The Wench Is Dead (5 page)

Copyright ©1978 by Wilfrid M. Deniston, QBE, MC. No part whatsoever of this publication may be reproduced, by any process, without the written authority of the copyright owner.

The author wishes to acknowledge the help he has so freely received from several sources; but particularly from the Bodleian Library, Oxford; from the
Proceedings of the North Oxford Local History Society;
and from the
Court Registers
of the City of Oxford Assizes, 1859 and 1860.

Further details of the trials mentioned in the following pages may be found in the editions of
Jackson's Oxford Journal
for 20th and 27th August, 1859; and of the same journal for 15th and 22nd April, 1860.

Those who explore the back-streets and the by-ways of great cities, or indeed our small cities, will sometimes stumble (almost literally, perhaps) upon sad memorials, hidden in neglected churchyards – churchyards which seem wholly separated from any formal ecclesiastical edifice and which are come across purely by accident at far side of red-bricked walls, or pressed upon by tall houses – untended, silent, forgotten. Until recent years, such a churchyard was to be found at the lower end of pretty little road in North Oxford, now designated Middle Way, which links the line of Summertown shops South Parade with the expensively elegant houses along Squitchey Lane, to the north. But in the early nineteen-sixties most of those tomb-stones which had stood in irregular ranks in the Summertown Parish Churchyard (for such was its official name) were removed from their original, supra-corporal sites in order to afford a rather less melancholic aspect to those who were about pay their deposits on the flats being built upon those highly desirable if slightly lugubrious acres. Each there in narrow cell had once been laid, and each would there remain; yet after 1963 no one, for certain, could have marked that final resting place.

The few headstones which are adequately preserved which are to be found – even to this day -leaning almost upright against the northern perimeter of the aforesaid enclave, are but one tenth or so of the memorials once erected there, in the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, by relatives, and friends whose earnest wish was to perpetuate the

names of those souls, now perhaps known only to God, who passed their terrestrial lives in His faith and fear. One of these headstones, a moss-greened, limestone slab (standing the furthest away but three from the present thoroughfare) bears an epitaph which may still be traced by the practised eye of the patient epigraphist – though make haste if you are to decipher that disintegrating lettering!

Beyond this poignant (if unusually lengthy) epitaph there lies a tale of unbridled lust and drunken lechery; a tale of a hapless and a helpless young woman who found herself at the mercy of coarse and most brutally uninhibited boatmen, during an horrendous journey made nearly one hundred and twenty years ago -a journey whose details are the subject-matter of our present narrative.

Joanna Franks hailed originally from Derby. Her father, Daniel Carrick, had been accredited as an agent to the Nottinghamshire and Midlands Friendly Society; and for a good deal of his married life he appears to have maintained a position as a reasonably prosperous and well-respected figure in his home community. Later, however – and certainly in the few years prior to the tragic death of his only daughter (there was a younger brother, Daniel) – he encountered a period of hard times.

Joanna's first husband was F. T. Donavan, whose family sprang from County Meath. He is described by one of his contemporaries as "an Irishman of many parts", and being a man of large physique we learn that he was familiarly (and predictably) known by the nickname of Hefty' Donavan. He was a conjurer by profession (or byone of them!) and appeared in many theatres and music-halls, both in London and in the provinces. In order to attract some badly needed publicity, he had at some unspecified date assumed the splendidly grandiloquent title of 'Emperor of all the Illusionists'; and the following theatre handbill was printed at his own expense to herald his appearance at the City of Nottingham Music Hall in early September 1856:

Three years earlier Donavan had written (and found a publisher for) his only legacy to us, a work entitled
The Comprehensive Manual of the Conjuring Arts.
But the great man's career was beginning to prove progressively unsuccessful, and no stage appearances whatsoever are traceable to 1858. In that year, he died, a childless and embittered man, whilst on holiday with a friend in Ireland, where his grave now rests in a burial-plot overlooking Bertnaghboy Bay. Some time afterwards his widow, Joanna, met and fell deeply in love with one Charles Franks, an ostler from Liverpool. Like her first, Joanna's second marriage appears to
have been a happy one, in spite of the fact that times were still hard and money still scarce. The new Mrs Franks was to find employment, as a dressmaker and designers' model, with a Mrs Russell of 34 Runcorn Terrace, Liverpool. But Franks himself was less successful in his quest for regular employment, and finally decided to try his luck in London. Here his great expectations were soon realized for he was almost immediately engaged as an ostler at the busy George & Dragon Inn on the Edgware Road, where we find him duly lodged in the spring of 1859. In late May of that same year he sent his wife a guinea (all he could afford) and begged her to join him in London as soon as possible.

On the morning of Saturday, June 11th, 1859, Joanna Franks, carrying two small trunks, bade her farewell to Mrs
Russell in Runcorn Terrace, and made her way by barge from Liverpool to Preston Brook, the northern terminus of the Trent and Mersey Canal, which had been opened some eighty years earlier. Here she joined one of Pickford & Co.'s express (or 'fly') boats
^[1]
which was departing for Stoke-on-Trent and Fradley Junction, and thence, via the Coventry and Oxford Canals, through to London on the main Thames waterway. The fare of sixteen shillings and eleven pence was considerably cheaper than the fare on the Liverpool-London railway line which had been opened some twenty years earlier.

