Snowy. Tim Harris
poor families would occasionally find it discreetly tucked out of view on their doorstep. For the mid-Victorian rural poor who could seldom afford to buy meat, this was a rare treat. Because of this, and the way that they flouted the rules, taking only in the main from the rich, poachers were held in some regard. One of Fred’s finest boasts was that he never killed a pheasant with someone’s name on its tail.
Ted Bradfield, poacher turned gamekeeper in Hunstanton Park, offers a rather different explanation: ‘When moonlit nights came round during the winter months, it was no good – I had to go on the prowl. I never did earn my living out of poaching, but all the same I used to earn a hell of a lot of pocket money.’ He also revealed, ‘. . . poachers have often told me that they mostly take game for the excitement rather than on account of pecuniary benefit, and that the poacher stood alone in the hierarchy of the village.’ Whatever the reason, poaching was rife and certainly not frowned on by ordinary folk.
Many labourers asked a tailor to put a poacher’s pocket inside their sleeved ‘weskits’ so that any rabbits or game they were lucky enough to kill while working in the fields could be carried home in complete secrecy. Poachers had a loop stitched at the top of the pocket on the inside of their coats which held the barrel of a gun, the butt resting in the bottom of the pocket. Usually, poachers’ coats were usually made of velveteen, which was often green.
Catapults were often used to poach and frozen blackberries made excellent bullets as they were eaten, or melted away and left no evidence. Poachers used to produce the game for the first day of the season, as it was not possible in reality to kill them legitimately and ship them to the poulterers in time for the great and good to have them on their dinner tables on the day shooting started. One story goes that a London butcher had scrupulous customers, who would not eat game slaughtered before the official date so the poulterer had live birds poached and sent to him. Immediately after midnight on the first day the season began, he shot them and everybody was happy.
Another tale was of a poacher returning with his night’s takings when he saw a policeman coming towards him, some way away. The postman came right up behind the poacher on his bike and quick as you like, the game was under the parcels and the postie rode past the policeman whistling. The poacher followed on with a cheery, ‘Good morning!’
Victorian women often helped poachers by moving game about under their voluminous skirts, some going so far as to have a specially constructed ‘crinoline’ frame made. Strung about the waist, this harness meant the kill could be hung from the contraption in complete secrecy. Sometimes, too, hooks were placed on the underside of well covers, a cool and secret place to hide ill-gotten gains. Certainly, the poacher was ingenious.
In 60 Years a Fenman (1966), Arthur Randall lets us into some of his secrets: he made ‘hingles’ consisting of long pieces of twine to which horsehair nooses were tied at 3in intervals. The twine was placed on the ground and seed scattered to attract larks, which coming down to feed were entrapped in the horsehair. He did not say whether they were to be sold as singing birds or food, probably the latter. Think how many you would need for larks tongue pie!
In a very old copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, first published in 1859, there are three recipes using larks. One for a pie requires nine whole larks which have been plucked, gutted and cleaned. How on earth do you pluck such tiny things, never mind truss them, as the second recipe demands? Larks were considered excellent and a great delicacy, either roasted for fifteen minutes over a clear fire, or broiled for ten and served on toast as an entrée. From Michaelmas to February, they were sent to London by the basket, having been netted in vast numbers on the stubble.
Larger hingles, with a single loop on top of a long stick, were used for slipping over a pheasant’s neck as it roosted at night. The very deft could reach up and catch a bird, but here the risk was that if it was not swiftly caught and silenced immediately, it might make a noise and draw the gamekeeper’s attention. Gypsies were reputed to be very good at ‘silent poaching’. Larger hingles were used to catch pheasants: while seeking corn, brandy-soaked raisins or dried peas spread out to tempt them, the birds would put their heads through the hingle, which then jerked up, being on a finely balanced bent wand of hazel.
Boys, many of them spending all day in the fields scaring crows and tending animals to earn a pitifully small wage, were not averse to a little poaching. Ingenuity was the name of the game: lying quietly in a ditch bottom sometimes proved lucky for them, as a rabbit ventured by. Another trick was to take a very prickly bramble stalk and push it down a hole, where you knew a rabbit was hiding. The briar was then turned round and round until the rabbit’s fur was well and truly tangled in the thorns and then it could be gingerly pulled out. Birds were also trapped for the collector and to save damaging any of the plumage, the boys killed their victims by forcing open their beaks and cutting the throat from the inside. They also trapped linnets, goldfinches and male nightingales to be sold as caged songbirds.
Snares were an effective way to catch rabbits, but the problem was that if the gamekeeper spotted the snare, he could then keep watch to see who came back to check on it.
Poachers always cut the buttons off their clothing so they did not become snagged on their nets as they dealt with them quickly in the dark. These were long nets, either a bagged net which was placed along a field edge and had rabbits driven into it, or gate nets covering the gate, usually held on by pebbles resting on top of the gate. A dog was used to drive hares towards the gate and as they reached the net, the stones were disturbed and the net dropped, entangling the hare.
One gamekeeper had two thousand stakes made, each with a twist of barbed wire on the top. These he drove into the ground, so the poachers snagged their nets as they dragged the fields at night for partridges.
In I Walked by Night, Fred recounts how his father disowned him and they did not speak for many years. John and Elizabeth must have been so disappointed in him; each had lost a son of their own, and perhaps placed undue pressure on him to be the model son they so desired. Model son he was not, though. Not only did he disgrace the family with his criminal ways, but he had also got a local girl pregnant.
CHAPTER 4
1882–86 Anna
Anna Carter was born on 21 March 1862 at Marham, a village – about two miles across the fen from Pentney. There, she was christened Ann Elizabeth. In legal documents as an adult she usually called herself Anna, so as this was obviously her preferred name, she will be called Anna in this book.
Her mother Mary Ann was a Marham girl, having been born in the village in 1840, the fifth child and only daughter of Ann and Garwood Steeles. They were a large and respectable family in the area, being wheelwrights, blacksmiths, beer retailers and carriers, travelling to and from Marham to the Maids Head, King’s Lynn, on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Later they were coachbuilders. After Mary Ann’s marriage to James Henry Carter, a journeyman shipwright, she lived in Woolwich, Kent. How the couple met is unknown: perhaps she went into service and met him there or he may have come up the River Nar on one of the lighters (barges). These flat-bottomed boats brought bone for the bone factory, where it was ground down for fertiliser. They also hauled coal inland from King’s Lynn; having arrived from northern England, this was loaded onto the lighters for distribution along the Ouse and its tributaries.
Mary Ann must have come home for the birth or been visiting her family when Anna was born. The railway had arrived at Narborough (the station serving Marham and Pentney) in 1845, so the journey from Woolwich – if that’s how Mary Ann travelled – would not have been difficult, although expensive for a working family. She registered her new daughter on 2 April 1862, twelve days after the birth, so one assumes it must have been a normal delivery. Across the fields, three weeks earlier Elizabeth Rolfe had given birth to her sickly baby, Fred.
Marham is an odd village, now overwhelmed by the RAF camp. Without a pub, it seems to have no heart and the church is neglected and unkempt. Even in Fred’s time it would have been unusual in that it stretched for over two miles almost entirely on a single road.
White’s Directory of 1845 records: