Historical English crime: A fatal case of mistaken identity

I was recently down in Rye, a lovely old town on the Sussex coast that has a long history as part of the medieval confederation known as the Cinque Ports, as well as many an old tale concerning smugglers and threats of invasion by the French. It’s full of history – the Mermaid pub has a sign saying that it was re-built in 1420 – which simply cannot be avoided as you walk up those cobbled streets to the churchyard at the top of the hill. 

The church, St Mary’s, has wonderful views of the surrounding area should you climb the tower (I, of course, cannot resist the chance to climb a good tower); you can see across Romney Marsh, down to Camber Castle, even to the power station at Dungeness on a clear day, and across to the cliffs by Pett Level – one of my favourite stretches of beach.

  

For any visitor to Rye, the Ypres Tower (pronounced ‘wipers’, just like the way the British soldiers pronounced the name of said Belgian town during the First World War) is well worth a visit for those wishing to find out more about the history of this fascinating place. One of the exhibits is somewhat macabre – it’s a full-size replica human skeleton encased in a gibbet, which was the metal cage in which the body of a condemned criminal was placed after said criminal had died by hanging, to be displayed at a suitable point such as a crossroads in order to warn people of the consequences of breaking the law.

This refers to one of Rye’s most (in)famous stories, that of a local butcher who murdered an ex-mayor of Rye in 1742. The twist is that he killed the wrong man. Not for nothing is it known as the ‘murder by mistake’.

The butcher in question was John Breads, who seems to have been the type to bear a grudge. In particular, he bore a grudge against the mayor of Rye, James Lamb, who’d fined him for selling meat at short weight. This angered Breads to the point at which he came to the conclusion that the best way of settling this grudge was by killing the mayor. Not being particularly subtle, he sometimes spoke about what butchers do to lambs (in an age before refrigeration, they did the slaughtering as well as the butchering) after he’d had a few drinks in the pub.

He got his opportunity on the night of 17^th March 1742. A ship docked at Rye was hosting a banquet and Lamb was invited as the guest of honour. Rye being a small town, it didn’t take long before everyone knew about this. To get from his house to the harbour and back, Lamb would have to walk through the churchyard, and it was here that Breads reckoned he would have his chance to kill him – preferably on the return journey when it would be darker and Lamb might have had a bit too much to drink (local gossip had it that French brandy – smuggled, presumably – would be served at the banquet). In the moonlight, it should be fairly easy to identify the mayor in his red cloak.

Unbeknown to Breads, though, it wasn’t James Lamb who went to the banquet. He’d not been looking forward to it as he wasn’t feeling well but had felt obliged to go because, well, he’d been invited and he was the mayor so it might cause offence if he didn’t go. However, his brother-in-law, a former mayor of Rye called Allen Grebell, popped by to see him in the afternoon and, on being informed that Lamb wasn’t up to it, offered to go in his place – for surely an ex-mayor would add just as much dignity to the occasion as the actual mayor? Lamb readily agreed, and decided that as Grebell would be going to the banquet on his behalf, it was only fitting that he should wear the red mayoral cloak.

Grebell had a lot to drink at the banquet, and was staggering on his way home which took him up the hill and through the churchyard. Seeing a figure in a red cloak and assuming it was Lamb, Breads (who’d been hiding behind a tombstone) attacked, stabbing his victim before fleeing. Grebell did not appear to realise he’d been stabbed – when he got home, he calmly informed his servant that someone had tried to attack him in the churchyard on his way home, and that he would sit down in front of the fire for a while before going to bed. No need for the servant to wait up any longer. What with Grebell wearing Lamb’s red cloak and the only available sources of light being the fire and maybe a lamp or two, the servant didn’t notice that his master was bleeding.

Lamb, meanwhile, was having a troubled night – he had a dream in which his late wife (Grebell’s sister) had appeared to him and warned him about her brother’s safety. Early in the morning, therefore, he decided to see if Grebell was all right. The servant answered the door, and on finding that Grebell’s bed hadn’t been slept in he remembered that Grebell had said he’d sit down by the fire in the front room. The checked the front room, and found Grebell. The ex-mayor had bled to death after falling asleep.

