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"Former MI6, counterterror, and police officials expressed disbelief at the refusal by the British authorities to countenance a full murder investigation into Perepilichnyy's death. 'It's so obvious that it’s an assassination,' said Chris Phillips, the former head of Britain’s National Counter Terrorism Security Office. 'There’s no way it wasn’t a hit. It’s ridiculous.'" In 2017, Heidi Blake and her BuzzFeed investigations team published a seven-part investigation of suspected assassinations on British soil by the Russians government.

Richard Kemp reposts a Byline Times article that condemns SLAPPs – strategic litigation against public participation – as a shocking abuse of the legal system where the rich try to bully the weak and poor into submission.

Guy Shrubsole argues that Andy Burnham's Manchesterism is ultimately a politics of land: "Burnham’s keen interest in regaining public control of housing and key utilities leads very quickly to questions of who owns land, and how the public sector might reverse decades of asset sales begun under Margaret Thatcher’s governments."

"For much of the 18th century, even though Number 10 (actually Number 5 for much of its early existence) remained the official residence of the First Lord of the Treasury, it was by no means always occupied by the Prime Minister." Robin Eagles finds that prime ministers once preferred to live in their own houses.

Adam Scovell goes to look for the London locations used in A Hard Day's Night, the first film featuring those lovable mop-tops The Beatles.

"Her national standing was confirmed with a damehood in 2000, an honour which she prized, though it didn’t make her decorous. She was shortlisted for the Booker five times without ever winning (no one forgets this). She remains a figure who is hard to place – widely appreciated, but not a member of any acknowledged group of writers, and without much discernible influence on those who came after." Dinah Birch on the work of the novelist Beryl Bainbridge.

A topical video: What constitutes "reasonable force"

Another video from barrister-at-law Alan Robertshaw. One interesting point he makes is that the common courtroom assumption that a statement given immediately after an event provides the best evidence is mistaken.

I also like his favourite line: "cross-examination does not mean examining someone crossly". And there's a useful tip on how to dress if you're planning a robbery.

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The Secret Barrister argues that Keir Starmer and David Lammy are taking an extraordinarily dangerous gamble with our individual liberty: "Restricting trial by jury has been paraded by the government as the only way to tackle the record backlogs and delays in the Crown Courts – caused by years of chronic underfunding and political mismanagement – yet the government has produced not a shred of credible evidence to support this claim, nor is it interested in discovering any, forcing the legislation through Parliament at breakneck speed in the apparent hope of avoiding inconvenient scrutiny."

"The electorate is fragmented, multi-issue, and stubbornly resistant to simple stories. The Greens won in Gorton and Denton because they grasped that. Everyone busy constructing sectarian phantoms did not. Democracy does not need protecting from Muslim voters. It needs protecting from the people who would rather not count them." John Oxley criticises the right's response to the Gorton and Denton by-election,

Mihai Andrei explodes the myth that wind farms massacre birds.

"When I talk to students and ask them to tell me the truth, not necessarily what they would tell their teacher, but quietly tell me whether they go on to AI when they’ve got a piece of work to do, they say 'well actually yeah please don’t tell my teacher but yes I do'." Samantha Booth reports that pupils have been confessing their sins to Ian Bauckham, the head of Ofqual.

"His paintings unnerve us as they unnerved their Baroque viewers. Caravaggio didn’t draw but painted directly onto the canvas. He invented a dramatic, overpowering chiaroscuro, a spotlit style he used to freeze the worst moments of his subjects' lives in paint. There are so many decapitations, a frankly weird number of decapitations." Erin Maglaque on the shocking art of Caravaggio.

 Grant McPhee chooses his top 15 wyrd folk albums.

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"It’s easy to believe that this is all a blatant and shameful effort by Republicans to distract from the Epstein files, shift focus from ICE’s domestic terrorism, seize another massive cache of global oil production, and fuel the cancellation of an upcoming election reckoning. These would all be correct assessments, at least from Trump’s self-serving, narcissistic point of view, but there’s another, more alarming motivation for religious Conservatives dragging the planet into a self-destructive, full-scale bomb-a-thon: the second coming of Christ." John Pavlovitz takes us inside a scary place – the Republican-Evangelical mind.

