The fuel that kept the story alive and fed the legend for over a century emerged in the days following the funeral with the appearance of two apparently plausible suspects. As they were a father and son, they offered a villainous counterpoint to the victims, but the claims against them – which initially looked strong – proved to have little substance.
They were by no means the only men arrested after the inquest, but the parallel ‘investigations’ were marked more by a sense of futility than any expectation that the murderers had been caught. The Leeds Intelligencer recorded on 12 April that ‘several other individuals have been taken into custody in various places, two in Manchester, under circumstances of some suspicion, but on subsequent inquiries, it was found that there was no ground whatever to detain them on this charge, and no one now remains in custody’. On 13 April, the Liverpool Mercury concluded its report on the inquest by saying: ‘Two men answering the description of the persons near the cottage on the night of the murder were apprehended on Monday evening [9 April], at Rotherham, in Yorkshire, and are still in custody’.
Butterworth’s report on the events in Rotherham – which appeared with minor variations in the Manchester Courier and Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle on 14 April – demonstrated the complete lack of method or co-ordination in the ongoing search and, as had been the case with Charles Mullen, how men were arrested on the basis of little more than prejudice and guesswork.
At Dobcross on Wednesday, 11 April, two constables (Hudson of Rotherham and Dalton of Huddersfield) told the Saddleworth magistrates James Buckley and the Reverend Mills (who had presumably recovered from his illness) how they had apprehended two men – Samuel Jarvis and William Stevenson – who were ‘applying for relief at the vagrant office in Rotherham’, simply because their clothing looked similar to that worn by the three wanted Irishmen. Reuben Platt was consulted by the magistrates, but without having seen the men, he could provide no more than a cautious affirmation that their descriptions – that of Jarvis in particular – might indicate some likeness to his three suspects. The constables reported that ‘they refuse to say where they were on the fatal night. One of them describes himself as a joiner, from Manchester. They spoke neither pure English nor Irish, though the taller looked like an Irishman’. However, neither man showed any signs of being in a recent fight, nor possessed any incriminating items. When they finally gave a satisfactory alibi, they were released.
Butterworth also recorded in his notebook (on two separate occasions) the story of some men seen at Hooley Hill near Ashton-under-Lyne on the night the Bradburys were believed to have been attacked, which seems to have reached him via two sources: Constable Heywood of Oldham and Constable Buckley of Saddleworth. Both officials had apparently received letters about three Irishmen who had arrived at a public house around midnight on Monday, 2 April, covered in blood as if they had been fighting. They had asked for a drink, which the landlord provided after they promised to finish quickly and leave. If these men existed – which is perhaps doubtful – they were never found.
Other, almost certainly innocent people continued to be caught up in the search. Butterworth also reported that ‘the constables of Huddersfield are in active pursuit of three suspected persons living near that town’. After Butterworth’s article, the editor of Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle (14 April) added an update: ‘The man whose apprehension in this town was mentioned in the last Chronicle has been discharged. It was reported yesterday that three men were in custody in Liverpool, but such is not the fact’. A man was also arrested at Tadcaster the following week; the Huddersfield and Halifax Express said that he was an Irishman who had with him ‘an instrument used in tobacco cutting, and said he was a cigar maker’. The man claimed to work in York, but this ‘proved untrue’, which along with his tobacco cutter and nationality may have been enough to arouse suspicion. But as with the other suspects, nothing further came of this. Two men were also arrested in Liverpool but released on 24 April.
Many of these arrests carried an air of desperation, particularly given the varied locations, miles from Saddleworth.
Just as the search for the murderers seemed doomed to failure there came an apparent breakthrough: a father and son were arrested at Holme near Huddersfield. They lived in Bradshaw, near Holmfirth. Unlike every other suspect, these men were believed to have an unquestionable motive. Their name, like the victims, was Bradbury. No-one could quite agree on whether they were related: the Manchester Courier claimed they were no relation to William and Thomas; the Huddersfield and Halifax Express identified them as ‘distant relations’; Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle said they were ‘half cousins’. A much later account, recorded in the problematic ‘Annals of Saddleworth’ – written in the early 1890s but possibly containing material from 1832 – also indicated that Thomas was their cousin.
The suspects were commonly known, according to the Manchester Courier, as the ‘Red Tom Bredburys’. This was the only contemporary account to use that name, but we shall stick with it to distinguish these suspects from the victims.
