The Gosport Tragedy: Story Of A Ballad
[Currently the whole article, The Gosport Tragedy: Story Of A Ballad by Fowler is unavailable. I'm including google book excerpts, my research and excerpts from Paul Slade's excellent article "Pretty Polly" here (bottom of this page).
Based on Fowler's article "The Gosport Tragedy" broadside (Roxburghe) could have: 1) been written on the 1726 events; 2) been rewritten on the 1726 events using an earlier unknown ballad about a murder or 3) been written independent of the events of 1726 and the names, Bedford, Gosport, Plymouth and Charles Stuart where coincidental (the name Charles Stuart is a ballad commonplace- see Henry Martin).
R. Matteson 2016]
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The Gosport Tragedy: Story Of A Ballad - by David C. Fowler, 1978
In the early eighteenth century there appeared a broadside entitled "The Gosport Tragedy: Or, The Perjured Ship-Carpenter," to be sung to the tune, "Peggy's Gone over Sea." The
When the young woman informs him that she is with child, the carpenter swears that he will marry only her, but soon we are told "the king wants sailors, to sea he repairs," which prompts
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The ballad ends with a warning to all young men to be constant and true to their loves.
H.M.S. Bedford
The circumstantial details of this ballad have for some time suggested to me that it may be based on historical fact, and the purpose of this study is to consider whether this might be so. The place names occurring in the broadside version are all to be found in the same region of the south coast of England: the area looking out on the Solent, that body of salt water bordered on the south by the Isle of Wight and on the north by the coastline of Hampshire. Above the western tip of Wight, Southampton sits at the confluence of the rivers Test and Itchen, from which point Southampton Water leads southeastward into the Solent. Above the east end of Wight, Southampton sits at the confluence of the rivers Test and Itchen, from which point Southampton Water leads southeastward into the Solent. Above the east end of Wight is the great Portsmouth harbor and navel base formed by two protective arms of land, with Gosport on the west and Portsmouth on the east side of the harbor. Even in the eighteenth century the harbor could not accommodate the great number of ships that were based there, but directly below the two towns (Gosport and Portsmouth), at the eastern end of the Solvent, is the Spithead anchorage, where vessels rode at anchor while being outfitted for sea duty or perhaps preparing for some naval expedition. This appears to be the geographical setting for the ballad, and the place names are consistently used throughout. The ship in the ballad is called the Bedford, and a study of the Admiralty documents in the Public Record Office, London, reveals reveals that there was indeed a ship of that name in
The Bedford left the Nore on 1 May 1727 for a new tour of duty in the Baltic, from which she returned to Portsmouth for a little over a month (17 August to 23 September) while taking on supplies in preparation for an assignment in the in the Mediterranean. During this time the Bedford sent 38 men to Gosport hospital, and in this case we know that one of them was Charles Stewart. The musters show that he left the ship on 26 August and returned from Gosport on 8 September. Whether the "ss" opposite his name (meaning "sick on shore") was merely a handy administrative device for permitting him to undertake a mission to the girl's parents, or whether he was really sick, it is impossible to say.[48] But at least we have
documentary evidence that on this occasion Stewart spent two weeks in Gosport, the home town of the girl whose ghost he had seen aboard the Bedford. On 8 September he returned to the ship, and sailed with her to the Mediterranean, coming back to Portsmouth on 20 January 1728. But despite the attractiveness of this possibility, I am inclined to believe that Stewart's best opportunity for visiting the girl's parents and perhaps helping them recover the body was during his long time ashore from November 1726 to April 1727.
On this basis it seems reasonable to conjecture that the ballad, composed sometime after the burial in Gosport Church, should be dated in the spring of the year 1727. Who told this story to the anonymous author of "The Gosport Tragedy"?
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In its young days the Bedford was involved in several naval actions.[4] Under the command of Captain Henry Haughton, as part of a combined Anglo-Dutch fleet in 1702 led by Admiral Sir George Rooke, she participated in successful actions against the Franco- Spanish fleet.
A year and a half later, on 12 March 1704 off Lisbon, the Bedford, commanded by Captain Sir Thomas Hardy as part of a task force under Rear-Admiral Thomas Dilkes, captured three richly laden Spanish vessels bound for the West Indies. Later that year, in a confrontation between the Anglo-Dutch and Franco-Spanish fleets off the Barbary coast on 13 August 1704 near Cape Malaga, the Bedford was heavily involved and suffered 12 killed and 51 wounded. After retiring to base
The subsequent history of the Bedford is more peaceful, and we need now to trace her movements before and after the year 1720, the estimated date of composition of "The Gosport Tragedy". With the exception of brief stays in Chatham and Woolwich, our ship was based at Portsmouth from 1710 until 1740, when she was taken to pieces and completely rebuilt in Portsmouth dockyard in 1741. When we concentrate our search on
1. Surviving copies of the original broadside are in the British Library, Roxburghe III. II, 510-511, and in Cambridge University Library, Madden 2-368. The text is on the whole accurate, but I note the following errors: 2[2] conseut (for consent); 11[1] passedon for passed on 11[2] see for sea; 19[1] And said (for he said); 19[2] instaantly for instantly
[For correspondence between Hook and the Admiralty secretary, referred to below, see the file of letters in ADM 1/1881 #9, covering the period 1726-38.]
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example is a list of occasions she was docked for repairs.
