General

A few years ago, I wrote a blog about the Sun Inn murders in Bedlington using the inquest report and witness statements held by NorthumberlandArchives. 

https://northumberlandarchives.com/test/2016/06/09/the-sun-inn-murders/   

In 2018, I wrote another piece about the funerals of the victims

 https://northumberlandarchives.com/test/2018/04/13/funerals-of-the-sun-inn-murder-victims-1913/

Over Easter, I visited the graves of the three victims, and it inspired me to write a final blog about the tragedy. 

On 15th April 1913, James Wood Irons, owner of The Sun Inn public house in Bedlington went to the premises to terminate the employment of his manager John Vickers Amos due to deficiencies in stock and takings. Irons had with him Richard Grice who he intended to make his new tenant manager. Richard’s wife Sarah was also present. After much agitation and anger at being told that he would not be entitled to his bond/deposit, Amos produced a gun resulting in the horrific murders of three innocent people. P.C. George Bertram Mussell (30) Sergeant Andrew Barton (40) and Mrs Sarah Ellen Fenwick Grice (33). John Vickers Amos fled but was captured and arrested the same day.  

The Morpeth Herald covered the court case which was held at the Northumberland Summer Assizes on 2-3rd July 1913. The indictment charged John Vickers Amos with the murder of Sergeant Barton, P.C. Mussell and Mrs Grice, but the prosecution only proceeded on the count charging him with the murder of Sergeant Barton.  There was a great deal of public interest in the case and the court was rapidly filled as soon as the doors opened. A large crowd also gathered outside the Moot Hall in Newcastle. The charge put to the prisoner was that that on 15 April, 1913 at Bedlington, he did wilfully murder Sergeant Andrew Barton. In a firm voice he answered, “Not Guilty.” Counsel for the prosecution were Mr Bruce Williamson and Mr Jardine; defence, Mr W. J. Waugh and Mr Leon Freedman.  

When addressed by Mr Freedman, [for the defence] Amos stated that in June 1912, when working as a miner in America, he was in a coal and gas explosion. As a result of this, two men were killed and 14 severely burned. Amos was asked if he was badly injured after his heroic attempt at rescuing two men, and he confirmed that he was and said that he was laid up for three weeks. Mr Freedman then asked him to tell the judge and jury the affect that his injuries had upon his health and he claimed that the explosion had given him pains in his head, made him very nervous and unable to sleep. Amos also stated that about a month after that explosion he was in another in which eight men were killed and many burned. This time, he was uninjured but was blown about 15 yards which affected his nerves and seemed to make him ‘’lose his senses that day.’’ This further accident led to more sleep disturbance, head pain and a feeling of extreme anxiousness. 

When asked about shooting the three victims in the Sun Inn, Amos said that his memory was a blank. He had no recollection of sending his son to the shop to buy cartridges or of shooting at anybody. He claimed that the two policemen were good friends of his. 

In his address to the jury, Mr Waugh [for the defence] said that the prisoner’s plea was that he was not responsible for his actions on 15 April. They were told that Amos was a different man after returning home from America. His time there had had resulted in a terrible strain on his mental faculties. His defence stated that although angry at Mr Irons, Amos was prepared to kill anybody. Due to a loss of mental balance, his reason had been dethroned. At the time of the shooting, it was clear that he had become temporarily insane as a direct consequence of the injuries he had received when employed as a miner.  

In his address to the jury, Mr Williamson [for the prosecution] said that the prisoner took the life of Sergeant Barton deliberately and intentionally and was therefore, guilty of murder. He pointed out that there was no medical evidence to support the claim that Amos has suffered mentally as a direct result of the explosions in America. The only evidence provided by a medic was from Dr Haworth, the doctor who was first called to the scene after the murders had occurred. He had witnessed Amos’s behaviour after the event and described him as being quiet and perfectly composed. There were many questions to consider. Were the jury going to accept the fact that Amos could simply not remember the crimes he had committed?  Mr Williamson asked them to assume that Amos had real grounds for thinking that Mr Irons had treated him unfairly. Did that not show that Amos had the strongest possible motive for anger and a desire for revenge against Mr Irons? Could the jury have the slightest doubt that Sergeant Barton was deliberately shot by Amos? It was evident that Amos feared that the sergeant would disarm him before he had the chance to kill Mr Irons, so he had to eliminate him.

