The Troublesome Gibbet of John Haines, the ‘Wounded Highwayman’ of Hounslow.

For this post, I am going to wander into the world of crime in the late eighteenth century, and the grisly fate that befell many who committed the heinous crime of highway robbery. (Full disclosure: I’m not an historian of crime, gibbets or highwaymen…perhaps the case I’m about to discuss is very well known. But he’s new to me, and I love a good story, so he makes it into the blog!)

I was recently reading the The Juvenile Tourist: or Excursions Through Various Parts of the Island of Great Britain, published by John Evans in 1805. Written as letters to a prospective young traveller, it contains descriptions of counties and towns in England and Wales, together with recommendations for tourists for things to see or do. Leafing through the first section detailing departure from London, a particular reference caught my eye. 

Royal Mail Coach 1805 – Image from Wikimedia Commons

The passage began with a situation familiar to any traveller of this period – a change of horses. Journeys by coach or on horseback were necessarily done in stages. Coaches travelled over fixed distances between two points – usually inns – at which point the horses would be changed. Mounting his new horse, the writer soon continued his journey, heading out on Hounslow Heath. Things quickly took a dark turn though. After pausing at a wooden monument ‘marked with a bloody hand and knife’ marking the spot where a local man who had cut the throats of his wife and child had been buried with a stake through his heart, he moved on to another, equally chilling, relic. 

“We still hear not unfrequently of robberies in [this] quarter during the winter season of the year; a recent proof of which is exhibited by a new gibbet, erected not far from Belfont, on which we saw suspended the body of Haines, generally known by the designation of the Wounded Highwayman…”

Who, then, was this mysterious Haines? The problem is that there are potentially many highwaymen Haineses. These include a notable fellow highwayman of the famous Dick Turpin gang, and also one William Haines, sentenced to death in 1783 for highway robbery in Acton, robbing the assistant postmaster of Hackney as he walked home alone through country roads on a dark, foggy December night. While criminal bodies could admittedly be left in gibbets for twenty years or more, becoming more macabre as the years passed and bits and pieces fell off them, 22 years before Evans’ description seemed unlikely. 

Image copyright of Wellcome Images

Professor Sarah Tarlow’s excellent chapter on the afterlife of gibbets (https://rdcu.be/dyItn), however, proved the key to unlocking the identity of the mysterious highwayman. As she reveals, the erection of a gibbet containing Haines’ remains on Hounslow Heath provoked controversy in newspapers, frightened travellers, caused the royal family to avoid the road, and even caused issues when it blew into the garden of a nearby house in a storm. (Anyone who has experienced a neighbour’s trampoline blowing into their garden in a storm should be grateful that it was just this and not a mouldy criminal in a cage!).

The Juvenile Tourist corroborates this, and adds some extra colour. From his description, for example, it is not hard to see how the spectacle of the rotting highwayman might upset delicate constitutions. “He was apparently a large, tall man; his irons were so constructed that his arms hung at some little distance from his body, by which means the hideous sight was rendered more terrific and impressive”.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Clearly no fan of the practice, he noted that Hounslow Heath had once been ‘disgraced with a long range of gibbets’, which had only been removed at the behest of the royal family, fed up with seeing them as they journeyed to and from Windsor. Further Evans noted that the dismal sight of Haines’ body “suggested with full force the horrible idea of a fellow creature deprived of the honours of sepulture” (i.e. burial and memorial) and instead left to rot “to the grinning scorn of public infamy”.

Things start to become clearer from the Old Bailey records, which have lengthy details of John Haines’ trial, and how he ended up in an iron cage by the roadside.  In 1799, Haines and an accomplice, armed with ‘certain pistols loaded with leaden bullets’ held up what they thought was a passenger coach. Unfortunately for them it in fact contained two Bow Street officers, and one other man, acting on reports of robberies in the area, and keen to trap a criminal. The trial report suggests that John Haines clearly played his role to the full, wearing a thick brown coat with a hat pulled low, having a distinctive horse and also scoring highly on his highwaymanly patter: witnesses attested to hearing him shout ‘damn your eyes, you bugger, stop and give me your money’!

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

But what of his nickname, ‘the wounded highwaymen’? A report in the Northampton Mercury provides the last piece of the puzzle. During the robbery there was in fact an exchange of fire. While most of the robbers’ bullets went through the back of the coach seats, one of the officers believed that he “had hit his man”. This was later proved true when witnesses stated that Haines returned to an inn later that night, saying that he had been wounded.  When Haines was later arrested  “A surgeon described him to have had one ball pass through his shoulder; he had extracted one and he believed there were more in his body”. The ‘wounded highwayman’ was clearly aptly named.

Whoever, he was, and whatever he did, though, there is undoubtedly something disquieting about the image of the desiccated body of the highwayman, the metal locks and hinges of the iron gibbet screaking, and the skirts of his tattered greatcoat waving in the wind!

Creams, Clothes and Cases: The material culture of pre-modern travel.

I am currently on study leave, getting on with research for my new project on the history of travel preparations. One thing that I’m particularly interested in is the material culture of travel, and what sorts of things were available for travellers as they got ready for their journeys. 