Each of these newspaper accounts, all published on 21 April, was based on a report by Butterworth. But the piece that appeared in his notebook had some very important differences from the version in newspapers and provided the most thorough account of what happened. The older Red Bredbury and his ‘associate’ (as Butterworth phrased it) had been detained on Monday, 16 April, and their house was searched. They appeared before the magistrates on Wednesday and again on Saturday, being remanded in custody in the meantime. Butterworth was not entirely certain why. His explanation was preceded by the disclaimer: ‘We believe the following to be the causes of their detention’. But newspapers were less hesitant. Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle and the Huddersfield and Halifax Express had a partial caution – ‘it is said there are strong facts against them’ – but the Manchester Courier reported everything as an unequivocal fact.
According to Butterworth’s cautious account, the two men were locally notorious poachers who hunted on Saddleworth Moor. Shortly before the murders, according to the story, the elder of the Red Bredburys was charged with ‘unlawfully chasing a hare on the Greenfield plantation’; this was most likely the trees near Bill’s o’Jack’s which later came to bear its name. The witness against him was Thomas Bradbury. Butterworth explained that the older Red Bredbury and Thomas Bradbury were to appear on the first day of the Pontefract Sessions. Butterworth’s original notes said that these began ‘a few days after’ the murder; the Huddersfield and Halifax Express used this wording, but Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle and the Manchester Courier subtly altered this to the far more incriminating start date of the ‘day after the murder’ (which presumably meant Tuesday morning). In fact, the Sessions had begun on Monday, 3 April.
Butterworth’s story reported that the Red Bredburys appeared at Pontefract, and the defendant ‘claimed an acquittal on the ground that his accuser could not appear against him as he had been murdered’. The magistrates, unaware of any such murder, were suspicious that the accused knew of it so quickly. Butterworth did not attempt to explain why it would have taken two weeks to follow up on these suspicions, but if he was correct that they were arrested on Monday, 16 April, and held until the Saturday, there must have been enough evidence to justify keeping them in custody. However, all Butterworth had discovered was that they had been seen in Saddleworth at the New Inn* near to St Chad’s church around 7 pm on Monday night, where they had a drink before saying they were on their way to Holmfirth – the road to which passed Bill’s o’Jack’s. He also revealed that the search of their house had concluded ‘without the discovery of anything likely to implicate them in the crime’.
The newspapers were selective in what they published of Butterworth’s article. None of them reported that the search of the house had produced no results. Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle pompously declared that it would not report the ‘other suspicious circumstances’, which would ‘risk propagating false rumours about men who must be considered innocent until they are proved the contrary’, but still printed everything that Butterworth had said except the unsuccessful search. Only the Huddersfield and Halifax Express showed any restraint, restricting its reporting to the fact of the arrest of the two men and that Thomas Bradbury ‘was to have appeared against one of them at Pontefract Sessions, a few days after he was so brutally butchered; they were also seen at Saddleworth on the day of the murder’. The article noted that there were ‘other suspicious circumstances’ but the newspaper did not wish ‘to propagate mere rumours’.
But not a single newspaper included an inconvenient detail recorded by Butterworth: that ‘a publican at Holmfirth’ claimed the two men were at his house before the murder had taken place and therefore, if that man was telling the truth, they could hardly be guilty.
The two Red Bredburys appeared a second time before Huddersfield magistrates on Saturday, 21 April, having been held in custody for almost a week. Despite the clamour surrounding the murders, no reporters were present. The only information that survives comes from brief articles – based on a report by Butterworth – which suggested that several witnesses were called and examined at length. Eventually the magistrates were satisfied that the Red Bredburys had a solid alibi and could explain ‘the circumstances which caused them to be suspected’; they were therefore acquitted.
It is hard to know what to make of this episode. The decision by the magistrates to hold the Red Bredburys in custody for several days indicates that there was something to investigate. Although there were no reports into what form the enquiries might have taken, presumably it was a constable who searched the house of the two men. Perhaps someone travelled to Holmfirth to check the alibi reported by Butterworth. Maybe the records of the Pontefract Sessions were checked (although as the magistrates were probably present at those sessions, that might not have been necessary). The hearing before the magistrates on the Saturday would have been less formal than the inquest, but perhaps witnesses corroborated the Red Bredburys’ story.
The most important detail, however, is what the magistrates did – or rather did not do – next. They could have remanded the two men for longer and sent the case to be heard at the next assizes, where capital crimes were tried. Had they discovered any incriminating evidence or suspicious circumstances, that would have been their inevitable course. Even if the case were not convincing, they could have passed it on, washing their hands of a story which had attracted national attention, to satisfy the public demand that someone be charged. But having taken the matter seriously enough to hold the Red Bredburys for almost a week and investigate in some depth, they chose to release them. The conclusion must be that there was very little evidence against either man; the magistrates believed them to be not guilty.
