The Wench is Dead (7 page)

For the moment, however, let us make a jump forward in time. After a Coroner’s inquest at The Running Horses Inn (now demolished, but formerly standing on the corner of Upper Fisher Row by
Hythe Bridge in Oxford) the four crew members of the
Barbara Bray
were straightly charged with the murder of Joanna Franks, and were duly committed to the nearby Oxford Gaol. In the
preliminary trial, held at the Oxford Summer Assizes of August 1859, there were three indictments against these men: the wilful murder of Joanna Franks by throwing her into the canal; rape upon the
said woman, with different counts charging different prisoners with being principals in the commission of the offence and the others as aiders and abettors; and the stealing of various articles,
the property of her husband. To a man, the crew pleaded not guilty to all charges. (Wootton, the boy, who was originally charged with them, was not named in the final indictments.)

Mr Sergeant Williams, for the prosecution, said he should first proceed on the charge of rape. However, after the completion of his case, the Judge (Mr Justice Traherne) decided that there could
be no certain proof of the prisoners having committed the crime, and the Jury was therefore directed to return a verdict of ‘Not Guilty’ on that charge. Mr Williams then applied to the
Court for a postponement of the trial under the indictment for murder, until the next Assizes, on the grounds that a material witness, Joseph Jarnell, formerly a co-prisoner in Oxford Gaol, and
previously committed for bigamy, could not be heard before the Court until he had obtained a free pardon from the Secretary of State. Oldfield, the boat’s captain, was understood to have made
some most important disclosure to Jarnell while the two men shared the same prison-cell. Although this request was strenuously opposed by Oldfield’s Counsel, Mr Judge Traherne finally
consented to the suggested postponement.

The Judge appointed for the second trial, held in April 1860, was Mr Augustus Benham. There was intense public feeling locally, and the streets leading to the Assize Court in Oxford were lined
with hostile crowds. The case had also excited considerable interest among many members of the legal profession. The three prisoners appeared at the bar wearing the leather belts and sleeve
waistcoats usually worn at that time by the canal boatmen, and were duly charged with “wilful murder, by casting, pushing, and throwing the said Joanna Franks into the Oxford Canal by which
means she was choked, suffocated, and drowned”. What exactly, we must ask, had taken place on those last few, fatal miles above the stretch of water known as Duke’s Cut on the Oxford
Canal? The tragic story soon began to unfold itself.

There are more than adequate grounds for believing that the journey from Preston Brook down to the top of the Oxford Canal at Hawkesbury was comparatively uneventful, although it soon became
known that Oldfield had sat with Joanna in the cabin while the boat was negotiated through the Northwich and Harecastle Tunnels. However, from the time the
Barbara Bray
reached the lonely
locks of Napton Junction – 30-odd miles down from Hawkesbury, and with Oxford still some 50 miles distant – the story appears to change, and to change (as we shall see)
dramatically.

William Stevens, a canal clerk employed by Pickford & Co., confirmed
²
that the
Barbara Bray
reached the Napton Locks at about 11 a.m.
on Tuesday 21st June, and that the boat remained there, in all, for about an hour and a half. “There was a woman passenger on board”, and she complained immediately to Stevens about
“the conduct of the men with whom she was driven to associate”. It would, he agreed, have been proper for him to have logged the complaint (the
Barbara Bray
was, after all, a
Pickford & Co. transport); but he had not done so, confining his advice to the suggestion that the woman should report forthwith to the Company offices in Oxford, where it should be possible
for her to switch to another boat on the last leg of her journey. Stevens had witnessed some shouted altercations between Joanna and a member of the crew, and remembered hearing Joanna speak the
words: “Leave me alone – I’ll have nothing to do with you!” Two of the men (Oldfield and Musson, he thought) had used some utterly disgraceful language, although he agreed
with Counsel for the defence that the language of almost all boatmen at these times was equally deplorable. What seemed quite obvious to Stevens was that the crew were beginning to get very much
the worse for drink, and he gave it as his opinion that they were “making very free with the spirit which was the cargo”. Before setting off, the woman had complained yet again about
the behaviour of the men, and Stevens had repeated his advice to her to reconsider her position once the boat reached the terminus of the Oxford Canal – where a partial off-loading of the
cargo was officially scheduled.

