By Victoria Evans, Searchroom Archivist
Inspired by April’s Explore Your Archive theme of crime, we have delved into a police charge register (POL/W/HQ/4/1) dated between March 1857–February 1866 from the headquarters of the West Sussex Constabulary. Many crimes that appear in this register were theft and the destruction of clothing provided by the workhouse to an individual, all rather petty crimes. However, you will come across more abhorrent crimes such as assault and murder. In this blog we will have a closer look at the entry below:
Peter Dewdney, aged 56, of Pigland Farm, Washington, was charged with the murder of Samuel Rowland on 28th of May 1860. Turning to the parish records and newspaper reports we can build a clearer view of what led up to and what happened on this fateful day.
Peter Dewdney was born on 14 July 1805 in Warnham. In 1846, he married Sally Wells and Sally’s father, Peter Wells, rented out Pigland Farm to Dewdney and from census returns his occupation was recorded as a gardener. However, Dewdney soon ran into money problems as his wife fell ill (newspaper reports stated her to be “insane”), and it became increasingly difficult to pay his father-in-law the rent for the farm and soon enough he could no longer make payments. Wells decided in May 1860 to recover the debt owed to him (£49 7s) and enlisted help from Thomas Challen, who was an auctioneer and house agent. Upon the day of intending to collect the debt, Samuel Rowland, who was well-known in the area as he was the landlord of the Star Inn in Ashington, also joined and, for unknown reasons, Dewdney had an instant dislike of him. It was agreed that Wells would take two cows and the manure and that Dewdney would give over possession of the meadows and cottage on the condition that Wells would find another place of residence for him and his wife and would pay the rent for as long as his daughter lived. As Challen went to collect the cows, he left Rowland with Dewdney and, at that moment, Dewdney went into the cottage and retrieved his gun and proceeded to shoot Rowland in the chest. Witnesses in the cottage stated that Dewdney proclaimed that he would shoot Rowland, and a minute later, the fatal gunshot was heard. However, Dewdney was also reported to have stated after the act that he did not mean to do it. In some newspapers it was reported that Dewdney shot Rowland when he ran into a field, and he was found shortly after trying to commit suicide.
From the cover of Illustrated Police News – Saturday 16 January 1869
He was first charged with wilful murder and committed to trial at the next Lewes Assizes. However, over the course of the case playing out, it became clear that Dewdney was “weak-minded”, which can today be interpreted as him having a mental disability. There was also reason to believe that he was under the impression that his father-in-law did not intend to find him another cottage and that his wife would be sent to a mental asylum. Only half of this was true, as his wife was admitted to a county asylum on the 29th of May 1960, where she remained until January 1880.
With all of this coming to light, the jury found him guilty of manslaughter and his sentencing was deferred. Later in August, Dewdney was sentenced to serve 10 years’ penal servitude, which involved imprisonment and hard labour. Having served his sentence, Dewdney would have been released in mid-1870 and from the 1871 census he went to live with one of his children in Horsham for the remainder of his life. He passed away in late 1875 at the age of 71 and was buried in Rusper.
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