This is not altogether surprising because the story as uncovered by Butterworth does not stand up to scrutiny. No-one named Bradbury or Bredbury appeared at the Pontefract Sessions (for which records survive and for which detailed newspaper coverage exists). Nor would the case have been omitted from the record because there had been no prosecution; the newspapers list those acquitted and those for whom there was ‘no bill’. If the Red Bredburys were in court, it was not at the Pontefract Sessions of April 1832. And the suggestion that the magistrates first heard of the murders from the mouth of the Red Bredburys does not fit the facts. It is fairly certain that the Saddleworth magistrates who were at Pontefract heard of the murders on Thursday when Constable Buckley asked them how they wanted to proceed and they immediately wrote to the Home Office. Had they learned what happened in such suspicious fashion, they would have mentioned it in that letter or taken immediate action against the suspects. That they did neither of those things suggests that the story was not true.
If the Huddersfield magistrates were satisfied the Red Bredburys were innocent, others were less convinced. Suspicion lingered around them. An article in the Huddersfield Chronicle in 1851 discussed the death of a 59-year-old man called James Bradbury from Whitewalls in Austonley. It observed that he ‘had always been suspected of being concerned in a most dreadful murder which took place in Greenfield, Saddleworth, about nineteen or twenty years ago … The exact reason why suspicion clung to this man we are not prepared to give. Some individuals assign one [reason], some another, but the one we have most frequently heard is that at the time of the murder a lawsuit was pending between James Bradbury and someone else, and that Bill o’Jack’s, his son, or both of them, were to appear in evidence against the said James Bradbury’. The newspaper repeated the tale first told by Butterworth of how James Bradbury informed the Pontefract Sessions that his accuser was dead – following the line taken by the Manchester Courier that this took place the morning after the attack on William and Thomas.
The Huddersfield Chronicle hinted at some rumours in circulation: ‘Popular report further says that some time ago [James Bradbury’s son] died, and that during his illness the father would not allow anybody to visit him. Another reason which we have heard … is that he has always, ever since the occurrence alluded to, had the appearance of being miserable, of having a weight on his mind, but this might be only a vulgar conjecture arising from the fact of his being suspected’. Similar stories in both Saddleworth and Holmfirth suggested that the father had admitted to the murders while under the influence of drink but although these ‘confessions’ were proven false, the stigma did not fade. Journalists for the Huddersfield Chronicle had investigated a few other rumours but could find no evidence of any confession. The reporter concluded that any purported admission of guilt by James Bradbury to his family was probably untrue, on the not unreasonable grounds that the family itself – the only possible source – would be unlikely to leak the story to the public.
It is impossible to be certain if this James Bradbury who died in 1851 was one of the Red Bredburys accused in 1832, because contemporary accounts were very vague about the identities of the two suspects. The only detail to emerge at the time was that they lived in Bradshaw. But there might be another potential hint in the ‘Annals of Saddleworth’ to link James Bradbury to the suspects. It must be emphasised once again that this document dates from the 1890s, which must cast doubt on anything it says. However, some of the relevant sections are based on older material, the origin of which is unclear and undatable. According to the ‘Annals’, the Red Bredbury involved in this episode was called Jamie Bradbury, Thomas’s cousin, and he was known locally as ‘Jammy o’Bradshaw’s’.
There was certainly a family living in Bradshaw called Bradbury, and they had a definite link to Saddleworth. The most prominent member, Job Bradbury, lived in Austonley (a region which includes Bradshaw) and had six children. His wife Hannah had been born in Saddleworth around 1786. On tax records, Job is listed interchangeably as Bradbury and Bredbury. Also living in Austonley in the early 1800s was a man called Thomas Bradbury/Bredbury; perhaps this was ‘Red Tom Bredbury’ referred to by Butterworth, but there is no way to know.
Except for the record of his death, James Bradbury cannot be traced with certainty. One possible candidate can be found in the Quarter Session records for 1819, when a James Bradbury of Austonley was found guilty of assaulting a Joshua Schofield in Saddleworth to the point that ‘his life was greatly despaired of’. Although Bradbury denied the charge, he was ‘fined sixpence and discharged’. If the incident involved the same man whose death was recorded in the Huddersfield Chronicle, it is the only independent contemporary evidence that the family’s negative reputation was in any way deserved. Another candidate – perhaps the same man – was a clothier and farmer called James Bradbury, born in Saddleworth, who lived in Fairbanks in 1841 and was imprisoned for debt in York Castle at the time of the 1851 census.