It soon transpired that Breads, who was nothing if not unsubtle, hadn’t fled far from the scene of the crime. He was wandering around the town, drunk, shouting about having killed the mayor. The parish constable found a blood-spattered knife in the churchyard. It had Breads’s name on the handle. The butcher of Rye was quickly arrested and imprisoned in the Ypres Tower.

The subsequent trial took place in May 1743 (actually a couple of months after the murder, as this was when Lady Day, 25^th March, marked the start of the new year in England). It was, apparently, unique in English legal history in that it was the only time when a murder trial was presided over by a judge (Lamb) who had been the defendant’s intended victim. The verdict was never in any doubt – the evidence of the knife and Breads’s behaviour on the morning after were damning, although it still took the jury ten hours before they reached a verdict. Before Lamb passed sentence, Breads left no-one in any doubt with an extraordinary outburst at Lamb: “I did not mean to kill Mr Grebell. It was you I meant it for, and I would murder you now if I could!”

Breads was sentenced to be hanged and, just over a month after the trial, that is what happened. The hanging took place out on the marsh, and afterwards the body was enclosed in a gibbet and left there – at a place known today as Gibbet Marsh.

Gradually, over the next fifty or so years, the bones disappeared as some of the townspeople apparently stole them – local legend has it that, back in the 18^th century, ground-up human bones were regarded as a remedy for rheumatism. When only the skull was left, it was taken to Rye Town Hall where it remains to this day; there are apparently plenty of requests to see it, although the occasional suggestion that it be put on public display is invariably rejected by the council on the grounds that displaying actual human remains wouldn’t be appropriate; tourists can make do with the fake skeleton in the Ypres Tower.

The main source for this story is a booklet called Murder by Mistake, which used to be available for sale at the Ypres Tower but which has now been out of print for many years (I got hold of a copy via eBay), although it was retold in a book called Murders of Old Sussex (of which I happen to own a copy, which stands on my bookshelves next to Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Barnet, Finchley and Hendon; make of that what you will).

It certainly raises a few questions, the big one being the question of why Lamb was able to officiate at Breads’s trial. Judges are supposed to be impartial, and in this case Lamb – as both the intended victim and a relative of the actual victim – most certainly was not (there’s a reason why the trial is unique in English legal history). Personal connections aside, why would the mayor – the local magistrate – take charge of a murder trial? Serious crimes were meant to be dealt with at the Assizes, those quarterly court sessions that were held in most county towns until well into the 20^th century. Rye being in Sussex, surely Breads should have been sent to Lewes to stand trial at the next Assize session? The reason given for why this was not done is Rye’s status as an ‘Antient Town’ within the Confederation of Cinque Ports, which appears to have exempted Rye from having to send its serious criminals to the Assizes; in the Cinque Ports, everything short of high treason was dealt with locally, with the mayor acting as a judge. The delay between Breads’s arrest and trial (over two months) could have been due to Lamb checking with the powers-that-be with regards to whether he should preside over such a high-profile trial in which he had a personal interest. 

If you ask around in Rye, you’ll find a different take on the town’s most notorious case of mistaken identity. Being an old and somewhat isolated port located on the edge of Romney Marsh, Rye has a long association with smuggling (of which more in a future post) and a local theory is that Lamb was in the pay of a group of smugglers known as the Hawkhurst Gang (who we will return to in said future post). Grebell, so this ‘unofficial’ version goes, found out about the mayor’s corruption and was planning to expose him; Lamb found out about what Grebell knew and planned to have him killed in order to keep him quiet. Breads, a violent man with a known grudge against Lamb, thus became Lamb’s unknowing tool in the elimination of Allen Grebell. Quite how Lamb was able to guarantee that Breads would be waiting with his knife in the churchyard, or even that Grebell would willingly take his place at the banquet, is not clear. But as conspiracy theories go, it’s an interesting one.

