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Posted: 17-08-2013 11:25 Post subject:

An unusual tale:

Look back in time: Murdered farmer had been 'dead' for 39 years
5:00pm Friday 16th August 2013 in Falmouth/Penryn .

Fifty years ago today, the Packet covered the amazing case of the brutal murder of a reclusive Constantine farmer who “died twice.” The case was even more notable for concluding with two of the last hangings in Britain.

William Garfield Rowe, 64, died officially when he was stabbed to death in the doorway of his isolated cottage at Nanjarrow Farm on August 14, 1963 - but for 39 years William had been “dead” to the outside world, with neighbours believing he was a victim of the 1914-18 war.

In 1917 he was conscripted to the Army, only to desert and be back home within a week.
Home then was Venton Vedna Farm at Porthleven. Armed with £50 and his parents’ blessing, he went into hiding in another part of the country.

The Military caught up with him and he was sent to a detention centre on the Isle of Wight – from where he escaped and went into hiding for the rest of the war. Then he returned to the family home and began his 39 years of living death.

He hid from authority in an upstairs room and earned his keep through farm work during the night. With family members sworn to secrecy, the farm was able to provide all he needed to lead his secret life.

Following the death of his father, William, his mother and brother Stanley moved to the Constantine address – with William hiding beneath a pile of sacks in a hay cart.

His brother and mother died in 1954 and 1956 respectively, but William was spared the dilemma of what to do by the granting by the Queen of a general amnesty to the deserters of both world wars.
The Packet reported: “Steadfastly, William Garfield Rowe marched into the local police station to tell the world of his existence . . . but there was no wild whoopee to make up for those missing 39 years.
“He carried on quietly at the isolated farmhouse, shopping once a week, visiting market now and again, but always happy to return to his cattle, pigs and cats at Nanjarrow.”

He met his brutal end at the hands of two uninvited visitors one summer’s night. Dennis John Whitty, 22, of St Keverne, and Russell Pascoe, 23, of Constantine, were arrested within two days.
Three days later, they made the first of their remand appearances before Penryn magistrates, with their arrival witnessed by several hundred spectators lining the streets.

As the case subsequently unfolded, it became apparent that the pair had believed Mr Rowe was keeping a fortune in cash hidden on his farm. He did have £3,000 in his farmhouse, but Pascoe and Whitty – after beating and stabbing him to death – escaped with just £4.

They were charged with murder, tried, convicted and condemned to death. Simultaneously, at 8am on December 17, 1963, Pascoe was executed at Bristol’s Horfield Prison and Whitty at Winchester Prison.
Both men were buried in unmarked graves within the walls of the prisons where they had been hanged, as was the custom. Only two more prisoners were executed in Britain, both in August, 1964.

http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/fpfalmouth/10617422.Look_back_in_time__Murdered_farmer_had_been__dead__for_39_years/

The B&W photos seem to come from another century - as of course they do! I was still at school at the time of the crime and the hangings, but I think this is the first time I've heard this tale.

Posted: 18-08-2013 18:59 Post subject:

Its in one of the `Mysterious Cornwall` or `Strange Cornwall` books

Posted: 18-08-2013 22:01 Post subject:

That is truly fascinating Rynner, you really couldn't make stuff like that up, could you? Those murderers though, they look decades older than they are supposed to be, especially Dennis John Whitty. From that photo I would have said he was in his 40's, not 22.

Hard paper round maybe.

Posted: 24-08-2013 12:18 Post subject:

This story must be a classic of forgotten history. An absolute sizzler!

Posted: 27-08-2013 01:35 Post subject:

Full text at link.

Posted: 27-08-2013 11:52 Post subject:

It's interesting that while schools in England routinely teach versions of the Rosa Parks story, this Bristol case has been buried. It was new to me.

The UK did not have discriminatory laws and prejudice in the jobs market would mainly be less confrontational than described here: easier, mainly, to go through the motions of an interview etc.

Was it coincidental that a bus company was the focus of this protest? The case of Rosa Parks would probably have resonated within the black community, even if her 1955 protest was not so newsworthy to the general population. Political action seems to require that its roots are disguised as "out-of-the-blue" moments in which a political innocent is confronted by horrible injustice and refuses to budge or lie down and take it. The versions of the Rosa Parks story which appear in school books paint her as a care-worn drudge who was inspired to light the torch of protest, entirely omitting to mention her long-standing political activism. An accidental simplification for the sake of children?