BEDFORD REPAIR SCHEDULE (1710 -1728)
HARBOUR FROM TO REMARKS
Portsmouth 8 Nov 1710 11 May 1712 major repair
Feb 1726 26 Nov 1726 30 Jan 1728 7 April 1713 15 May 1714 19 July 1715 5 March 1720 5 March 1721 11 May 1723 31 Dec 1723 11 June 1724 7 Feb 1726 1 Feb 1727 30 May 1728
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The existence of the Bedford, and the confirmation that she was indeed based in Portsmouth, as the ballad says, provides
This seems enough at least, to warrant a close look at our ship for the two-year period (1726-27) when Stewart was on board. In particular: who was the ship carpenter of the Bedford? From the musters we learn that he was John Billson (Bilson, Bellson), entered for the Bedford on 1 May 1723, and reporting aboard the same day.[7] With him was an assistant, Benjamin Sturgis, his servant.[8] Billson's first name is not William, but William and Molly are common names in balladry, enough so at least to justify pursuing Billson a bit further. This will require a temporary departure from our main topic, but the following excursus on the Royal Navy I shall not lose sight of our main objective: the possible historicity of events related in "The Gosport Tragedy." The Baltic Expedition of
orders, the sighting of other vessels, and the occasional accident or death on board ship. Fortunately the ballad gives us one more fact of considerable importance, that is, the name of the crewman who saw the ghost: Charles Stewart (Stuart, Steurt, Steward). This seems a common name, and I feared at first that it would not help, but a search of the Bedford musters for this period discloses only one Charles Stewart, an ablebodied seaman who was entered for the Bedford 27 January 1726, and came on Board 11 February. He remained on the muster lists through the year 1727 and until the crew was paid off early in February 1728.
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The five who died ashore are identified by location variously as "Gosport" or "hospital.
ships had sailed out, leaving the fleet's medical facilities even more constricted[17]. we have no official diagnosis of the illness the was affecting the men, nor a count of the number affected. In 1712 the Bedford had reported 150 men down with Dunkirk fever,[18] but in the Baltic expedition of 1726 it is more likely (in the absence of reports) that scurvy was the disease involved. Medical science had not yet solved this problem, but a
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been kept of men ashore during the time (unless in a surgeon's journal which doe not survive) but the captain's log reports that the Bedford's sick men came on board "from the port" (presumably Nargan Island) on 6 September, preparatory for the return voyage to England.[20]
The Case of the Cruel Carpenter
With the adventures of the Bedford in 1726 now placed before us, it is appropriate to return to the original question: is the ballad known as "The Gosport Tragedy" based on fact? And was John Billson indeed the "cruel ship carpenter" of the Bedford who killed the girl from Gosport? Without trying to answer this question decisively here, I shall in the following analysis attempt a hypothetical reconstruction of events based on the known evidence. The love affair between the carpenter and the Gosport girl developed in that developed in that period when the Bedford was moored in Portsmouth harbor as a guard ship from May 1723 through December 1725. During this time, as we have seen, the ship's crew worked during the day, but had shore leave on a fairly regular basis. A ballad from the Madden collection entitled "New Sea Song" gives the sailor's view of such duty:21
Our ship she is unrigged, all ready for docking
Straightway on board of those hulks we repair,
Where we work hard all day, and at night go a-kissing. }
Jack Tar is safe moor'd in the arms of his dear.
The crisis in the lovers' relationship comes on 26 January 1726 with the news that the Bedford is to be outfitted for duty with the Baltic fleet. Word goes out that "the king wants sailors" (as the ballad reports), and impressing of the ship's crew begins. Possibly at this time the girl informs the carpenter that she is with child, in the hope that this will persuade him to marry her before going to sea. Unfortunately her news instead drives the carpenter to desperate measures. He kills his mistress buries her in a lonely place, and returns to his ship where he is now caught up in a whirlwind of activity preparing the Bedford for sea duty. If the above hypothesis is correct, the murder must have
20. Surgeons' journals
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One detail in the ballad, though at first glance it seems contradictory, offers indirect support for this theory. When the ghost appears to the carpenter in the captain's cabin he falls to his knees, confesses his guilt, and begs the "sweet injur'd ghost" to forgive him. Whereupon in the following stanza we are told:
No one but this wretch did see this sad sight,
Then raving distracted he dy'd in the night:
As soon as her parents these tydings did hear
They sought for the body of their daughter dear.
The reader (or listener) may in the first instance conclude from this stanza that the carpenter confessed at about the time the ghost was reported to the captain, and that he promptly died during the night following his confession, so that the report of it could be taken immediately to the girl's parents who then recovered the body. Indeed some later versions, exhibiting a characteristic broadside penchant for instant justice, do report that "raving, distracted he dy'd the same night."[26] But the original version does not say this, and I am of the opinion that the stanza quoted
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He is my choice as the mariner who held a London publisher with his glittering eye, telling an intriguing story of love, death and the supernatural, which was then turned into one of the most popular broadside ballads in the last 250 years
The Broadside and its Sequence
"The Gosport Tragedy" first appeared as a broadside "Printed and Sold at the Printing-Office in Bow Church-Yard, London." It is undated, and the British Library catalogue estimates that it was published about 1720, but if our findings are correct, date of publication in all likelihood was 1727. No printer is named on the sheet, but in 1727 the man who operated the Printing-Office in Bow Church- Yard was John Cluer, who had first gone into business for himself about 1703 in a shop at the sign of the Maidenhead, opposite the East door of St. Mary-le-Bow in Bow Lane [48] Exactly when Cluer moved to Bow church is uncdertain, but we know he died there and Plomer places his residency there in the period 1726-28, exactly right for our estimate of the date of the broadside.[49] Among the many places in London where John Cluer might have stumbled onto the story of the Bedford's ghost, those that most appeal to me are the Rondys set aside for the purpose of recruiting sailors. London had several that were. . .
