Dreadful to the brim
Mugged... John Vincent investigates the horrific double murder of a landlord and his son at a Pennine pub nearly two centuries ago.
It reads like the plot of a Conan Doyle thriller. But there was no Sherlock Holmes to solve the gruesome double murder at a remote moorland inn nearly 190 years ago. And the mystery of who killed landlord Bill Bradbury and son Tom at the Moor Cock Inn on the road between Greenfield and Holmfirth remains as baffling today as when the pair were savagely slashed and beaten in the early evening of April 2, 1832.
The bodies were found by 84-yearold Bill’s grand-daughter Amelia, 12, when she called at the pub the next morning. Muscular 6ft-tall ex-wrestler and bare-knuckle boxer Tom, 46, his face unrecognisable, lay dying on the floor in a pool of blood after a desperate struggle. He had 16 head wounds, a fractured skull and bruises all over his body. Upstairs she found her grandfather fatally wounded on a blood-soaked bed, his body mangled. Blood-stained sock footprints were found, along with a poker, spade, auger (hole-boring tool) and a broken musket matted with Tom’s blood and hair.
As for suspects, Tom and a friend, Reuben Platt, were approached on the road to Greenfield shortly before the murder by three suspicious, Irishsounding men who asked how far it was to Holmfirth (eight miles). One witness said the dying father moaned “pats” or “the pats” – a derogatory local name for the Irish. The pub – nicknamed Bills O’Jacks after Bill’s father Jack (Bill, son of Jack) – was a gambling den and some say the murders were the result of a gambling debt or for money Bill kept back for his funeral expenses.
Other suspects included violent local poachers James and Jamie Bradbury (no relation to Bill or Tom), who were seen in the area and bore a grudge against Tom. More likely culprit was a young hawker and robber, James Hill from Saddleworth, who was transported to Australia in 1841 and executed there for another murder. But nobody was ever charged.
It may seem strange to modern eyes that such a heinous crime was commemorated with a mug but this was an age of bloodthirsty “penny dreadfuls” and freak shows highlighting human disability. The cylindrical earthenware mug, depicting the inn, its name and the murder date, surfaced at Woolley & Wallis of Salisbury, Wiltshire, where it fetched £500, well above estimate. Other ceramics at the sale recalled other celebrated murders – the 1834 Houses of Parliament fire, 1829 York Minster arsonist James Martin, Catholic emancipation, civil liberty, free trade and a famous perjury trial of 1831.
As for the Moor Cock, high above Yeoman Hey Reservoir, it became a grim tourist attraction, with some 32,000 visiting the site on the Sunday after the murders. It was finally demolished in 1937. A weatherbeaten stone slab in a Saddleworth graveyard reads: “Here lies the dreadfully bruised and lacerated bodies of William Bradbury and Thomas, His son, both of Greenfield, who were together savagely murdered in an unusually horrid manner.”