Helen Amass talks to Uta Frith about her current understanding of autism. Professor Frith says: "People still hang on to the idea that there is something that unites all the people who are diagnosed as autistic. I don’t believe that any more."

Richard Toye warns against simplistic invocation of Winston Churchill's name as a way of supporting military action: "Churchill once observed that war, once unleashed, rarely follows the tidy paths imagined by those who start it. That warning may be as relevant as any of his more famous phrases."

A leading judge has as issued new guidance saying unregulated psychologists should not be called to give expert evidence in family courts, reports Hannah Summers.

"Both – and they were truly intertwined for decades – made their mark at Oxford University: Potter, the controversial working-class voice who shocked viewers on BBC Television’s Does Class Matter? (1958); Trodd, the provocative editor of university mag Isis who got removed from his post in favour of the milder-mannered David Dimbleby in 1959." Ian Greaves celebrates the career of Kenith Trodd, the television producer who worked closely with Dennis Potter.

Libby Brooks finds the children of Lanark enjoying Whuppity Scoorie.

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"The memoir shows that for Mandelson the cast of people who matter is very narrow, he is always the betrayed rather than the betrayer, his press critics are always acting in bad faith, and he is never adequately rewarded or appreciated." James Butler on the fall of Peter Mandelson.

"'At the moment, you’ve got Reform, who are weaponising concerns around net-zero', she says, and 'the Conservatives recklessly rowing back on the very infrastructure they created to tackle climate change, which is the Climate Change Act;". Noah Vickers talks to Pippa Heylings, the Lib Dem spokesperson on energy security and Net Zero.

Gemma Motion makes the case for raising England's age of criminal responsibility: "Internationally, the UK’s position is becoming isolated. Article 40(3) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child obliges states to establish a minimum age of criminal responsibility. While no specific age is prescribed, 14 is the most common minimum across Europe. Several other countries set it higher still. Even our devolved neighbour Scotland, which historically had a lower threshold at eight years of age, has now raised it to 12."

Tourettes Hero discusses the fallout from the BAFTA awards ceremony.

"The central strategic question is not whether non-host counties will survive. They will. The question is whether they will retain any meaningful competitive agency within the professional game. On the evidence available, the answer is no. Not under the current framework." Gary Mason and Simon Aldis argue that the future is bleak for most of cricket's first-class counties.

Discontinued Notes has been to Oxford to see the exhibition at the Bodleian about John Le Carré.

What charges might Peter Mandelson face in court?

Barrister at law Alan Robertshaw is our guide to the complexities of the law on insider trading and misconduct in public office.

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Peter Jukes says Boris Johnson and Alexander Lebedev must be investigated in a new public inquiry into Russian influence

"If you are young or have a young family, should you vote for millionaire Nigel Farage? For me, he is likely to directly impoverish and disenfranchise the young – Reform UK policies are already shaping up in this way. Where will it end?" Mark Cunliffe itemises Reform's attack on the young.

"This punishment represents the state’s most severe power to harm its citizens. Understanding how and why it is used tells us about our appetite for punishment and the state’s power to inflict it. And evidence suggests that its use is rising." Jake Phillips and Hannah Gilman discuss why the number of whole-life sentences is increasing in England and Wales.

Charlotte Williams investigates how archaeology helped the US colonise the Panama Canal Zone – just as the current US government threatens to retake it.

Alex Harvey revisits Lindsay Anderson’s If.... 50 years after its release: "Anderson was a classic child of the British imperial class. His father, a Scot and a soldier, was born in Northern India, his mother, a formidable memsahib, in Queenstown, South Africa, and Anderson himself in Bangalore. He was raised to replicate his father’s social class and profession."

"The family of the ITV Sport presenter Mark Pougatch were all wearing lederhosen." Thomas Weber attends the World Conker Championships at Southwick in Northamptonshire.

