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 9^th 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 4^th 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 14^th 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