19th
century crime and punishment.
(This
is loosely connected to my family history.)
I
do wander away from the subject of my family history when I find
stories involving my ancestors. This time I am going back to my
great great grandfather Asa Godber for the start of my post.
Asa
was the son of James and Ann Godber. He was born in 1826 in
Nottinghamshire.
By
1861 he had become a police officer working in Derbyshire and
his name appears quite frequently in the newspapers of that time.
More often than not this is when he is breaking up fights and being
attacked in the process.
One occasion was really
upsetting when he was called because a 10 year old girl had been
attacked by a young man. On 9th May 1869 Ellen Greaves
age 10 and her friend were out walking with their dolls and picking
wild flowers when she was approached by a young man who spoke to her
and asked her to give him kiss. She refused and he grabbed her and
pushed her to the ground and brutally attacked and raped her.
Her friend ran along the road to
get help and she told two men who she met that a man was murdering
her friend. They ran back with her but didn't apprehend the man.
They took Ellen home where her mother called the doctor. The doctor
said she had been ravished and frightfully torn and lacerated with
bruising round her head and arms. She had been shockingly used and
he had never in his experienced seen anything so bad as this.
Ellen's friend, Ann Pearce,
gave the men a description of the attacker and they said they knew
who he was. With they information they gave to Asa he was able to
find him and arrest him. At first he denied the attack but later
admitted it and said he had been drunk.
Ellen and Ann were able to identify him. He was called John Webster
and was 18 years old. He was committed to the next Derby Assizes.
I
have often thought about this story and wondered what had happened to
Ellen following this terrible ordeal and also if John Webster had been
punished for his heinous crime against a 10 year old.
Ellen
was the 4th
daughter of Robert and Sarah Greaves, they had 5 daughters and 2
sons. In 1871 after the attack she was living with her parents and
brother and their granddaughter in Eckington, Derbyshire. In 1881
she was working as a cook in a household in Doncaster, Yorkshire. By
1891, 33 year old Ellen was still single and living in the home of
her brother Robert and his family back in Eckington along with her
widowed mother. I wonder if she would have married and had a family
of her own if it hadn't been for this tragic event. I can find no
further record after 1891.
John
Webster was tried before a judge at the Derby Assizes and sentenced to 10 years penal servitude.
I
found several record of his prison history. He was first sent from
Derby prison to Pentonville in March 1870 and 2 months later he was
transferred to Chatham prison where he served until February 1876.
On
14th
February 1876 he was transferred to Borstal
Convict Prison in Rochester, Kent. In May of the following year
he was released on licence.
John Webster was born in 1849, son of John and Sarah Webster. In 1841 and 1851 they lived on Primrose Hill in Dudley, Worcestershire. Can't find the family in 1861.
On John's prison records the names of 2 different people were given as his next of kin. One was James Price of Netherton, Worcestershire who was his brother in law. The other was Ann Morris, his sister of Primrose Hill in Netherton. I've had difficulty tracing both of these but have found John living with an aunt, Sarah Morris, and her son Richard in Bumble Hole, Dudley in 1891. Sarah was John's father's sister who was born in 1815 and was the widow of James Morris. John was 40, single and working as a boiler maker. Maybe a trade he had learned in prison.
I have given up delving any further because as usual this has taken up a lot of my time. I do believe if someone attacked a 10 year old so brutally now they would have had a harsher sentence, John only served 7 years of a 10 year sentence