But even if the Red Bredburys could be definitively identified, they should be entirely ruled out as suspects. The case against them centred on their supposed involvement in the Pontefract Sessions. Without this, the entire story collapses. If they were not at Pontefract – which they almost certainly were not – they cannot have attracted the suspicion of the magistrates, nor demonstrated incriminating knowledge of the murder. And Butterworth, from whom all the evidence originated, had already established their alibi. Every subsequent report was subtly altered to strengthen the case. This careless – or perhaps deliberately sensationalist – reporting meant that the Red Bredburys have been strong suspects ever since. The evidence against them never warranted such prolonged attention.
Once the Red Bredburys had been freed by the Huddersfield magistrates, Irishmen again came under press scrutiny. The Huddersfield and Halifax Express concluded on 28 April 1832 that the murders must have been committed by the three men seen by Platt and the newspaper claimed that they were seen on the road to Ashton that night by a man returning home; this same man had supposedly heard noises from Bill’s o’Jack’s earlier in the evening. As this appears to be based on the claims of Abraham Dawson (who would not have been anywhere near the road to Ashton late at night), this was at best a distortion and at worst a fabrication. In either case, the man supposedly heard one of the trio, speaking in a conveniently loud Irish accent, say: ‘If it had not been for that spade, I should have been done for’. A spade had, of course, been found at the scene covered in blood, as everyone would have known by then. Like much of the ‘evidence’ after the inquest, this can be safely discounted.
The article concluded that ‘the wretches would have been secured’ but for the absence of so many officials at the Pontefract Sessions. Given the number of suspects investigated, the obsession with finding Irishmen, and the lack of conclusive evidence against anyone, this seems unlikely.
Even four years later, the idea that Irishmen were responsible stubbornly lingered. When five Irishmen were arrested at Manchester for highway robbery in 1836, rumour connected them with the 1832 murder.
Following the release of the Red Bredburys, the press and apparently the authorities lost interest. The fascination did not go away – within a month, a play based on the murders was performed in Oldham – but all hope of solving the case apparently evaporated. However, in the years that followed, other ‘confessions’ briefly made waves before being forgotten.
The first came almost a year after the murder. On 18 March 1833, a navigator called Nathaniel Stannyer, from Bollington near Macclesfield, handed himself in to the constable of Compstall Bridge (near Stockport) and claimed that he had been one of those responsible for killing the Bradburys. But by the time the magistrates examined him, he had changed his story and said he had been drunk when he ‘confessed’. He was remanded until the Saddleworth constable could be informed of the case, but as nothing further was reported he must have been released. The continuing interest in the Bill’s o’Jack’s case can be gauged from how widely this ‘confession’ was reported; an article which told the story was reprinted nationally, including in several London publications.
The next ‘confession’ occurred in 1845. A man called John Mitchell was working as a navigator when he went into a beer shop in Huddersfield on 15 April at 6 am and stayed until noon, drinking eight pints of beer. Towards the latter part of his visit, as he became progressively more drunk, he interrupted a man reading aloud a newspaper report of a murder trial and began singing a song. The landlady told him to stop as it reminded her of a song about the Bill’s o’Jack’s case. He began to claim intimate knowledge of the story, eventually saying – to much protest from his fellow patrons – that he was present at the murders and ‘saw the first blow struck’. He went on to say that ‘the old man used the spade manfully, and if we had not killed them they would us’.
Mitchell’s version of events was that, on that night in 1832, Thomas Bradbury had gone for candles and when he returned ‘we thought he was too strong for us, so we knocked him down at his entrance’. Mitchell claimed to have been arrested at Holmfirth the next day because his clothes were bloody, but subsequently released. After Mitchell had gone on at length, a constable arrested him after getting a warrant from a magistrate. At this point Mitchell’s story changed; he denied all knowledge and said that he had begun working on the Shepley Lane Head and Greenfield Turnpike Road shortly after the murders, during which time he had learned of the story. When James Buckley, still the Saddleworth magistrate, heard of Mitchell’s tale, he wearily replied that the man had been before him on numerous occasions and was ‘an idle, drunken, dissolute blackguard’ and although Mitchell had ‘ill-used his wife’ Buckley did not think he was connected to the murders. He was ‘discharged with a reprimand’. And Buckley was doubtless correct; everything Mitchell described would have been common knowledge or could have been read in newspapers.