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"Whether it is the private contractors paid enormous sums of public money to bring prisoners to court failing to bring prisoners to court, or technology procured at vast public expense simply not working, or entire court buildings being shut down because the roof is falling in, the Crown Courts every single day endure absurd, entirely-fixable inefficiencies which contribute significantly to the backlog of work." The Secret Barrister explains that abolishing most jury trials will not touch the main causes of delay in the legal system.

Paul Bernal argues that banning children from social media is a very bad idea: "For the most part, most kids, most of the time, are able to navigate the internet – and in particular social media – in ways that work. Rather than being a cesspit of trolling and misinformation, the internet mostly works. Just like for the grown-ups, the internet is simply part of their lives – how they organise themselves, how they get information, how the socialise, how they do their (home)work, how they find entertainment, how they listen to music and watch television and movies, how they date, how they shop and much more."

"You only have to take a look recent exam papers to see the problem. For example, when my colleague Catherine Gower and I surveyed 219 GCSE, AS and A-level history papers issued in the summer of 2023, we found only 6 per cent of 991 exam questions directed students to discuss women (37 per cent directed students to discuss men)." Natasha R, Hodgson shows that women are largely absent from the questions, sources, and mark schemes that shape how history is taught and assessed in schools in England.

Municipal Dreams reviews Ned Hewitt's Housing the People of Leicester: A History of Social Housing: "Spending cuts and a cross-party emphasis on rehousing slum dwellers (previously excluded from council housing dues to its relatively high rents) from 1930 had their own impact. The North Braunstone Estate, built as a slum clearance estate, is one of many across the country that reflected both these aspects and suffered a resultant social stigma."

National Museums Scotland tells the fascinating story of the Isle of Lewis chessmen and their discovery.

"Living in the Past was a song in five/four time, with jazz flute solos, and grumpy lyrics about how the hippie lifestyle, with protests about war and talk about revolution, wasn’t for Anderson, who was also very staunchly opposed to drug use, and in general found little common cause with the hippies, despite his bearded, long-haired, eccentric appearance." Andrew Hickey on the eccentric single that became Jethro Tull's biggest hit.

Magistrate Dr Delicate censured for swearing

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The good doctor's response was a bit "I'm sorry if you feel you've been sworn at":

Dr Delicate, who hitherto had a five-year unblemished record, apologised "if such behaviour occurred", and said some of her actions may have been misinterpreted.

The Joy of Six 1423

"The study, which examined nearly 300 child-arrangement case files and observed over 100 hearings, found that domestic abuse featured in almost nine in ten (87 per cent) of cases. Yet judges routinely treated it as background noise. In over half of those cases, courts ordered unsupervised overnight contact between children and alleged abusers." England and Wales's family courts aren’t just failing survivors, they are complicit in state-sanctioned abuse, argues Zoe Grunewold after a reading a report by two academics from Loughborough University.

George Foulkes says broadcasters are warping our politics by failing to subject Nigel Farage to the scrutiny that other politicians rightly experience.

"Along with restoring trust in the church’s safeguarding processes, Mullally must also heal divisions within the church’s hierarchy over leadership culture. In the weeks leading up to Welby’s resignation, both he and the archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, were accused of using 'coercive language' by the bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley." George Crozier on the many challenges facing the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

"Today, Denmark's wolf population is estimated to be just over 40 wolves, with at least seven breeding pairs known to have produced cubs. Yet even this small number has sparked fierce debates over livestock and public safety in one of Europe's most intensively farmed countries, with views on wolves seeming to reflect wider political divides across Denmark." Kristian Kongshøj and Troels Fage Hedegaard explain why 40 wolves have shaken Danish politics.

Ellen Hawley sets out the long history of curry in Britain.

Mike Taylor champions an undervalued Paul Simon album: "One of the most striking qualities of One Trick Pony as an album is how understated everything is. There are no big, heart-on-sleeve emotions, no vocal histrionics. Many of the songs have a stumbling quality, and almost all of them feel gentle. Every time a song starts to seem like it has a clear emotional shading, something undercuts it – whether it’s Simon’s idiosyncratic vocal delivery, a flash of colour from the band (and all of them are superb), or a switch in direction in a bridge or chorus."