Small ads, especially for accommodation, probably did contain blatant "No Blacks etc etc" clauses but they seem to be recalled as a matter of principle more than fact.

The equivalent "NINA" (No Irish Need Apply) has proved much more elusive than its notoriety suggests:

History Myths Debunked

Modern Property Ads Raise Awkward Questions

edit: added 12:45 pm: The BBC article underlines the "out-of-the-blue" nature of the story with its "A spring afternoon in 1963 . . . " opening. Compare that with the account on the Wikipedia page:

"Four young West Indian men, Roy Hackett, Owen Henry, Audley Evans and Prince Brown, formed an action group, later to be called the West Indian Development Council, as they were unhappy with the lack of progress in fighting discrimination by the West Indian Association. Owen Henry had met Paul Stephenson whose father was from West Africa and who had been to college. The group decided that the articulate Stephenson would be their spokesman.[6] Stephenson set up a test case to prove the colour bar existed by arranging an interview with the bus company for a young warehouseman and Boys' Brigade officer, Guy Bailey. When Stephenson then told the company that Bailey was West Indian, the interview was cancelled.[7] Inspired by the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama and the ensuing Montgomery Bus Boycott, the activists decided on a bus boycott in Bristol"

In this version, Bailey did not even attend the offices in person!

Wikipedia on the Bristol Bus Boycott

I see the full article contains a lot of detail and recollections by some of the participants but that interview story sounds like an event as re-imagined for a Sydney Poitier movie!

Posted: 27-08-2013 19:26 Post subject:

In fairness, it's been discussed a fair bit locally for years. Bristol went through a protracted phase of contrition a few years ago about the slave trade, etc, and the bus boycott, subsequent abolition of the colour bar, and the St Pauls Riots of the early 80s are seen as the "end" of institutional racism here (discuss.) I do have to say racial tensions in Bristol today are, compared to many cities, minimal.

The M Shed museum on the Harbourside has an entire area dedicated to a comprehensive and permanent exhibition about racial prejudice in the city (so much so that upon opening some wag dubbed it the "We're Very Sorry Warehouse".) There's a multimedia display about the boycott included, and it pulls no punches.

Posted: 04-09-2013 22:49 Post subject:

The British WWI prisoner of war who returned to captivity

A British officer captured during World War I was granted leave to visit his dying mother on one condition - that he return, a historian has discovered.
And Capt Robert Campbell kept his promise to Kaiser Wilhelm II and returned from Kent to Germany, where he stayed until the war ended in 1918.

Historian Richard van Emden told the BBC that Capt Campbell would have felt a duty to honour his word.
It also emerged that Capt Campbell tried to escape as soon as he returned.
Mr van Emden discovered the story when researching Foreign Office documents at the National Archives for his book, Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War.

Twenty-nine-year-old Capt Campbell, of the 1st Battalion East Surrey Regiment, had been captured in northern France on 24 August 1914 and then sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Magdeburg, north-east Germany.
While in the camp he received news that his mother Louise was dying of cancer.
Capt Campbell wrote a letter to the German emperor begging to be allowed to go and see his mother, which the Kaiser allowed - as long as Capt Campbell gave his word that he would return.

Mr van Emden said that Capt Campbell almost certainly travelled through the Netherlands and then by boat and train to Gravesend in Kent, where he spent a week with his mother before returning to Germany the same way.
His mother died in February 1917.

Mr van Emden told the BBC that Capt Campbell would have felt a duty to honour his word and "he would have thought 'if I don't go back no other officer will ever be released on this basis'".

Mr van Emden said it was "surprising" that Capt Campbell was not blocked from returning to Germany from Britain.
No other British prisoners of war were afforded compassionate leave, though, after Britain blocked a similar request from German prisoner Peter Gastreich, who was being held at an internment camp on the Isle of Man.

In another twist to the story, Mr van Emden said that as soon as Capt Campbell returned to the camp he then set about trying to escape.
He and a group of other prisoners spent nine months digging their way out of the camp before being captured on the Dutch border and sent back.
Mr van Emden said that as well as feeling honour bound to keep his word to return to the camp, as an officer, Capt Campbell was also honour bound to try to escape.

