A “Health & Safety” lapse in the Downer case opens this year, followed soon by the Quinton case, which raises the issue of excessive drinking and no food, or perhaps the results of working in the gunpowder mills. Late in the year is the Warren case, showing how we are perhaps right to be worried by fairground rides.
This years cases include two results of loneliness, one the Love case and the other the Dawton homelessness case, whilst in the case of Jane Hobbs one gets the impression the Asylum patients were perhaps too cold. There is a clear demonstration of what happens when a cyclist is towed by another vehicle in the Sheppard case. An unclear death is the Reynish case in which a young domestic servant between positions found her way into the water; but why?
November brings two similar cases concerning food, the White case questioning the food eaten, and the Fry case questioning the parents methods of feeding. The Cave case raises the curtain ever so slightly on the moralising influence of do-gooder worthy citizens. Did Miss Naish really welcome Mrs Cave to take the pledge, and cross-examine her past in the way described? We will never know, and the jury and coroner were certainly keen to deny the possibility.
Finally, there is an amazing military blunder in the Henry Lewis case, two brigades of mounted cavalry mistakenly charging into each other before they can stop themselves.
Sheppard, Frederick Netheravon
Brobant, Sister Anna Warminster
Reynish, Mary Ann West Harnham
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Wiltshire Coroner's Inquests 1801-1920 