Theoretically the date of our broadside could be after the death of John Cluer, because his widow Elizabeth kept the business going and used the same imprint. Moreover when she then married her late husband's foreman Thomas Cobb in 1731, the latter managed the the Bow Church-Yard Printing Office until 1936 when William Dicey took over the business. William Dicey of course became famous as a ballad publisher, but there is no basis for placing "The Gosport Tragedy" as late as 1736, when William took over. Dicey lists our ballad in his catalogue of 1754 (unique copy in Bodleian Library), but this was very likely a new edition, of which I suspect a copy survives in the Crawford Collection (Bibliotheca Lindesiana no 655).
but to the east of Bow Church-Yard was the most notorious one, St. Katherine's Stairs on Tower Hill, and to the west on Bow Street (near Covent Garden) was the Cock and Runner. If, then, Charles Stewart was involved in impressing men, like those who came aboard the Bedford with him
48. I am indebted to the excellent dissertation by R. S. Thomson, "The Development of the Broadside trade and It's influence. His discussion of John Cluer begins on p. 83 of this dissertation.
49. H.R. Plomer 9et al.) A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were a Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1726 to 1773 Oxford 1932. See Cluer (John), Cluer (
A useful article is Victor E. Neuberg, "The Diceys and the Chapbook Trade," The Library, XXIV (1969) , 219-231 .
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"The Cruel Ship Carpenter" gives way in the song to the murderer's simple admission that he is going to hell. The melody of "Pretty Polly" has dictated a triplet form in which the first line of the couplet is repeated and the second line sung only once: Pretty Polly, pretty Polly, come go ...
Judy Collins, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" (New York 1968) Elektra EKS— 74033, side two, band 4, "Pretty Polly"
[Having given Hook his orders on the 27th of January, the Admiralty secretary, Josiah Burchett, inquired on the 29th as to his progress. Busy as he must have been, Hook replied coolly and calmly:[10]
Pursuant to their Lordships' command of the 29th instant am to acquaint you I have borne 135, checqued 24, sick on shore one, and expect an account p. post from my officers in ]
Edmund Hook was born on or about 9 April 1683 in Portsmouth, son of Mr. Edmund and Elizabeth Hook (St. Thomas baptismal register). In the year 1711, at the age of 28, he received his first command, the Jamaica sloop on the West India station under Commodore Littleton. On 30 November 1712 he was appointed captain of the Garland. There follows a decade for which we
have no information. Then in 1723 he was named captain of the Bedford, which operated first as a Portsmouth guardship (1723-25), and subsequently as a ship of the line in the Baltic fleet under Sir Charles Wager (1726-28) . On returning to Portsmouth in 1728 the Bedford was put out of commission and dismantled. In 1731 Hook commanded the Canterbury, and in November 1733 he was appointed to the Ipswich, [ a third rate of seventy guns,] which is the last command we have any proof of his having held.
[Despite the temptation to invoke this text in support of our earlier reconstruction of events, I must concede that the emergence of this American version matching our hypothesis is probably a coincidence, though I would not object if someone wished to argue that the songster text preserves details from oral tradition going back to the time of the incident in 1726.
The form of the ballad in The Forget-Me-Not Songster continued to be popular in the nineteenth century and appears also in a song sheet of about 1835, published by L. Deming, No 62, Hanover Street, Boston.[70] There are some small differences, the most notable of which is the statement in Deming's text that the carpenter "set sail from Plymouth," an error which we have noted already in a Manchester chapbook. Prints like to Boston once helped keep the "America" version alive and this, together with some form of the shorter version known as "The Cruel Ship Carpenter" (referred to above), combined to determine the future development of the ballad in American oral tradition in the twentieth century.
Having traced our ballad through print and oral tradition to the twentieth century, it is very satisfying to find, at the end of the trail, a modern form of it which is highly lyrical, shaped almost exclusively by oral tradition. This is a brief little song of six stanzas, usually known as "Pretty Polly."[71] In spite of the radical reduction of the story, occasional phrases of the original broadside are echoed in the song. Thus "he led her through valleys and groves so deep" seems to have suggested the lyrical "over the hills to the valley so low"
The details of the story are lost, but this haunting folk-song, beautifully sung by Judy Collins, preserves the emotional .
[p. 297 not part of this article]
when Wilfred Wareham took me to Arnold's cove on Placentia Bay to hear the great Malcolm Masters [1908-1977] sing in that distinctive Newfoundland style, with its stop-and-go rhythms, its long sustained notes sung in a vibrato so rapid as to be nearly tremelo, and its almost unbearable intensity of feeling. Hearing Masters sing his version of "The Cruel Ship's Carpenter" was an emotional high such as one only experiences in the presence of a superior artist.
Footnotes:
1698-2 QH/S3, closely resembling H M S Bedford, built by Fisher Harding, 1698. Fig. 2. Portsmouth Habour from a Survey by Talbot Edwards. 2. ... of the Bedford herself. 4. See H. S. Lecky, The Kings Ships (6 vols.),
35 Spears, p. 113, and Fuller, p. 177.
36 Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, pp. 85-86.
37 Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry (New York: types; the first line echoes a ballad, and two phrases 80 R. Gerald Alvey.
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seems to have suggested the lyrical "over the hills to the valley so low." The grave and spade, perennial favorites, are preserved, along with the stabbing and burial of the body, but in at least one version the mourning of the birds is lost in the otherwise similar line, "leaving nothing behind but the girl left to mourn.
168
We need follow the course of naval history no further, but return instead to the Bedford and her crew. So far in our glimpses into the life of John Billson we have had to use our imaginations, because the record has established only that he was a warrant officer with the rank of carpenter. But while the Bedford was in the Baltic, on her way back
during this period to fill vacancies.
16. The deaths not recorded in the log are to
168
they were much inclined to issue forth and defy the allies, Gordon succeeded in dissuading them from this suicidal course; and eventually the ships were laid up. Wager displayed throughout great tact and diplomatic ability. In the autumn he
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To summarize: since the ballad gives the carpenter's death as one of its facts, and since documents tell us that he died at sea nearly six months after the Bedford's departure from Portsmouth, we may tentatively conclude that a report of the carpenter's confession did not reach the girl's parents in Gosport until after the return of the Bedford on 4 November 1726.