Another ‘confession’ came from the opposite side of the world eight years later. On 5 March 1853, the Huddersfield Chronicle printed (with his permission) a letter from a man living in Australia to his brother who still lived in Huddersfield. The article stated: ‘We do not give the name of the writer, yet we have every confidence in his veracity’. But even if he was as truthful as the newspaper hoped, his letter presented evidence that, at best, was several times removed from the original source.
The author was actually telling someone else’s tale – he had been given a ‘statement’ (it is not clear whether this was in a conversation, through a letter, or if he had read the story elsewhere) in October 1852 from Robert Whitehead, a sheep farmer living in Australia at Springs Creek, ‘about 160 miles’ from Melbourne. By a remarkable coincidence, Robert Whitehead was almost certainly the son of Daniel Whitehead, the owner of the shop visited by Thomas Bradbury on the night he was attacked. The bulk of the letter was taken up with what appears to be a transcription of Whitehead’s statement.
Whitehead in turn had been told the story in late 1851 or early 1852 by a wool carrier to whom he spoke in a public house at ‘Port Fary’ (presumably Port Fairy), a town in South-West Victoria, about 180 miles from Melbourne. The wool carrier entered and said to Whitehead: ‘I know you and I knew your uncles’. After asking if the murder at Saddleworth had ever been solved, the wool carrier told him that he had been working on the nearby canal at the time. He said the murderer was ‘a young man hawking tape in a basket in Saddleworth’, and related the hawker’s story to Whitehead.*
Shortly after the murders, the hawker had been arrested for robbing a drover at Leicester and was therefore transported to Sydney in Australia. The hawker was later hanged for murder in Hobart, but not before confessing to the wool carrier. According to this confession, the hawker had only intended to rob the Bradbury’s house and so sent William upstairs out of the way. However, the old man subsequently came back down. The hawker struck him on the head and Bradbury crawled upstairs. At this stage, the narrative became muddled – perhaps unsurprisingly given how many hands the story had passed through by the time it appeared in the newspaper – and described Thomas Bradbury entering the house on two separate occasions: as the hawker was searching the drawers and as he was about to leave. Whichever version was the one given by the hawker, the outcome was the same: ‘Seeing Tom coming he turned back, and as Tom entered the door he knocked him down with the fire poker’.
As the basis for a confession, this is not a particularly robust source given the multiple levels of hearsay – the hawker told the wool carrier, who told Robert Whitehead, who told the anonymous author of the letter which was sent to the newspaper. Even if we believe that each person was telling what they believed to be the complete truth, the probability of garbled transmission would be high. While the basic tale seems plausible enough, it does not account for the violence of the attack on the Bradburys (an observation made by the Huddersfield Chronicle writer), nor does it mention all the implements used as weapons, particularly the pistol. And once again, nothing was described that was not common knowledge in 1832.
The modern writers Neil Barrow and Terry Wyke have identified the most likely person to have made this confession as James Hill, the only man executed at Hobart in the 1830s and 1840s, from Leicestershire. According to their research, Hill was baptised at Church Gresley in Derbyshire in 1810 and worked in various occupations before twice being convicted of theft; on the second occasion in 1841, his sentence was transportation to Australia. There, he briefly became more respectable until he was charged with the murder of an elderly woman in 1846 – although it is not clear why he did so, it is possible he was disturbed during a robbery. He was found guilty and hanged. When the judge passed sentence and concluded with the usual remark ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul’, Hill muttered that ‘there was little chance of that’.
However, James Hill was a very common name – shared by many who were transported to Australia – and we can never be certain whether all these facts relate to the same man. And even if they do, we will never know if James Hill made the reported confession, nor – if he did – whether it was genuine. With such uncertainties, it is unlikely that the solution to the murder is to be found here.
There was one interesting passing comment at the end of the Huddersfield Chronicle article about the hawker: ‘In any case there should appear any reasonable grounds for hope that … this singularly brutal and most mysterious murder may be cleared up; and “the thousand and one” dark insinuations which are aimed at certain families in the locality – as connected with this transaction – may thus be set at rest for ever’. Is this alluding to suspicions against the Red Bredbury family? Or against someone else?
This final ‘confession’ from Australia attracted only passing attention, although it did influence some later dramatisations of the murders. Like the earlier ‘confessions’, the story of the hawker offers little evidence, nor any plausible solution to the mystery. In fact, these confessions mark a turning point. Any hope of finding the guilty party was long-gone, and the Bill’s o’Jack’s murders had begun an irreversible transition into the realms of legend.
* Later renamed as the Church Inn.
* A hawker was a person who travelled from place to place selling cheap goods. It was a precarious sort of occupation and hawkers were not respected.