Chinese spying case: Why did the Crown Prosecution Service throw in the towel?

Alan Robertshaw looks at the Crown Prosecution's decision not to pursue the case against two men who were charged with spying on behalf of China. 

Reading between the lines, he is puzzled by it.

He gives links to the three witness statements the government supplied on YouTube, and he has also posted an earlier video on the case there.

Alan's YouTube account is well worth following for topical discussion of legal matters.

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"Gill and Farage remained close. When the latter quit UKIP in December 2018, Gill followed him two days later. In the following February Farage announced his new Brexit Party. Gill was one of six former UKIP MEPs to join immediately." Angus Young traces the journey of Nathan Gill, former leader of Reform UK in Wales, from Hull to Moscow.

Jo Elvin writes about her experience of applying for Indefinite Leave to Remain: "It took the Home Office four weeks to come back to me and tell my application had been rejected. I was informed of this in a short, cold letter stating that they were not satisfied that our marriage was genuine. The last sentence of the letter told me I had four weeks to get my affairs in order and vacate the country for good."

Owen Sennett finds that YouTubers are earning up to £20,000 a month by making provocative videos that have targeted a Norfolk hotel used to house asylum seekers.

"In 1981, the tide turned for Lethbridge when she was able to return to the bar. 'It seemed like the end of a nightmare – it had been 20 years in which I couldn’t work in the profession I loved. It turned out a lot had changed while I’d been away. I was astonished: there were black faces, and women, in chambers. I couldn’t believe it – it was wonderful.'" Joanna Moorhead talks to the magnificent Nemone Lethbridge.

"Edge-of seat perils, Bond-style gadgetry, a dash of espionage, a villain both hissable and hilarious, and Tracy Island: the coolest playground in the world with its movable swimming pool and lift-and-slide rocket entries. What kid didn't love all that?" Mark Braxton on his lifelong engagement with Thunderbirds.

lachlansimages visits Ludlow on market day.

Lord Chief Justice Goddard played a part in the abolition of national ID cards in 1951

With Labour returning to its ancestral love of national identity cards, the name of Harry Willcock has been heard again. He was the Liberal councillor and parliamentary candidate who, after being stopped for speeding in 1950, refused to show his identity card with the immortal words: "I am a Liberal, and I am against this sort of thing."

Highgate magistrates found him guilty of refusing to show his card - Wilcox had argued that this police power had lapsed when the state of emergency that gave rise to the relevant act had expired - but gave him an absolute discharge. He was also fined for speeding.

Despite the absolute discharge, Wilcox appealed to the High Court against his conviction for not showing his card.

At this point, as Neil Hickman tells in a letter to The Law Society Gazette, a second and very unlikely Liberal hero emerged in the shape of the ferocious lord chief justice Lord Goddard:

Let’s recall the post-war saga of identity cards. These were introduced as an emergency measure at the outbreak of World War 2. The post-war Labour government, an admirable administration but with a marked authoritarian streak, took a conscious decision not to repeal the relevant legislation; and the police routinely demanded the production of identity cards whenever they stopped someone. 

One Harry Willcock, stopped for speeding, refused 'on principle' to produce his identity card. On his appeal from the inevitable conviction before the magistrates, Lord Goddard said [Willcock v. Muckle [1951] 2 KB 844]:

'Of course, if [the police] are looking for a stolen car or have reason to believe that a particular motorist is engaged in committing a crime, that is one thing, but to demand a national registration identity card from all and sundry, for instance, from a lady who may leave her car outside a shop longer than she should, or some trivial matter of that sort, is wholly unreasonable… [and] tends to turn law-abiding subjects into lawbreakers, which is a most undesirable state of affairs. 

Further, in this country we have always prided ourselves on the good feeling that exists between the police and the public and such action tends to make the people resentful of the acts of the police and inclines them to obstruct the police instead of to assist them….'