See H. S. Lecky, The Kings Ships (6 vols.), I (1913) p. 177 ff. What Lecky calls "the first Bedford" is usually known as the "Bedford Galley" and should not be confused with our much larger warship H.M.S. Bedford. In 1722 the Bedford Galley
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Excerpt's from "Pretty Polly" by Paul Slade
Southampton’s just 14 miles north-west of Gosport, and only 17 miles from Portsmouth, so all the locations given in the Roxburghe Gosport are consistent with one another. It offers a couple of other important clues too, telling us that the ship involved was the Bedford and that it was moored in Portsmouth harbour when the murder took place. William and Molly are both generic names, used in countless ballads of the time no matter what the real individuals were called, so there’s not much to be learned there. Charles Stuart looks a bit more reliable, though, and the ballad is clear the Bedford’s crew included someone of that name when the ghost appeared.
Armed with this information, the University of Washington’s Professor David Fowler set about researching Royal Navy records to see how many of the Roxburghe Gosport’s details he could confirm. The resulting essay, which appeared in a 1979 volume of Florida University’s Southern Folklore Quarterly, provides our best account of the ballad’s background yet. (10)
Fowler’s first problem was to decide which decade – or even which century – to begin his search. The British Library gives two different dates as its best estimate for the Roxburghe Gosport’s printing, opting for 1720 in its General Catalogue (GK), but for 1750 in its English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC). Both carry a cautionary question mark to indicate they’re only approximations. (11)
Fowler took the first of the British Library’s two dates as his starting point and quickly discovered that there really was an HMS Bedford at this time. She was the first of three Royal Navy warships to bear that name, and launched from Woolwich Dockyards in September 1698. This Bedford was what Fowler calls “roughly the equivalent of a destroyer in the modern navy”, measuring 150 feet long by 40 feet wide, with 70 guns on board and a full complement of 440 men. (12)
The ship survived in that form until 1736, when orders came to demolish and rebuild her in accordance with new Navy standards. This process was not completed until 1741, when she was relaunched from Portsmouth in her new form. The Bedford was reduced to a hulk in November 1767, and sold off 20 years later. Fowler discovered from Navy records that, except for short stays in Chatham and Woolwich, she was based at Portsmouth from 1710 until 1740.
Let’s assume for the moment that The Gosport Tragedy really was inspired by a real crime. HMS Bedford wasn’t built until 1698, so that’s the earliest that any real-life murder matching the ballad’s description could have occurred. The British Library’s dates suggest around 1750 as the latest possible date for any such crime, and that rules out all but the first warship to bear the Bedford’s name. So far, so good: we’ve got the right ship in the right port at the right time.
Fowler’s next step was to dig out the Bedford’s pay books, muster books and captain’s log from the crucial period – all of which can still be found at the UK’s National Records Office in Kew. Starting in 1699, he read down the long lists of every crewman’s name, looking for a Charles Stuart, or some alternative spelling of the same name. He hit paydirt with the entry for January 27, 1726, when the muster book notes that one “Charles Stewart” has joined the crew. Stewart remained on board the Bedford for at least two years, and he’s the only man of anything like that name Fowler was able to find on-board.
“The existence of the Bedford, and the confirmation that she was indeed in Portsmouth, as the ballad says, provides justification for taking seriously the name of Charles Stewart, the third piece of evidence from the ballad thus confirmed by Admiralty documents,” Fowler says in his essay.
The ship’s carpenter when Stewart signed up is listed as John Billson, who joined the Bedford in that post on May 1, 1723, and remained there till his death on-board in September 1726. That means Stewart and Billson were shipmates there for eight months. “Billson’s first name is not William, but William and Molly are common names in balladry,” Fowler reminds us. “Enough so to at least justify pursuing Billson a bit further.”
For the two-and-a-half years before Stewart signed up, the Bedford had been serving as a guard ship in Portsmouth harbour, with a skeleton crew of about 80 men on-board. Quiet periods like this were a golden opportunity for Billson and his gang of eight to twelve junior carpenters to carry out any repairs the ship needed. “The work of the crew, and particularly the carpenters, was primarily a matter of maintenance, which in a wooden sailing vessel of this date was a constant problem,” Fowler says. “The ship’s crew worked during the day, but had shore leave on a fairly regular basis.”
To illustrate this point, Fowler quotes a Madden Collection ballad called New Sea Song which, he says, “gives the sailor’s view of such duty”:
Our ship, she is unrigged, all ready for docking,
Straightway on board of these hulks we repair,
Where we work hard all day, and at night go a-kissing,
Jack Tar is safe moored in the arms of his dear.
Billson left no widow behind to receive his out-standing Navy pay after death, so we know he was a single man. If he really is the model for William, this spell of guard ship duty would have been his ideal opportunity to seduce Molly with the promises of marriage the ballad records and enjoy her to the full when those efforts prevailed. Ample time too, for Molly to discover her delicate condition, and remind William of his obligations to her more forcefully each day. She knew full well that a Navy carpenter had to sail with his ship when hostilities broke out – “in time of war, to the sea you must go” – and that peaceful interludes like these never lasted for long.
And so it proved. On January 26, 1726, Edmund Hook, the Bedford’s captain, received orders that he should prepare the ship for active duty. Spain had joined with Austria to threaten the British territory of Gibraltar, and was now thought to be plotting with Russia too. Acting on Admiralty advice, King George I ordered the Bedford and 19 other Royal Navy ships to stage a show of force in the Baltic and remind the Russian navy that Britain wasn’t to be messed with.
