Agony of the agony aunt husband tied to a bedpost
Beatrice: Loved by women
IT WAS THE first day of the trial at 7am on Monday, July 2, 1928, and already what seemed to be the whole population of the little village of Fetter Hill had arrived on a fleet of buses … what did they hope to see? asked the Daily Express reporter.
The public space in the court was small and only those who had privileged tickets would be admitted. Many famous writers turned up but would not give their names. The police struggled to keep order outside in a crowd more than 2,000 strong.
And so began the murder trial of the alleged female killer known as the Tragic Widow, Beatrice Pace in Gloucester. No one could know then that she would go down in the annals of history as one of the Sunday Express’s most remarkable women in England.
And the Daily Express was later to brand the case as ‘the most astonishing judicial drama in a lifetime.’
Beatrice was in the dock to plead not guilty to the arsenic murder of her sheep farmer husband Harry, in a bleak and obscure cottage in the Forest of Dean. The police had halted his funeral and taken his body away to examine following a tip-off and they found a toxic sheep dip in his stomach.
But the court was to hear that the years of abuse and cruelty this pale, demure and thin wife suffered was more than any woman should ever know.
It was to finally lead her to be given her own agony aunt column in the pages of the Sunday Express and the publication of her life story, along with her freedom.
The court heard that her husband treated her like a machine only for sex and to bear his three children and yet he never looked at her face; she just belonged to him and he would beat her with a stick before whistling and singing ‘I’m ‘Enery the Eighth I am, …’ and then the whole song as she wept.
He would even sleep with a loaded gun under her pillow and wake her up at night with it at her head. If the mood took him he would tie her to a bed post and leave her there all day without food or sanitation.
He even regularly burned her with her heated hair tongs, something he began on Christmas Day. But the court heard that she loved him and could never leave him no matter what.
“I can’t explain why I loved him,” she said, “I just did and once I started that was it. Even when he was cruel to me, he was my man. He had taken me as a girl, and I grew to be a woman with him. I suppose I was a great fool.”
The mother-of-three’s words struck a chord with women up and down the country. Thousands of people wrote petitions to set her free. And at the end she was acquitted.
Within minutes of the verdict, the word spread.
The Daily Express reporter said: “In court we heard the big roar of the cheers from outside. The courtroom remained orderly until after the judge had bowed to barristers and retreated. Then, with magical swiftness through a curtained door, the whole decorum of the court went to pieces as wild cheering burst out.
“Several of the jury joined in the applause and a woman cried: ‘God bless her!’
Beatrice, 35, who had poor sight and health and who could only see the judge to her right as a red mark, blew kisses to her friends, unable to believe what was happening and asked guards if it was true. Then she collapsed in the dock and was carried out shoulder high.
Her road home was packed with thousands of people and one of the first things she did was to write to all the women who had stood by her through her harrowing ordeal in the pages of the Sunday Express. Hundreds of women wrote back with their stories and the paper published many of them.
Beatrice told them: “It is easy for women to talk of running away when there is nothing to run from; when you are free and have no responsibilities and no ties. A woman thinks then that she is going to be the master, that she can do as she likes and that if anything goes wrong, she has only to walk out like a cook giving notice.
“When you are poor and married and trouble comes you begin to realise that you have got to light the world together, even if you are fighting each other all the time. I had my children, and I suffered for them. They made me feel closer to Harry, not the Harry who beat me, but the Harry I thought of as my husband. They were the better part of him.”
Beatrice died three years later.
Fleet Street is end of the road
for gentleman highwayman
Davies: Real-life Robin Hood
AT EVERY turn of Fleet Street I seem to find another story in our journey through the centuries. Salisbury Court is no exception. Pepys was born there of course, and a theatre was built to stage Shakespeare plays in 1629. Unlike The Globe, it had a roof.
But few people know that one of England’s most notorious highwaymen, William Davies, known as the ‘Golden Farmer’ was captured and hung there after shooting dead a butcher who was chasing him for burgling a house.
And so ended his 42-year trail of highway robbery in the Surrey and Berkshire countryside, even his wife knew nothing about. After his death in Fleet Street, his body was chained and left to rot at a crossroads in Bagshot, Surrey, on the spot where he had held up many coaches.
Davies (sometimes Davis in the court history books) was a real-life Robin Hood, often giving to deserving cases and with an eye for the women. He would pay coachmen bags of gold to tip him off that they would have women passengers. They were easier to rob, and he charmed them.