Today, ‘things’ are incredibly important both before and during our travels, and we are usually accompanied by a wealth of ‘stuff’. First there is the right luggage, whether finding bags small enough to qualify as ‘carry on’ for the plane, or cases large enough to contain all the necessaries for two weeks in the sun. Then come decisions about clothes: do we take a bare minimum, or instead give ourselves lots of choices? Do we have the right clothes for the right weather or environment? (Authorities in Naples are fed up of people trying to walk up Mount Vesuvius in Crocs!) These types of decisions about what, and how much, to take were all ones that were faced by travellers over the past three centuries.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

But perhaps the other most common type of products that accompany us on journeys are those related to health and hygiene. Commonly travellers will take some form of medicines, cosmetics or personal grooming products, sun cream, insect repellent, deodorant …the list goes on and the market for these kinds of products is massive. And if you’re anything like me, this often takes up more space than the clothes!

It’s perhaps easy to assume that these type of health/cosmetic travel goods are a feature of modern tourism, but in fact they have a much longer history.  I’ve long been interested in the history and advertising of products, and my project on the history of facial hair explored the world of shaving products in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Another big strand of my work looked at the early modern medical marketplace and the ways in which all manner of remedies and preparations were touted as the universal cure for all ills. By the nineteenth century, of course, newspapers were stuffed full of advertisements for products, with many makers and sellers starting to target the growing numbers of British travellers and tourists heading off to foreign climes.

(Copyright Wellcome Images)

Travelling cases, for example, containing everything necessary to attend to appearance on a journey had been available since the eighteenth century. In 1780 the razor maker Daniel Rigge advertised his ‘Travelling cases and leather pouches, which contain the whole apparatus for shaving’ as well as bottles and space for other items of personal grooming. As tourism expanded, so did the range and design of these types of travel ‘furniture’. One notable maker was the firm of Mechi and Sons in Cornhill, London. ‘Mechi’s Dressing Cases’ for travellers contained tooth and nail brushes, soap and other requisites and were, according to the advertisement, an ‘invaluable acquisition’ for the ‘steam boat or travelling companion’. 

(Copyright Wellcome Images)

Soaps were particularly popular, offering tourists something familiar from home with which to perform their daily ablutions. In 1830 James Atkinson’s Almond Soap was particularly noted as a useful accoutrement for travellers, as well as the army and navy, and sold in ‘neat portable pots’ for ease of carriage. 

Health was another common topic, offering solutions for various problems. ‘Lamplough’s Effervescing Pyretic Saline’ offered to replenish the vital salts lost from ‘exciting causes’ which included excessive heat or tiredness. ‘Dr Locock’s cosmetic’ was a refreshing cream that could be used to treat sunburn or tan, whilst his asthmatic customers could also treat themselves to some of his ‘pulmonic wafers’ which promised relief in ten minutes for those suffering in cold climates or inclement weather. Even food was not neglected. Nineteenth century tourists could purchase ‘Mellin’s Food Biscuits’, recommended particularly for travellers who often require a sustaining and nutritious food, that can be easily digested and assimilated’.

It is interesting to note, though, how some manufacturers began to tailor the advertisements of existing products towards travellers, in turn ascribing new attributes to them specifically related to the rigours of travelling. 

(Author’s own image)

One useful example of this was Rowlands’ ‘Kalydor’. Alexander Rowlands and his son established a perfumery business in London in the late eighteenth century, which expanded through the nineteenth. Rowlands specialised in cosmetic products and undertook something like the modern advertising campaigns across various newspapers, extolling the many and various attributes of their wares. 

‘Kalydor’ was a skin and beauty cream that became their flagship product. In early advertisements in the 1820s ‘Kalydor’ was touted as a refreshing cosmetic compound, ‘imparting a glow of youthful beauty’ on the cheeks of women, ‘keeping their complexions clear and lovely’ whilst also soothing and protecting men’s faces after shaving ‘leaving a softness not to be described’. A decade later, further attributes included protection against wind and damp. 

By the 1860s, however, Rowlands had hitched a ride on the growing numbers of specialist travel advice literature and magazines, adding their by-now-familiar products to the back pages of these publications. By this time Kalydor had become the traveller’s best friend: 

‘Tourists and Travellers, visitors to the seaside, and others exposed to the scorching rays of the sun and heated particles of dust, will find Rowland’s Kalydor a most refreshing preparation…dispelling the cloud of languor and relaxation, allaying all heat and irritability and immediately affording a pleasing sensation’. 

Not only that, adverts often also included Rowland’s ‘Macassar Oil’ (useful in preventing hair drying out and falling off in the sun) and ‘Odonto’ – imparting a ‘graceful purity and fragrance’ to the teeth!

Travellers were obviously a lucrative market. The soapmaker Gibbs turned on the charm in their advertisement, stating that ‘The refined habits of English travellers render a COMPLETE TOILET EQUIPMENT one of the first essentials of the tourist’. Putting their existing ‘Naples Soap’ into an elastic case (keeping the case shut to prevent soggy soap scum from leaking out into the portmanteau), they introduced their new innovation, the ‘Naples Travelling Tablet’.

These are just some of the many products that I’ll be looking into in more detail, especially for what they can reveal about preparations, and what the supposed risks and dangers of travel were. As thoughts begin to turn to summer, many of us will soon be putting ourselves in the shoes of past travellers, and making those awkward decisions about what to take.