On 23 April 1908, farm labourer William Fidler and his colleague were taking a welcome break from their work to eat their lunch when they made a chilling discovery that must surely have ruined their appetites. In a disused well in a field on Southgrove Farm, near Burbage, they found the badly decomposed body of a young boy.
An inquest into the death of the so far unidentified child was opened at the White Hart Inn in Burbage where the local doctor, Dr Farquhar, gave evidence that the boy was about twelve years old and, in his opinion, had been in the well for about nine months. No missing children had been reported in the area during the time the boy’s body had lain undiscovered in the well, but gypsies often used the field in which the well was situated as a camp and it was believed that the dead child might have come from a gypsy family. With no clues to the boy’s identity and with his body showing no obvious marks of violence and being too decomposed to provide sufficient evidence as to the cause of his death, the inquest recorded an open verdict.
It was almost three years before a possible identity was suggested for the child, who had since been interred in Burbage churchyard, his death recorded as that of an ‘unknown boy’. Mary Ann Nash had given birth to an illegitimate son on 16 September 1901 and named him Stanley George Nash. Having a baby meant the end of Mary Ann’s freedom and she soon arranged for him to lodge with her father at his home in Milkhouse Water, Pewsey Vale, with Mary Ann contributing to her son’s upkeep. When she defaulted on her agreed payments, the child’s grandfather wrote and told her that he could not afford to keep the boy and Mary Ann was forced to make other arrangements for her son’s care. She agreed terms with Mrs Mary Jane Stagg to keep her son, while she continued to work in London. However, in May 1907, while Mary Ann was between jobs and staying with her aunt and uncle at their home in Collingbourne Kingston, Mrs Stagg turned up on her doorstep with Stanley in tow. Once again Mary Ann had failed to keep up with the agreed payments for her child’s care and his foster mother could no longer keep him if his mother was unwilling to pay for his keep.
Burbage at the turn of the century. (Author’s collection)
Mary Ann’s aunt and uncle, Emma and Ephraim Stagg, flatly refused to board the child for their niece, insisting that she took him to the workhouse. Thus Stanley lived in the workhouse until 27 June 1907, when his mother came to collect him, saying that she had made new arrangements for his care with an old school friend, a woman named Mrs Hillier who lived in Crabtree Cottages, Savernake Forest. Stanley was dressed in his Sunday best suit, with a jaunty sailor cap and lace-up boots and taken to meet his new guardian. Later that day, Mary Ann arrived back at her aunt and uncle’s home alone. She told her aunt and uncle that she had safely delivered Stanley to Mrs Hillier, who had tucked him up in bed with her own children. A few days later, she had packed up all Stanley’s clothes and announced her intention of taking the parcel to Mrs Hillier.
Stanley was never seen again, although whenever Mary Ann was asked about him, she always told people that he was doing well, even stating that he had been on a holiday to Reading. It took until 1911 for someone to realise that Stanley was missing and to connect this information with the discovery of the body of the unidentified male child in Burbage. Police questioned Mary Ann Nash, who repeated her story that the boy was lodging at Savernake Forest. Mrs Stagg pointed out that the police were sure to check with Mrs Hillier, but Mary Ann was insistent, telling her aunt, ‘I have told you the truth. He is where I have taken him to.’
Naturally, the police went straight to interview Mrs Hillier who admitted to knowing Mary Ann but denied ever having been placed in charge of Stanley. When Mary Ann Nash was unable to provide the police with a true account of her son’s current whereabouts, she was arrested by Inspector Elkins and charged with his wilful murder.
Mary Ann Nash appeared before a special sitting of magistrates at Marlborough on 27 March 1911. On 14 March, the child had been exhumed from his grave in Burbage and his almost skeletonised body examined by Mr Pepper of the Home Office. Pepper determined that the child was considerably younger than had first been thought, putting his age at between five and seven years old. He based his conclusions on an examination of the boy’s teeth, noting that the boy had only one permanent molar on each side of his upper and lower jaws, the remaining teeth being milk teeth. Pepper also found that the body had very light brown, almost yellow hair, as had Stanley Nash.
Mary Ann Nash was committed for trial at the next Wiltshire Assizes for the wilful murder of her son. Her trial opened on 31 May 1911 at Salisbury, before Mr Justice Coleridge. Mr F.R.Y. Radcliffe and Mr Emmanuel appeared for the prosecution, while Mr Rayner Goddard defended Mary Ann, who pleaded ‘Not Guilty’ to the charge against her.
