with the diocesan registrar. This led to improvements, but records were still incomplete.
The Burial Act (1768) decreed all corpses must be buried in a wool shroud to aid the coffers of the government as there was a tax levied on wool. After each burial an oath had to be taken to confirm the Act had been obeyed.
Eventually, in 1837 two Acts came into being: The Registration Act and the Marriage Act. The General Registrar was appointed to administer, at local level, the civil registration of births (not baptisms), marriages and deaths, and to allow a system for civil marriages. Medical statistician William Farr pressed for the cause of death to be included on certificates so that records could be kept to follow medical patterns.
There is no record to be found that Edith was christened, something that might have helped reconcile Fred with his father. He went on seeing his mother, so she may have seen the baby, but Anna would have been denied the chance to defiantly show off her new husband and baby before the villagers, cutting a dash in a flattering outfit, including a new hat.
Fred was listed again as a labourer on Edith’s death certificate when he registered the child’s death aged 8 months, on 16 January 1883. He is recorded as being with Edith when she died, it would seem they were living in Pentney at the time.
Edith’s death certificate records her cause of death as marasmus. The Collins Dictionary definition is wasting of the body, with most cases due to inadequate calorific intake. Clinically there is a failure to gain weight, followed by weight loss and emaciation. The medical description goes on to describe symptoms similar to those seen on television film footage of harrowing scenes from famine areas of Africa. Poor little thing, she just starved to death.
In the 1860s mills had come into use that ground corn into refined white flour, removing the valuable wheat germ. It was much the same health issue as today: brown wholemeal bread versus refined white. By the 1870s, this was available in the remotest of shops and most likely Anna, like all the forward thinking girls of her time, thought it modern and labour saving, so the bread she baked would not be very nutritious. This she would have fed crumbled into milk to her child, a form of baby food known as ‘pap’.
Along with the rest of the labourers’ families in the village, almost certainly the only milk Anna would have been able to buy would be the skimmed version from the local farm. Skimmed, because the cream would be removed to chum into butter; it was known as ‘blue milk’ because of its colour. Probably after Anna stopped feeding Edith herself, she weaned her on to pap, which had insufficient nourishment and so her daughter slowly faded away.
In Henry Rider Haggard’s book A Farmers Year, which he wrote after turning to farming and good works, he recounts:
Never shall I forget my early experiences of Heckingham Workhouse. Having been elected a guardian I attended the Board in due course, and, as is so often my fortune, at the very first meeting fell into controversy. At that date all the children in the house, including infants, were fed upon skimmed milk. Owing to some illness, however, the Doctor ordered them a ration of fresh milk, which ration the master had neglected to discontinue when the sickness passed. Consequently there arose trouble, and with the Doctor he was brought up before the board to be reprimanded.
Thereon, with the courage of inexperience, I rose and announced boldly that I considered new milk to be a necessity to infants and that, if I could find a seconder, I would propose that the allowance should be continued to them until they reached the age of nine years. Somewhat to my astonishment a worthy clergyman, now long dead, seconded the motion, and there followed a great debate. Soon we found it would be absolutely hopeless to carry the innovation in its original form, and were obliged to reduce the age limit from nine to five years.
The argument of the opposition was that the children were not fed upon new milk in their own homes, to which I replied that even if they starved at home, it was no reason why they should be starved when in the public charge. Ultimately the Board divided, and to my surprise I carried the motion by a majority of one vote, so that henceforth the infants at Heckingham were rationed with fresh milk instead of ‘blue skim.
Within eight months, Anna had become a wife and mother, and she now stood beside a tiny grave grieving for her child, the weather as bitter and raw as her emotions must have been. Fred described his wife as a woman fond of animals and wildlife, and it would seem the death of her child was from ignorance rather than neglect. In I Walked by Night, Fred recalls that she cared for Fred’s working dogs, and one of her own, Tip, with much care and affection:
My wife thought the world of Tip, and I often used to say to her in fun, you think more of the dog than you do of me. She looked after them all, but he was always the first to have a hot drink and a rub down wen we came in from a night’s work. He would lie at her feet and look at her, and she would talk to him as she would have talked to a child, and I beleve he knew what she said as well as I did. Perhaps her feeling the way she did for that dog had something to do with what hapened after.
The months went by and it came to about three months befor her time. She had to give up going out with me as she always had done, as she could not get about as well as she used because of the child that was comen. So I went out alone one night and took Tip with me and lost him. Of corse I did not pay much regard to that, as dogs often miss there Master at night, but are shure to find him or go home on there owen.
Wen I got home to her in the morning time the first thing she said to me was ‘Where is Tip, you have not brought him back with you?’ I said no, and told her that I had missed him some were, but she need not fret as he would be home on his owen befor long. Then she said ‘No, he will not come home any more, he is dead and lay on Narborough park at the foot of a tree – I saw him hit the tree’.
Well of corse I pooed that and told her she must have been dreaming, but she said no, she had never been asleep all night but lyen and waiting for me to come home.
Well as the dog did not come back I went to look for him, and shure enough after a bit I found him as she had said layen at the foot of a large oak Tree. He had made to kill at a rabbitt and struck his head on the bole of the tree, and broke his neck.
After military service, local man Les Harrison came to Narborough (the next village to Pentney) in about 1953, when he must have been in his early 20s. He lived in a cottage on the Narborough Hall Park. One day, while sheltering from the rain under a large oak tree in the park, he was joined by Albert Coggles, the elderly gamekeeper for the estate then owned by the Ash family. As they stood beneath the dripping leaves, Mr Coggles remarked that they were under the tree where the Norfolk Poacher had hanged his dog.
Mr Harrison recalls, ‘I think it was only when it was mentioned this summer, when a friend and I were talking in the cricket pavilion and someone brought up the poacher who used to take game from the park where the pavilion now stands, that I thought of it again. I have never spoken to anyone, not even my wife and children, about the incident. I remember I thought it awful at the time.’ He has never read I Walked by Night, so he has no knowledge of the facts in the book.
When told that Fred had said his dog broke its neck on the tree chasing a rabbit, Harrison said, ‘I know dogs – I can’t believe a dog would do that. I think what the gamekeeper told me, that the dog was hanged, is more likely right. Whether the dog was no good, or Fred lost his temper, I don’t know.’ He also recollects hearing, though he can’t remember the source, that one night the poacher took pheasants home and hid them under his pregnant wife’s bed. When police arrived to search the house, the dog indicated the pheasants’ whereabouts by sniffing round the bed and this led to Fred being charged with poaching. It was suggested this might have been his motivation in killing the dog. ‘That does not tie up,’ said Harrison, ‘he would have been taken straight off to the lock-up,