Hook’s log entry for January 26 reads: “This forenoon, received their Lordships’ direction to man and get fit for channel service as soon as possible, to the highest complement, together with four press warrants which I issued out to my lieutenant to be put into execution”. (13)
The new orders meant Hook had to get the Bedford’s crew up from the minimal 80 men it used as a guard ship to its full complement of 440, and to get this done in double-quick time. The press-gang warrants gave his men the legal powers to force any seamen they found in Portsmouth’s pubs and brothels to join the Bedford whether they liked it or not - a crude form of conscription. In extreme cases, reluctant recruits were simply knocked unconscious and dragged on board against their will. This practice was known at the time as “pressing” or “impressing” the crew.
The new orders sharply increased the workload for Billson and his gang of carpenters too, as Hook began pushing them to complete the thousand and one jobs needed to get the ship ready for active service.
If Billson did have a pregnant girlfriend ashore, she’d know his departure was looming very near
“The crisis in the lovers’ relationship comes on 26 January 1726 with the news that the Bedford is to be outfitted for duty with the Baltic fleet,” Fowler suggests. “Word goes out that ‘the king wants sailors’ (as the ballad reports), and impressing of the ship’s crew begins. Possibly at this time, the girl informs the carpenter that she is with child, in the hope that this will persuade him to marry her before going to sea.”
If Billson really did have a pregnant girlfriend ashore, she’d have known his departure was now looming very near, and that there was no guarantee he’d ever return to Gosport again. If she was going to get him to marry her – no small matter for a single girl in her condition at the time – then she couldn’t afford to let him forget the issue for a moment. Billson’s only escape from this would have been the equally relentless pressure he faced at work, so his mood would have been far from sunny.
On January 27, 1726, the day Stewart signed up, Hook’s log confirms the Bedford has already begun press-ganging new men and getting them on-board. Stewart’s own name in the pay book has the single word “pressing” noted against it, but he does not appear on a separate list of men recruited in this way. Fowler concludes that “pressing” was an indication of Stewart’s duties rather than the reason he joined.
Although he gave his signature on January 27, Stewart did not come aboard the Bedford until two weeks later, and Fowler thinks that’s because he was busy ashore recruiting others. “As a press gang member, he would have been more likely than the average to be known personally to the captain, and would spend more time ashore when the ship was in port,” Fowler says. This may help to explain why the Stewart of the ballad was so willing to take his fears to the captain, and – as we’ll see in a moment – why he’s the only crewman given his real name in full.
On January 30, the Bedford was towed alongside a hulk in Portsmouth dockyard so Billson and his gang could remove the old mizzen mast and get a new one set in its place. Next day, they began the huge job of lightening the ship by removing anything that wasn’t nailed down so she could be hauled into dry dock for her caulking to be renewed. The ship spent from February 5 to February 7 in dry dock, with Billson and his gang working on her all this time, and then returned to Portsmouth harbour, where she spent the next three weeks.
All this time, Hook’s frantic efforts to rope in the crew he needed were continuing. He’d got the total up to 410 men by the time the Bedford sailed out of harbour to the Navy’s Portsmouth anchorage at Spithead on February 26, at which point shore leave became very rare. Still, Hook was adding new men every day, eventually getting the ship up to a strength of 486 crew against its supposed capacity of 440. The Bedford stayed at Spithead for six weeks as she and the rest of Admiral Sir Charles Wager’s fleet completed their preparations, then sailed for the Baltic with everyone else.
All this suggests that any real murder behind The Gosport Tragedy – and therefore behind Pretty Polly as well - most likely happened between January 26, 1726 and February 26 the same year. Any earlier, and the Bedford would still have been months away from sailing. Any later, and its carpenter would have had no opportunity to murder Molly or anyone else in Gosport. Once the Bedford left for Spithead, John Billson would never tread on English soil again.
Fowler’s own guess is that Molly announced her pregnancy towards the end of January, just as the Bedford was getting ready to go into dry dock, and that the murder itself came around February 1. “Her news drives the carpenter to desperate measures,” Fowler writes. “He kills his mistress, buries her in a lonely place, and returns to his ship, where he is now caught up in a whirlwind of activity preparing the Bedford for sea duty.”
The six weeks at Spithead that followed trapped the entire crew on their over-crowded ship, but gave them far less work to do than the frantic preparations in harbour. Fowler thinks this is when gossip about a ghost on-board may have started circulating. Perhaps this began because someone in the crew noticed Billson was having disturbed nights, or perhaps because he was foolish enough to confide in one of the other men.
“The first stirrings of conscience start to haunt the carpenter, and the first rumour of voices heard in the night begin to come from the crew,” Fowler writes. “The ballad offers some support for the anchorage setting in the cry of the ghost: ‘This ship out of Portsmouth never shall go / Till I am revenged for this overthrow’, meaning that the Bedford shall not leave the Portsmouth anchorage [at Spithead] until she has her revenge.”
With little to do in their off-time but get drunk, rumours of a ghost swirling throughout the ship and plenty of time to swap tall stories, the Bedford’s crew must have been ready to glimpse spirits in every shadow. It’s at this point that a sloshed Charles Stewart stumbles into the dimly-lit hold and sees what he thinks is a beautiful woman holding a baby in her arms. He steps forward to embrace her, but the image instantly vanishes. You or I would conclude this was trick of the light, remind ourselves how primed we’d been to expect something like this, and swear to lay off the rum in future. For an 18th century sailor, though, a very different explanation suggested itself – he’d just seen Molly’s ghost! (14)
There’s more evidence for Spithead being the setting for this episode in the ballad’s report of Hook’s reaction. If there really is a murderer on board, the ballad’s captain says, then “our ship in great danger to the sea must go”. Partly, that line is just a reflection of the seamen’s usual superstition about murderers, but the timing it implies is interesting too.
