Mary Jane Bennett and her child. (Author’s collection)
James Billington had gone from being a ribbon-wearing teetotaller to a publican. He’d given up his hairdressing business to run the Derby Arms Hotel in Churchgate, Bolton, but William and John continued the old family trade with a new Billington barber shop in Great Moor Street.
Meanwhile, William Warbrick had received his training but his days as assistant were drawing to a close as rapidly as Billington’s as number one. Warbrick’s final appearance as assistant should have been for the execution of Joseph Holden. Holden was a drunk who had killed his nine-year-old grandson, John Dawes, by throwing him into a pit. For Warbrick, the appointment of the executioner’s assistant held more interest than the case itself:
As I had been to the last execution at Strangeways in the previous December, I fully expected to be engaged to hang Holden, whose execution was fixed for December 4, 1900. But the days went by and no word came from the Governor. The Home Office always engages the executioner, while the Prison Governors choose the assistant.
I heard that Jim Billington had received his notification so I decided to write to Governor Cruickshank at Manchester. I told him I would be at liberty on the date fixed for the execution and would act as assistant if so desired.
Mr Cruickshank’s reply was most mystifying. He declared that Mr Thomas Billington had already been appointed.
Now Tom Billington was the eldest of Jim’s sons, all of whom at one time or another were executioners. The middle one of the three brothers was William, whom we always called ‘Bill’.
Some time prior to Holden’s execution, Tom Billington had, I know, undertaken a few jobs, but I knew it was impossible for it to be true that he had accepted the Holden appointment because at the time he had been away from home for about twelve months, and his whereabouts were not known so far as I know.
How, then, could he have accepted the Holden job? The governor’s positive statement that he had been engaged made it clear that somebody else had accepted the appointment in Tom’s name, so I at once communicated my suspicions to Governor Cruickshank.
I must have been right in my surmises. I never heard who was the person who had falsely represented himself as Thomas Billington, but that something of this kind had happened was clear from the fact that I was almost immediately given the appointment.
Given that William Billington was trained and had already assisted at several executions by the time Holden was hanged, it does not make sense that William Warbrick was hinting the William Billington was the impersonator, but no other scenario fits either. It seems that William Warbrick felt that the Manchester job should have gone his way, despite his failing relationship with the Billington family and the fact that it had been officially documented and acknowledged as a cause for concern.
Warbrick retired after this execution, but was to make two final appearances, including one which left a permanent scar on the Billingtons.
Louise Masset’s case was not the only one where rumours of a miscarriage of justice continued long after the execution.
On Saturday 22 September 1900 a courting couple, Mr Mason and his girlfriend, discovered the body of a young woman on Yarmouth beach. She had been strangled by a boot lace which was still around her neck, her face was scratched and the medical examiner found bloodstains on her underwear.
The woman was soon identified as a Mrs Hood, who was staying at a guesthouse in the Rows that belonged to Mrs Rudrum. Mrs Hood had arrived on Saturday 15 September and with her she brought her baby girl. Each evening Mrs Hood went out, leaving her daughter in the care of Mrs Rudrum. The child was still in her care when Mrs Hood was reported missing. The investigating officer, Inspector Lingwood, quickly discovered that Mrs Hood had been using a false name and her real identity remained a mystery; the biggest clues were the personal belongings left in her room. These included the return section of a first-class rail ticket to Liverpool Street station, some baby clothing, a brooch and a small purse containing a door key. In the bedroom he found a photograph of the dead woman and her baby. This was traced to a beach photographer named Conyers and he stated that the photograph had been taken on Thursday 20 September. The baby clothes had a laundry marking of 599; at that point the only other clue was the disappearance of the necklace that Mrs Hood had been wearing when she had left the guesthouse that evening.