By the start of the trial, further investigations had been carried out on the remains of Stanley Nash, who would have been five years and nine months old at the time of his death. Dr W.H. Dolamore of the Royal Dental Hospital in London had examined his skull and concurred with Mr Pepper and Dr Oliver Maurice, the police surgeon from Marlborough. All agreed that the child was about six years old, give or take three or four months. The dead child’s clothes had been examined and, although badly rotted through having been in water for so long, were found to resemble those that Stanley was wearing when he was last seen alive, leaving the workhouse. In particular, the child had been found with a hatband around his forehead and Pepper had been able to discern the name of a ship, HMS Swift, painted on it in gold letters.
While the prosecution maintained that Mary Ann Nash had killed her son by putting the boy into the well, the defence insisted that there was no case to answer. Mr Goddard pointed out that the body of the unknown boy had never been formally identified as being that of Stanley Nash and that there was no evidence that the child had been murdered. Even if there were, there was absolutely no evidence to suggest that it was Mary Ann Nash who had killed her boy – Stanley could have been murdered by almost anyone.
Goddard failed to convince the jury with his arguments and they retired for just eight minutes before returning with a verdict of ‘Guilty’, albeit with a recommendation of mercy for the accused. In passing sentence of death, Mr Justice Coleridge told Mary Ann Nash that she had put her son to a dreadful death and that the mind shuddered at her total absence of all feelings of maternity and humanity.
With Stanley Nash dead and his mother sentenced to death for his murder, the ‘Wiltshire Well Mystery’, as it was referred to in the newspapers of the day, had been responsible for yet another controversy. Dr Farquhar, who had originally told the inquest in 1908 that the unidentified remains were those of a twelve-year-old boy, was tried for perjury, having given false evidence in his examination before the magistrates, which might have prevented the correct identification of the child’s body. Dr Farquhar had insisted that he had examined the child’s teeth when the body was found and that he had told the police that the child was aged between nine and thirteen years. Yet Farquhar’s description of the child’s teeth did not coincide with that of the two expert witnesses at the trial. Claiming to have mislaid his notebook, in which he had recorded details of the case at the time of the discovery of the body, Farquhar subsequently managed to produce the book in court and his notes were found to substantiate his original evidence. However, the notebook had been heavily mutilated to remove pre-printed information and, on closer examination, was found to have been one issued as a free gift to doctors by Messrs Oppenheimer and Co., a firm of Wholesale Chemists from London. The notebook that Farquhar produced, claiming it to contain his original notes from 1908, could not possibly have been issued before 1911, since it referred to a drug, wychodine, which had not been marketed in 1908 and had not appeared in the printed diary in the position in which it appeared in Farquhar’s copy until 1911. Farquhar had been afraid that his carelessness in losing his notes would affect his professional reputation and had lied under oath. He was committed for trial at the Wiltshire Assizes charged with ‘falsely, wickedly, absolutely and corruptly committing wilful and corrupt perjury.’
Farquhar was eventually found guilty at his trial, but he was by now an old man and his career was ruined. The judge determined that the doctor’s perjury had not adversely affected the court case against Mary Ann Nash and dealt with the doctor leniently, binding him over for the sum of £50. The doctor returned to Burbage where the villagers gave him a hero’s welcome, hanging banners and bunting in the street to mark his return. However Farquhar was a broken man. He resigned from the Pewsey Board of Guardians, citing old age and increasing infirmities, and by the end of June 1911 he had sold up his medical practice and left the village.
Meanwhile, Mary Ann Nash’s defence team had been busy putting together an appeal on her behalf. They also wrote a letter to the local newspapers to quash rumours that she had murdered another child, stating that the child in question was alive and well and living at the Marlborough Union Workhouse.
The crux of the appeal was that the prosecution had not successfully proved that the child’s body was that of Stanley George Nash. Secondly, they had failed to demonstrate that the child had been unlawfully killed and finally they had failed to produce any evidence that the child’s murder was committed by the accused, Mary Ann Nash. Mr Rayner Goddard maintained that Nash may have abandoned the child or given him to the gypsies that were known to frequent the area. She might even have given him to Mrs Hillier, who may have subsequently killed him.
The appeal court ruled that sufficient evidence had been provided to positively identify the dead child as Stanley George Nash. It was not disputed that the boy had last been seen alive in the company of his mother, who had subsequently lied about his whereabouts and well being. The circumstances of the child’s death meant that it had to have occurred either as a result of foul play or accident and that either scenario would have been within Mary Ann Nash’s knowledge. Had the boy died by accident, it would have been in her interests to say so and yet she had continued to insist that her son was safe with Mrs Hillier and that she was in contact with him and receiving reports of his progress.
With the appeal dismissed, Mary Ann Nash’s execution was scheduled for 6 July 1911. However, a petition with some 14,000 signatures – including those of some of the members of her trial jury – was sent to the Home Office and, on the day before she was scheduled to die, she was given a temporary respite pending further instructions from the Home Office. The then Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, eventually commuted her sentence to life imprisonment.