Principal sources:
Kenneth M. Clarke, Murder by Mistake (Rye Museum Association, 1975)
Rupert Taylor, Murders of Old Sussex (Countryside Books, 1991)

The modern history books: Spies, conspiracies and Britain in the early Sixties

We live in an age where there’s a lot of popular history about, and some of it manages to combine a high standard of writing with excellent historical research. Here are three of the best that I’ve enjoyed reading recently:

Popping up on TV as well as in print, Dominic Sandbrook is one of those historians who’s pretty good on revisionism – reinterpreting historical facts by looking at the evidence from a different perspective and coming up with something that challenges the accepted historical view of historical events; the old A.J.P. Taylor maxim of nothing being inevitable until it happens is very much Sandbrook’s guiding principle, it seems. In the first of his four books on recent British history, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles, he strikes a fine balance between the political, the economic and the cultural, looking below the surface of events. The travails of Harold Macmillan’s various Chancellors (Reggie Maudling strikes me as being one of the most amusing people ever to have held that particular post) are juxtaposed with sections on movies, books (Ian Fleming of course, but also Kingsley Amis and long-forgotten types like Colin Wilson), television (this was the time when ITV started and the BBC entered one of its most creative periods), moral panic in the newspapers over immigration and the sexual behaviour of teenagers (plus ca change…), the early Sixties satire boom and pop music; plenty of stuff in that last bit on Lonnie Donegan, Billy Fury and Acker Bilk (whose presence is explained by the notion that in early 1962 there were those who thought that trad jazz would be the defining sound of the Sixties) before we get to the Beatles (where Sandbrook’s revisionism is clearly shown, with there being nothing inevitable about Beatlemania, the last remark on which goes to Ted Heath of all people – as Trade Secretary at the time, he remarked that the demand for Beatles-style jackets in late 1963 single-handedly saved Britain’s corduroy industry). It’s a long book (738 pages, not including the footnotes) but it’s well worth persevering with. The set-piece chapter is the one on the Profumo scandal – which has quite the build-up by being referenced or alluded to in previous chapters before, following an account of the Vassall scandal, it breaks out in a surprisingly low-key fashion (the central point, a junior minister’s affair with a call-girl, lasted just a few weeks) before becoming something that “might have been scripted to encompass a wide range of sensitive issues of the early sixties: espionage and subversion, sexual wantonness, unchecked materialism, the supposed exoticism and criminality of immigrant communities and the nepotism and ineptitude of the Conservative government ... it touched on public and private anxieties that had already been festering for years.” Interesting times, indeed, and fascinatingly chronicled here.

History of a somewhat different nature is covered by David Aaronovitch in his Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory has Shaped Modern History. If we really do live in a conspiracy-obsessed age – and reactions to recent events both here and in the United States have presented little evidence to the contrary – then perhaps a look at conspiracy theories of the past, the truth behind them and why so many are willing to believe them (the need for a certain type of narrative is a key part of this) is no bad thing. Thus, we have a chapter on the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a document which, despite being exposed as a forgery in 1921, did much to fuel anti-Semitism in the twentieth century and is still doing the rounds in the Middle East) and a somewhat lighter chapter on the pseudo-history concerning the Priory of Sion myth (amusingly entitled ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Holy Shit’). Showing that conspiracy repeats itself, there are links made between the conspiracy theories surrounding the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana, and also (exploring a particularly British vein here) between the deaths of Hilda Murrell and David Kelly. Personally, I’d’ve liked to have seen what Aaronovitch might have to say about the various conspiracy theories surrounding Harold Wilson, but what makes this book so relevant for readers today is the American stuff. When Aaronovitch turns his attention Stateside, there are chapters on conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbour, various Clinton-related cover-ups, the 9/11 ‘truthers’ and the Obama ‘birthers’; those last two show how belief in conspiracy theories has risen with the advent of the Internet (“Cyberspace communities of semi-anonymous and occasionally invented individuals have grown up … the democratic quality of the Net has permitted the release of a mass of undifferentiated information, some of it authoritative, some speculative, some absurd”). As this book was published in 2010, there’s nothing about Donald Trump’s involvement in the ‘birther’ nonsense, although if Aaronovitch is going to do a second edition he’d probably need to include a whole chapter (maybe more), building on the post-Internet rise in the popularity of conspiracy theories, about the uses of conspiracy theories as political weapons in this year’s Presidential election. This book is intelligently written and hugely enjoyable, and a good one to have read before the next time someone brings up the subject of the ‘truth’ about, say, 9/11 or the pseudo-history behind The Da Vinci Code.

