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WDWTYA update -Joshua Webster Found!!!!

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  • WDWTYA update -Joshua Webster Found!!!!

    For those of you that were looking for Joshua for me last week on WDWTYA and previously - I've found him.
    Another result due to Gale Trial, it's a very sad and tragic sad story - see below

    From Reynolds Newspaper, July 9, 1865

    Extraordinary Suicide in Hoxton - On Tuesday an inquiry was held by Mr John Humphreys, Middlesex coroner at the Green Man Tavern, Hoxton Old Town, respecting the suicide of Joshua Webster, aged 39 years. The deceased was a Sawyer, living in Rose Street, Hoxton and since the death of his wife recently he became melancholy, took to drinking to excess and so ill used and neglected his children that they left him last week. On Saturday week he climbed upon the water butt and contrived to let himself down head foremost into the water through a small hole in the lid or cover, which was nailed down. His next door neighbours had their attention attracted by his feet which were visible above the top of the water butt, and with great difficulty he was got out. Dr Burchell was called in, and pronounced him to be quite dead. Dr Burchell said it was next to an impossibility for the deceased to have got into the butt by accident; he must have used great ingenuity to accomplish the feat. The coroner having summed up, the jury returned a verdict "Suicide while of unsound mind"


    What a dreadful way to die ... and how he must have loved his wife to do that and abandon a young family (my gt grandfather would have been only 4yrs old) The strange thing is his father committed suicide by hanging 9yrs earlier...

    I still have to find his death certificate and that of Ann his wife but now at least I can narrow it down to a year.
    Sue

  • #2
    Sue

    Pleased you've found him, but as you say, what a sad ending. My gt x 3 grandfather committed suicide when he was 79. He'd been widowed two years previously. His eldest son was in Broadmoor, having killed someone whilst insane, and his eldest daughter (my gt gt gran) had bled to death in childbirth several years earlier.
    The saddest bit was that the poor chap cut his throat with a razor but lived for 20 days before dying. I can't imagine what those 20 days were like. Awful.
    ~ with love from Little Nell~
    Chowns, Dunt, Emms, Mealing, Purvey & Smoothy

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    • #3
      Both horrible ways to end it all, they must have been determined.

      OH's gggf hanged himself in the barn one morning, found to be of unsound mind. His wife had died two years earlier in childbirth and they left ten children aged 20 to 4 years. The 20 year old found his father early in the morning.

      Some years later, his nephew committed suicide by Strangulation, which I thought was pretty odd - would have thought once you strangled yourself unconcious, you could not go any further. I must get the full inquest papers to find out - perhaps whatever he used tightened up after loss of conciousness.

      Di
      Diane
      Sydney Australia
      Avatar: Reuben Edward Page and Lilly Mary Anne Dawson

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      • #4
        I've always known that life was hard for my ancestors - the majority lived in the poorest parts of London. But so many of them persevered, remarried two or three times (as much for mutual support I imagine as anything else) and some of them even living to a reasonable age that it still comes as a shock when you get cases like these where the sheer drudgery and misery of life obviously became too much bear. Reading through the pages of some of the newspapers in the Gale Archive you realise how many people were taking their own lives - and I believe the papers were only reporting the "extraordinary" ones such as my Gt Gt Grandfather's.

        I wonder if there are any statistics for suicides in Victorian times?
        Sue

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        • #5
          An interesting question Sue. I googled but didn't find much, though I did find this:

          "There was no accurate, consistent system of classification for cause of death until 1858, when William Farr, the Registrar-General, began to tabulate suicides separately from other deaths. Even then there was widespread skepticism about statistics of suicide because concealment was presumed to be common and definitions of suicide varied."
          Chapter One: Verdicts
          ~ with love from Little Nell~
          Chowns, Dunt, Emms, Mealing, Purvey & Smoothy

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          • #6
            I Googled too Nell and it looks as though the info is out there but you have to find a hard copy - I'll have to see what the library can do!!
            Sue

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