It was more than a month after the body was discovered when the coroner’s jury returned the verdict that an unknown woman had been murdered by an unknown man. The breakthrough came when Mrs Rudrum and her daughter discussed the case and remembered that Mrs Hood had received a letter bearing a Woolwich postmark. On 5 November the owners of 1 Glencoe Villas, Bexley Heath, finally reported that their tenant Mrs Mary Jane Bennett was missing. Police quickly established that this was Mrs Hood’s real identity and began to look into her background.
Her maiden name had been Mary Jane Clarke, and she had been born in 1877. At the age of nineteen she met her future husband, Herbert John Bennett. He was only sixteen at the time. Her first job was teaching piano and he became her first pupil. Their families tried to thwart their marriage, objecting on the grounds of their age, but Mary and Herbert decided to ignore this obstruction. He stated that he was twenty-one years old and they married at Leyton registry office.
This slightly devious start to their married life was an indication of events that would follow. They worked together selling violins, which they claimed to be Stradivariuses, and sold on at a very inflated price. At the start of the 1900s they purchased a grocer’s shop in Westgate. It would appear that this was bought either from proceeds of the violin sales or possibly from some other fraudulent activity as there is no indication that they earned any money from legitimate employment.
The shop burned down within days and Bennet was paid £658 for its loss, some of this payment was to replace stock which he had bought on credit. He took the money but never settled his bill with his suppliers.
By May the couple and their daughter had returned to London, this time renting rooms in Plumstead. It is not known what went wrong with their relationship but by this point the landlady, Mrs Elliston, was aware that they were on bad terms and soon after this they began to live separately, although Herbert still visited his wife from time to time.
Herbert took a job at Woolwich Arsenal, and on 1 July took a trip to London with Mr Stevens, another employee at the arsenal. That day Herbert met Alice Meadows. Herbert was obviously very attracted to Alice and rewrote his adult history, overlooking his fraudster past and the small detail of his wife and child. Bennett mentioned that a fictitious cousin called Fred lived at Bexley Heath and explained that he liked to visit Fred’s family occasionally.
By the end of July, Alice was confident that an engagement was on the cards and amazingly Herbert was able to pay his own rent, court Alice and support his now secret family. On 4 August he took her to Great Yarmouth where they stayed overnight, in separate rooms, at the Crown and Anchor Hotel. A few days after their return, Herbert received a telegram that read, ‘Try to come home M very ill.’ Herbert explained that his cousin at Bexley Heath was ill and went to visit; it is not known whether Mary Jane was ill, but certainly by Saturday 15 September she was well enough to tell her neighbour, Miss Langman, that she was taking a holiday in Yorkshire.
This was a lie as Mary Jane had already made a booking with Mrs Rudrum in Great Yarmouth. More interestingly, this was one of the people to whom Herbert had written before his own trip to Yarmouth. On her arrival, Mary Jane explained that she was a widow who had travelled with her brother-in-law. She also told Mrs Rudrum that he was a very jealous man and would often follow her.
Each evening Mary Jane went out for several hours, leaving her daughter in the care of Mrs Rudrum. On Friday 21 September Mary Jane stayed out two hours longer than usual and told the landlady that this was because she’d got lost. But Alice Rudrum, Mrs Rudrum’s daughter, had just seen her at the end of the road with a man, whom she had overheard saying ‘you understand, don’t you, I am placed in an awkward position just now?’ Alice Rudrum also heard them kiss.
When Mary Jane left on the Saturday evening she was well dressed and wearing several items of jewellery, a silver watch and carrying plenty of money. She was seen in the company of a man by a Mr Borking; he would later identify her companion as Herbert Bennett. This was the last live sighting of Mary Jane; within a few hours her body had been discovered and the police investigation was under way.
By the time of Bennett’s arrest and trial there were witnesses that identified Bennett as the man who arrived at the Crown and Anchor late on Saturday night and left in time to catch the 7.20 train to London on Sunday morning.
