The Cretingham Murder (2 page)

Twelve years in Haddenham were followed by five in Kent and it was from the parishes of Bexley and Erith that William was to make his final move to Cretingham.

By the time the family moved into the new parsonage with its ‘favourable southerly aspect’, the family was growing up. Frederick at 21 had already left home. Described in the 1861 census as a ‘chymist’ he later became a ship’s surgeon. Thomas was 15, William 13, Susannah 11, Elizabeth 10 and Arthur 7. The 12-year-old Ada had died in 1860.

Curiosity makes us ponder on what life was like for the family in those early days. Since the later census records no living-in staff, we can only assume that the domestic staff came daily from the village. There would surely have been at least two maids as there had been in their Bexley household, with a gardener to attend to the extensive grounds and also act as groom when carriage transport was required.

And what of the education of the children? William, it has been established, spent the years 1865–6 at what is now known as Framlingham College. Arthur was probably taught at home with the girls until such time as he went off to school. Maybe they employed a daily governess and possibly both parents helped with the children’s education.

Such speculation is beyond this present narration. All we do know is that the Revd Farley performed his parochial duties according to the evangelical precepts held by most of his fellow clergy in Suffolk at that time. That he felt strongly about his own faith and the need to inspire higher and more moral principles into that faith is witnessed by his one known published work on the subject, a tract entitled
On Regeneration
. Sadly, I have been unable to trace a copy of this work. His memorial tablet in Cretingham church states that he was a Greek scholar. Possibly, like many clergymen of the period, he had set himself the task of translating or commentating upon the great classical works.

During his early years at Cretingham, he was also very involved in politics, actively campaigning locally for the Liberal Party. However, in 1868 he severed all connection with that party when Gladstone introduced the measure to disestablish the Protestant Church of Ireland. No doubt, like so many of his colleagues, he saw this as a dangerous move which would encourage the spread of Roman Catholicism in England. A stalwart member of the Church of England, Farley was essentially a Protestant and as such, he was willing to befriend those who took their faith from within the Non-Conformist churches. A brief glimpse of Farley as outsiders saw him came in this tribute by Samuel Pendred, the Minister of the Union Chapel in Aldeburgh:

The good vicar of Cretingham...had been a visitor at Aldeburgh (1886) and when here, occupied lodgings where his gentle disposition was noticed and felt; he also manifested the goodness and charitableness of his Christian character by worshipping on several occasions with nonconformists. It was not only the pleasant surprise of seeing a clergyman in our dissenters place of worship that has made his visit remembered but his warm grasp as he took me by the hand when service was over, his fatherly, ‘God Bless you’ and earnest words about ‘the one way to that home where we all shall meet as brothers.’ . . . I have some hymns of his own composition sent from Cretingham among them, ‘His love shall keep me every hour/And raise me to the sky.’

Physically, Farley was a very large man, his weight increasing further as he aged. A newspaper report recalls that ‘his well known portly figure was often seen in the streets of Framlingham’. It was rumoured that at the time of his death he weighed nearly twenty stones. In old age he sprouted a long, bushy white beard which gave him a truly venerable appearance.

In later life his par ishioners found him of somewhat irascible temperament, given to impetuous outbursts over minor matters or indeed over nothing at all. With true Suffolk forbearance they ‘never took much notice of it’. One gains the impression too that he could be of a jealous disposition and was likely to be mean where money was concerned. Certainly he was reluctant to pay his curates their due. It may be that at some stage he had financial problems, as there is evidence that he had found it necessary to borrow £100 from the Trust Fund set up for his son, Thomas by his maternal grandmother.

Not an easy man to live with it would seem, though perhaps the situation was not helped by the long illness suffered by his wife, Susannah, nor the tragedy which struck the family just before her death.

In early 1880, their son, William brought his wife, Ellen, their 12-year-old daughter and new baby son of 2 months for a visit. On 19 January, the baby had a slight cold but not enough to prevent it being taken out for an airing. At five o’clock the following morning, Ellen fed the child and returned it to its cot but when the nursemaid went into him at eight, the baby was dead. A coroner’s inquest was held at the house – foreshadowing the similar event which would occur seven years later. The tiny corpse was laid to rest in a corner of Cretingham churchyard, close to where Mrs Farley would join him in March the next year.