Conspiracy of a real rather than a theoretical sort abounds in A Spy Among Friends: Philby and the Great Betrayal, the tale of how Kim Philby betrayed, well, just about everyone. Ben Macintyre – an author of espionage-related stuff who I have read before (his Agent Zigzag is excellent) – is on good form here dealing with the story of perhaps the most notorious traitor in British history, aided by being able to access recently-declassified government files and previously unseen private papers. This isn’t a straight biography of Philby, though (there have been plenty of those); this one tells the story of British and American intelligence in the Second World War and the early part of the Cold War, focussing in particular on the friendship between Philby and two of his closest associates, Nicholas Elliott of MI6 and James Jesus Angleton of the OSS, and later the CIA. Elliott was a very good friend of Philby – or so he thought; they were of a similar background (public school, Cambridge, made their names in intelligence during the Second World War) and he shared everything he knew with him at a time when people who worked for the secret service were very tight-lipped outside of it, but frequently got drunk and let slip all sorts of interesting information when socialising with colleagues (something of which Philby took full advantage). After the defections of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, which ruined Philby’s intelligence career by virtue of his closeness to the former rather than any concrete evidence, Elliott was instrumental in maintaining Philby’s innocence – blackening the reputation of a particularly troublesome MP who used Parliamentary privilege to ask some questions that some would rather have remained unasked – while trying to bring him back into the fold (he eventually succeeded in having him appointed as an agent under journalistic cover in Beirut, from where Philby defected to the Soviet Union in 1963). Elliott was also involved in the Crabb fiasco of 1956, the story of which is told here (one wonders how he was able to keep his job after that one, which went against the explicit orders of the Prime Minister). He was deeply affected by Philby’s betrayal, as was Angleton, although the effect on the latter was perhaps more ruinous for the intelligence community; having trusted Philby implicitly, Angleton switched to not trusting anyone and, having convinced himself that there was a mole in the CIA, wasted much time and resources as well as resorting to illegal methods in the chasing of this phantom, to the extent – irony of ironies – that some came to believe that Angleton himself was a KGB mole, charged with causing as much damage to the running of the CIA as possible. It all, it seems, went back to Philby. As retold by Macintyre, this is a truly irresistible read for anyone who, like me, has a penchant for spy fiction.

Biographies of war heroes

My latest post concerns two books that I’ve read over the past few months – both of which happen to be biographies of men who, among other things, were war heroes.

First of all, I’d been looking forward to reading Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper (2012), as the subject is one of my favourite writers – although it is true that his prose is a little too purple for some tastes (I, for example, am glad that I didn’t stumble across him until I was in my late twenties; had I started reading him when I was younger, I don’t think I’d have appreciated it as much). There is much that is of interest in the life of Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011), or ‘Paddy’ as he was universally known. Here, after all, was a man who walked across Europe before he turned twenty, served in the Special Operations Executive during the war (most famously abducting a German general in Crete in 1944), and after it designed his own house in Greece, could sing folk-songs in at least eight languages, mingled with lords as easily as he mingled with vagrants and swam the Hellespont when he was 70. Oh, and he wrote some of the finest works of non-fiction of the twentieth century, specifically his accounts of that youthful walk, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.

There’s no way a biography of him would ever be dull, although there is always the chance that such a work could never live up to the man’s own prose (as was the case with a biography of Norman Lewis that I read last year). But what Artemis Cooper – who knew him well – does is to bring to light his unpublished diaries, allowing us to see the man behind the prose, as it were. Another side to the man comes through; the often-penniless Paddy was quite the freeloader (the original couch-surfer, maybe?) and an habitual womaniser (to the extent that his wife would even give him money in case he needed to visit a brothel). Despite this, Paddy still comes across as a highly likeable sort – a prodigious networker (as a biographer, Cooper is nothing if not a name-dropper), always curious about exploring new places and wanting to learn new things. He was never, ever dull or boring.