And, though Willcock's conviction was upheld, he was not ordered to pay costs, and Goddard indicated that any future bench of magistrates obliged to convict a citizen of failing to produce an identity card should grant an absolute discharge. Identity cards were, in fact, scrapped the following year.

Neil Hickman, a retired district judge, is the author of Despotism Renewed? Lord Hewart Unburied, which I reviewed in Liberator last year. Hewart was a Liberal politician who later served as lord chief justice between 1922 and 1940.

Oh and Harry Willcock's full name was Clarence Harry Willcock, which may be why Lord Bonkers insists on calling him Clarence "Frogman" Willcock.

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Helen Charman dissects the claims of the flag-bearing demonstrators. "One slogan used to promote the hotel protests on social media, often emblazoned over a Union Jack or St George's Cross, is 'Safety of Women and Children before Foreigners'. There is a clear distinction being made here between British women and children and 'foreign' women and children. The category of the vulnerable always already excludes the marginalised group being targeted."

All good Liberals know the tale of Harry Willcock – "I am a Liberal, and I am against this sort of thing" – and his part in the abolition of national identity cards after the war, but there was another hero in his court case. It was the unexpected figure of the ferocious Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard. Neil Hickman explains.

"For over three years, the people of the UK have opened their homes to Ukrainian families and welcomed them into our communities. Offering them safety in the face of Russia’s indiscriminate shelling of cities and the illegal occupation of Ukrainian territory. However, at no point over these three years has our government provided Ukrainian families with certainty or stability." Rowan More looks ahead to a debate at the Liberal Democrat Conference.

Finlay McLaren finds that the chief effect of podcasting has been to give more publicity to people who were already famous.

James Wright suggests commercial interests may encourage the spreading of unverified stories and pseudo-archaeology connected to ancient buildings.

"Old Nick was so enraged he laid an everlasting curse upon them, and hence it was said that after Michaelmas Day, any blackberries on the bushes now belonged to the Devil Himself and it was most unwise to pick them." Jim Moon knows why you shouldn't pick blackberries after Michaelmas.

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Adam Barnett itemises Nigel Farage's long history of support for Vladimir Putin: "On the eve of Russia’s 2022 invasion, Nigel Farage ... argued for ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine – an odd time to do that – and when the war started he called it 'a consequence of EU and NATO expansion'. Last year he called on the west to negotiate with Putin, adding that 'the relentless insistence on continued war is worrying. Whose insistence, Nigel?" 

"There are few fundamental political differences between Corbyn and Sultana. There is a clash instead of style, but this could well be used to their advantage. The conflicts are many when it comes to the wider group involved, however." Sienna Rodgers takes us the power struggles attending the birth of the proposed new left-wing party.

Francis FitzGibbon on the threat to jury trials: "Juries decide​ the outcome of about 1 per cent of criminal cases in England and Wales, and yet the jury system is permanently under threat. The latest threat comes in Sir Brian Leveson’s Independent Review of the Criminal Courts."

"The problem has always been where to place him. Unlike Monsarrat he wasn’t published in the 1930s, so can’t be ranked alongside early social realists like Graham Greene and George Orwell. Two decades later he was older than the proto-Angry Young Man writers John Wain and Kingsley Amis. Nor did he write about life outside London, like William Cooper, John Braine and others." Simon Matthews explores the life and works of novelist and TV dramatist Alexander Baron

"As luck would have it, the club had arranged Mick Channon’s testimonial match for 3 May, and so two days after the cup triumph, fans were still in a celebratory mood as they packed into the Dell to see their heroes. The FA Cup was paraded in front of an official attendance of 29,508 that night, although those who were there would probably tell you there were a few more than that. Spare a thought for the hundreds outside who could not get a ticket." Historic Southampton tells the story of The Dell.

Andrew Nette watches a favourite political thriller. "The Day of the Jackal spends a hell of a lot of time just showing things being done and the minutia involved. For Jackal this includes creating and sourcing a false identity and designing, ordering and learning how to use a bespoke lightweight sniper rifle. ... The mechanics of the police investigation into Jackal’s identity and whereabouts is also painstakingly rendered and I love every minute of it."