The Daily Mail reported that after the war Capt Campbell returned to Britain and served in the military until 1925.
He then rejoined when World War II broke out in 1939, serving as a the chief observer of the Royal Observer Corps on the Isle of Wight.
He died in the Isle of Wight in July 1966, aged 81.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23957605

Posted: 07-09-2013 17:24 Post subject:

Mike Truscott remembers Penryn's 'Johnny Onions' and street hawkers
3:00pm Saturday 7th September 2013 in Falmouth/Penryn
Mike Truscott writes:

I had a lovely catch-up coffee session recently with a dear friend, Joan Coote, whose late husband Roy was loved by so many as a boxer, sailor and, for much of his working life, Falmouth tug skipper, writes Mike Truscott.

Roy, who died in 1999, was actually a Penryner - as recalled in a book that profiles his life and remains one of Joan's treasured possessions.
Published by the Packet in the early 1990s and written by our then editor John Marquis, it provides an early 20th Century snapshot of Penryn that is scarcely recognisable today.

For instance: “Penryn alone had six or seven full-time professional fighters, all of them kept busy by the insatiable public demand for sporting excitement.
“Sky Sport and Match Of The Day might be major attractions now, but in those days the 'couch potato' culture had not taken hold. People liked to get away from their own firesides to watch sport live.”

And on Penryn life in general: “It would have seemed busier. People were out and about more then, either on foot, bicycle or horse and cart.
“Milk, bread and fish were all delivered on carts, the milkman scooping milk into housewives' jugs from a giant churn.
There were also hawkers and travellers to be seen buying and bartering, knife-grinders among them offering to sharpen cutlery.

“In the summer, Breton farmers would appear in the streets selling their delicious onions, which they carried like bandoliers around their necks.
“These strange foreign figures were known locally as ‘Johnny Onions’ and would bring their crop over from France aboard their boats, which they moored in Penryn.
“They used premises in Commercial Road for sorting their onions before setting off on bicycles to sell them.”

Dressed in striped shirt and beret, riding a bicycle hung with onions, the Onion Johnny became the stereotypical image of the Frenchman and may have been the only contact that the ordinary British had with France.

From the area around Roscoff in Brittany known as Bro Rosko, Johnnies found a more profitable market in England than at home, and typically brought their harvest across the English Channel in July to store in rented barns, returning home in December or January.

They could have sold their produce in Paris, but the roads and the railways were bad in the 19th century and going there was a long and difficult trip - crossing the channel was shorter and easier.

The golden age was during the 1920s and in 1929 nearly 1,400 Johnnies imported over 9,000 tonnes of onions to the UK. The Great Depression, followed by the devaluation of the Pound in the early 1930s, ended the era as trade suddenly fell, reaching a low in 1934, when fewer than 400 people imported under 3,000 tonnes.

http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/fpfalmouth/10657764.Mike_Truscott_remembers_Penryn_s__Johnny_Onions__and_street_hawkers/

There's another thread with a lot about Johnny Onions, both serious and silly, here:-

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1280851#1280851

Posted: 09-09-2013 13:51 Post subject:

Posted: 09-09-2013 14:11 Post subject:

I was going to accuse The Packet of nicking much of that article from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Johnny

Re-reading the start, I see that the unattributed borrowing was the other way about!

The quotes from the old book in The Packet, however, miss out the fascinating detail that the Breton Johnnies were not French-speaking. It seems they were happy in neither English nor French but were able to converse with fellow Celts in Wales. I wonder if they found many speakers of Cornish to compare notes with?

Smile

Posted: 14-09-2013 01:32 Post subject:

Posted: 21-09-2013 20:49 Post subject: four films thought lost, now found

http://www.newser.com/story/174448/lost-part-of-film-history-found-in-barn.html
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(Newser) – Just before tearing down an old barn in New Hampshire, a contractor did one last check and discovered a treasure: seven reels of film that he donated to the Keene State College Film Archives, reports the college. It has since determined that at least four of those films were ones thought to have been lost. One of those, Their First Misunderstanding, is the 1911 silent short film that features silent movie star Mary Pickford appearing in her first credited role. Prior to that, Pickford, then 18, had been known only as "Little Mary" in films. The Library of Congress is funding the film's restoration (it hadn't even been stored in a can), and it will be screened at the New Hampshire college on Oct. 11.