It does sound as if the captain wished to settle the matter as soon as possible, while at the same time conceding that the ship will probably have to sail before a verdict can be reached,” Fowler says. “On these somewhat tenuous grounds, I conclude that the affair of the ghost was reported to the captain by Charles Stewart at about the time of the fleet’s scheduled departure from Spithead (April 7), and that the eventual breakdown and confession of the carpenter came at some future time.”
The Bedford reached the Gulf of Finland at the end of June and anchored at Naissaar Island off the coast of Estonia. The fleet’s job there was simply to park somewhere in the Russians’ field of vision and stay put for a bit, radiating a quiet sense of British naval power by its presence alone. The more gung-ho Russian commanders were keen to engage the British fleet, but Vice-Admiral Thomas Gordon – who’d defected to Russia’s navy in 1714 – persuaded them this would be suicide. After three months in the Baltic, the Admiralty felt Britain’s point had been made so the fleet set off back to Portsmouth.
No actual fighting had proved necessary during this expedition, but the voyage home presented some genuine danger. On September 22, the Bedford had reached a point about 150 miles west south-west of Nargen Island – placing her smack in the middle of the Baltic Sea – when storms struck the ship. These storms tore up the Baltic for three days and, as The Weekly Journal later reported, sank no fewer than 17 ships there. It was, The Newcastle Courant adds, “a long and stormy passage”.(15, 16)
“At half past 10pm, HF topsail,” Hook’s log entry for September 22 begins. “At 6am, set fore topsail; broke one of our main shrouds HM topsail. At 8 fixed him again and set main topsail. At 10 saw some breakers bearing NNE 6 or 7 miles; fired a gun being a sign of danger, and tacked.”
‘There can be no doubt that the captain considered his ship to be in grave danger’
I asked Admiralty Librarian Jennifer Wraight to translate this log entry into landlubbers’ English for me, and she explained that the first section means Hook was hauling in sails on his fore mast and main mast respectively. “Making adjustments to the sails is normally a reaction to weather conditions,” she went on. ‘In stormy conditions, you would normally reduce the amount of sail a ship is carrying, which would be consistent with the entry you have.
“The shrouds are not sails, but part of the rigging: they provide lateral support for the masts. One of the main shrouds breaking would suggest that the mast was under strain. Taking in the main topsail would have reduced strain on the mast while the broken shroud was being repaired.”
There was a second threat too, because the breakers Hook sighted told him there was shallow water and rocks near the ship. Wraight believes these rocks carried more potential danger for the Bedford than the weather alone, adding that they would have been all the more difficult to avoid when storms were cutting both visibility and the ship’s capacity to manoeuvre. “Tacking – changing direction – would be eminently sensible,” she said. “He’s taking the ship away from hazard.”
Fowler gives Hook credit for his calm, unemotional language in the log entry, but adds: “There can be no doubt that, on 22 September, the captain of the Bedford considered his ship to be in grave danger. Three days later, John Billson, carpenter, died.”
Fowler’s theory here is that Billson, still tormented by the fear of supernatural revenge, had by now fallen prey to some unknown illness too. “If, as the ballad suggests, there was a concern on the part of the captain and crew over the possible presence of a murderer on board, the foul weather and the sighting of breakers perilously nigh may well have prompted some of them to begin looking for their Jonah,” he says.
Perhaps some of the Bedford’s men even threatened to throw Billson overboard, just as those described in William Glen had done to their own jinx. Faced with intolerable stress from both his own guilty conscience and the ill-will of everyone around him, it would be small wonder if the carpenter once again began to fancy he could see Molly’s ghost. In a man already weakened by illness, the fits these visions produced could well have proved the final straw. “The death of John Billson provides us with a fourth fact related in The Gosport Tragedy,” Fowler says. “Namely, that the carpenter of the Bedford died on board ship.”
Fowler calls his whole scenario for The Gosport Tragedy’s tale a “hypothetical reconstruction”, and I think he’d accept that Billson’s death is the point where it becomes most speculative of all. The only thing we know for certain is that Billson died at 9:00am on September 25, 1726. Hook’s log entry for that day is his usual long list of times and headings, punctuated by just six words on Billson’s death. “At 3am wove to the southward,” he writes, “at 6 wove again and stood westward, at 9 John Billson carpenter died, at ½ past tacked westward.” (17)
Hook’s log entry also tells us that September 25 began with mild winds and fair weather, continuing with clear skies later in the day. That was the first calm morning the Bedford had seen after three days of terrible storms and, if the crew really had blamed Billson for causing these, it must have seemed equally obvious that his imminent death was ending them.
Fowler argues that the ballad’s need to concertina all these events together conceals just how much patience Molly’s spectre had been prepared to show. “She gets her revenge by alerting the ship’s crew and the captain, but is not made a liar by the tardy demise of her victim,” he writes.
Hook’s terse account of Billson’s demise in the ship’s log looks callous to modern eyes, but he’d have been well-accustomed to his men dying of various illnesses on board. Fowler has collected figures showing the Bedford lost about 40 of its 486 men to illness during its seven-month Baltic mission. Seven died on the return voyage to Portsmouth alone – including Billson himself – and another five in Gosport Hospital as soon as they reached shore.
We have no official cause of death for Billson, but Fowler thinks it was probably scurvy that did for him. This disease killed more British sailors than enemy action did in the 18th century, and it was not until 1747 that James Lind proved it could be prevented simply by adding citrus fruits to the sailors’ very restricted diet. This practice was not adopted by the British Navy until the 1790s, and not fully understood even then.