The jury retired and after an absence of only eight minutes, returned with a verdict of guilty of wilful murder. When Amos was asked if he had anything to say about the death sentence that was about to be passed, he answered, “I don’t remember anything, they were good friends to me.” Amos received the sentence calmly and as he left for the cells he waved his hand to some friends in the court room.  

John Vickers Amos was executed at Newcastle Gaol on 22 July 1913. The only witnesses were prison officials and the Under Sheriff, Mr Percy Corder. Outside the prison a large crowd gathered eager to try to catch a glimpse of the rope or hear the thud of the trapdoor bolts. However, on this occasion, the trap doors were so muffled that no sound could penetrate the huge walls of the prison. The execution was carried out at 8am and a bell tolled from within the prison grounds, so the waiting crowd knew it was over.  

Soon after 9am, the inquest on the deceased was conducted within the prison by the city Coroner Mr Alfred Appleby. He found all procedures had been carried out correctly and it was noted that Amos had been given a rope drop of 6 feet 6 inches. On examination of the body, the prison doctor confirmed that the cause of death was due to a fractured spine. The newspaper reported that John Vickers Amos was buried within the prison walls.

Morpeth Herald 4 July 1913 

Morpeth Herald 25 July 1913 

Northumberland Archives – QSCP/6 

Warning – this article mentions murder and capital punishment of criminals.

The gibbet near the village of Elsdon is often referred to as Winter’s Gibbet, taking its name from William Winter who was hanged from it.  On 10^th August 1792 William Winter and two sisters Jane and Eleanor Clark(e) were executed for the murder of Margaret Crozier and house-robbery of Raw Pele near Elsdon; a number of others, including children, were committed to a house of correction on suspicion of being accomplices.  Winter was hung in chains near the site of the crime until his clothes rotted off and then his body was cut down.  The original gibbet remained until the wood was destroyed, but it has been remade along with a replica head since. 

The execution was reported nationwide.  Winter made a voluntary confession in front of three magistrates and named the sisters as being involved in both crimes.  Jane and Eleanor had denied being part of the murder.  At the execution it was said that he acknowledged the justice of his sentence.  Newspapers of the time refer to all three parties having both a criminal past.  Winter appeared to have served previous sentences including stealing in Hexham and Newcastle; it was said that ‘he [had] not been at liberty six months together during the last eighteen years’.   

The Leeds Intelligencer newspaper (amongst others) reported that his father and brother were hanged at Morpeth in 1790 alluring that this familial pattern was the root cause of William’s behaviour.  It is possible that newspaper got the year wrong.  In August 1788 John and Robert Winter, father and son, were executed at Fair Moor, Morpeth for breaking into Hesleyside  House, the home of William Charlton and stealing a silver tankard.  Other reports refer to Robert and John Winter as being horse stealers and were executed for stealing a bay mare worth £10 in the parish of St. John Lee.  

At the execution, the son addressed the spectators recommending that they paid attention to their ‘duties of religion’ especially the Sabbath; he had turned towards evil and a life of vice from a young age as he had been brought up ‘without any regard to morality’.  This last-minute speech did not change the outcome either man faced, and both seemed resigned to their fate.    

Dr Greg Finch is a historian based near Hexham who has written on various early modern North-East of England topics. He is currently preparing a book on the rise of the Blackett family in seventeenth and early eighteenth century Newcastle for publication later this year.

Amongst the papers of the Allgood estate in the Northumberland Archives is a fragile and unexplained listing of over 600 households giving, for each of them, the name of the head of household, the number of men, number of women and number of children under the age of sixteen (ZAL 84/16). Such counts are rare for this period, certainly in Northumberland. When first catalogued in 1960 it was described only as ‘Census? Nunwick [the Allgood country seat at Simonburn on the North Tyne]?’ More recently a typed transcript of the document by Sue Wood, Head of Archives, also filed with the Allgood catalogue, described it as ‘Unidentified census, probably Hexham, n[o] d[ate] c.1740.’ As I live near Hexham I’ve been exploring this further in the hope of confirming its identification and date.