It appears, in fact, that Stevens’s advice did not go unheeded. At Banbury, some twelve miles further down the canal, Joanna made a determined effort to seek alternative transport for the
remainder of her journey. Matthew Laurenson, wharfinger at Tooley’s Yard, remembered most clearly Joanna’s “urgent enquiries” about the times of “immediate coaches to
London – and coaches from Oxford to Banbury”. But nothing was convenient, and again Joanna was advised to wait until she got to Oxford – now only some 20 miles away. Laurenson put
the time of this meeting as approximately 6.30–7 p.m. (it is hardly surprising that times do not always coincide exactly in the court evidence – let us recall that we are almost ten
months after the actual murder), and was able to give as his general impression of the unfortunate woman that she was “somewhat flushed and afeared”.

As it happened, Joanna was now to have a fellow passenger, at least for a brief period, since Agnes Laurenson, the wharfinger’s wife, herself travelled south on the
Barbara Bray
down to King’s Sutton Lock (five miles distant); she, too, was called to give evidence at the trial. Recalling that there was “a fellow passenger aboard who looked very agitated”,
Mrs Laurenson stated that Joanna may have had a drink, but that she seemed completely sober, as far as could be judged – unlike Oldfield and Musson – and that she was clearly most
concerned about her personal safety.

The tale now gathers apace towards its tragic conclusion; and it was the landlord of The Crown & Castle at Aynho (just below Banbury) who was able to provide some of the most telling and
damning testimony of all. When Mrs Laurenson had left the boat three miles upstream at King’s Sutton, it would appear that Joanna could trust herself with the drunken boatmen no longer,
according to the landlord, who had encountered her at about 10 p.m. that night. She had arrived, on foot, a little earlier and confessed that she was so frightened of the lecherous drunkards on the
Barbara Bray
that she had determined to walk along the tow-path, even at that late hour, and to take her chances with the considerably lesser evils of foot-pads and cut-purses. She hoped
(she’d said) that it would be safely possible for her to rejoin the boat later when its crew might be a few degrees the more sober. Whilst she waited for the boat to come up, the landlord
offered her a glass of stout, but Joanna declined. He had kept an eye on her, however, and noticed that as she sat by the edge of the canal she appeared to be secretly sharpening a knife on the
side of the lock (Musson was later found to have a cut on his left cheek, and this could have been, and probably was, made with the same knife). As the boat had drawn alongside Aynho wharf, one of
the crew (the landlord was unable to say which) had “cursed the eyes of the woman and wished her in hell flames, for he loathed and detested the very sight of her”. As she finally
re-boarded the boat, the landlord remembered seeing Joanna being offered a drink; and, in fact, he thought she might have taken a glass. But this evidence must be discounted wholly, since Mr
Bartholomew Samuels, the Oxford surgeon who conducted an immediate
post-mortem
, found no evidence whatsoever of any alcohol in poor Joanna’s body.

George Bloxham, the captain of a northward-bound Pickford boat, testified that he had drawn alongside Oldfield’s boat just below Aynho, and that a few exchanges had been made, as normal,
between the two crews. Oldfield had referred to his woman passenger in terms which were completely “disgusting”, vowing, in the crudest language, what he would do with her that very
night “or else he would burke her”.
³
Bloxham added that Oldfield was very drunk; and Musson and Towns, too, were “rather well away,
the pair of ’em”.

James Robson, keeper of the Somerton Deep Lock, said that he and his wife, Anna, were awakened at about midnight by a scream of terror coming from the direction of the lock. At first they had
assumed it was the cry of a young child; but when they looked down from the bedroom window of the lock-house, they saw only some men by the side of the boat, and a woman seated on top of the cabin
with her legs hanging down over the side. Three things the Robsons were able to recall from that grim night, their evidence proving so crucial at the trial. Joanna had called out in a terrified
voice “I’ll not go down! Don’t attempt me!” Then one of the crew had shouted “Mind her legs! Mind her legs!” And after that the passenger had resumed her
frightened screams: “What have you done with my shoes – oh! please tell me!” Anna Robson enquired who the woman was, and was told by one of the crew: “A passenger –
don’t worry!”, the crewman adding that she was having words with her husband, who was with her aboard.

