Coroner’s Inquests 1856 cases
There are 68 cases for 1856, presented over five sub-pages. The images for this year are not sharp, and in some cases I have been unable to discern the words or figures reported, in some cases I will leave hyphens to indicate this, or use italics if I have been able to provide a guess.
A serious fire threatened to overwhelm the village of Hindon, destroying several cottages and an old woman, Sarah Ranger, but the quick-thinking of the villagers in creating a fire-break – by taking down an entire house – stopped the fire continuing its destruction.
We live in an age where child labour is a distant myth, yet in 1856 James Hayward was employed at the age of only nine years to drive horses operating a spindle attached to the machinery of Mr Buckland, an edge-tool maker. Needless to explain, he fell into the machine. The jury thought the boy’s master should be communicated with about covering the spindle – I cannot print what I would have said and done had I been there! Again, in the case of John Cook.
On a similar theme of child-misuse, nine-year old Louisa Garrett came into Salisbury Workhouse with itch, and it seems to emerge from the trepidation of a fellow witness that the witness Wheeler, known as the ‘industrial woman’ in the house, put Garrett in a confined sulphur bath for more than the stated half-an-hour, and when the child asked for water, was by her denied, indeed probably slapped. There was no medical superintendence of this operation.
Another indication of the tough lives working people faced, Joseph Yeo getting up from bed at 2am in order to walk 14 miles to work in probably the Great Western works at Swindon.
Two most rare instances, I think, in this collection. One is a tornado, which threw in a door on John Collins, the impact of which caused death. Two is eating the poisonous berries of a yew tree, eaten by a small boy, Thomas Pitcher.
There are regular cases of potential infanticide, usually featuring girls, in service, who, for fear of losing their unenviable position, hide their pregnancy (how they were got that way is never mentioned), and hide their child-birth by feigning illness, the child often dying due to lack of proper attention at birth, and the corpse being disposed somewhere and later found. Harriett Fell was such a girl, but in her case the baby was alive and she disposed of it in a breathtakingly awful but very practical way.
The outstanding case is the first Salisbury Railway disaster, which pre-dates the rather more famous boat-train disaster of 1906 by half a century. The Great Western Railway line from Westbury had reached Salisbury only in June of this very year, and four months later an afternoon cattle train set out from Bristol through the towns of Wiltshire to arrive for Salisbury Market that evening.
Samuel Nicholas and William Eyles – the two victims – had charge of Bergion, a younger and more powerful engine, running in second place to Virgo, an older and smaller engine driven by John Mays and fired by William Symonds. Only Mays had ever driven on the line to Salisbury before, the night was dark and greasy, and there seemed to be confusion about which engine should be leading the train, Bergion clearly the more powerful engine eventually bringing the train through Wilton at too high a speed, coming to the descent at Skew Bridge completely unable to then stop the train, with the inevitable result that they ran into the new Salisbury terminus, right through the buffers and through the station building, killing the two poor men and over a hundred sheep.
Reading this account is somewhat revelatory for us in this modern age of highly organised transport systems, to see how poorly arranged a railway service could be. It is similarly shocking that this was not the first fatality on this branch of the GWR, John (Stephen) Croft being crushed by a truck at Wilton whilst shunting using a rope.
Telling, Olive – Ashton Keynes
Daniels, Edmund – Barford St Martin
Street, Elizabeth – East Lavington
White, George & Lusty, George – Limpley Stoke
Sheppard, male infant – Melksham
Cullerne, George – Castle Eaton
Stephenson, Tabitha – Warminster
Ireland, female infant – Malmesbury
Hamilton, William & Lodge, George – Dinton
Croft, John (Stephen) – Wilton
Nicholas, Samuel & Eyles, William – Salisbury (The Salisbury Railway Disaster)
Strange, William – Lydiard Tregoose
Curtis, Moses – Kington St Muchael
Unknown male infant – Yatton Keynell
Lansdown, Charles – Manningford Bohune
New, Jane – Stratton St Margaret
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Wiltshire Coroner's Inquests 1801-1920 