As far as the location is concerned, many of the names given of heads of households are found elsewhere as residents of Hexham. 70 of the 620 heads of households listed also appear as Hexham residents who voted in the 1748 Parliamentary by-election, as shown in The Northumberland Poll Book… 1747-8, 1774, 1826, (1826). Other names appear in the parish registers (NRO EP/184) and these also help to narrow the range of dates within which the census must have been drawn up.

Mary Bearpark, the twelve-year-old daughter of William Bearpark, was buried at Hexham in May 1740. William’s household can be found in the census, but it contained no children under the age of sixteen, so it seems almost certain that the document was drawn up after May 1740.

Only two months later, the burial of ‘Mr. Skurfield, minister of the meeting house’ was entered in the register, which can perhaps be linked to the empty household of ‘Mr Scofield’ given in the census. This might therefore move the earliest date of the document to July 1740. Since the house was shown as unoccupied, his death might have occurred recently.

As far as the latest date is concerned, the family of Thomas Lambert is shown headed by him in the census, but he was buried in December 1741. So the document was probably compiled between the summer of 1740 and the end of 1741, and perhaps nearer the start of that period than its end.

Why was it drawn up? A strong clue lies in the separation of counts of children under the age of sixteen from adult men and women. Sixteen was the usual age of communion in the Church of England at the time. The number of potential and actual communicants was a question commonly asked of parish clerics by their ecclesiastical hierarchy every three years. One such visitation covered the entire Archbishopric of York in 1743, including Hexham, so it is possible that the previous visitation took place in 1740. It therefore seems likely that the census was taken for church purposes, but this does not explain why it should have ended up in the Allgood archives rather than those of the parish.

However, different branches of the Allgood family had often occupied civic offices in Hexham from the seventeenth century, and Thomas Allgood was bailiff of Hexham manor between 1736 and 1741. This was a role closely linked in practice to that of the parish vestry, the ‘Four and Twenty’, which set and collected the town rates and was therefore familiar with drawing up lists of local households. The census might have been taken primarily for church purposes but it may also have been of wider use in support of later rate assessments.

What of its coverage? Until 1764 Hexham parish included rural Hexhamshire to the south of the town, so if the listing was drawn up to support a visitation return the whole parish might have been included. Fortunately we can compare the total number of households (621) with those declared by the parish curate, William Graham, in his reply to Archbishop Herring’s visitation queries of 1743 (775). We know that the latter figure includes rural Hexhamshire. The difference of 154 households is a feasible total for ‘the Shire’ in comparison to the total of 150 given for it in the 1673/4 Hearth Tax assessment and the 164 enumerated in the 1821 census. So the 1740 listing covers Hexham town only.

The census is incomplete, for some of the right hand side of the manuscript has been nibbled by rodents or otherwise lost. [Before it came into the archives! Ed.] This means that while the counts of males and females over the age of sixteen are all still present, the number of children is missing for 44 of the 621 households (7%). The best that can be done here is to estimate the number of missing children based on the ratio of children to adults in the other households. This adds 50-60 children to the total. Hexham’s population was about 2,550 in 1740. 784 adult men were counted, and 1,007 women. While this might seem quite imbalanced, it was actually reasonably common in many early modern English towns.

The largest household was Sir Edward Blackett’s at Hexham Abbey, with 29 in total. Seventeen were family members, Sir Edward and his wife Mary (previously Roberts), her son Nicholas, his wife, and their children, all of whom are listed in a Roberts family tree given in Hinds’ Volume 3 of the History of Northumberland (1896, p.297). The remaining twelve were presumably servants. Other prominent local residents’ households included the seventeen in Lancelot Allgood’s substantial house overlooking the Market Place, ten at the Reverend Andrewes in Hexham House and nine at John Aynsley’s home in Fore Street. At the other end of the scale were 32 houses with only a single occupant, (of the households for which records are complete), 25 of them women. The town’s workhouse apparently contained just five male occupants. On average there were 4.1 people per household, confirming Hexham as a town made up mostly of small nuclear families.

A date of 1740-1 for this census places it just about half way between two other two dates for which Hexham’s population can be estimated – 1673/4, from a Hearth Tax assessment, and the first national census of 1801. A longer article on what this tells us about the town’s growth will appear in the 2021 issue of the Hexham Historian journal due to be published by Hexham Local History Society in the autumn.