A couple of things I’d always wanted to know about Paddy are explained; for example, why, aside from an uncharacteristically staid report for the Imperial War Museum (which can be read in the Paddy-anthology Words of Mercury), Paddy didn’t write his own account of the kidnapping of the general – something he left to his comrade-in-arms, Billy Moss, whose account, Ill Met by Moonlight, was made into a film in which Paddy was portrayed by Dirk Bogarde. The reasons for this lack are explained in detail; Paddy being Paddy, a blood-feud is among them (which also explains why he didn’t return to Crete for many years after the war). The question of why the long-awaited third volume of his youthful journey was never completed is also explained; Paddy was a notorious perfectionist who took ages over his writing, and in this context, perhaps the most revealing thing in the book is the reproduction of a page of one of Paddy’s drafts – written in longhand (for years, and I for one find this rather shocking, he never learned to use a typewriter) and replete with all sorts of corrections and crossings-out, it was used by his long-suffering publisher whenever anyone asked when Paddy’s next book was coming out! Which brings us to Cooper’s next project; along with Colin Thubron, she’s been editing Paddy’s journals, notes and drafts to bring said third volume to publication. The Broken Road has just been published, and is due out in paperback next year. I can’t wait.

As far as I can tell, Paddy did not cross paths with Airey Neave (1916-1979); the latter, whose name I first encountered in Major P.R. Reid’s The Colditz Story, certainly doesn’t crop up in the pages of Cooper’s biography which at the very least mentions in passing a large number of well-known people who Paddy met over the course of his long life. There are a few similarities between the two men; both visited Germany as young men shortly after the Nazis came to power, and both fought in the Second World War with distinction, being awarded the DSO. But there the similarities would appear to end.

This brings me to the second biography, Public Servant, Secret Agent: The Elusive Life and Violent Death of Airey Neave by Paul Routledge (2003). This is an at-times fascinating biography about a relatively minor and now largely forgotten politician, albeit one whose career did not end in failure but was tragically cut short by an INLA car-bomb at the Palace of Westminster in 1979. The most interesting part relates to what he did in the Second World War, and Neave’s war was most certainly adventurous – after being taken prisoner at Calais in 1940, he ended up in Colditz Castle – from which he escaped by dressing up in a home-made imitation of a Wehrmacht officer’s uniform and subsequently travelling to Switzerland – before going on to work for MI9 (the wartime secret service responsible for escape and evasion) and playing a role in the Nuremberg trials. These parts of Routledge’s book are very good indeed.

Sadly, the book flags once we get to Neave’s post-war career as a Conservative MP; to make up for the relative lack of excitement as Neave tries to climb the greasy pole and doesn’t do particularly well, the author tries to make something of Neave retaining his links to the secret services but there’s not much to go on here, and Routledge gets bogged down chasing shadows as he attempts to link Neave to various conspiracy theories about right-wing groups trying to overthrow the Wilson government. Even Neave’s greatest political achievement – his central role in Mrs Thatcher’s campaign in the 1975 Tory leadership election – appears somewhat rushed here (Routledge, I think, overlooks Ted Heath’s failure to engage with his own backbenchers while overplaying Neave’s apparent deviousness). Of Neave’s subsequent career as Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, there isn’t really a lot that can be said, as he was shadowing one of the most effective holders of that office, and did not live to put any of his own policies into action – he was killed days after the vote of no confidence that brought down Jim Callaghan. After the account of Neave’s murder, the conspiracy theories, and there are quite a few relating to who exactly would have wanted him dead, take over again – the effect being that rather too much time is given over to the musings of Ken Livingstone and Enoch Powell, and that surely cannot be a good thing.

Much more substantial is the author’s story of how he got to speak to some veteran Irish republican terrorists about the all-too-real conspiracy to murder Neave himself. For sheer guts in his pursuit of this side of the story, Routledge deserves much credit.

To conclude, I’d say that both of these books are worth a read, although both do have a rather limited appeal. The Neave one will probably appeal more to politics-junkies than anyone else, while the Paddy biography is perhaps best tried after a dose of Paddy’s own inimitable prose.