and sworn by her in the Infirmary before she died.
Horwood was found guilty and sentenced to hang. The sentence was carried out just two days later.
It was what happened next that ensured that John Horwood would not be forgotten.
At this time it was legal, indeed routine, for executed felons to be delivered to the medical profession for dissection. At a time when the numbers of doctors and surgeons was growing, it was one of the principal ways in which anatomical knowledge could be increased.
The body was to be delivered to Richard Smith.
It was equally normal at the time for the friends of the deceased to try to secure the body to save it from this final humiliation, and Smith heard that coal miners and quarrymen from Hanham had indeed planned to grab the body and take it away by boat.
In the meantime, Smith had already had refused the pleas of Horwood’s parents that their son’s corpse not be cut up, but that it should simply be buried. It was, he wrote to the solicitors representing the parents, his “duty” to cut up the body, and furthermore to exhibit the skeleton at the Infirmary.
To foil anyone trying to cheat him of his prize, Smith had the body carried away to the Infirmary by coach. He had to pay two prison inmates half a crown each to lift it into the carriage for him.
“On the Monday,” Smith wrote, “the body was taken to the Operation Room and placed upon the table. About eighty persons were present, none being refused who made application. I then delivered a lecture, adapted to a mixed audience, upon the general structure of the human body and its physiology, pointing out the great and infinite wisdom and power which they exemplified.”
He lectured again over the following three days. He removed the skin, some of which was sent to a tanner in Bedminster, and from there to a contractor in Essex to be made into the notorious book cover in which Smith kept papers relating to the case. The front cover of the book is embossed with a gallows motif and skulls and crossbones, with the Latin words “Cutis Vera Johannis Horwood” – the genuine skin of John Horwood.
The skeleton was kept in a cupboard at Smith’s home, where he often showed it to visitors. After his death it was passed to the Infirmary, and later to Bristol University where it was left hanging in a cupboard with a rope around its neck.
To modern eyes, Richard Smith’s behaviour in making and showing off his grisly trophies seems sick, though this was an age in which the corpses of working people were treated with shocking disrespect.
Smith himself had been a “resurrection man” in his earlier years, stealing bodies from graveyards for dissection. John Horwood was hanged six years after Waterloo, where contractors had patrolled the battlefield in the immediate aftermath removing the teeth from the mouths of the dead to be shipped to England in barrels and sold to the makers of dentures. The bodies of fallen officers and gentlemen were, of course, treated with great reverence.
Whatever we might say about different times and different values, the fact remains that once Eliza Balsum died, Richard Smith did everything in his power to ensure that the blame was pinned entirely on John Horwood, and the suspicion has to be that he did so because he wanted to divert attention away from his own failure as a surgeon.
And Smith’s influence in Bristol at the time ran deep.
At that religious service before he died, the Bristol Mirror tells us that Horwood was permitted to address the other inmates. Raising his hands to heaven, he said: “Lord! Thou knowest that I did not mean to take away her life, but merely to punish her; though I confess that I had made up my mind, at some time or another, to murder her.”
He went on, the paper tells us, to confess to several robberies and