At her mother’s death, only Elizabeth was still living at home. Frederick had by then qualified as a surgeon and was serving on board a ship. Thomas had followed his father into the Church, William was a hydraulic engineer’s clerk and Arthur eventually became an attendant in an asylum. Daughter Susannah had been married at Cretingham church in 1878 to Mr Gilbert Palmer, the son of a London wine merchant. The young people made their home at the Black Bull Inn in the Old Kent Road, London.

Then 28, Elizabeth had no plans to remain at home as the dedicated spinster daughter of a clergyman. Not for her the role of housekeeper of her father’s establishment, shouldering the attendant parochial duties of sick visiting and Sunday schools. Six months after her mother’s death, in September 1881, she was married in Portsea, Portsmouth to Archibald Court, a naval officer aged 34, who carried the rank of paymaster on board HMS
Wellington
. Court has the rare distinction of appearing twice on the census records for 1881. He is listed with the complement of his then ship, HMS
Duke
and also at private lodgings at 45 St Thomas Street, Portsmouth.

Elizabeth’s brother, Arthur acted as a witness to the marriage but we can only surmise that the Revd Farley travelled to Hampshire for the celebrations. For now, a strange coincidence occurred. From those same census records mentioned earlier we learn that also living in Portsea at that time as a boarder at 6 Gordon Terrace was (Harriet) Louisa, the 40-year-old widow of Lt-Col William Moule. Where the pair met, who introduced them, we shall probably never know but on 9 November the Revd Farley had his third wife.

They were married at St James’s church, Clapton, in the London district of Hackney. One of those who signed the marriage register as a witness was Farley’s other son-in-law, Gilbert Palmer. Thus we may conclude that the match had family approval. Although the marriage was by licence rather than Banns, Louisa gave her place of residence as Clapton – perhaps she had moved into lodgings for the statutory period. Two of the other witnesses offer a clue to the intricacies of this affair. One, Charles Atkins, a shipping agent, was a middle-aged widower who had also recently remarried. His bride, a widow, was another Louisa, and she had been born Louisa Farley. Coincidence? Or was she the Revd Farley’s niece? And was it in her home that the bride-to-be, Louisa Moule, stayed in the weeks before the wedding?

Harriet Louisa

What sort of woman did the vicar bring back to Cretingham? Described as still being in her prime, she was lively and extroverted, used to the gregarious life of the wife of an army officer. So how did she take to the quiet rural life and what were the villagers to make of her?

The old Suffolk saying ‘Tha’s a mystery’ just about sums her up. Research has shown that her early life is indeed shrouded in mystery. If, as she stated for the census return of 1881, she was 40, then she was born around 1840. She gives Windsor as her place of birth and on her marriage certificates her father is named as Robert Head, a grocer. So far no record of either her birth or details of her parents have been found.

The earliest records that can be found for her are in Gloucestershire, where she turns up in the 1861 census living at a house called Spring Vale in the village of Hewelsfield just outside Gloucester. She is listed there as the 19-year-old ward and niece of a retired army captain called Charles Paget. However, one could easily have missed her because she appears on the census form as ‘Louisa Howard’. Matters were clarified somewhat when, the following year, Capt Paget died. His will makes very interesting reading. At the beginning of the document comes the slightly macabre injunction that his body is to be placed in an open coffin and remain there until visible changes remove all doubt of suspended animation. Only then may his funeral take place. He then bequeaths all his property to ‘Harriet Louisa Head now under my care in the name and by my request of Harriet Louisa Howard’.

There may be a perfectly logical explanation for this. Perhaps Harriet Louisa was the child of his married sister whom he had taken into his care or she may have been his wife’s niece and he preferred to maintain her family’s name. Perhaps the childless captain and Mrs Paget had adopted the grocer’s daughter;such informal arrangements were common in the nineteenth century as was the assumption of different surnames. But taking a more romantic view, could it have been that while Capt Paget was on military service in the Windsor area he fathered a child and that for some reason, the mother, a Miss Howard, then married Robert Head who gave his name to it? Maybe, years later when he was retired, the captain took responsibility for his child to be his companion in his old age.