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"I asked the Appellant why, in the light of this citation of non-existent authorities, the Court should not of its own motion strike out the grounds of appeal in this case, as being an abuse of the process of the Court. His answer was as follows. He claimed that the substance of the points which were being put forward in the grounds of appeal were sound, even if the authority which was being cited for those points did not exist." Matthew Lee looks at the problems the increasing use of AI are causing the judicial system.

Paul Kirkley fears British stories are in danger of vanishing from our TV screens: "ITV managing director Kevin Lygo has admitted it probably wouldn’t get commissioned now. Why? Because a miscarriage of justice against British postmasters doesn’t have sufficient global appeal to attract the foreign investment and international sales that are increasingly the topline requirements of any UK drama."

Kathryn Rix looks back to the Pontefract by-election of 1872, which was the first British parliamentary election to use the secret ballot: "In contrast with the unruly behaviour which had often marred previous elections, seasoned observers declared that 'they never saw a contested election in which less intoxicating liquor was drunk' and there were no allegations of bribery or other corrupt practices. So quiet and orderly was the town that 'it hardly seemed like an election'."

Teaching philosophy in prison is a rowdy, honest and hopeful provocation, says Jay Miller.

Koraljka Suton celebrates Quentin Tarantino's postmodern masterpiece: "One of the many reasons why Pulp Fiction is widely regarded as a postmodern classic, lies in the brilliance of its screenplay. In true postmodern fashion, Pulp Fiction plays with narrative structure, presenting us with three interconnected storylines told out of chronological order and centering on a different protagonist each."

"Ahmed is a technicolour player, an energy bath bomb with a textbook technique. The Spin has been lucky enough to watch him razzle-dazzle two hundreds in the flesh this year – both against Lancashire, one at Old Trafford, one at Grace Road, opponent-draining, sparkling innings so much better than the previous blind boundary biffing. He added another against Kent, another against Glamorgan and became the first Englishman to take 13 wickets and score a century in a first-class game since Ian Botham in the Jubilee Test of 1980, after taking Derbyshire to the cleaners with both bat and ball." Tanya Aldred argues that Leicestershire's Rehan Ahmed deservers a place in England's Ashes squad this winter.

Couple who ‘closed station’ miss court due to lack of trains

The story is hidden behind The Times paywall. In fact, the headline is pretty much hidden there too. Nevertheless, the judges were unanimous. This is our Headline of the Day.

Besides, you can read about the saga of Altnabreac station on Wikipedia.

What a night lawyer does behind the scenes at a newspaper

Alan Robertshaw, barrister at law, explains the role he used to fulfil for a daily newspaper at Wapping before it went to press. Defamation. Court orders. Confidentiality. They're all here. 

There was never a successful action against an article he had signed off, though his ignorance of football once almost got the paper in trouble with the solicitor general.

I recommend this channel if you're interested in topical and informed comment on the law – and nice views of Cornwall.

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Ben de Pear and Ramita Navai tells the story of how the BBC repeatedly delayed and ultimately shelved a damning documentary on the destruction of Gaza's health service. Gaza: Under Attack was eventually screened by Channel 4.

“Resilience is critical to manage global heating: housing, food defences, water supplies, food supply, healthcare, finance and workplaces. Too often we are fighting last centuries’ wars by insulating homes from cold and failing to protect them from heat; hence, we install air to water heat pumps, where other countries are promoting air to air (which provides cooling in summer).” Simon Ferrigno asks if Britain is prepared for more heatwaves.

“The data doesn’t suggest that total demand on the criminal courts is unprecedentedly high. The number of cases coming into the system has increased in recent years, but remains below levels in the early 2010s. Indeed, the total amount of court time spent on jury trials has decreased by almost a quarter since 2016. The biggest problem facing the courts is the growing productivity gap – what we’re getting out compared to what we’re putting in.” Cassia Rowland is not convinced by Sir Brian Leveson's recommendation that we severely restrict the right to a tribal by jury.

Jacqui chooses 10 favourite London novels.