In his 2005 essay Scurvy: The Sailors’ Nightmare, Grant Sebastian Nell describes its final stage as: “a terrible fever which left men raving and ranting before they died”. Once again, this does seem to match the ballad’s description: “Raving distracted he died in the night”. (18, 19)
When I put the scurvy theory to Wraight, however, she was distinctly sceptical. “There are many reasons why Billson may have died, but no apparent reason to assume scurvy,” she told me. “It would not normally have been too difficult to obtain supplies of fresh food while serving in the Baltic.” In this particular case – as Wraight also pointed out – the Bedford was on a relatively cushy mission, and within easy reach of land throughout the summer. We know Hook’s men visited Nargen Island regularly enough, because he set up a tent hospital there to handle the Bedford’s sick.
We can’t rule out the possibility that Billson died as a result of some random accident on board the storm-tossed Bedford, or even that he had his throat slit by superstitious crewmates. There’s no record of any official investigation following his death, however, so some form of illness remains the most likely explanation. Whether it was scurvy or not is a different matter.
The Bedford was over 900 miles from Portsmouth when its carpenter died, about 15 miles from the nearest land, and with over a month of her voyage home remaining. Wondering if there was any point in trying to track down Billson’s burial records, I asked Wraight how the ship would have handled his body in a case like this.
“Someone who died on board would have been given a perfectly conventional burial in the nearest available cemetery if this was feasible,” she replied. “If the ship was out at sea and this was not practicable, then the corpse would normally have been sewn up in a weighted hammock and buried at sea with due ceremony. [...] Billson would definitely be more likely to be buried at sea than brought home. Sharing a ship with a decomposing body is not pleasant, nor conducive to health and morale. Cases like Nelson’s where they did attempt it, are very rare and they didn’t find it easy then.”
Most likely, John Billson’s body ended up at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. His victim on the other hand, as the ballad tells it, was eventually buried in Gosport churchyard. Molly’s parents must have been relieved to lay their lost daughter to rest in sacred ground at last, and Fowler thinks it’s Charles Stewart who made that possible.
As soon as the Bedford’s carpenter has breathed his last, The Gosport Tragedy leaps forward in time again to deal with Molly’s burial. The two verses involved, you’ll recall, go like this:
No-one but this wretch did see this sad sight,
Then, raving distract’d, he died in the night,
As soon as her parents these tidings did hear,
They fought for the body of their daughter dear.
Near a place called Southampton, in a valley so deep,
The body was found, while many did weep,
At the fall of the damsel and her daughter dear,
In Gosport churchyard, they buried her there.
In fact, it looks as if just over a month must have passed between the second and third lines of this extract. Fowler assumes that Billson confessed all about his crime in the day or two before he died on September 25, but no-one on the Bedford would have had the chance to reach the girl’s parents until the ship docked again in Portsmouth harbour on November 4. The ballad’s wording therefore implies that her body remained undiscovered in its shallow grave for at least nine months. As the Bedford returned to English waters, all the girl’s family could have known was that “Molly” had gone missing around February 1, and that no-one had heard from her since.
Returning to the Bedford’s pay and muster books, Fowler discovered a series of new marks against Stewart’s name running from November 18, 1726, until April 12 the following year. These, he says, are “a series of check marks indicating a legitimate absence from the ship – that is, he is not being paid on board during this period, but neither is he a runaway”. We can rule out Stewart’s press-gang duties as a reason for this because the Bedford was set to remain in Portsmouth for the next five months, and would not leave Britain again until May 1727.
Instead, Fowler suggests, Hook picked Stewart as someone he could trust with a different task: find the girl’s parents, tell them what happened to their daughter and pass on whatever information Billson had volunteered to help locate her body. “I assume that the captain decided no legal action needed to be taken since, before the ship returned to port, the confessed murderer was himself dead,” Fowler writes. “Nevertheless, I think it would be in character for Hook to take responsibility for seeing to it that the carpenter’s confession was communicated to the murdered girl’s parents.”
The ballad implies that the murdered girl’s remains lay undiscovered for at least nine months
The Bedford remained in Portsmouth harbour until February 28, 1727, and then sailed back to the anchorage at Spithead, where she spent the next week. On April 9, she left Spithead for a new mooring at the Nore, where the mouth of the Thames meets the North Sea. Stewart rejoined the ship there on April 12, and a week later the marks against his name change again to indicate “paid on board”. They remain that way for the rest of the year. That gives him a spell of five months on-shore, during which he seems to have both contacted the girl’s parents and told his story to the London print-shop owner who produced the Roxburghe Gosport.
Neither The Gosport Tragedy nor the Navy’s records give us any clue to Molly’s real identity – even that Christian name is a fiction, remember – which scuppers any possibility of finding her grave. We do know that Gosport’s parish church back in 1726 was St Mary’s at Alverstoke, though, so that’s almost certainly the place the ballad has in mind when it mentions “Gosport churchyard”. If Stewart really did manage to trace the girl’s parents and give them enough information to find her remains where the killer had dumped them, that would have allowed them to rebury her at St Mary’s, just as the Roxburghe Gosport says.
Reverend Ted Goodyer looks after St Mary’s today. “We do indeed have a number of gravestones dating back to the early part of the 18th century,” he told me. “Holy Trinity Church in Gosport was built in 1695, and did have a churchyard which has now been flattened, so the records of that church may also be helpful.” (20)
Fowler searched the burial records, gravestone inscriptions and church wardens’ accounts at both St Mary’s and Holy Trinity, as well as the era’s inquest files, but found nothing of any use. It occurred to me that he may not have thought to look for a “truculenter occisa” (violent death) note like the one that tipped me off in my own Knoxville Girl investigation, but I’ve now been through St Mary’s 1726 and 1727 burial records for myself, and no such note exists.