Whatever her background, Harriet Louisa Head was certainly known in Gloucester as Louisa Howard but when, as a young woman of some means, she married at St Michael’s church in that city on 1 December 1862, she signed the register in her original name, adding the words, ‘otherwise Howard’.

Some sixteen years her senior, her new husband, William Moule, described himself on the marriage certificate as a ‘gentleman’ and his father, John as a ‘soldier’. That was a piece of understatement for a father who was actually a Major General in the Indian Army. On that same certificate Harriet acknowledges Robert Head, grocer, as her father and since the word ‘deceased’ followed his name on her second marriage certificate, we can assume he was still alive in 1862. Of the two witnesses who signed the certificate, one was an Eliza Head. Whether this was Harriet’s mother (née Howard) or a sister remains unresolved.

Like his father and Capt Paget, who may have been a relative or very close family friend, Moule was also in the army, having received his commission in 1857. Almost immediately following her marriage, Louisa must have found herself en route for an eventful life in New Zealand where her husband was to play an active role helping to put down the various Maori uprisings against the colonial government. Moule was gazetted as a captain in July 1863 and shortly afterwards appointed Acting-Adjutant of Miltia in command of the Esk Redoubt when the Waikato tribe marched on Auckland intent on driving the Pakeha (European settlers) back into the sea.

When the British successfully ended the war in 1864, the Waikato land was seized and Moule was given the task of settling the area with men able to defend it. To achieve this, a Special Regiment of Militia was recruited from the Melbourne and Sydney areas of Australia. This became the 4th Waikato Regiment and Moule, by then a Lieutenant Colonel, was its first commanding officer.

In return for their readiness for military service when necessary, the members of the battalion were given grants of land according to their rank. With a field officer receiving 400 acres, the amount diminished until the lowly private was due but fifty. In addition, each man was to be allotted a town section and 1,000ft of timbers with which to build his house.

The site chosen for the new town was a deserted Maori village. Here, in 1864, Moule wrote, ‘I cleared a spot at Kirikiriroa upon which to pitch my tent. I had the honour of naming the settlement after the late Capt Hamilton of HMS
Esk
who died fighting for his country and the colonists of New Zealand at Gate Pa.’

While some of the men were clearing the land, setting up a sawmill and preparing the first houses, the main body of the regiment and their families were living in cramped, overcrowded conditions in Onehunga. However, pressure was put on them to move and although the settlement was not ready, they were installed in Hamilton by December 1864. The population of the new town consisted of 443 men, 287 women, and 766 boys and girls under the age of 21. It is not known if Harriet Louisa made the move or if she stayed on in Onehunga but given her position, one assumes that her home was among the first to be ready.

Moule’s proven capabilities, both as a soldier and a civil administrator, led to his being made Colonel-Commandant of all the Waikato forces in 1865 and in 1868 he was given the duty of enrolling and organising two divisions of the Armed Constabulary. In addition, he was appointed registrar of marriages for his district and he also acted as a justice of the peace.

As the wife of the commanding officer, Harriet Louisa’s life would not, one supposes, have been quite as rigorous as that of the wives of lesser ranks. Among her duties, she would have been expected to entertain her husband’s junior officers, a task, which by her own account, she enjoyed. But, no doubt, she welcomed the opportunity of the more sophisticated lifestyle which came with Moule’s further promotion to Commander of the Armed Constabulary which took them to live in Tauranga. A final move to Wellington when Moule became Under-Secretary for Defence in the New Zealand Government would have brought her into the very cream of society.

Thus, it must have been hard for her when her husband’s health began to deteriorate and sometime towards the end of the 1870s, Col Moule took the decision to return to England. Here he died aged 55 on 25 June 1880. His death certificate states that he died from Bright’s Disease, a condition that had prevailed for some years. How incapacitated he was by this disease of the kidneys which can lead to dropsy, we don’t know. Again, the death certificate records his occupation as ‘Colonel in the Army’ so we know that he had not been retired as medically unfit. At the time of his death, the Moules were living in the Surrey town of East Molesey.