Susan McDonald discusses her love of the poetry of W.H. Auden: “In Tonight at Seven-Thirty, Auden says ‘the funniest mortals and the kindest are those who are most aware of the baffle of being’. I agree – that’s why I’ve read his poems for the past 30 years.”

“If horror film makers have nothing else they can always rely on a cheap mask to bring a sense of the uncanny, playing upon our deepest instinctive fear of The Other.” Ray Newman on the power of the mask.

The Stonton Wyville boiler explosion led to manslaughter charges

Back to the inquest into the deaths of the four men killed by the explosion of the boiler of a steam threshing machine at Stonton Wyville in 1862.

The Gimson who gave evidence to the inquest, as the Leicester Guardian for 1 March 1862 reported, was Josiah Gimson from the Leicester engineering family. He described the condition of the engine which made it, or at least the way it was operated, sound dangerous (Josiah was the father of the architect and furniture designer Ernest Gimson, incidentally.)

Having heard his and others' evidence, the inquest jury returned its verdict. The Leicester Advertiser (8 March 1862) described what happened:

The coroner told the jury he should not make many remarks as it was a case entirely for them. They were to consider whether the parties died from the effects the explosion, why it happened and whether it happened from negligence or from accident or from some deficiency in the boiler or want of skill on the of the parties in charge. 

The jury retired and after deliberating two hours returned the following verdict: 

We find that William Woolman George Woolman Thomas Lee and Samuel Ashby killed by the explosion of steam thrashing machine boiler January the 13th 1862 and that the deaths were owing to the culpable negligence of William Bloxam and Henry Butcher. We also beg to suggest that machines of this kind are now use and many eases are managed inexperienced hands the propriety of appointing an inspector to report on their safety – Thomas Burnaby foreman

The coroner told the jury that was a verdict of manslaughter, but the jury said they did not intend to return a verdict of that kind, although all agreed in the words of the verdict. After some time the coroner, finding there was no chance of the jury agreeing, said he would enter the verdict received and leave it for the magistrates to take it up if they thought fit.

They did think fit, and Henry Butcher, the owner of the machine whose boiler exploded was tried for the manslaughter of the four men at Leicester Assizes, which were held in the courtroom at Leicester Castle. This was sited in the castle's medieval great hall, which lies behind the Georgian facade you see in the photo above.

 The Leicester Journal of 25 July 1862 reported his acquittal on these charges.

So that's the end of the Stonton Wyville story, but I wondered how common such accidents with steam threshing machines were. I did a little googling, and what I found was alarming.

Here's a piece written for the Prairie News Room from North Dakota by Steve Hoffbeck:

From the 1880s through the 1920s, steam-engines powered threshing machines. The boiler-men tending these tractors had the serious task of preventing pressure build-ups that could shatter boilerplates into shrapnel and release the fiercely-hot steam.

In the fall of 1889, about fifty men in threshing crews perished in such explosions. Similarly, in 1895, there were 'numerous boiler explosions' in the state, 'in which numerous lives were lost, and many persons [were] maimed and disfigured.'

At times, these tragedies happened because careless or incompetent operators refused to use good sense. Newspaper headlines shrieked: ;Water Is Low, Boiler Lets Go,' telling of a boiler-man who brought catastrophe 'by running his engine short of water to rush the head of steam,' his body 'blown to atoms.' In another boiler-explosion, the deathly headline read: “Blown Into Eternity.”

The deepest blame went to farmers who used 'old and worn' machines. Indeed, the 'gradual deterioration of boilers' was the number-one cause of their failure. Corrosion caused weaknesses in boiler-metal so that the simmering strain of high-pressure steam would find a fatal defect, perhaps a single rivet, leading to explosive rupture. Engineers also faced dangers from worn-out safety valves or inaccurate pressure gauges.

Reformers called for inspectors to examine boilers, believing that the explosions were preventable. And state law eventually did provide for inspections, seeking to halt the 'terrible slaughter.'

Was the situation any better in Britain? I'm sure the British Newspaper Archive will help me find out.