Joanna was an extremely petite and attractive figure, wearing an Oxford-blue dress, with a white kerchief around her neck, and a figured silk bonnet with a bright pink ribbon. The clothes may not have been new; but they were not inexpensive, and they gave to Joanna a very tidy appearance indeed. A very tempting appearance, too, as we shall soon discover.

The captain of the narrow-boat
Barbara Bray
was a certain Jack 'Rory' Oldfield from Coventry. According to later testimony of fellow boat-people and other acquaintances, he was basically a good-natured sort of fellow, of a blunt, blustery type of address. He was married, though childless, and was aged 42 years. The fellow-members of his crew were: the 30-year-old Alfred Musson, alias Alfred Brotherton, a tall, rather gaunt figure, married with two young children; Walter Towns, alias Walter Thorold, the 26-year-old illiterate son of a farm-labourer, who had left his home town of Banbury in Oxfordshire some ten years earlier; and a teenaged lad, Thomas Wootton, about whom no certain facts have come down to us beyond the probability that his parents came from Ilkeston in Derbyshire.

The
Barbara Bray
left Preston Brook at 7.30 p.m. on Saturday, 11th June. At Fradley Junction, at the southern end of the Mersey Canal, she successfully negotiated her passage through the locks; and at 10 p.m. on Sunday, 19th June, she slipped quietly into the northern reaches of the Coventry Canal, and settled to a course, almost due south, that would lead down to Oxford. Progress had been surprisingly good, and there had been little or no forewarning of the tragic events which lay ahead for the
Barbara Bray,
and for her solitary paying passenger – the small and slimly attractive person of Joanna Franks, for whom such a little span of life remained.

After reading these few pages, Morse found himself making some mental queries about a few minor items, and harbouring some vague unease about one or two major ones. Being reluctant to disfigure the printed text with a series of marginalia, he wrote a few notes on the back of a daily hospital menu which had been left (mistakenly) on locker.

The Colonel's style was somewhat on the pretentious – a bit too high-flown for Morse's taste; and yet the writing was a good deal above the average of its kind -a pleasing peroration, calculated to ensure in most listeners some semi-compulsive page-turning to Part Two. One of the most noticeable characteristics of the writing was the influence of Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country churchyard' – a poem doubtless stuck down the author's throat as a lad in some minor public school, and one leaving him with a rather lugubrious view of the human lot. One or two
very
nice touches, though, and Morse was prepared to a couple of ticks to that epithet 'supra-corporal'. He wished, though, he had beside him that most faithful of jail his literary companions,
Chambers English Dictionary,
for although he had frequently met 'ostler' in crossword puzzles, he wasn't sure
exactly
what an ostler did; and 'figured' bonnet wasn't all that obvious, was it?

Thinking of writing – and writing books – old Donavan {Joanna's first) must have been pretty competent. After all, he'd 'found a publisher' for his great work. And until the last few years of his life, this literate Irish conjurer was seemingly pulling in the crowds at all points between Croydon and Burton-on-Trent… He must certainly have had
something
about him, this man of many parts. 'Greatest man in the World' might be going over the top a bit, yet a mild degree of megalomania was perhaps forgivable in the publicity material of such a multi-talented performer?

'Bertnaghboy Bay?' – Morse wrote on the menu. His knowledge of geography was minimal. At his junior school, his teachers had given him a few assorted facts about the exports of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and the rest; and at the age of eight he had known – and still knew (with the exception of South Dakota) – all the capital cities of the American States. But that was the end of his apprenticeship in that discipline. After winning a scholarship to the local grammar school, the choice of the three 'G's had been thrust upon him: Greek, German, or Geography. Little real choice, though, for he had been thrust willy-nilly into the Greek set, where the paradigms of nouns and verbs precluded any knowledge of the Irish counties. Where
was –
what was the name? – Bertnaghboy Bay?

It was paradoxical, perhaps, that Morse should have suddenly found himself so fascinated by the Oxford Canal. He was aware that many people were besotted with boat-life, and he deemed it wholly proper that parents should seek to hand on to their offspring some love of sailing, or rambling, or keeping pets, or bird-watching, or whatever. But in Morse's extremely limited experience, narrow-boating figured as a grossly over-rated activity. Once, on the invitation of a pleasant enough couple, he had agreed to be piloted from the terminus of the Oxford Canal at Hythe Bridge Street up to the Plough at Wolvercote – a journey of only a couple of miles, which would be accomplished (he was assured) within the hour; but which in fact had been so fraught with manifold misfortunes that the finishing line was finally reached with only five minutes' drinking-time remaining – and that on a hot and thirsty Sunday noon. That particular boat had required a couple of people – one to steer the thing and one to keep hopping out for locks and what the handbook called 'attractive little drawbridges'. Now, Joanna's boat had got four of them on it – five with her; so it must surely have been awfully crowded on that long and tedious journey, pulled slowly along by some enthusiastic horse. Too long! Morse nodded to himself he was beginning to get the picture… Far quicker by rail, of course! And the fare she'd paid, 16
s
11
d,
seemed on the face of it somewhat on the steep side for a trip as a passenger on a working-boat. In 1859? Surely so! What would the rail-fare have been then? Morse had no idea. But there were ways of finding out; there were people who knew these things…