He mostly worked in the woods of Bagshot Forest, on the Great West Road to the West Country, where he was a wealthy farmer and he left the jewels of the women he robbed, taking only gold so he could not be identified when he spent his plunder. He had no loyalties though, and even robbed farmers on their way to pay their rent.
Davies, born in 1627 who had 18 children, was such a master of disguise that on one occasion he robbed his own landlord of the rent he had collected without him realising.
He became a bit of a folk hero when he robbed the Duchess of Albemarle in her coach on Salisbury Plain, after winning a single-handed fight over her guard, a coachman and two footmen. He was young, strong, agile and fit and they were no match for him.
He was 22 when he began his highway-robbing career and throughout most of his life he worked alone, none of his family, friends or neighbours ever knew his secret. He was everyone’s gentleman and friend and even most of his victims liked him, men and women alike.
But he made a mistake when he worked for a while with another highwayman Thomas Sympson, nicknamed Old Mobb.
They fell out later in life and it was Sympson who later betrayed him by revealing his real identity as a highwayman. Davies, 64, was slowing up in his older years and had turned to house breaking and stealing plate and jewellery in London, when he was caught in the act after robbing a butcher in Salisbury Court.
He stayed in London often. In his old age, he was a corn-chandler in Thames Street, near the Tower of London selling his produce by day and robbing homes at night.
As he fled the house in Salisbury Court, he shot the butcher giving chase dead and headed into Fleet Street, getting as far as Newgate Jail in Ludgate before being surrounded by cavalry.
He was committed to Newgate and tried for murder at the Old Bailey in 1690, when his full past became known and he was condemned to be hanged in the place where he had shot the butcher, instead of Tyburn as usual in those days.
There are conflicting reports about how he met his end, but one of them led to the famous Alfred Noyes poem: The Highwayman.
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.
Fancy a quick slope to
the cockfight next door?
WE WERE a cruel lot in England in the 1600s and Fleet Street was the place to be for a good drink at the Bell on a Saturday night, followed by a stroll down Shoe Lane to The Cockpit Inn for more ale and a night of cock fighting.
If fighting birds were too tame for you, then a gentle toddle over Blackfriars Bridge would take you to a night of Bear and Bull Baiting in Southwark, where the maddened and starving beasts would rip each other to pieces as you supped your ale … and you could win some big money.
Even Queen Elizabeth I would spend a pleasant afternoon with her court watching this bloodthirsty sport back in the 1500s and every town in Elizabethan England boasted a Bull and Bear Baiting ring.
Fleet Street though was known as the Golden Triangle of cockfighting in the 1600s. From a pit at Blackfriars over to Shoe Lane and across to Westminster, fight nights were packed. Shakespeare even included the sport in Macbeth and went to see the fights himself.
Samuel Pepys wrote of them in his diary in 1663 when he went to the most famous pit of them all The Cockpit in Shoe Lane.
He said: “Being directed by sight of bills upon the walls, I went to Shoe Lane to see a cockfight at a new pit there, a sport I had never seen. But, Lord, to see the strange variety of people from Parliament man to the poorest ‘prentices, bakers, brewers, butchers, draymen, and whatnot, swearing, cursing, and betting, and yet I would not but have seen it once.
“I soon had enough of it, it being strange to observe the nature of these poor bird creatures; how they will fight till they drop down dead upon the stage and strike after they are ready to give up the ghost, not offering to run away when they are dying or wounded past doing further.
“But when an owner comes and pricks him, the bird will run off the stage, and the owner will wring his neck without much more ado.”
Pepys was amazed at the amount of money spent on the bets.
He said: “It’s strange to see how people of this poor rank, who look as if they had not bread to put in their mouths, shall bet three or four pounds at one time and lose it, and yet bet as much on the next battle (so they call every match of two cocks), so that one of them will lose £10 or £20 at a meeting; thence have enough of it.”
The sport of cockfighting was not something that could be taken up by just anyone. Birds took two years to breed, the right food was expensive, and they had to be trained to spar with specially-stitched boxing gloves and then later how to kill. Owners could earn big gate money for the best bouts.
Even their tail feathers were trimmed for the fight, cut into the shape of a short fan at a slant so that in rising, a lucky stroke might take out the eye of an adversary. The cock’s legs were fitted with deadly spurs of steel two inches in length.
Cockfighting was banned outright in England and Wales and in the British Overseas Territories under the Cruelty to Animals Act 1835. But it is still reported to go on today in some areas illegally.
TERRY MANNERS
3 February 2025