Forbidding to Joanna as the tall lock-house must have appeared that midnight, standing sentinel-like above the black waters, it presented her with her one last chance of life – had she
sought asylum within its walls.

But she made no such request.

At this point, or shortly after, it appears that the terrified woman took another walk along the tow-path to escape the drunken crew; but she was almost certainly back on board when the boat
negotiated Gibraltar Lock. After which – and only some very short time after – she must have been out walking (yet again!) since Robert Bond, a crew-hand from the narrow-boat
Isis
, gave evidence that he passed her on the tow-path. Bond recorded his surprise that such an attractive woman should be out walking on her own so late, and he recalled asking her if all
was well. But she had only nodded, hurriedly, and passed on into the night. As he approached Gibraltar Lock, Bond had met Oldfield’s boat, and was asked by one of its crew if he had seen a
woman walking the tow-path, the man adding, in the crudest terms, what he would do to her once he had her in his clutches once again.

No one, apart from the evil boatmen on the
Barbara Bray
, was ever to see Joanna Franks alive again.

A
S WITH
P
ART
O
NE
, Morse found himself making a few notes (mentally, this time) as he read through the
unhappy narrative. For some reason he felt vaguely dissatisfied with himself. Something was nagging at his brain about Part One; but for the present he was unable to put a finger on it. It would
come back to him once he’d re-read a few pages. No hurry, was there? None. The theoretical problem which his mind had suddenly seized upon was no more than a bit of harmless, quite
inconsequential amusement. And yet the doubts persisted in his brain: could anyone,
anyone
, read this story and not find himself questioning one or two of the points so confidently reported?
Or two or three of them? Or three or four?

What was the normal pattern of entertainment for canal boatmen, like Oldfield, on those ‘protracted stops’ of theirs? Changing horses was obviously one of the key activities on such
occasions, but one scarcely calculated to gladden every soul. Dropping in at the local knocking-shop, then? A likely port-of-call for a few of the more strongly sexed among them, most surely. And
drink? Did they drink their wages away, these boatmen, in the low-beamed bars that were built along their way? How not? Why not? What else was there to do? And though drink (as the Porter once
claimed) might take away the performance, who could gainsay that it frequently provoked the desire? The desire, in this case, to rape a beautiful woman-passenger.

So many questions.

But if sex was at the bottom of things, why were the rape charges dropped at the first trial? Agreed, there was no DNA biological fingerprinting in the 1850s; no genetic code that could be read
into some desperate fellow’s swift ejaculations. But even in that era, the charge of rape could often be made to stick without too much difficulty; and Confucius’s old pleasantry about
the comparative immobility of a man with his trousers round his ankles must have sounded just as hollow then as now. Certainly to the ears of Joanna Franks.

The footnote referring to the
Court Registers
had been a surprise, and it would be of interest, certainly to the sociologist, to read something of contemporary attitudes to rape in 1859.
Pretty certainly it would be a few leagues less sympathetic than that reflected in Morse’s morning copy of
The Times
: ‘Legal Precedent in Civil Action – £35,000
damages for Rape Victim’. Where were those Registers, though – if they still existed? They might (Morse supposed) have explained the Colonel’s bracketed caveat about
discrepancies. But
what
discrepancies? There must have been
something
in old Deniston’s mind, something that bothered him just that tiny bit. The Greeks had a word for it
–
parakrousis
– the striking of a slightly wrong note in an otherwise tuneful harmony.

Was that ‘wrong note’ struck by Mrs Laurenson, perhaps? Whatever the situation had been with Joanna, this Laurenson woman (with her husband’s full assent, one must assume) had
joined the
Barbara Bray
for the journey down to King’s Sutton with – as the reader was led to believe – a boat-load of sexually rampant dipsomaniacs. Difficult to swallow?
Unless of course the wharfinger, Laurenson, was perfectly happy to get rid of his missus for the night – or for any night. But such a line of reasoning seemed fanciful, and there was a
further possibility – a very simple, and really rather a startling one: that the crew of the
Barbara Bray
had
not
been all that belligerently blotto at the time! But no. Every
piece of evidence – surely! – pointed in the opposite direction; pointed to the fact that the boatmen’s robes of honour (in Fitzgeraldian phrase) were resting, like the Confucian
rapist’s, only just above their boot-laces.