Bennett was arrested on 6 November and charged with murder, by this time he was engaged to Alice Meadows and they were planning to marry at Christmas. Much of the evidence against him was circumstantial, but the discovery of what appeared to be her necklace at his lodgings was one of the main points that convinced the jury of his guilt. His defence team were equally convinced of his innocence. Bennett’s counsel, Sir Edward Marshall Hall, fought very hard for Bennett’s freedom producing a reliable witness, named Douglas Sholto Douglas, who gave a detailed alibi that would have made it impossible for Bennett to be on the beach at the time of the murder. The main problem with the statement was that Bennett refused to enter the witness box and confirm the story himself.
Marshall Hall also brought forward witnesses who cast doubt on the evidence that the necklace found with Bennett was the same one that had been taken from Mary Jane’s body. A further witness, Mr O’Driscoll, testified that a man had come into his Lowestoft shop asking for a newspaper. He had noticed a lace was missing out of one of the man’s boots and his hands and face were scratched. Unfortunately for Bennett the Yarmouth Police ignored this and so did the jury.
Alice Meadows was an honest woman who came forward and willingly told the police what she knew. However, she seemed to be genuinely torn between trying to do the responsible thing and still feeling loyalty towards the man who had lied to her but had behaved with love and respect in every other way.
In the end Bennett was convicted and executed on 21 March 1901. He was twenty-one years old.
At the execution James Billington was assisted by his son Thomas and it was reported that death was not instantaneous, with the body twitching violently for over two minutes. The streets outside the prison were crowded and when the black flag was hoisted the flagpole snapped. Some people took this as an indication that Bennett was not guilty.
It is obviously always dangerous to try to mould the evidence to fit the story, but one plausible scenario is that Mary and Herbert were continuing to work together and the trip to Yarmouth was part of a fraudulent enterprise. This would explain Herbert’s first visit to Yarmouth and the fact that Mary visited exactly the same place just two weeks later, but went to the trouble of hiding this by saying that she was going to Yorkshire. If Bennett was fulfilling the role of the jealous brother-in-law, it is reasonable that he checked into the Crown and Anchor, far less likely that he openly checked into a hotel if his attention was to commit murder. Both Herbert and Mary Jane were in the habit of travelling first class, having their clothes professionally laundered and living a lifestyle that appeared to be beyond their legitimate means.
If it had been their habit to acquire money through blackmail and if the trip to Yarmouth was another such enterprise, it is plausible that this went tragically wrong and it was at the hands of a third party that she died. It is also possible that Bennett could have discovered her body on the beach and been the one to remove her jewellery. His relationship with Alice Meadows would have made him feel that it was impossible to come forward, and may also have left him feeling that to appear in the witness box would only have damned him further. This is just supposition but could have given the jury enough reasonable doubt to have secured an acquittal.
As a final footnote to this case, on 14 July 1912 Dora May Grey, aged about seventeen, was discovered on the same stretch of beach where Mary Jane Bennett had been murdered, and the killer had strangled her with a bootlace. This crime was never solved.
William Warbrick claims to have assisted at Bennett’s execution. Although this conflicts with information available that indicates that the execution of Joseph Holden in December 1900 was his final engagement with James Billington, his quote on the execution is still interesting. Whether this is a true report of Bennett’s execution incorrectly attributed to Warbrick, a total fabrication by Warbrick, or an account which can be taken at face value, is a matter for judgement:
Semi-conscious, he shambled rather than walked that 20 yard corridor, but at last he was on the drop, and his yellow, pale face and staring eyes were hidden from us by Billington’s deft placing of the white cap, while I bent down and strapped the condemned man’s legs together.
Bennett seemed to give his body a final straightening, as he stood there alone for a brief second as Jim and I sprang away after finishing our preparations for the end. Then down he went.
He did not die immediately, but I am sure his agony could not have lasted more than a second or two. He had been given a drop of 6ft 9in, which some people declared was too short for a man of his build. At the time I agreed with Billington that this drop was amply sufficient for a man of Bennett’s condition, and I still think so.
The body certainly swayed about for a moment of two, but I have the doctor’s authority for the statement that Bennett himself would have no knowledge of this, as sensation would be removed almost at the instant his body had dislocated his neck.