"It's a big deal," says a Pickford scholar of the film's discovery seven years ago. Another expert says the movie "fills an important gap," because Pickford had a "short-lived association" with Carl Laemmle's Independent Moving Picture Co. Their First Misunderstanding was the first movie she made for IMP. It's about a newlywed couple's first fight, and also stars Pickford's then-husband Owen Moore, the Los Angeles Times reports. The nitrate reel was stuck to another, and had to be carefully separated. Though there are slight "jumps in action," the Pickford expert says "no significant amount of footage" was lost. See a clip here.

Posted: 22-09-2013 08:18 Post subject:

Recovering a WWII bomber hidden in a French cave
By Chris Bockman, Sacoue, south-west France

For historians, wreckage from a World War II German bomber in the French Pyrenees is an exceptional find, but some local residents are less keen on digging up the past.

It is a long drive over gravel and dirt roads in the Pyrenees through the mist.
Finally, more than 1,000m (3,280ft) up, I reach my destination and I feel I have either joined the flickering embers of an all-night rave party or a group of hardcore forest environmentalists.
The men look haggard, bundled up against the early morning cold.
There are shabby tents bunched on the rare patches of dry earth and lots of heavy machinery on the ground, while coffee brews on a makeshift stove. The remains of a cassoulet sit on the bottom of a large pan.

This is the select French world of WWII plane wreckage investigators.
About 50 of them are here retrieving the remains of a German bomber - the dreaded Dornier 217.ZA. Some 1,700 were built, but none remain intact to this day.

This particular salvage operation is intriguing.
The Germans had stationed many of the Dorniers outside the French city of Toulouse from where they conducted bombing runs on allied forces at sea.

However, in July 1944 two of these bombers got lost on their return to base and collided over the Pyrenees mountains.
The eight crew members were killed instantly but the mountains were also home to "passeurs" - members of the resistance - who helped smuggle allied troops over the peaks and into relative safety in Spain.
Local people feared reprisals from the Germans who would come looking for the bodies, so they decided to throw the wreckage down a nearby 100m (328ft) cave hole to hide the evidence.
And then, for decades to come, a collective unofficial silence descended on the community.

Today's plane wreckage hunters are a mixed bag, including archaeologists and historians.
Many, though, come from the aerospace industry, working for manufacturers like Airbus or the turboprop maker ATR. You could say they have aviation in their blood.

Gilles Collaveri is one of the most determined members of the group. It was word of mouth and long-forgotten rumours that sent him trekking through the forest last year in search of this remote cave.
Its location matched eyewitness accounts of the crash but it was inaccessible.
So he asked a local speleologist group to help him discover what might be at the bottom of the cave and sure enough they stumbled on large charred metal sections of one of the lost Dorniers.

Like most things in France, it took months of haggling and bureaucratic paperwork to get the official permission they needed to start retrieving the wreckage - it proved a complex affair requiring makeshift cranes, harnesses and muscle power.
Many of the parts weigh more than 50kg each and pulling them up a narrow 100m shaft was far from easy.

Out in the open much of the wreckage looks like mundane scrap metal, but some pieces bring the history back to life.
These include the wing sections, remains of an oxygen tank, ammunition and one cockpit part with German instructions still intact.
The team say that what they have found is relatively well preserved.

There is not enough to consider rebuilding the plane, so it will all end up in museums in Berlin and southern France.
In fact, one reason why there are no complete Dorniers today is because after the war, their metal fuselages were recycled for other industrial needs.

This team celebrated its success with a makeshift lunch provided by the owner of an aviation-themed restaurant near the airport control tower in Toulouse.
He is an amateur pilot but too old to go down a cave on ropes.
Instead he rustled up a beef stew with mustard sauce followed by chocolate brownies, all washed down with local strong red wine.

Yet not everyone is happy to see this history brought to light.
In the nearby village of Sacoue is the mayor, Yvette Campan, who has lived there all her life. She remembers her grandparents talking about how scared they were when the two bombers crashed and seeing the crews' bodies scattered over a wide area.
The last thing they wanted was to attract attention.

And even now, there was no local ceremony to mark the recovery of the wreckage - in her words the Germans were the enemy after all. She said if it had been a British plane that was being salvaged it would be a different story.

The local hunters out searching for wild boar also seemed uncomfortable at the sight of these outsiders digging up the past.
But one of the elderly plane hunters, Georges Jauzion, a former pilot in the French air force and test pilot for Airbus, sees it differently.
He says he wants to put himself in the place of the German pilots and to understand what really happened in the skies over this mountain range nearly 70 years ago.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24159975

Posted: 24-09-2013 00:46 Post subject: