A Murder at Burnham Abbey

 

Ralph Willis Goodwin 1820 -1863

A Murder at Burnham Abbey

Ralph was the youngest child of John Goodwin and his wife Mary Ann (formerly Willis). His sister Juliana was Mary Alice Willis’s 2 X great-grandmother. He was born in Datchet, Buckinghamshire and by the early 1850s he was farming at Burnham Abbey, which was about five miles away.

The abbey itself was founded in 1266 for a community of Augustinian nuns. The community continued until 1539 when Henry VIII was dissolving the monasteries. By the 1800s the abbey church had been demolished and the remaining buildings had become in a farmhouse.

On the 1^st November 1853 events at Burnham Abbey hit the newspaper headlines:-

“HORRIBLE MURDER AT BURNHAM.—A murder, attended with circumstances of sickening atrocity, has been perpetrated at Burnham Abbey Farm, near the old Bath Road, about three miles from Maidenhead, and four from Windsor. The farm-house is a comfortable residence recently erected on the ruins of the old abbey of Burnham, and is occupied by Mr. Ralph Willis Goodwin, a gentleman farmer, unmarried.”

A very long report on the circumstances surrounding the murder ensues, which I’ll attempt to summarise.

The farmhouse was occupied by Ralph, his housekeeper, Mary Ann Sturgeon, and a groom/stableman by the name of Moses Hatto. There was also a cottage in the farmyard which was occupied by a Mr Bunce. The farm labourers lodged at the cottage. The farmhouse appears to have been large and substantially built.  

Ralph Goodwin used to visit his cousins in Langley Marish several evenings a week. They lived about five miles away and he generally left home at about 5pm and returned home between eleven and twelve. The groom would wait up for him and stable his horse on his return.  

The housekeeper would leave a light in the hall and a candle. She usually went to bed about 10 o'clock. The door to the kitchen would be left unlocked.

When Ralph came home on the 1st of November at about 11.30pm, the groom was waiting to stable his horse. He told Ralph that there had been some disturbances during the evening and a colt had been found loose in the yard. He said that he had called at the housekeeper's window, but she did not answer.

Ralph discovered that he could not get into the house via the kitchen door and let himself in with a key through the front door. There was no light or candle waiting in the hallway. Ralph pottered around downstairs for a while, during which time Hatto kept coming in and out in an agitated way instead of attending to the horse. Ralph noticed a stain on the carpet, which proved to be candle-grease and blood; there was also blood on the skirting of the door-post, and a tooth lying two or three feet from the blood. Hatto said nothing.

Ralph then went upstairs and noticed thick smoke. The alarm was raised, water was brought and a smouldering fire in the housekeeper’s room was extinguished. The room was full of suffocating smoke, with a horrible stench. It is then that the body of the housekeeper was discovered. Her clothes were on fire, and it became clear that an attempt had been made to cover up her murder by setting fire to the house. It was obvious from her injuries that she had been attacked with a poker.

Suspicion fell upon Hatto but there was not enough evidence to convict so he was allowed to go free. As time went on various contradictory statements led to him being tried at the Spring Assizes at Aylesbury. The evidence against him was entirely circumstantial, but the jury found the prisoner guilty, and he was sentenced to be hanged.  

The same night he confessed his guilt and was subsequently hanged. A lurid account of his confession appeared in the papers.

Ralph died in 1863 at Abington Asylum of “organic brain disease” and rather spookily, his brother, John Willis Goodwin died at Burnham Abbey in December of the same year.

It seems that the farm and buildings then fell into disrepair until 1913 when it was purchased by James Lawrence Bissley, an architect and surveyor, who restored the remaining buildings and converted the original pre-reformation chapter house into a chapel.

In 1916 James Bissley sold the property to the Society of the Precious Blood who, in 1952, enlarged the chapel without spoiling its simplicity. Their website states.

“We are a contemplative Augustinian Community and our principal work is worship, thanksgiving and intercession, reaching out on behalf of others to the source of all love and goodness and holding before Christ the pain and suffering of the world.

Rooted within the monastic tradition, we live a life of prayer, silence, fellowship and solitude. The Eucharist is the centre of our life, where we are most deeply united with Christ, one another and all for whom we pray. This is continued throughout the day in the Divine Office and all the ordinariness of work, reading, creating and learning to live together.”

Full circle.