Surviving newspapers from the 1720s are few and far between, but both Fowler and I have searched those available and turned up nothing that’s relevant. If there ever was a real murder behind The Gosport Tragedy, then the ballad itself seems to be our only record of it. But even if the tale’s based in nothing more substantive than the Bedford’s prevailing gossip, there’s good reason to think Stewart had a role in transmitting it to the wider world.
Stewart’s progress from Gosport to the Nore during his time away from the Bedford would logically have taken him through London, and perhaps to one of the many seamen’s inns there he’d have known there from his work with the Navy’s press-gangs. These joints were known as “rondys” – short for “rendezvous” – and there were a couple of big ones near the Bow Churchyard print shop where the Roxburghe Gosport was produced.
“The oldest rendezvous was at St Katherine’s Stairs on Tower Hill, the neighbourhood being frequented by seamen because of the proximity of the Navy Office where pay tickets were cashed,” Christopher Lloyd writes in his book The British Seaman 1200 – 1860. “A convenient tavern there was The Two Dutch Skippers. Other well-known places in London were the White Swan in King Street, Westminster, and the Cock & Runner in Bow Street.” Inns like these kept a “press room” on the premises – essentially a jail cell where men the press gangs had already rounded-up could be safely locked away before being taken to the ship.
We know from Henry Plomer’s dictionary of 18th century printers that the Bow Churchyard shop was operated by a man called John Cluer from 1726 till 1728, which puts him in charge there when Stewart passed through London. Fowler suggests that Cluer may have frequented pubs like the Cock & Runner hoping to gather material for future ballads, and that Charles Stewart found him there one night on just such an expedition.
That would certainly explain why Stewart is the only man given his real name in the song, why that name is spelt out in full, and why he’s described in such flattering terms (“a man of courage so bold”). Cluer would have been keen to keep such a useful source of material happy, either because he needed more than one interview to get the Gosport story down in full or because he hoped other lucrative yarns might follow. (21)
Just how much of that is true, we’ll never know. Someone must have provided the bridge that transformed The Gosport Tragedy from a sailors’ oral tale to a printed ballad, though, and the details above make Stewart a very tempting candidate. “He is my choice as the mariner who held a London publisher with his glittering eye,” Fowler says, “telling an intriguing story of love, death and the supernatural, which was then turned into one of the most popular broadside ballads of the last 250 years”. (22)
Slade Footnotes 10-22
10) The Gosport Tragedy: Story of a Ballad, by David Fowler. Published in The Southern Folklore Quarterly volume 43, issues 3 & 4, 1979 (University of Florida). The second of my two most important sources, and well worth reading in full. Cecil Sharp House in London has SFQ's bound volumes, and I’m sure many US university libraries have them too.
11) I asked Karen Limper-Herz, the British Library curator who looks after its 18th century printed documents, to clarify the Roxburghe Gosport’s conflicting dates for me.
“Both dates are guesses to some extent,” she replied. “In a lot of cases, a date of 1750 was suggested by ESTC if the cataloguer was not sure whether an item was printed in the first or second half of the 18th century. The ESTC cataloguer was therefore no more or less sure about the dating than the cataloguer who created the record for GK. On balance, and from typographical evidence, I would go with the dating suggested by ESTC, possibly slightly earlier or later, but round the middle of the 18th century.”
The ETSC catalogie was started only in 1976, she added, so it’s perfectly possible that only the GK date existed when Fowler researched his own essay. If both he and Limper-Herz are right, then as much as 25 years may have have passed between the killing that inspired The Gosport Tragedy and the Roxburghe sheet itself being printed. There’s no reason to assume this is the first Gosport Tragedy sheet of all though – it’s simply the earliest that’s survived to our own time – and the ballad may have already been in print for a decade or more before Roxburghe’s sheet was produced.
12) The Royal Navy had one earlier Bedford, strictly called HMS Bedford Galley, but she was far too small to qualify as a ship of the line. She was built in 1697, converted to a fireship in 1716, and sunk to form a foundation at Sheerness in 1725.
13) Captain’s log of The Bedford, 1723-1728. Original held at The National Archives, Kew (item ADM 51/132).
14) As Fowler points out, this implies that Molly – pregnant when killed – had somehow given birth in the after-life. Killing a pregnant woman generally means killing her foetus too, so you can see why a sailor expecting Molly to haunt the ship might envisage her spectral form with a baby in its arms.
15) Weekly Journal, October 15, 1726.
16) Newcastle Courant, November 19, 1726.
17) Hook actually spells the carpenter’s surname here as “Bellson”, but it’s clear he has the same individual in mind. Everyone took their own guess at how any particular surname should be spelt at this time, and I’ve changed Hook’s spelling to “Billson” here just to avoid confusion.
18) Scurvy: The Sailor’s Nightmare, by Grant Sebastian Nell (http://grant-sebastian-nell.suite101.com).
19) The only US version I know which has Willie raving to death after seeing the ghost appears in a 2001 Mudcat post from Clint Keller. He recalled his grandmother singing Pretty Polly with these lines: “He was taken with fits the very next night / And died in the morning before ‘twas daylight / Saying ‘Polly, Pretty Polly, over yonder she stands / With rings on the fingers of her lily-white hands’.”
20) Other sources claim the oldest surviving gravestones at St Mary’s go back as far as 1666. One of the people buried there is Captain GM Bligh, who served on board the Victory at Trafalgar and was related to the Bounty’s Captain Bligh.
21) If Cluer really was the man who first put The Gosport Tragedy in print, then he had precious little time to enjoy that triumph. He died in 1728, long before he could have any inkling how popular the ballad would become.
22) This scenario would make the Roxburghe Gosport a little older than Karen Limper-Herz’s estimate (above), but only by a few years. It’s still well within the British Library’s general range of 1720-1750.